Chapter 17

Chapter 17

We finally made it out of that village, but Lai Zhi and I still didn’t dare slow down. We kept running until we reached the very end of the mountain hollow.

When I turned back then, bright moonlight spilled down over the land. What village? There was nothing there at all, only a stretch of ruined walls and broken rubble buried in the weeds.

Only then did I finally remember why I had forgotten everything that happened in that village afterward.

Because after I carried Tang Dong out of there, not a single adult in my family believed me.

They all said there was nothing left in that mountain hollow. The village had already been completely stripped down.

And after so many years, even if there were houses that hadn’t been dismantled, they would have collapsed by now.

They insisted that Tang Dong and I must have wandered around and scared ourselves stupid. Everything we saw wasn’t real.

After the adults denied it enough times, I gradually began to think maybe I really had remembered it wrong.

Slowly, I forgot everything that had happened in that mountain hollow.

But some instincts and feelings remained carved deep into my heart.

Perhaps Tang Dong was the same.

I dragged Lai Zhi out of the hollow, and by the time we got halfway down the mountain, Uncle Ye had already brought people to meet us.

I hadn’t expected that, by then, dawn was almost breaking.

I brought Tang Dong’s clothes back to the Tang family. This time, the burial went exceptionally smoothly.

I picked up Tang Dong’s urn with ease.

I’d already made up my mind: if Tang Dong tried anything again, I would smash his urn to pieces. But he never gave me the chance.

After Tang Dong was buried, I took an axe and chopped apart that blood-red coffin.

Uncle Ye had originally wanted to find someone to examine it, but before he could, Jiang Kai and Ye Xiaowu soon woke up.

Both of them were dazed and confused. They had forgotten everything that had happened over the past few days.

Afterward, I also asked Uncle Ye about that village.

What Uncle Ye told me was more or less the same as what Lai Zhi had said.

The only difference was that Uncle Ye told me a landslide really had happened there.

By the time they went, part of the village’s buildings had already been buried underground. So he had never seen any octagonal house.

However, the elders who had been there all knew there was indeed something evil about that village.

Why did the adults later forbid children from going anywhere near that place?

Because before that, many adults who had gone to tear down the houses and haul away bricks came back and fell ill.

Some of them acted as if they had been possessed, even trying to hang themselves with hemp rope.

After too many incidents, that mountain hollow became forbidden ground in the villagers’ mouths.

But I believed everything about that village definitely had something to do with Kuitian Pavilion.

Lai Zhi said that as long as there was money involved, those people would take on any crooked, sinister job.

During this time that I’d been helping people exorcise evil and dispel baleful influences, I’d ruined a lot of people’s livelihoods.

Someone had already put out word that an expert was watching me.

This time, the refinement of Tang Dong’s ashes seemed to be inextricably linked to that strange village, and also to Zhou Banshen.

I had a faint feeling that sooner or later, I would meet Kuitian Pavilion and the people inside it again.

The End