Chapter 11

Chapter 11

When I carried Jiang Shuang out on my back, the supermarket owner thought she’d suffered heatstroke. She gave her some water and medicine.

It took quite a while before Jiang Shuang woke up.

After she came to, she kept crying, her body shaking uncontrollably.

Once Jiang Shuang had recovered a little, I told the three of them to get in the car at once. We couldn’t afford to waste any more time.

By the time the car started, the sun was already leaning west.

Before I’d even stepped on the gas, an old woman with gray-white hair suddenly appeared in front of our hood.

She shuffled forward shakily, then, in broad daylight, turned into a wisp of blue smoke.

“Th-th-th-th…” Zhang Qing was so frightened he couldn’t even get the words out.

Fan Qian cursed under his breath. “Fuck, that’s fucking eerie.”

I glanced over at him and saw that he had clenched the pendant on his wrist in his fist. It was glossy and reddish, like an oval stone.

Hauling a coffin down the road was bound to attract this sort of thing. Not to mention the fact that the coffin we were transporting wasn’t an ordinary one.

I stopped paying attention to the rest and drove on.

The road conditions here were far from good. The land on both sides was barren, and every now and then there’d be a few trees, all twisted and crooked.

There were hardly any cars on the road. It took ages before one finally passed by.

As the sky grew darker and darker, we kept driving straight along the highway, but still couldn’t find the turnoff to Xiaogu Village.

I reset the navigation several times, but the voice from it seemed to grow more and more mechanical.

That stiff male voice kept repeating: “Go forward five hundred meters,” “Continue forward another five hundred meters…”

At last, night fell completely.

The drive should have taken only an hour, but now it was already seven o’clock.

“This is wrong!”

Fan Qian was still gripping his pendant tightly. With his other hand, he rummaged through his bag for a long time before pulling out a talisman. He lit it with a lighter and tossed it out the window.

But nothing changed.

Zhang Qing was shaking so hard his teeth were chattering. He grabbed Fan Qian’s shoulder and asked, “Master, what’s going on? A ghostly maze?”

“If it were just a ghostly maze, that’d be fine.”

Grinding his teeth, Fan Qian stared at the highway ahead, which seemed to stretch on forever. “I’m afraid the coffin we’re hauling is too damn sinister. We’ve already wandered onto an underworld road.”

“W-what?”

Zhang Qing hurriedly grabbed at me with trembling hands. “Brother Long, how about we stop for now? Let’s stop and wait until daylight.”

I caught Jiang Shuang’s increasingly pale face in the rearview mirror and said flatly, “No stopping. We have to deliver the coffin today.”

I lit a cigarette and stuck it out the window. It went out almost immediately, and Fan Qian sneered at the sight.

Just then, the road ahead suddenly split in two, the guardrail stretching off to both sides-one branch to the left, the other to the right.

“We’re done for!”

Fan Qian’s face went white in an instant. “Life-or-Death Road. If we take the wrong way, we’ll never get back out.”