Chapter 15

Chapter 15

I ran out of the inn and saw that my truck was already empty. They had hauled away all five coffins.

It was still the middle of the night, and the village wasn’t very big.

I hadn’t gone far into the village when I saw an old man leading several men into a house. He seemed to be fetching something, and soon came back out.

I quietly followed them from behind. As I passed that house, I glanced inside through the door that hadn’t been shut properly.

To my surprise, I saw another familiar face.

The woman inside looked exactly like the innkeeper’s wife.

But they definitely weren’t the same person.

The woman was inside coaxing her children. In front of her were three swaddled infants of the same size.

I realized something then. This village seemed to have a lot of twins-even triplets.

The woman who ran the supermarket at that service area had very likely married out of Xiaogu Village too.

I vaguely remembered what that old man had said before I passed out. He said the Sky-Gazing Platform had abandoned them.

Then why had the Sky-Gazing Platform chosen this remote little village in the first place?

The people here were so lazy and indolent. If no one had been supporting them before, how could they ever have been wealthy?

This chain of thoughts sent a chill down my spine. I couldn’t help thinking again of the five coffins buried in front of Fengmao Mall, and that so-called Five Ghosts Fortune-Gathering Array…

Those things had appeared before my eyes again and again, each one with the same face as Jiang Shuang.

So the so-called “five ghosts” were actually five living quintuplets?

I followed those men all the way to the deepest part of the village. It looked like an ancestral hall, with a wide courtyard.

The five red coffins had been placed in one corner of the courtyard, just as they had been when they were dug up, arranged in a circle with their heads facing inward.

Jiang Shuang’s hands and feet had been bound, and she had been thrown into the center of the courtyard.

I saw the innkeeper and Fan Qian. Fan Qian was smoking as he stood alone in a corner.

There were quite a few men in the courtyard, and some women too.

I saw many similar faces. It seemed my guess had been right-this village really did produce a lot of multiple births.

The old man I had just been following appeared to be the village chief.

He had Jiang Shuang hauled up and forced to kneel on the ground.

Holding a copy of the village rules, he put on an act and said, “Twenty years ago, the Jiang family broke the rules. They secretly switched out the ghost fetus, allowing you to live an extra twenty years-and causing the village to suffer twenty years of poverty.”

“Now that our ancestors have shown their spirit, it is time for your Jiang family to repay the sin you committed back then. Today, we will send you back into your coffin. Perhaps, in the future, your memorial tablet will enter the village ancestral hall, and you will receive offerings from later generations. In your next life, may you enjoy incense, wealth, and honor.”

Jiang Shuang spat out the dirty rag that had been stuffed in her mouth. Her eyes were red as she said, “You people killed my family! You made me lose my home!”

“You bunch of freaks! Demons! I don’t care about entering some rotten ancestral hall!”

“You all deserve retribution! Even if I die today, I’ll become a ghost and drag all of you down with me-”

Jiang Shuang’s mouth was gagged again. After being dragged here, she must have pieced together the truth of what happened back then from these people’s conversations.

Her family had been treated as materials for creating the Five Ghosts Fortune-Gathering Array. Those five coffins had been sold to Jiaxing Commerce, in exchange for support and wealth for the village.