Chapter 188
Chapter 188
At some point, fog had begun to spread through the mountains.
Inside an ancient shrine built of stone slabs, a strip of faded red silk hung from one of the drooping eaves, no one knew how long it had been there.
The fog surged in from every direction like a rising tide.
It swallowed the moss-covered drainage ditch outside the entrance, along with the torn paper cutouts of the Double Happiness character floating in the filthy water.
It churned before the stone threshold.
The old man’s shrill cry instantly plunged the shrine into an atmosphere of abject terror.
Blond-Haired Zhang Lao San stared at the fallen Phoenix-Bird Floral Crown, his eyes bulging from their sockets, and stumbled several steps backward.
At that moment, his fear was unmistakably genuine.
“There’s something in the fog.”
The bride pressed close to Qin Ying. Her voice trembled and stretched with fear, making it sound all the more ghostly.
Qin Ying turned her head. Outside the shrine, the dense fog seethed and churned. There really were “people” moving inside it.
They resembled figures in some ancient black-and-white silent film, moving about and working amid the fog.
Most were dressed in rags, with much of their gaunt rib cages exposed.
The entire shrine fell so silent one could hear a pin drop. Only the sound of heavy breathing remained.
Suddenly, the fog churned again, and the figures within vanished. Tap, tap. Footsteps approached.
A stooped man in an ocher-brown jacket emerged from the fog.
Perched on his right shoulder was a girl with a face as white as risen dough and a pair of long, narrow eyes slanting up toward her temples.
A Red Flower was pinned beside the girl’s temple. She looked sixteen or seventeen and was equally thin.
Sitting on the stooped man’s shoulder, she looked like a slender matchstick balanced atop a thicker one.
The man turned his head, grinned, and asked something in an extremely heavy accent.
It was July, yet he seemed bitterly cold. When he opened his mouth, he exhaled a puff of white vapor.
The others might have understood him, but Qin Ying certainly didn’t.
No one dared answer. The man standing before the stone threshold repeated himself.
This time, Qin Ying understood.
He was asking, “Want to buy?”
Buy what?
Before she could give it any thought, there was a sudden commotion behind her.
Zhang Lao San, who had just been cowering like a plague-stricken chicken, lunged forward and reached for the silver Phoenix-Bird Floral Crown on the floor.
“Lao San, don’t touch it!” the shriveled old man inside the shrine cried out.
But Zhang Lao San had already snatched up the Phoenix-Bird Floral Crown.
The teardrop-shaped silver bells hanging beneath the Phoenix-Bird Floral Crown struck one another with a bright jingle.
Clutching the Phoenix-Bird Floral Crown, Zhang Lao San charged straight at Qin Ying.
“Put it on! Hurry!”
His extreme terror had curdled into fury, turning him into a drunken bull on a rampage.
He spewed obscenities as he tried to force the Phoenix-Bird Floral Crown onto Qin Ying’s head.
Qin Ying tried to retreat, only for her foot to come down on the bride pressed close beside her.
The bride squeezed her eyes shut and shrieked, her hand coiling around Qin Ying’s arm like a vine.
That brief delay was enough for Zhang Lao San to close the distance.
Just as triumph flashed in his eyes, Qin Ying lashed out with a kick, her face expressionless.
Zhang Lao San went flying several paces, and the Phoenix-Bird Floral Crown fell to the floor once more.
The flowers and birds decorating it, hammered from thin sheets of silver, struck the ground and bent out of shape.
Clack.
A black pebble tumbled out of the Phoenix-Bird Floral Crown.
It rolled across the floor toward Qin Ying.
The bride’s shriek rang beside her ear.
Her eyes were tightly shut, and as she screamed, she clung to Qin Ying like a shackle, anchoring her in place with astonishing strength.
“Stop screaming,” Qin Ying said with startling calm.
The bride’s shrill cry abruptly cut off.
She felt a hand clamp around her wrist. The next instant, the world spun around her.
Qin Ying threw the bride over her shoulder.
As the hem of her dress swept through a wide arc, Qin Ying’s voice rang out again.
“You sure know how to scream and put on an act. What are you, a whistling kettle?”
“Huh?”
The airborne bride only had time to voice her confusion before her back slammed hard into the floor.
Agony tore through her entire body, leaving her breath caught in her throat.
Before she could recover, pain shot through both cheeks as someone forcibly pried her jaws apart.
Qin Ying shoved the tiny Black Stone that had fallen from the bridal headdress into her mouth.
“Didn’t you want me to touch this Yellow Springs Eye Stone?”
“Let’s see what happens when someone touches it.”
With that, Qin Ying pulled back the right hand she had used to ram the stone down the bride’s throat.
Under the dim light, a silvery metallic sheen glinted across the skin of her hand.
The bride’s violent coughing was the only sound in the ancestral hall.
There were around a dozen villagers from Qingzhai Village inside.
At the sight before them, every one of them stood frozen in place.
It wasn’t until Zhang Yubo’s face twisted and he shouted, “Yuqin!” that the stunned crowd finally snapped back to their senses.
Aside from Blond-Haired Zhang Lao San, who was still unable to rise after taking a side kick from Qin Ying, everyone surged toward her as though waking from a dream.
Qin Ying remained where she was and raised a hand to pat her hat back into place.
“Knock them all out.”
Without looking back, she bent down and grabbed the bride by the collar. The woman was coughing so hard that drool covered her face.
“Yuqin? Zhang Yuqin?”
The moment she spoke, a burst of electrical crackling filled the hall.
A streak of violet-blue electricity flashed out from beneath her hood.
Moving almost too fast for the naked eye to follow, it shot straight toward the ceiling, then darted back and forth several times among the villagers.
Amid the sharp crackle of electricity, the villagers who had been charging at her collapsed one after another.
Their limbs convulsed, and the voltage made them lose control of their bodily functions.
Even the shriveled old man and the fallen Zhang Lao San were no exception.
They never saw what had attacked them, not even as they lost consciousness.
The streak of electricity flew back beneath Qin Ying’s hood.
In the span of a single second, Qin Ying became the only person left standing in the ancestral hall.
“Well done,” she praised the empty air.
The bride, or rather, Zhang Yuqin of Qingzhai Village, had finally swallowed the stone lodged in her throat. Her face streaming with snot and tears, she looked up.
When she saw the scene around her, the corners of her mouth twitched, but she still tried to maintain her act. “What are you talking about?”
Qin Ying sighed. “If I’d panicked just now and let you put that bridal headdress set with the Yellow Springs Eye Stone on me, what would you have done?”
“Would you have sent me into the mountains as a bride?”
As she spoke, Qin Ying turned to look outside the ancestral hall.
Thick fog continued to churn beyond the doors, but the man in ocher robes who had been standing outside was gone.
The bride shook her head frantically, instinctively about to deny it.
Then she seemed to remember something. The realization shook her so deeply that she even forgot to lie.
Qin Ying curled her lips. “Remember now? You swallowed that damned stone, so you’re the one in trouble.”
The bride’s face gradually contorted as she lay half-reclined on the floor.
She hurriedly rolled onto her stomach and tried to jam her fingers down her throat to vomit up the stone.
Before she could succeed, Qin Ying kicked her over.
“Did you use that story about the Mountain God’s bride to fool the people from the Cultural Preservation Bureau?”
At the thought of Yin Minmin, Qin Ying was so furious she laughed. “Maybe you even tricked Minmin into becoming the bride?”
Qin Ying hadn’t believed a single word out of this bride’s mouth from the very beginning.
Zhang Yuqin dropped her earlier act. Scrambling up from the floor, she snatched up a machete one of the villagers had dropped and swung it at Qin Ying.
“I’ll kill you!”
At the thought of what she had swallowed, Zhang Yuqin’s eyes turned bloodshot.
It was over. She was finished.
Those words flooded her mind as she charged at Qin Ying with the machete, only to be sent sprawling once again.
Just as Qin Ying was about to continue questioning her, startled cries suddenly erupted from a house outside the ancestral hall.