Chapter 237
Chapter 237
The ancient town’s commercial street was bustling at night.
Viral snack stalls lined both sides of the street, all overpriced and mediocre.
There was nothing particularly remarkable about such a cookie-cutter setup.
But tourists loved it anyway.
The moment they stepped onto the street, they were assaulted by a DJ’s ear-splitting hype chants.
Qin Ying resisted the urge to frown. Walking beside her, Han Lie subtly angled his body to shield her from the crowd.
Xie Shao had not come with them. He had stayed near the Hu Family Manor.
After all, strolling through the night market in that Black Trench Coat would attract far too much attention.
As Han Lie had said, that spot was the best vantage point in the area. But that also meant that if they could go there, so could anyone else.
Until they had determined whether the crows had gathered there due to human intervention, it would be unwise for Xie Shao to show himself.
Qin Ying had brought Han Lie along instead.
The teahouse was just up ahead, and several influencers were livestreaming upstairs.
Qin Ying pulled on the mask hanging from one ear and linked her arm through Han Lie’s.
She felt him instantly go rigid, his arm as straight as the stalks of sugarcane at the juice stand nearby. Qin Ying discreetly gave his taut arm muscles a pinch.
“Relax,” she whispered.
Han Lie’s heart gave a violent flutter. Only by repeatedly reminding himself that this was part of the mission did he manage to force himself to calm down.
He let Qin Ying hold his arm as they made their way through the crowd and into the teahouse.
The service there was impeccable. As soon as they entered, two rows of staff stood eagerly on either side to welcome them.
“I want to go to the fourth floor,” Qin Ying said directly.
A hostess escorted them to the teahouse’s top floor.
The teahouse had introduced several visually stunning wellness teas, and business was still brisk despite the late hour.
Qin Ying and Han Lie were in luck. The private room facing the Hu Family Manor was still available.
The lotus tea cost 499 yuan per person, but Xie Shao had said their operational expenses would be reimbursed, so Qin Ying ordered several photogenic pastries as well without the slightest hesitation.
Then she pointed at the window. “Please open that. I’d like some fresh air.”
The server was a young woman with a petite frame and a round face. At Qin Ying’s request, her expression stiffened almost imperceptibly.
“Well, miss, it’s quite hot outside, and the air conditioner is on in here. It might get a little warm if I open the window,” she said with a smile.
Qin Ying knew at once that she was lying.
Still smiling, she insisted, “I prefer a natural breeze. Please open it.”
Seeing that Qin Ying would not budge, the server finally opened the antique-style wooden lattice window.
The gauze curtain fluttered in the breeze, and the plastic beads along its hem rustled softly.
Qin Ying took out her phone and pretended to snap a few pictures. Smiling, she said, “This makes it much more atmospheric.”
The server returned a strained smile, nodded, and withdrew.
Qin Ying and Han Lie stood side by side at the window.
Unlike the front street with its riot of colorful lights, the ancient buildings behind the teahouse were cloaked in darkness. The few streetlamps scattered among them looked like ghostly will-o’-the-wisps.
The entire Hu Family Manor lay before them.
Qin Ying was just about to speak when she felt Han Lie slip an arm around her shoulders.
He drew her halfway into his embrace like an affectionate boyfriend, although his palm was as hot as a hand warmer about to explode.
Someone watching? Qin Ying asked with her eyes.
Han Lie cast an almost imperceptible glance toward the corridor outside their private room.
The server from earlier had not left. She was standing nearby, speaking into the black device clipped to her waist and asking for a manager to come upstairs.
Qin Ying fell silent and motioned for him to look at the Hu Family Manor.
Han Lie quietly took several deep breaths, forcibly dragging his attention back to the situation at hand.
His eyesight was exceptional. The moment he focused and swept his gaze across the Hu Family Manor, he frowned.
The reason was simple: the crows gathered inside the Hu Family Manor were arranged far too neatly.
Every courtyard wall, stretching all the way into the depths of the compound, was lined with crows.
The male crow had tucked its head beneath a wing and stood silently on guard at the perimeter.
This was the most common sentry behavior in a flock. Sentries watched their surroundings and swiftly relayed warnings at the first sign of a potential threat.
Crows coordinated the flock through calls, dives, and circling motions. Once they received a warning from a sentry, they would quickly decide whether to fight or retreat.
Judging from the sentries’ defensive formation, the flock before them appeared to be guarding against a powerful enemy.
After Han Lie finished explaining in a low voice beside Qin Ying’s ear, she let out a breath of relief.
Whatever else might be going on, at least it wasn’t some kind of deadly epidemic.
Following Han Lie’s lead, she leaned in and whispered as though they were sharing a secret. “Could someone be ordering them to do this?”
Han Lie considered it for a moment. “I can’t rule it out.”
As they spoke, someone knocked on the private room’s door.
The tea and pastries they had ordered had arrived.
Regardless of how they tasted, the pastries here were certainly beautiful.
Each intricate design had its own mold, and the pastries’ subdued colors made them especially pleasing to the eye.
A smiling middle-aged man came in, put on gloves, and began pouring hot water over a lotus blossom resting on a white porcelain plate.
The whole point was to lay the ceremony on thick so customers would feel the few hundred they’d spent had been worth it.
Qin Ying obligingly took out her phone and started filming.
A cup of golden tea delicately scented with lotus was placed before her, and she thanked him with a smile.
The middle-aged man who had prepared the tea strolled casually over to the window. “I’ll close the window for you, so the wind doesn’t blow out the candles.”
His movements were perfectly natural, but Qin Ying bent forward and blew out the two candles, one tall and one short, before he could close it. “Now we don’t have to worry about the flames.”
Blow them out before the wind could.
Flawless logic.
The middle-aged man’s hand paused on the window, but he pretended not to understand and tried to close it anyway.
Qin Ying smiled and shot Han Lie a look.
He understood at once and closed the private room’s door.
Then he planted himself in front of it. The middle-aged man went completely rigid. They weren’t going to get physical over him closing a window, were they?
Qin Ying walked over and asked, “You’re going to all this trouble to close the window. What exactly are you hiding out there?”
Before the man could make something up, Qin Ying offered a suggestion. “Is it haunted?”
As if on cue, wind poured in through the window.
Strangely enough, it was the height of summer, and the snack street downstairs couldn’t sell iced drinks fast enough, yet the incoming draft was eerily cool, sweeping the fragrance of tea from the room.
The middle-aged man had been called in by the server to smooth things over. With Han Lie blocking the door and Qin Ying pressing him for answers, his face crumpled.
Qin Ying reassured him with breezy confidence. “Don’t worry. I’m a local. I’ve heard ghost stories about Hu Family Manor since I was a kid. I just want to know if there’s been a new version lately.”
With no room left to evade the question, the middle-aged man lowered his voice and rattled off a few sentences before hurrying away.
Han Lie might have been standing by the door, but his hearing was excellent. He had caught every word.
The man said that crows had begun gathering at Hu Family Manor over ten days ago. During the day, they foraged all over the area. At night, they perched silently atop the walls.
But at a certain point each night, they would suddenly erupt into chaos, swarming across the sky and forming patterns.
During those seven or eight minutes, dead crows would fall like rain. No one knew whether the birds were slaughtering one another or being killed by something else.
Before the carcasses could even hit the ground, the other crows would snatch them up in their beaks and carry them off to eat.
As a result, the cleaners who swept Hu Family Manor every day found only speckled drops of blood and the occasional feather on the ground, but never a single crow carcass.
This had continued for nearly fifteen days. And because it happened to coincide with the Zhongyuan Festival, the tea house hadn’t dared let word get out.