Chapter 66

Chapter 66

Xia Ximo entered the residence, pushed open the door, and headed straight for the main room.

In the corner, the wandering soul shrank back in fright at the sound.

Xia Ximo wasted no words. Her lips parted coldly. “How did he die? You should know.”

The wandering soul said nothing. Instead, she began to cry in a hollow, mournful voice.

Xia Ximo frowned. “He’s already dead. What use is crying?”

The ghost sobbed. “It was me. I was the one who killed him…”

“Good that you know.”

Xia Ximo swept a glance around the dilapidated room.

Anything of value looked as if it had long since been looted. On the table sat a bowl of soup and rice that had been left there for who knew how many days.

The windows were sealed shut, letting in almost no daylight.

It was hard to imagine a living person surviving half a year in a place like this.

“What exactly happened last night?”

From what she had seen yesterday, the yin energy around Zhou Zigui had indeed been far too heavy. He had been in danger of his soul leaving his body at any moment.

But his allotted lifespan had not yet run out. Even if his Living Soul left his body, he might briefly lose all signs of life, but he would not die immediately.

And his soul would not dare leave this residence at will.

Yet now, he was truly dead.

He had died a gruesome death, and an unjust one.

The wandering soul in the corner slowly stopped crying and revealed her original form as a woman. Only then did she begin to speak. “Last night… someone broke into the courtyard.”

“Someone?”

“No. That wasn’t a person. It was… a Vengeful Ghost!”

Liu Shi’s voice trembled, her face full of terror.

Xia Ximo’s eyes darkened. “Explain clearly.”

At the thought of her husband’s death, Liu Shi was overcome with grief again. After a moment, she slowly recounted what had happened the night before.

“Last night, around midnight…”

Zhou Zigui was woken by a knock on the door.

No one had dared set foot in the Zhou residence for quite some time. Even thieves and burglars had begun avoiding it.

So that knock sounded especially abrupt in the dead of night.

Zhou Zigui still got out of bed. Staggering to the door, he asked, “Who is it?”

The person outside said coldly, “I’ve come to borrow something.”

“I have nothing here to lend you. You should leave.”

After that, the person outside fell silent.

Zhou Zigui turned to go back, but by the moonlight, he saw that another shadow had appeared beneath his feet.

He whipped around. A faceless monster was floating behind him. The sight frightened his already unsteady soul so badly that it was knocked straight out of his body.

Yet the monster fixed its gaze on his soul, reached out a hand, and seized it with ease.

A Living Soul that had left the body was already fragile. It had no room to resist at all.

The monster let out a sinister laugh, opened a gaping, blood-red maw, and swallowed the soul whole.

At this, a faint ripple passed through Xia Ximo’s eyes.

“A monster that eats souls?”

Liu Shi nodded. “It’s absolutely true.”

It seemed Shangjing City was not as peaceful as it appeared on the surface.

There were quite a few sinister things lurking here.

Xia Ximo continued, “Yesterday, your husband wanted me to help find the real culprit who killed you. Why were you unwilling?”

Faced with this question, Liu Shi seemed hesitant and did not answer at once.

After a long while, she sighed again.

“The person who killed me is… someone important. Someone we cannot afford to offend.”

“I knew that if I told my husband, he would risk his life to kill that person and avenge us.”

“But… I didn’t want him to die. I wanted him to live well.”

Hearing this, Xia Ximo gave a derisive laugh. “Then take a good look at him. Living like this, how is he any different from being dead?”

“No, you don’t understand!”

Liu Shi raised her voice in protest. “You look so young. You have never been married, and you surely have no one you love. Of course you wouldn’t understand the agony of being separated by life and death from the one you love…”

That day, Zhou Zigui and a group of yamen runners found the bodies of Liu Shi and her two children beneath the cliff.
Her soul and the souls of her children drifted at his side.

But Zhou Zigui could not see them at all.

The children were so anxious they wailed, “I want Father! Why won’t Father answer me?”

Liu Shi did not know how to explain what it meant to be alive, what it meant to be dead, or what it meant for humans and ghosts to walk separate paths.

All they could do was follow her husband and watch him drown in grief.

In court, the coachman Ah Da took all the blame.

Zhou Zigui lost control. He rushed forward and grabbed Ah Da by the collar. “You animal! Give me back my wife! Give me back my children!”

She stepped forward, wanting to seize her husband’s arm, but her spirit body caught nothing. All she could do was scream helplessly beside him. “It wasn’t him! He isn’t the murderer!”

But no one could hear her.

She could only watch as Ah Da, the scapegoat, was dragged away to prison by the yamen runners.

The case seemed to have been brought to a perfect close, but Zhou Zigui returned home like a walking corpse.

He began lying in bed, neither eating nor drinking, paying no mind to the world. His whole being seemed empty, as if his soul had been ripped away.

Liu Shi watched him grow more haggard by the day and could only keep vigil beside him with the children’s souls.

“Husband, you mustn’t let anything happen to you…”

“You have to live well.”

“The person who killed us wasn’t Ah Da. They arrested the wrong man!”

Day after day, she murmured these words by his ear.

After an unknown number of days, Zhou Zigui, who had been starving to the brink of death, suddenly opened his eyes.

With great effort, he called out, “Wife, is that you? I heard your voice.”

Liu Shi was overwhelmed with joy and hurriedly replied, “It’s me… Husband!”

Zhou Zigui immediately sat up. There was no one in the room, yet his wife’s voice was there.

He asked, “Why can’t I see you? Wife, I want so badly to see you again, to see you and the children!”

Liu Shi’s heart filled with sorrow. “Husband, we are already dead…”

Zhou Zigui was not afraid.

After so many days of bitter longing, what did it matter if they were ghosts?

He still desperately wanted to see them. “Wife, you just said the one who killed you wasn’t Ah Da! Then who is the real murderer? I will avenge you!”

Liu Shi had wanted to say that name, but when she saw Zhou Zigui looking so worn and frail, she truly feared he would be smashing eggs against a rock and throwing his life away for nothing.

“I can’t tell you. We can’t take revenge.”

Zhou Zigui said angrily, “A life for a life. That is the natural order of things!”

Liu Shi sighed softly.

He was not wrong.

But since ancient times, before absolute power, human lives were no different from weeds.

Once a person was dead, they were dead.

If no life could be paid back, then how could justice be repaid?

“I didn’t want him to seek revenge, so I refused to say it.”

Liu Shi clenched her sleeve tightly in one hand, clearly struggling inside. She continued, “After that, my husband began to pull himself together a little, but he still refused to leave the house.”

“He was afraid that if he went out and came back, he would no longer be able to hear my voice…”

“I promised him I wouldn’t leave. Only then was he willing to go out once in a while to buy food.”

“People outside began spreading rumors that he had gone mad, but only I knew that my husband’s heart for me had never changed, even though I was a ghost.”

“We lived side by side like that, day and night. Strangely enough, after another period of time, he gradually became able to see me…”

Only then did Xia Ximo understand what Yan Zhengchu had meant-when a person on the brink of death was of one mind and heart with a soul, they could break through the barrier between yin and yang.

She truly did not understand such feelings.

Of course, she disdained understanding them as well.

She was just about to ask who the true murderer of the mother and her two children was when footsteps came from outside the door, and the wandering soul instantly scattered at the sound.

Xia Ximo had already sensed that pure yang energy. She walked to the door, blocking it, and looked displeasedly at the person outside. In a cold voice, she said, “Ren Fengjue, you scared the ghost away.”