Chapter 113.2

“Mengmeng, what are you trying to do?”

“Don’t worry about it. Help me open everything and dump it on the ground.”

“Oh, okay.”

Zheng Jiayi opened all the snacks they had bought from the little shop and scattered them across the ground.

Yin Meng also piled up the cooked food she had bought from a neighbor.

This was at the edge of town, pretty remote, with hardly anyone around. If someone else saw them, they would probably point and curse them for wasting food like this, the kind of waste people said would bring down heaven’s punishment.

After all the food had been spread out, Yin Meng sat down with Zheng Jiayi nearby and waited in silence.

But after waiting and waiting, the thing she wanted to attract still did not appear.

Yin Meng could not help wondering whether all the rats in this town had already been eaten clean.

Last night, she had hung from the roof beam and listened to the gnawing sounds coming from the other two rooms.

In one night, that family of three had gone through two whole fertilizer sacks of rats. No matter how fast rats reproduced, they probably could not keep up with being eaten like that.

No wonder the Zheng family had to go into the mountains to catch more.

“Sigh.”

Yin Meng rubbed her forehead and let out a long breath.

She had not slept at all last night, because the second half of yesterday night had been even crazier than the night before.

Three pairs of eyes had kept appearing from every corner of the house, searching for any crack they could use to peek into the room.

Even shining a flashlight at them did no good. At first they still knew enough to dodge a little, but later they more or less stopped pretending. They would stare back at her right through the beam, even deliberately rolling their eyeballs around while meeting her gaze.

Yin Meng had actually wanted them to make the first move. That way she would finally have a reason to tear apart this fake atmosphere and fight back.

But she waited all the way until dawn, and the family of three still withdrew without rushing in.

Judging from how things were progressing, though, tonight they would definitely come in.

“Hahaha, memorial feast! Hahaha, memorial feast!”

At that moment, a filthy fool with disheveled hair and a ragged padded coat came running out. He rushed straight toward the food on the ground, grabbed it, and stuffed it into his mouth.

“Hey…” Zheng Jiayi started to speak, wanting to stop him.

Yin Meng picked up the unopened snacks still left in the bag, walked over, and handed them to him.

“The ground’s dirty.”

The fool looked at the little bit in the bag, then at the huge pile on the ground, shook his head, and kept eating off the dirt.

“Eat this!”

Yin Meng opened the package and held it out to him, but he waved it away.

“You eat this first!”

Yin Meng raised her voice, startling him so badly that he shuddered. He had no choice but to lift his head, take what was in the bag, and start eating.

Zheng Jiayi asked quietly, “Mengmeng, do you know him?”

Yin Meng replied with a question of her own. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

Zheng Jiayi hurriedly waved her hands. “I hardly ever come back.”

“Then he’s one of those village guardians. Almost every village has someone like that.”

In the past, because parents did not take it seriously, because medical care was poor, and for all sorts of other reasons, people whose minds were damaged like this were common in the countryside.

And as they got older, their family members either aged or died, and they gradually lost anyone willing to care for them. Quite a few were abandoned early and left to wander.

“Village guardian” was really just a well-meaning title. Sure, there were always rare cases where someone was truly gifted, where genius and madness blurred together. But most of them were, simply put, fools.

Calling them that, and attaching all kinds of mystical functions to them, was really a kind of unspoken agreement that bound them to the village.

Looked at another way, if a village had a village guardian and that person could still live in decent health, that in itself proved the village had reached a certain basic standard of living, and that the local people were kindhearted enough to fit the villagers’ simple idea of a good life.

At first, Yin Meng did not think she had stumbled onto anything special. But when the fool kept eating, and nearby came a series of squeaks, and more and more rats began emerging from nowhere to eat the food on the ground, the look in Yin Meng’s eyes changed as she watched him.

She really might have found a true village guardian.

Now that the rats had been lured over, it was time for her to get to work.

“Jiayi, open the bag.”

“Okay.” Zheng Jiayi opened the fertilizer sack in her hands.

“Don’t let your hands shake. Endure it.”

“Okay!”

Yin Meng drew her leather whip. With a snap and a pull, one rat was wrapped up by the whip and flung into the fertilizer sack.

One, two, three, four…

Zheng Jiayi had already squeezed her eyes shut. Her hands were trembling too, but she still held up the increasingly heavy sack.

“All done.”

At that, Zheng Jiayi opened her eyes and looked down. When she saw the pile of rats inside the sack climbing over one another, her stomach immediately began to convulse.

Yin Meng took the bag from her, tied it shut with rope, then hoisted it onto her shoulder.

“Let’s go.”

“Okay, Mengmeng.” Zheng Jiayi wanted to walk close to Yin Meng the way she used to, but when she looked at the bulging sack that kept shifting, she still put a little distance between them.

When they passed the fool, Yin Meng stopped, looked at him again, and said,

“Thanks.”

The fool acted as if he had not heard her and kept eating what was in his hand.

Yin Meng did not head straight home. Instead, she stopped in front of a house, took out some money, and asked whether they could lend her the kitchen and a few ingredients so she could stir-fry a dish and take it with her.

The homeowner was very polite and told her to stay and have dinner with them instead, no need to pay.

Yin Meng declined the invitation and insisted on paying. The host still would not take the money. After helping her light the stove, the woman brought out a jar of lard, pointed out the seasonings on the counter and the vegetables in the cabinet, and told Yin Meng to use whatever she liked.

Yin Meng really did use whatever she liked. She took down every strip of smoked cured meat hanging from the beam, did not even wash it, just chopped it up and dumped it straight into the wok.

Only then did the homeowner’s expression finally change.

Yin Meng took out the money again and asked whether it was enough.

This time the host accepted it awkwardly, saying over and over, “It’s enough, it’s enough, more than enough.”

Right after special training ended, she and Runsheng had come out to follow Little Yuanhou on river walk. Under normal circumstances, after special training ended, the two of them would still have gone back to help out at the shop on campus.

Both she and Runsheng had lived through the kind of days when even a few coins felt heavy in the hand. Earning money itself brought them joy.

Zheng Jiayi set the sack of rats to one side, then happily ran to the back to help tend the fire, saying with a smile,

“Every time I come back to my hometown, I love using this kind of stove. It’s so fun.”

While stir-frying, Yin Meng said, “If you had to cook on a stove like this every day just to eat, you wouldn’t think it was fun anymore.”

After moving to the city, she still preferred gas stoves. Unfortunately, Runsheng would not let her into the little kitchen in the basement of the shop. When the two of them had late-night snacks, Runsheng always cooked them himself, refusing to let her help at all. He would not even let her pass him the salt or MSG.

Even her master, Aunt Liu, after tasting her cooking, had once praised her by saying, “Mengmeng, you really were born to be a pampered young mistress.”

Then she had added one more sentence:

“If I had your cooking skills, the old madam probably wouldn’t bear to let me cook either, afraid the smoke would dirty my face and hands.”

There was actually another half-sentence she had left unspoken:

“Even more afraid it might kill her.”

Yin Meng kept stir-frying, then went to cut vegetables, tossed them into the wok, and stir-fried again. Once the seasoning seemed about right, she started adding it in. During the process, she even took out a whole bunch of little bottles and jars from on her person and poured them in one by one. At the end, she even thickened the sauce.

“All right, stop feeding the fire.”

Hearing that, Zheng Jiayi immediately got up and went over to the stove. Looking at the dish in the wok, which looked terrible and was even more colorful than a rainbow, she praised it anyway:

“Wow, it smells amazing! Mengmeng, you’re incredible!”

The corner of Yin Meng’s mouth lifted slightly.

This was the first time anyone had ever praised her cooking while she was making it.

“I’ll taste a bite first.”

Zheng Jiayi picked up a pair of chopsticks and reached in, planning to grab a piece.

She had been the one tending the fire, keeping it blazing. No matter how strange the dish was, the ingredients had to be cooked through.

Smack!

Yin Meng slapped the chopsticks from her hand.

“Don’t eat it. Stay alive and keep praising me.”

Yin Meng enjoyed the feeling of cooking, but she was not so delusional that she truly believed the things she made were fit to feed to her own people.

There were not enough bowls to hold it, so Yin Meng planned to buy a ladle from the host family and also a small crock.

The host waved off the money again, saying they were worthless little things, and she could just take them. At worst, she could come get them back from Old Zheng’s place in a couple of days.

Yin Meng ladled her personally crafted delicacy into the crock, then left another sum of money behind before leaving.

When they got back to Old Zheng’s house, she shoved both the crock and the fertilizer sack under the bed.

At dusk.

Yin Meng stood by the second-floor stairway window, watching the three members of the Zheng family return home one by one.

Each of them had a fertilizer sack slung over a shoulder, but every bag was noticeably smaller than before.

Night fell. Zheng Jiayi, who should have been asleep, sat in front of the vanity on the chair, too afraid to get into bed.

“Get in bed and sleep.”

“Mengmeng, I’m not sleepy.”

“Be good.”

“Oh… okay.”

Zheng Jiayi climbed onto the bed and wrapped her arms around her knees. The thought of a giant sack of rats under the bed made it impossible for her to lie down.

“Mengmeng, aren’t you coming up to sleep?”

“In a bit.”

Yin Meng stood at the doorway.

Late into the night.

The sounds of chewing came from outside once again. Old Zheng’s household was having dinner.

Only this time, the sounds did not last very long.

Yin Meng walked back to the bedside and sat down.

She did not pretend to be asleep. Even so, an eye appeared in the crack above among the roof beams, another eye showed up along the wall, and in the round hole in the floor beneath them, an eyeball was rolling around too.

The family of three were like lizards, clinging and crawling however they could, doing everything possible to peer inside.

And this time, perhaps because they were hungry, peeking was no longer enough. They began biting with their teeth and prying with their hands, trying to widen the cracks they were using to watch.

“Mengmeng, what’s that sound?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Soon, they were no longer satisfied with that either and became even more direct. The door began to shake under repeated pushes, and from outside came the voices of the eldest uncle, the eldest aunt, and Daqiang one after another:

“Jiayi, be good, open the door. Your aunt has something she wants to say to you.”

“Jiayi, open the door. Your uncle wants you to pass a few words to your dad.”

“Little Sister Jiayi, remember when you used to come back for tomb-sweeping when we were kids and the two of us played together?”

Zheng Jiayi did not open the door. This time, she could feel the wrongness head-on.

“Mengmeng, what happened to my uncle’s family?”

“Can’t you hear them?”

“They… they won’t be okay, will they?”

“They’re fine.”

“Haa…” Zheng Jiayi let out a breath of relief.

“They’ve been dead for a long time already.”

Zheng Jiayi: “…”

“If you don’t want your parents to turn into that too, help me drag the crock out from under the bed.”

“Okay!”

Zheng Jiayi got off the bed and pulled with both hands, dragging the crock out.

Yin Meng untied the fertilizer sack, then used the ladle to scoop the dish she had cooked, one big spoonful after another, into the bag.

The rats inside ate very happily.

At last, the whole crock had been emptied into the sack, and meanwhile, the pushing at the door had turned into pounding.

The table and chairs braced against the entrance were close to giving out.

“Get on the bed.”

“Okay.”

Zheng Jiayi obediently climbed back onto the bed.

Bang!

The bedroom door burst open. Only Daqiang was standing there.

Zheng Jiayi clutched the quilt in front of herself. “Brother Daqiang… you…”

“Little Sister Jiayi, why didn’t you open the door just now?”

After Zheng Daqiang spoke, he turned around. Behind him was actually his mother.

“Jiayi, you weren’t being good. You made your aunt knock for so long.”

Then Zheng Daqiang turned back, reached up, and tore the skin off his own face, revealing the eldest uncle’s face underneath.

“Jiayi, you made your uncle wait a very long time.”

Yin Meng had long since noticed how strange this family of three was. No wonder they only ever appeared one at a time, never in pairs, much less together as a whole family.

Because they could only keep one person looking alive at a time. The other two were like human skins being worn.

So when they talked inside the house, they stayed pressed against the door. When they ate rats, they also stayed pressed against the door, because at that time their real bodies were hanging behind the door like clothes.

Watching Zheng Daqiang’s movement, this really was tearing off one’s face in the most literal possible sense.

Yin Meng let out a breath in her heart. That meant she no longer had to keep holding herself back. She could move freely now.

She lifted her foot and kicked over the fertilizer sack.

Instantly, the rats inside that had just finished their extra meal came pouring out in a swarm, skittering all over the floor.

This time Zheng Jiayi did not scream, because she had just seen something even more horrifying. Compared to that, rats no longer seemed like much.

The two sheets of human skin hanging from the eldest uncle’s front and back slipped off him. Like flat paper figures, they snatched up the rats on the ground and stuffed them into their mouths.

The eldest uncle himself dropped to his knees and swept rats toward himself with both arms before burying his whole face down into them and chewing.

If one looked closely, one could see that the rats’ eyes had already changed color. On some of them, stripes had even appeared on their bellies or tails.

They were eating with great relish. Even while enjoying the meal, they occasionally raised their heads to glance at the two girls on the bed, as if silently saying that once they finished eating, it would be their turn.

Yin Meng waited quietly.

For the first time, she was full of anticipation for her own cooking.

“Ah!”

Suddenly, Zheng Daqiang was the first to lose it. His body, thin as a sheet, began to twist. The twisting grew more and more extreme until he started tying himself into knots.

His mother was the same. Her body had already twisted into a rope.

Yet even in that state, they still kept exerting themselves and writhing harder. Then came the sound of skin splitting, and the two of them burst apart like popped balloons, exploding into countless fragments.

The eldest uncle froze.

His wife and son had splattered all over his face and body.

Then he started reacting too. His body convulsed, and his mouth stretched open to an outrageously exaggerated degree. As if that still was not enough, he actually raised his hands, grabbed his upper and lower jaws, and began pulling.

Riiip…

Like peeling open a pomegranate, he tore his mouth completely apart.

Plop…

A huge fish jumped out. There was still a rat tail hanging from its mouth.

Yin Meng grabbed the spatula and was about to chop it.

The big fish kept blinking, as though begging her to help end its suffering. It even shed fish tears.

Yin Meng put the spatula away, took out a Dissolution of Evil Talisman Needle, and stuffed it into the fish’s mouth.

The fish stopped trembling, but its body kept swelling larger and larger.

Seeing that, Yin Meng yanked the vanity over, then pulled Zheng Jiayi to her side, and the two of them crouched behind it.

Bang!

A violent explosion rang out. Wherever the pus splashed onto the walls, the floor, or the vanity in front of them, it caused corrosion to varying degrees.

Yin Meng let out a breath of relief, but Zheng Jiayi was still in a daze, as if her soul had not returned to her body.

At that moment, the fool’s voice came from the yard:

“Hahaha, memorial feast! Hahaha, memorial feast!”

Yin Meng pulled Zheng Jiayi into the next room. When she opened the door, sure enough, there was a fishhook hanging behind the door panel.

She pushed open the window and looked down at the fool below.

The fool hopped and skipped as he shouted:

“A monster wearing human skin! A monster wearing human skin!”

Yin Meng frowned. “A Dead Sinker?”

“I’m a Corpse Retriever! I’m a Corpse Retriever!”

The moment Yin Meng heard that, she immediately asked, “Did Little Yuanhou send you?”

“Take me to Zhengmen Village and haul it up! Take me to Zhengmen Village and haul it up!”

“All right, I’ll go with you right now!”

Yin Meng grabbed her backpack and ran downstairs. When she reached the yard, Zheng Jiayi chased after her.

“Mengmeng, where are you going? Let me come with you. Please let me stay with you, okay?”

“Jiayi, your parents are fine now. You can go home.”

“No, I’m scared to stay here alone. I’m scared to go back by myself. Please let me go with you, Mengmeng, I’m begging you!”

She really had been terrified just now. The only person she could rely on was Yin Meng.

“I can’t take you with me. Little Yuanhou will get angry.”

She knew very well that she could not let kindness cloud her judgment. Earlier she could look after Zheng Jiayi, but now that things were over, she could not bring a burden with her to see Little Yuanhou.

“Mengmeng, I’m begging you. Just let me go with you.”

Faced with Zheng Jiayi’s pleading, Yin Meng was in a difficult position. But after another thought, once they met Little Yuanhou, Zheng Jiayi could just head back then. At worst, Little Yuanhou would only glare at her.

In the end, Yin Meng could only nod helplessly. “Fine. You can come for now.”

“Yin Meng, you’re so good. Thank you!”

In the dead of night,

the fool danced and sang in front as he walked, while behind him the two young girls followed in silence.

…

“Is Uncle Xue okay?”

Li Zhuiyuan was mixing a fresh batch of red seal paste, using blood that had just been taken from Xue Dad.

“Don’t worry, Little Yuanhou. He’s fine. He’ll be all right after he sleeps. I was very gentle.”

“Mhm.”

After finishing the red seal paste, Li Zhuiyuan packed it into his bag. Before leaving, he made a special trip to Xue Dad’s room to check on him and confirm that Runsheng had been telling the truth. Xue Dad was sleeping soundly.

The wound in his palm had also been carefully bandaged.

Li Zhuiyuan placed a hand on Runsheng’s shoulder. Runsheng hoisted him onto his back, and the two of them climbed onto the roof, then leapt over the courtyard wall from above without alerting Xue Mom downstairs or any of the relatives and neighbors.

He had, however, left a note saying that inspiration had suddenly struck and he had gone out to sketch, thanking them for the hospitality and asking them not to worry.

They had just landed outside when the fool came running over happily, eating candy, holding up three fingers with both hands, and waving at Li Zhuiyuan with a grin.

“I’m a Corpse Retriever! I’m a Corpse Retriever!”

Li Zhuiyuan said, “You’re a village guardian.”

“I’m a village guardian! I’m a village guardian!”

“This town is lucky to have you.”

The fool chuckled and walked ahead, and Li Zhuiyuan followed behind him.

Runsheng leaned closer and asked, “Little Yuanhou, then what about Binbin and Mengmeng?”

Li Zhuiyuan pointed at the fool’s three raised fingers.

“He’s leading all of us.”

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