Chapter 155.2

Lin Shuyou turned his head and looked outside. He saw a pillar of fire rising high into the air. His gaze began to refocus, and he recognized the place that was burning.

It was his family’s temple.

He immediately scrambled to his feet and ran like a madman. Along the way, he had no idea how many people he knocked over. Under normal circumstances, he would have stopped at once and apologized sincerely, but right now, he could no longer care about any of that.

Whoever dared block his path, he shoved aside. If the road ahead was blocked, he vaulted over the wall.

Though he had already been utterly exhausted, the fire in his family’s temple squeezed new strength out of him.

That temple held not only his master and senior brothers, but also his own family. Everyone usually lived there.

The closer he got to the fire, the fewer people there were around him, and he did not see anyone trying to put it out.

But Lin Shuyou would never have noticed details like that.

He ran to the temple gate. Inside, the flames were raging.

Lin Shuyou kicked the temple doors open with one foot. He desperately hoped that everyone inside had already escaped.

But the moment he entered, he froze.

The fire was still burning, but the bodies of his fellow disciples and family members lying on the ground had clearly not died from the blaze.

Some had their chests punched through. Some had their necks snapped. Some had even been torn in half at the waist by brute force.

Right in front of him, on the steps before the main temple hall, Lin Shuyou saw a man in red holding his grandfather up with one hand.

His grandfather had opened his face, proving he had already performed Spirit-writing, yet even so, he was still no match for this man.

Who was this man? How terrifying was he?

His grandfather’s throat was being crushed in the man’s grip. At that moment, he could only barely twist his head a little and look toward him. Bloody foam kept spilling from the corners of his mouth.

“A-You... run...”

The man kept one hand clamped around his grandfather’s neck. Then he reached out with his other hand, grabbed his grandfather’s head, and pulled.

Bang!

His grandfather’s head came free from his neck. Blood gushed from the stump of the headless body.

“Grandpa!”

The man casually tossed the head aside, then began walking toward the main gate.

Whenever the surrounding flames tried to draw close to him, they were pushed away by the gusting force pouring off his body.

Lin Shuyou charged at the man, but the moment he reached him, he was blasted away by an overpowering aura.

He lay on the ground, coughing up blood, pounding the earth with clenched fists in unwilling fury. He could not perform Spirit-writing. He could not invite the great one to descend. As he was now, he had no way at all to threaten the man before him.

The man continued walking বাইরে.

Lin Shuyou shouted viciously, “I’m not dead yet! Why won’t you kill me? Why won’t you kill me?!”

The man replied, “Because you are not one of the people of this temple.”

“I am! I am! I obviously am!” Lin Shuyou shouted again, his face twisted savagely. “Why? Why did you do this? Why?!”

The man stopped, turned back, looked at him first, then at the blazing fire surging ever higher in the main temple, and said:

“Those who offend the dignity of the Dragon King deserve to have their whole household exterminated!”

…

It was raining on Fengdu Ghost Street.

Little Yin Meng stood at the entrance of the coffin shop, watching the curtain of rain before her.

There were not many pedestrians on the road. A mother passed by holding an umbrella, walking hand in hand with her daughter, the two of them chatting and laughing.

As the little girl passed, she turned her head and waved at Yin Meng, who stood in the shop doorway.

Yin Meng tilted her head and looked at her without responding.

Then she turned around and went back into the shop.

At the very end of the room was a small cabinet wrapped in clothes. The cabinet’s four corners were made up of two hands and two feet.

She lifted the top layer of clothing, revealing glass beneath. Looking down through it, she could see her father’s head preserved underneath.

Half of the head was rotten, and the other half still had skin hanging from it.

When he saw her, her father smiled. It looked hideous.

Yin Meng walked into the kitchen, where two large pots were set up.

She climbed onto the stool beside them and looked into one pot. Inside, she saw a man whose whole body had been boiled until it was swollen.

Then she looked into the other pot and found her mother there.

Both of them had been stewed into mush.

Just like when the two of them had floated in the pond back then.

Yin Meng turned away and went into the back room, sitting down with her back against the side of a coffin.

This place had been the greatest source of warmth in her childhood, and the longest release for her exhaustion during her girlhood.

Inside lay the grandfather who had raised her with his own hands.

She remembered clearly the sense of relief that had appeared in her heart on the day he died.

She no longer had to wipe down his body every day. No longer had to massage him daily to keep him from developing bedsores. No longer had to force a smile and sit with him talking every day. No longer had to keep watch over this coffin shop that barely had any business at all.

That moment of relief had been real.

But whenever she thought back on it, it filled her with an intense sense of guilt.

Faced with the person who had loved her most, her true reaction had, over one year, two years, three years... ten years, gradually turned him into a burden in her heart.

She was relieved that she had managed to keep up the act until the end, and ashamed that she had truly been acting all along.

By now, Yin Meng was actually numb. Little by little, she had lost all feeling for everything around her.

In truth, she really was not that fragile.

Her mother had colluded with her lover to murder her father and sink him to the bottom of the water.

It was only later, from a ghost passing by at night, that her grandfather learned what had happened.

But even before that, her parents’ relationship had long since fallen apart. Whether they were around or not had never made much difference.

If anything, whether they lived or died... they might as well have died sooner and gotten it over with cleanly.

Once, she had been a girl who longed for the love of both parents. Once, she had envied others. But in the end, she got used to it.

When a child has been away from their parents for too long, they stop feeling much. And when parents have been away from their child for too long, it becomes hard for much affection to be rebuilt.

There was nothing humans could not adapt to.

But what she could not endure was dream after dream, showing all of it to her over and over again, not only repeating it but deepening it each time.

Yin Meng had not broken yet.

But she was close.

No matter how strong a person was, they could not withstand this kind of endless grinding.

Just then, the sound of a suona came from outside.

She saw the neighbors. She also saw her mother’s new mother-in-law’s family. Among them were her two younger half-brothers.

Yin Meng turned her head and looked at the coffin behind her.

Oh. Grandpa had died too.

The people coming in spoke sorrowful words. They shed tears. But every so often, they smiled.

From a very young age, Yin Meng had known that in this world, very few people truly cared about you or empathized with your joys and sorrows. Whether your life was good or bad, ruined or fine, had nothing to do with them. They themselves knew that too.

Yin Meng was changed into mourning clothes and draped in black gauze. She sat there and let other people arrange everything for her.

Her grandfather’s coffin was lifted and prepared to be taken out for burial.

That younger half-brother, under the direction of her mother’s new mother-in-law, smashed the bowl and walked in the very front row of the funeral procession.

Yin Meng could only follow behind the procession.

This meant that after the funeral, the shop and the little bit of property left over would also be inherited by their family, with nothing to do with her.

Yet Yin Meng felt neither resentment nor anger.

She thought she ought to feel something. She was not that timid. But she simply could not find those emotions.

Because all of them had already been worn dry in those repeated dreams before this.

The rain was still falling. The wind was still blowing. It was bitterly cold.

The younger brother at the very front began to cry. He wanted to duck toward the back of the procession to avoid the wind, but in return his grandmother slapped him hard across the face. The crack rang out loudly.

After all, the Yin family had only this one little girl left, and she had no other relatives worth mentioning. Once today’s business was over, the shop and all the coffins inside would belong to their family.

They would keep the girl for now, use her for labor in daily life, and once she got a little older, marry her off in exchange for a bride price. Either way, it was a guaranteed profit.

When the funeral procession passed a riverbank, the wind suddenly grew fierce. It blew everyone staggering around, and even the coffin slipped from their hands and tumbled down.

Amid a string of crashing sounds, the coffin rolled into the river. The lid had been meant to be nailed down at the burial site, so at this moment it flew open directly, and the old man inside rolled into the water as well.

Everyone hurried to steady the coffin and drag the corpse back, trying to restore everything to order.

Yin Meng stood expressionlessly by the river, watching her grandfather in the water. No matter how they pulled, they could not drag him back.

Some brought ropes. Some fetched hooks. Some simply jumped into the water to haul him in. But her grandfather floated on, unwavering, drifting toward the deeper part of the river, farther and farther away.

A feeling rose in Yin Meng’s heart, as though her grandfather was going to the place he was meant to go.

For that very reason, the girl actually felt a small measure of comfort, like a few traces of moisture seeping once more into a well that had long since run dry.

But for some reason, the funeral procession, which had originally been a sloppy, half-hearted arrangement thrown together just for appearances, now displayed a strange and eerie orderliness.

After they all cast a collective glance at Yin Meng, they immediately threw themselves back into the river.

They would spare no effort to drag her grandfather’s body back again, bury him, let him rise as a corpse, let him return to the shop, criticize the girl’s hypocrisy in the way she had treated him, and tell her that he knew very well that all along she had secretly wished he would leave sooner so she could finally be free.

Very quickly, only the girl remained on the riverbank. Everyone else was in the water.

Old people and children, men and women, all of them swimming with all their might.

At last, they caught up with her grandfather floating in the distance.

They joined forces, forming a human ladder on the water’s surface, dragging her grandfather’s body back.

As they pulled and pulled, four blurry black shadows appeared behind him.

“There’s a ghost!”

“A ghost!”

Terrified screams rang out. The orderly crowd from moments earlier collapsed instantly.

One after another, they desperately tried to swim back and get to shore without even daring to look behind them.

But very soon, people began getting dragged beneath the surface. One, two, three...

Standing on the bank, Yin Meng watched with her own eyes as her two younger half-brothers disappeared beneath the water right in front of her.

Her mother’s new mother-in-law, though, was quick with her hands and feet. She made it onto shore and stretched out a hand, pointing at Yin Meng.

“You cursed little jinx, you bring doom—”

With a splash, a black, blurry hand seized the woman’s ankle, flipped her onto the ground, and dragged her sliding toward the river.

The old woman clawed at the gravel and stones on the bank with both hands and cried to Yin Meng for help, begging her to pull her up and save her.

Yin Meng walked forward.

The old woman looked relieved and reached her hand toward Yin Meng as far as she could.

Yin Meng lifted her foot and stepped down on the old woman’s hand.

She had clearly not used much force. After all, she was still only a young girl. Yet the old woman let out an extremely shrill scream, as if she had seen something horrifying beyond belief.

Very soon, she too was dragged into the bottom of the river.

A deathly silence fell over both the riverbank and the river’s surface.

Yin Meng sat down where she was, hugging her knees.

She had no idea how long she sat there. At last, she blankly lifted her head and discovered that the sky was half rainy and half clear, and she herself was sitting exactly on the boundary line between gloom and brightness.

She turned her head and looked behind her.

Clearly, she was still sitting on the riverbank, yet behind her was once again Ghost Street, her own coffin shop.

Again she saw that woman holding an umbrella and walking hand in hand with the little girl, chatting and laughing.

Only this time, when the little girl looked at her again and was about to wave to greet her, both the girl and her mother crouched down on the ground and let out piercing screams.

As though in response, the father in the coffin shop, who had become part of a cabinet, also began shrieking. In the kitchen, her mother and her lover in the two pots both stretched out their arms. Their stewed, rotten flesh sloughed off, yet the white bones still strained outward as they wailed in terror amid the bubbling broth.

Then, from one shop after another along Ghost Street, painful screams began to rise.

Countless jarring sounds stabbed into Yin Meng’s ears.

She felt dizzy and suffocated. She collapsed to the ground and wanted to scream too, but it was as though something was lodged in her throat. No matter how hard she tried, no sound could come out.

Yin Meng grabbed stones from the ground and smashed them over and over into her own face. She hoped this would ease the torment she was enduring.

Very quickly, her face was covered in wounds, and blood dripped nonstop.

Some fell to the ground. Some slid down from the corners of her lips and into her mouth.

She froze.

In her mind, images that should never have appeared seemed to surface. She wanted to catch them, but doing so was terribly difficult.

And the screaming on Ghost Street not only failed to subside, it grew even more exaggerated.

Countless shopkeepers ran wildly out into the street and, together with the original passersby, began tearing at the skin on their own bodies. The scene looked like hell on earth.

…

Inside the little yellow pickup truck.

From the car radio, what had originally been Tan Wenbin’s personal crosstalk performance was suddenly replaced by harsh static, and countless shrill howls burst out from within.

Li Zhuiyuan felt a stabbing pain in his eardrums. He reached out, but instead of turning the volume down, he twisted the knob and cranked it all the way up.

The boy’s shoulders began to shake.

At that moment, his urge to laugh had nearly reached its peak.

Inside the car, Yin Meng, who had been there just moments ago, suddenly disappeared.

Runsheng and Lin Shuyou both spoke up, demanding, “Tell me, what exactly is going on? What exactly is going on?!”

Li Zhuiyuan’s shoulders were still shaking.

What was going on?

Dream ghost, dream ghost, dream ghost...

As a ghost, you actually dared drag the Great Emperor of Fengdu into a dream?

In nearly two thousand years, not a single ghost had ever been as brave and fearless as you. You could practically be called a model for the ghost world.

At that moment, Runsheng began slamming his head wildly into the truck, making the yellow pickup shake violently, shouting again and again, “No! No! No!”

Lin Shuyou clenched his fists, waving them as he shouted savagely, “Don’t go! Kill me! Kill me!”

Li Zhuiyuan knew that the dream ghost was using Runsheng and Lin Shuyou to threaten him.

Although something had already gone wrong with the dream ghost when it came to Tan Wenbin and Yin Meng, and that problem was getting worse and worse, with Runsheng and Lin Shuyou it had nearly succeeded.

Perhaps it only needed one more dream to completely shatter their mental defenses, seize control of their minds, and turn them into the most obedient puppets.

This kind of damage was almost irreversible. Even if they could barely crawl their way out of it later, they would still be ruined for good.

At the gambling table, the dream ghost had taken out the chips it had just won. It wanted to hand over those chips in exchange for a chance to leave the table.

At that moment, Li Zhuiyuan’s shoulders stopped shaking.

The feeling of forcing back laughter disappeared.

But the boy did not become angry or humiliated because of it. The corners of his lips still curled faintly upward. He was still smiling.

That smile expressed an attitude.

Negotiation was impossible.

In the dream ghost’s eyes, this was only a trap. Since both sides feared each other, they should simply separate and leave on their own.

But in Li Zhuiyuan’s eyes, this was a river they had crossed together, and a hidden mastermind they all had to face together.

Once the bowstring had been drawn, there was no turning back. Once this boat had set out upon the river, no matter who fell into the water, the people remaining aboard could only keep rowing with everything they had and continue forward.

Li Zhuiyuan opened the car door and got out.

The vehicle was shaking too hard because of those two going mad inside. Sitting there made his head spin.

The boy walked forward along the bridge.

Behind him, the car window glass shattered, and from inside came Runsheng’s furious roar and Lin Shuyou’s wailing.

Li Zhuiyuan kept smiling, without slowing down in the slightest.

To the boy’s ears, the near-collapse of Runsheng and Lin Shuyou sounded like beautiful music.

That was making it harder and harder for the smile at the corners of his mouth to hold.

It was not that he wanted to rage, or hurt, or scream.

He still wanted to laugh.

Back in the car, he had actually been acting.

The more firmly he showed that he refused to negotiate, the tighter the dream ghost would cling to Runsheng and Lin Shuyou as bargaining chips. It would not dare destroy them now, because in its eyes, those were the only things it had left to haggle with.

In that brief stretch of time between the final meeting ending and their departure, he had made an arrangement for everyone on the team.

Honestly, while it was the limit of every method he had managed to think up at the time, the arrangement itself was not very significant.

It could even be said to be as thin and fragile as paper.

That was this:

He had hypnotized every single one of his teammates.

The Calming Talisman, the bone ring, and the pocket watch had all been prepared specifically for hypnosis.

And on top of that, his companions trusted him unconditionally and cooperated willingly, so hypnotizing them had been truly easy.

That was why Yin Meng found the sunlight glaring when she stepped out of the shop door. That was why Tan Wenbin felt tired after driving for a while and needed to switch with Yin Meng.

Because when everyone set out, they had actually all been in a “sleeping” state.

Placed here, it merely served to cancel out one round of dreaming.

At most, it could make you suddenly wake once when you were being destroyed completely in dream after dream, but its significance was still not great, because the dream ghost could casually send another dream at any time.

It really was only a tiny bit of cleverness.

But it was precisely this sheet of paper that now produced an excellent effect. Runsheng and Lin Shuyou were obviously already on the verge of breaking, but as long as the dream ghost did not go all the way and utterly destroy them, it had no way of discovering the existence of that sheet of paper.

Theoretically speaking, Runsheng and Lin Shuyou were still safe.

The business with the sea-bottom turtle and the Great Emperor of Fengdu had already made Li Zhuiyuan nearly burst out laughing, and the fact that that sheet of paper was still preserved added another layer of delight for him.

The reason he got out of the car was that he really was about to lose control.

He did not want the other side to detect any clue from his outward expression. He needed this matter to ferment further, to spread from the dream ghost and then on to that hand behind it.

He had to endure it.

He could not laugh.

For ordinary people, the best way to suppress laughter was to recall the most painful and miserable thing in their life.

Li Zhuiyuan did the same.

To keep himself from laughing, he had to get out of the car and go see someone.

He believed that the moment he saw that person, he would immediately stop wanting to laugh.

And so Li Zhuiyuan walked all the way to the end of the bridge.

At the end of the bridge was a ticket gate.

Li Lan stood there at the entrance to the gate, holding two tickets in her hand, waiting for him.

Sure enough, the moment he saw her, Li Zhuiyuan could no longer laugh.

Li Lan bent down, clapped her hands, and with the gentle smile of a loving mother, opened her arms to Li Zhuiyuan.

“My precious son, are you happy to go play at the amusement park with Mommy?”

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