Chapter 529

Six coffins surfaced on the river.

They happened to surround the figure in red right in the middle.

Her form had been constantly shifting and flickering, but once she was enclosed, she could no longer move outside the ring.

A curtain of water appeared on the outer edge.

Inside it stood a woman in a white dress.

The last time Li Zhuiyuan saw her here, she had still been wearing bridal clothes.

Back then, she had still been the one in charge of Baijia Town.

But after that, she had become a pitiful woman who, for the sake of Baijia Town’s survival, had borne humiliation and been forced to give herself to Xue Liangliang.

And all of it had been because of the Dragon King’s oppression.

She was no longer dressed in red. Her hair was now done in a married woman’s style, meaning she had already positioned herself as someone’s wife.

A single sheet of yellow paper had not only summoned six Bai Family Matrons to assist, it had brought her there in person as well.

Tan Wenbin knew very well this was not because of his own prestige. Still, as the one shouting from the bow, he represented the Dragon King’s will whenever he was out and about.

Little Yuanhou had never liked the Bai family.

And the Bai family knew that clearly as well.

That was exactly why, under the Dragon King’s order, they had appeared so promptly.

Most likely, the moment Tan Wenbin arrived at the riverbank, just as that figure in red drifted downstream intending to settle here, the Bai family had already made their preparations.

They knew perfectly well that they could not give that future Dragon King a reason to formally move against them.

The jianghu was vast, stretching boundlessly.

And the jianghu was also small, so small that even a place like Nantong was its own jianghu.

With the one beneath the peach grove no longer planning to move against Li Zhuiyuan and even taking the initiative to help open and close the door for him, the boy could already lay down rules here for those of the occult world, as well as for malevolent spirits and demons.

Either follow his will and uphold those rules together, or stand outside them and be purged.

The young married woman within the curtain of water turned to face Tan Wenbin and offered a half-bow. Her cold voice spread over the river’s surface.

“The Bai family receives the Dragon King’s order!”

Tan Wenbin flicked ash from his cigarette. He knew his task for tonight was already complete.

He had really just come to deliver the decree.

To a certain extent, was the most troublesome and difficult evil thing tonight really that figure in red on the river?

No.

The strongest force tonight, and the one that most needed to be subdued, was Baijia Town.

Creak...

Creak...

The coffin lids all fell away.

One after another, Bai Family Matrons of different ages from their former lives sat up inside.

Some were white-haired old crones. Some were little girls not even ten years old.

The figure in red let out a scream.

This time it was no longer anger, but panic.

She had only meant to sneak in through the gap and seize a little territory for herself, but instead, the moment she entered Nantong, she ran into this situation.

She began murmuring again, but not to launch a mental attack on Tan Wenbin. This time, she was speaking toward that Bai Family Matron.

She wanted permission to retreat.

But plainly, the Bai Family Matron refused. She raised a hand and swept it forward.

All six Bai Family Matrons stepped out of their coffins and stood upon the water.

There was no way they would allow her to leave. This was the very first Dragon King order the Bai family had received. No matter what, there could be no bargaining room.

Only by utterly destroying her could they show that boy the Bai family’s attitude. With this sort of thing, the last thing you could do was compromise.

The slaughter began on the river.

It was a bit far away, and the wind had stirred up waves, so Tan Wenbin deliberately held the cigarette between his fingers and entered a shade-walking state to watch.

He saw that figure in red quickly fall into a disadvantage under the siege of the six Bai Family Matrons.

Even so, while her red clothes were gradually torn apart and she herself was getting ripped open again and again, all six Bai Family Matrons were injured by her as well.

She really was fierce.

The cigarette burned down to the end and scorched Tan Wenbin’s fingers.

He immediately ended his shade-walking state, took a hard drag from the butt, then tossed it to the ground and ground it under his shoe.

He had only watched through shade-walking to go through the proper procedure.

That was what the Bai family wanted. It was the equivalent of having a witness.

Once the decree had been delivered, there also had to be a supervising official.

Now that he had seen it, it was time to wrap things up.

Lihua made her move.

She reached a hand out through the curtain of water and made a grasping motion in the air.

The figure in red instantly froze in place.

The six Bai Family Matrons swarmed her.

A shrill scream rang out over the river. A tattered strip of red cloth floated up, then slowly drifted toward the riverbank, where Tan Wenbin caught it in his hand.

It was a token, a head, and also the Bai family’s pledge of allegiance.

The six injured Bai Family Matrons returned to their coffins, lay back down, and the coffins gradually sank beneath the water and vanished.

Only the one inside the curtain of water remained on the river.

Tan Wenbin looked carefully and did not notice any swelling in Lihua’s abdomen.

Was it hidden by the watery distortion?

But that should not have been the case.

If she was trying to show her attitude and build personal ties, what could be more suitable than a pregnant belly?

So was the Bai Family Matron’s pregnancy unusual... or was Liangliang’s seed unusual?

Tan Wenbin could not be bothered to think about it further.

He waved the strip of red cloth in his hand and called out:

“See you around, Sister-in-law Liang.”

Then he turned and left.

When he got back to the taxi, he looked through the window and saw the driver sitting in the driver’s seat with his eyes closed, seemingly asleep, his face covered in tear tracks.

People always say you should go see someone one last time, but that last meeting is never truly fixed. It is only a compromise for the reality that you can no longer see them again.

Tan Wenbin leaned back against the car door and did not hurry to wake the driver.

He had nothing else to do anyway. Better to let the driver sleep a little longer in a dream that still carried his mother’s scent.

...

“Heh heh heh.”

On the burial mound, Benben was laughing happily.

This child liked, and was more suited to, an environment filled with gloom and ghostly yin energy.

Fortunately, he was still very young. There was still time to correct it.

Li Zhuiyuan looked at the child in his arms with some helplessness.

He reached out and pinched the child’s mouth shut.

The child stopped laughing.

But the moment Li Zhuiyuan let go, the child laughed even more happily, apparently thinking the boy was playing a game with him.

On the ground beside the boy were five damp humanoid outlines.

That meant the boy had just suppressed and killed five malevolent spirits trying to claw their way up from the earth.

For him, that was nothing difficult.

Compared to the evil things carefully cooked up by river water, these randomly born wild spirits were nothing more than little snacks between meals, good only as variety.

Originally, the feng shui of this place had not been a problem. It was not especially good, but at least it was not bad. But because construction had begun ahead to build an industrial park, one river had been cut off and another rerouted, turning an ordinary feng shui site by human hands into a trapped yin ground.

Then, by coincidence, Ding Dalin and that gang of Water Monkeys had startled the one in the peach grove, causing the peach grove to suppress the surrounding area and hold back the contradiction that should have broken out.

Then when the one in the peach grove turned over and dozed off, the accumulated yin energy came surging in here like floodwater through an opened sluice gate, and that was what caused the abnormal change.

Advances in industrial technology had made it easier and easier for human beings to reshape nature. In the past, projects that required vast manpower and material resources could now be completed by a single construction team equipped with enough machines.

With the age of massive infrastructure now underway, sudden feng shui upheavals of this sort, and the incidents they produced, were bound to become more common.

Li Zhuiyuan had long expected this.

Still holding Benben in his left arm, he stretched out his right hand. Karmic fire appeared and spread outward.

Under the intangible scorching of the karmic fire, the yin energy over the burial mound was swept clean, leaving the surroundings exceptionally pure.

Benben pouted his lips and stopped giggling.

Just before dawn, Li Zhuiyuan returned home.

None of the others had come back.

And over the next two days, they still did not return.

What they already knew had been dealt with, but there might still be aftermath. It was better for everyone to continue holding their positions on the four sides and remain on standby.

Three times a day, Li Zhuiyuan placed the Bagua Compass on Benben’s belly and used it for calculation and sensing.

Whenever he discovered some small fry trying to sneak in, or something new about to form somewhere, he would page his companions and have the nearest one go deal with it.

Back when Tan Yunlong had taken him to investigate a case on his motorcycle, when they had made inquiries at a foot massage parlor, Tan Yunlong had told him that the disharmonious things in society would never truly disappear. There was no such thing as a permanent one-time solution in this world, but that did not negate the meaning of every cleansing and crackdown.

It was the same with filthy things. No matter how clean a place was, if it was not cleaned regularly, dust would still settle.

Still, news finally came.

Wu Yougen, the honest and dutiful second son of the Wu family, came to invite Li Sanjiang to conduct a sitting vigil.

Li Zhuiyuan had finally heard the whistle signaling the end.

One could even say this was what all the dumplings had really been wrapped for in the first place.

It was just that at the beginning, he had truly only wanted the vinegar.

What surprised Li Zhuiyuan, however, was that the way the Wu family died was not quite what he had expected.

The police had received a report and opened an investigation into the Wu family.

There were no witnesses and no material evidence, and the informant’s identity had to be kept confidential. The investigation was awkward from the outset.

As expected, Luo Jinhua and Wu Changshun flatly denied everything. One after another, they swore to heaven that if they had really done something so heartless, then they deserved a terrible death.

They thought someone in the village was deliberately gossiping and trying to make things hard for their family just to enjoy the spectacle. Luo Jinhua even brought people to the doorsteps of villagers she had grudges against and cursed them out. She did not know exactly who had reported them, but she would rather curse all of them than risk missing the right one.

More absurd and infuriating still, Wu Youhou, the husband and also the father of those three children, did not accept such baseless rumors either. He even took the initiative to stand up for his family and explain things to the police on their behalf and guarantee for them.

That day, Taigong sat in the rattan chair on the second floor and cursed him for quite a while. Taigong had eaten more salt than many people had eaten rice, and he understood perfectly well just how spineless and hateful a person like Wu Youhou truly was.

The heart of foolish filial piety was not the filial part, but the foolishness. Only a genuine idiot, after being treated so unfairly in life, would still refuse to split from the family after all this time and continue willingly letting those two half-brothers suck him dry, dragging his wife and children down with him so that none of them could live well.

When Tan Yunlong received Tan Wenbin’s phone call to report the case, he had said from the start that it would be difficult, because he had too much experience with these things. Some cases could be handled cleanly and precisely, but with others, it was not that the police wanted to muddy the waters. The truth was that the case itself was already a heap of mud.

The police were very responsible. They even exhumed the body of the recently deceased child for a forensic examination. There were no signs of poisoning. The child really had died of illness.

But with a child whose body had never properly developed in the womb to begin with, daily life only needed deliberate targeting, intentional exposure to cold, malnutrition, or even deliberate emotional torment to make such a fragile little life die young.

The investigation ended without result.

But Luo Jinhua and the others were still guilty at heart. Their consciences were unclean. So on the second day after the investigation ended, they had their own biological fourth son borrow a tractor from the factory and take Wu Changshun, their third son, and Luo Jinhua herself, four people in total, up to Wolf Mountain to burn incense.

Their family had not even gone to burn incense during the New Year, yet now they rushed there in a panic.

On the way, they were in an accident.

The tractor first drove into the wrong lane and crashed into a truck, then overturned into a ditch. All four people on board were smashed into a bloody mess and died. Not a single one survived.

What Li Zhuiyuan found strange was how those four had died: too cleanly and too neatly. It had even managed to look like a traffic accident.

There was no way those three formed little ones could have done something like that.

And in truth, that was exactly the case. When Li Zhuiyuan accompanied Taigong to the Wu family again for the vigil and funeral rites, while Taigong was conducting the ritual, Li Zhuiyuan saw the three small figures standing beside the offering table.

The three had already taken shape, but they had resentment without much murderous balefulness yet, meaning they had not had time to stain themselves with blood and human lives.

So the deaths of those four really had been an accident.

An extremely coincidental accident.

Li Zhuiyuan looked toward Taigong’s back.

He could not help feeling suspicious, because he had once had a similar experience himself.

He still remembered that time he had received Taigong’s blessing of fortune, won money playing cards, and then immediately felt a dreadful foreboding.

If Grandpa Shan had not taken half the money and helped him lose it back, what happened next would really have been hard to deal with.

After all, Luo Jinhua and the others still owed Taigong his wages.

That matter could be trivial or enormous.

But that afternoon, after they buried that poor child, the things Luo Jinhua and the others had said were only audible to Li Zhuiyuan because his hearing was so sharp.

Taigong did not have such good hearing.

But the wind could carry words too.

The one beneath the peach grove had covered the map with peach blossoms and borne the backlash for him so he would not have to lose merit over a matter like that.

And Taigong, meanwhile, did not want him getting his hands dirty at all.

Even though Taigong himself knew nothing about it.

The true instigator, Li Zhuiyuan, had somehow been left completely clean.

More amusing still, the dumplings had already been cooked and served on the table before anyone realized the vinegar bottle did not contain any vinegar at all.

After standing beside Taigong for a while, the three children left. They did not dissipate. Instead, they went over to their father, Wu Youhou.

As a filial son, Wu Youhou was kneeling there in mourning clothes. All three children climbed onto him and glared at him viciously.

The dead were already dead. Even if it had been an accident, those people had received their retribution. They had paid with their lives.

But beyond that, the three children were also filled with hatred toward their father.

There were some things Wu Youhou could not have failed to suspect, but he had deliberately chosen not to believe them.

If Luo Jinhua and the others were the direct murderers, then Wu Youhou was, in another sense, an accomplice too.

Kneeling there, Wu Youhou’s eyes were bloodshot and his forehead was dark.

He had not slept for days, because the moment he closed his eyes, the first thing he heard was the crying of his children, and then scene after scene from daily life rose up in his mind.

Many details he had once been unwilling to face, details he had chosen to ignore or blur away, had now been spread out again and forced before his eyes.

No matter how unwilling he was emotionally, he had no choice but to acknowledge one fact: the deaths of his three children had not been accidental, and it was not that his wife had simply been bad at bearing children.

During the day, Li Zhuiyuan only focused on assisting Taigong and did not do anything about the three children. He let them continue haunting their father.

Because four people had died suddenly at once, an additional overnight vigil had to be kept.

Taigong sat behind a pile of Buddhist and Daoist funeral drapes, holding a peachwood sword and chanting scripture.

As he chanted, he fell asleep.

Yet even his snoring rose and fell in a rhythm strangely like chanting, a kind of indistinct muttering that could not really be made out anyway.

It had been the same last time during the overnight vigil at the Niu family’s place. Liu Jinxia and Grandpa Shan had practically been wrecked by the Corpse demon, while Taigong still slept sweetly as though nothing at all had happened.

The second younger brother, Wu Yougen, knelt in front of the brazier in the mourning hall, making sure the fire inside did not go out.

Li Zhuiyuan walked over, grabbed a large handful of spirit gold, and threw it into the brazier, then stuffed a thick stack of yellow paper in after it.

Wu Yougen was the simple, honest sort, the kind of person with no hidden thoughts.

Ordinarily, when burning paper offerings, you could not throw in too much at once. Not only would it fail to burn through properly, it would also produce smoke.

But Wu Yougen only smiled at Li Zhuiyuan, then picked up a stick and spread apart the spirit gold and yellow paper the boy had just thrown in so they could burn fully.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

Inside the mourning hall, all four rented crystal coffins gave off explosive sounds at once.

Offerings burned by the Dragon King could only be endured in small measure by those close to him or by people of great virtue.

Did the four inside deserve that?

Just like a body too weak to handle rich nourishment, the violent collision of baleful force could, in severe cases, scatter the soul completely. In lighter cases, it could at least strip away the chance of being reborn as a human in the next life.

They had done no great good in this life, and instead carried a pile of karmic debts. Who knew how many lifetimes as pigs and dogs it would take before they could repay this sort of blessing?

Wu Yougen looked up in surprise. But when he saw that the boy beside him showed no reaction at all, he began to wonder if the sound he had heard earlier had just been his own hallucination.

After staying a little longer, Li Zhuiyuan left.

In the corner of the tent, he saw Wu Youhou curled up alone, clutching his head.

The three children were crouched viciously on their father, biting into him.

Luo Jinhua and the others had died too quickly and too cleanly. Logically, after the three children had taken revenge on them, the combination of baleful force and resentment should have made them gradually transform into evil ghosts.

But right now, only the faintest trace of savagery had begun to emerge.