Standing to the left and right were six statues each, but directly in front, where the main position should be, was empty. There were a total of twelve statues here, and correspondingly, twelve in the Land Temple. If they could truly be matched one-to-one, Chang Chuchu’s pupils couldn’t help but tremble—an indication this ant that the statue representing the Ancestor was hidden among these twelve statues!
Considering tonight’s mission, Chang Chuchu felt that this possibility was highly likely, and more than just the statue representing the Ancestor, it was the Ancestor himself!
With this thought, Chang Chuchu’s first reaction was to raise her lantern to examine the ground for traces, but alas, this place was outdoors with no cover overhead, and the ground was covered with a thick layer of withered yellow leaves. She couldn’t find any footprints or remnants of cremains.
Logically speaking, the first three people wouldn’t easily give up on searching this place, yet sothing within Chang Chuchu told her that she was the first living person to arrive here tonight.
These strange statues by her side were waiting for her.
She couldn’t continue thinking this way, scaring herself was aningless. Chang Chuchu knew what she had to do next: find the one thing that differed from the other statues, the thing that had snuck in and was bound to be bizarre.
She had a plan, but she dared not act too obviously. She tried to walk exactly between the two rows of statues, watching as she went, her steps light and slow as if fearing to wake sothing asleep.
During her observation, she hadn’t noticed anything unusual about the statues, for every one of them here seed abnormal. Moreover, and most importantly, Chang Chuchu always felt like she was being watched with a piercing and icy gaze, clearly not by a living person.
Now she was sure, what she was looking for tonight was hidden among these twelve weathered statues.
She circled around three tis, and the only thing she gained was that the eerie feeling was getting closer and closer, so much so that she didn’t dare to continue searching and had no choice but to pretend that she’d discovered nothing and leave.
However, Chang Chuchu didn’t go far; she had found the root of the problem. Leaving now would be cutting off all avenues of retreat. After quickly discerning the direction, she squeezed through a broken wall to the side courtyard behind the ancestral hall, confirming that the surroundings were safe, then she used a tree next to the wall to climb up until her head popped over the courtyard wall.
Indeed, behind this wall was the dilapidated open-air ancestral hall. To avoid startling anyone, Chang Chuchu didn’t even carry a lantern and instead relied solely on the feeble moonlight and her eyesight to spot the so-called anomaly.
This ti, after changing her perspective, she finally made a discovery. Underneath the wall on her side were six statues, but on the opposite side, there were only five.
One was missing.
Without a doubt, Chang Chuchu imdiately confird that the missing one must be her target for the night.
The Ancestor!
Sure enough, it was hidden among the eleven statues. This place was originally supposed to have twelve statues, just like the arrangent in the Land Temple.
But as she attempted to identify the right one, she encountered a problem. The six statues beneath her were ruled out, but the five opposite her in the current conditions were just dark silhouettes, each wearing huge, strange masks, making it impossible to tell which was which.
She tried to use the statues beneath her as reference points, but every ti she identified one, the next one would beco confusing. After several unsuccessful attempts, Chang Chuchu realized there was so peculiar force interfering with her.
This must be the strangeness that Steward Wu was talking about.
anwhile, Chang Chuchu keenly sensed a faint gaze scrutinizing her. However, when she followed that sensation, she was unable to pinpoint the exact target, only knowing it ca from the position of those five statues opposite her.
The Ancestor remained hidden in its original place. Xiang Fengchen had said it couldn’t move easily unless forced. Soon, when Chang Chuchu returned to the ancestral hall, the scene in front of her had changed, with six statues neatly arranged on each side.
However, this was within Chang Chuchu’s expectations. She had confird that one of the statues on her right hand side was problematic.
And the root of the problem ca from the eyes of the statue.
Ti passed by the second, and she had already spent too much of her energy and ti here. There were six suspicious targets, but the corpse-ash on her was only enough for two chances.
Chang Chuchu quickly ca up with a bold plan. She would closely examine the eyes of each statue, and once she found a problem, she would sprinkle the corpse-ash into the statue’s eyes.
But before that, she slowly reached into her clothes and took out a cloth package, long and wrapped ticulously. Upon opening it, there were four sticks of dark-red incense inside.
Life Burning Incense, the lifesaver for everyone throughout the night. However, Chang Chuchu glared at them with resentnt. The next second, she exerted force in her palms, pinching these precious life-saving items until they broke into pieces, and then tossed them onto the ground.
She didn’t need such things.
More precisely, she couldn’t afford to use them.
Because she simply couldn’t use them.
She wasn’t even sure if she had three more years to live.
She knew very well how much suffering she had endured in her life. She was once saved by a passing Corpse Driver when she was on the brink of death and thus acknowledged him as her makeshift master. Seeing that her Life Chart was ferocious and filled with Evil Qi, he trained her as a Mummy Girl, specifically to handle the wicked affairs encountered on the Corpse Chasing path.
Not long before, during one such Corpse Chasing journey, the corpse in the coffin ca back to life. In the struggle to suppress the malicious corpse, she was bitten and lost a part of her finger, and Corpse Poison entered her body. She fell unconscious, and upon waking, her master determined that she wouldn’t live much longer, and quite straightforwardly expelled her. After all, there were many Mummy Girls like her in the sect, and she was not the most outstanding among them.
She didn’t harbor many complaints against her master since it was him who had picked up her life. Moreover, according to the rules of the trade, the master was supposed to escort her on her last journey, in other words, kill her and arrange her funeral.
But perhaps out of pity, he let her go and allowed her to fend for herself. The odds were high that she would eventually die from the Corpse Poison, but her master also honestly told her that the world was full of wonders. If he couldn’t save her, it didn’t an others couldn’t as well. Whether she lived or died was up to her own fate.
Now, with less than a year left before her master’s predicted deadline, the Life Burning Incense was useless to her. Not burning it may an death, but burning it would guarantee it.
Previously, when discussing the allocation of the incense, she was just putting on a show with the others. After all, if outsiders knew of her current situation, it was uncertain whether they would have malicious intentions, using a dying person to scout ahead might just be the best solution.
But she didn’t want to die, and she owed these teammates nothing. To step back, even if she died here, it would just be her own death, but to make a wedding dress for soone else before dying, that was sothing she couldn’t do.
Nalan Shuo, Xiang Fengchen, Jiang Qingluan, Lou Huixiang, and Yang Xiao, none of these people were good. That Fang Zhou seed reticent, like a newcor with no fewer ghostly tricks; crucially, he always stayed out of the discussion, detaching himself cleanly when problems arose.
A chilly wind swept in, making Chang Chuchu, who was lost in thought, shiver. The fla in the lantern also trembled in response. Chang Chuchu knew that she had to make a move now.
She held her breath, approached the first statue on her right, lifted the lantern, and used its light to illuminate the eyes hidden beneath the mask.
Looking through the eye holes of the mask, the eyes inside were not damaged. On the contrary, they emanated a sinister and foreboding Evil Qi.
However, Chang Chuchu quickly cald down from her panic. She didn’t blindly use the corpse-ash but instead walked to the next statue and repeated the previous step. Indeed, the next statue was the sa - eyes wide open, emanating Evil Qi.
This should only be an illusion. With this discerning mindset, Chang Chuchu arrived in front of the third statue and looked through the eye holes of the mask.
This ti, she seed to have discovered sothing unexpected. Her eyebrows furrowed slightly, and the next second, she was enveloped by a great force and violently slamd against the statue over and over, until her head was bloodied.
The next second, the fallen lantern on the ground extinguished imdiately.
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