Chapter 43 A Truly Fairytale Ending

The layout of the house was similar to the Zhang family's place next door to Grandpa and the others. Upon entering, there was the main hall, flanked by bedrooms on both sides.

Aside from a few chairs and a lacquered wooden table, the main hall was completely bare.

In contrast, the bedrooms on either side were pitch black, exuding an eerie gloom.

A single glance was all it took for me to realize that the hand and the pair of shoes that had just appeared at the doorway were not in the main hall. If they weren't here, they could only be in the bedrooms!

My purpose in coming here was to uncover whatever information Old Man Wu's house might reveal, so I had to thoroughly explore this place.

Seeing the piles of dog feces outside the house earlier had already told me that this place was unclean; dogs only frequented areas heavy with yin energy.

"Let's go, let's check out the bedroom!" I said. Even though it was hair-raising, we had no choice.

I still walked in front, with Huang Ying second, and Stone third.

I stood at the threshold and peered inside. The stench here was even more pronounced.

It was pitch black inside, lacking even a window. No animal would live in such an environment; I couldn't figure out how a human managed to survive here!

After peering into the doorway for a moment, I made up my mind to go in. Actually, while I was looking, I had been hesitating whether or not to step inside.

As soon as I entered the room, I caught the smell of rotting flesh. I turned on the flashlight on my phone and swept the beam forward. A piece of pork hanging on the wall was covered in maggots; the stench must have been coming from it.

We pinched our noses and walked further in. Standing in this room was an old-fashioned, blackened wardrobe and a bed draped with a mosquito net, making it impossible to see what was inside!

In front of the bed was a small wooden step used for placing shoes.

Since I was a bit far away, I directed the flashlight beam toward the side of the bed.

Our gazes all converged on the bedside. I swept my light under the bed, and my breathing instantly grew heavy.

Resting on the small wooden step was a pair of shoes—a pair of Liberation shoes, exactly the same as the ones I had just seen through the crack of the door.

"Did you guys see those shoes?!" I tried to keep as calm as possible. "They're the same pair from the doorway just now!"

Huang Ying's face didn't show any extreme expression, but Stone was badly frightened upon seeing the shoes.

"L-let's go take a look!" Even if I wanted to remain calm, I couldn't anymore. The pair of hands from the doorway earlier was right around here.

With that, Huang Ying looked at me and said, "I'll go take a look!"

"We'll go together!" I pulled her back. I was a man, after all; how could I act so cowardly?

Guided by the phone's light, we slowly moved toward the bed. The closer we got to the bed, the clearer the scene inside through the mosquito net became.

When we were about a meter away from the mosquito net, we could basically make out what was inside.

It was a quilt, grayish-brown in color, draped over the bed in a way that looked as though someone was lying beneath it.

Back at Grandpa's house, when I was scared, I used to sleep with my head covered by the quilt. Perhaps to ghosts looking from the outside, I looked just like this bed I was staring at now—the head was invisible, but the middle of the quilt was raised.

There wasn't the slightest sound from inside. All three of us held our breath, and the whole world fell completely silent!

We continued to approach the bedside. When we were just a single step away, the quilt on the bed suddenly shifted.

Huang Ying immediately blocked me in front.

After just a single movement, it grew still again.

The suffocating terror from a moment ago vanished, replaced by a sudden, comforting warmth as I looked at the beautiful woman before me.

I closed my eyes, took a giant stride forward, thrust my hand straight into the mosquito net, grabbed the quilt, and yanked it off violently.

Yet there was nothing inside the quilt.

Phew... I let out a sigh of relief. If a person had actually been lying in there, I honestly wouldn't have known how I would react.

Just as I was relaxing, I caught sight of a rope in the corner of the bed.

It was twisted from hemp fibers, extremely sturdy.

The knot tied in the rope looked very familiar—it was the kind used for hanging oneself.

The rope was still swaying continuously, as if something had just left it!

My eyes shifted to another corner of the bed, where I made a new discovery: a stiff, crusty garment.

I had seen this piece of clothing yesterday. Old Man Wu was still wearing it when he hung it on the tree yesterday, but now it had appeared here.

"Let's go! Let's get out of here!" I said.

Without a moment of hesitation, we left the place.

Stepping out of the house, we were greeted by bright daylight; inside, it hadn't felt like daytime at all.

I turned my head to glance back inside. It remained pitch black. This place was deeply unclean, and without knowing the full situation, we couldn't act rashly.

"Do you know where Old Man Wu's body is?" I asked Stone. They were people from the same village, so if there was news, everyone should know.

"I don't know either. They went to fetch the body back last night, but I stayed home to take care of my dad and didn't go out with them," Stone said.

When I got home last night, I hadn't heard Grandpa Ke mention anything about the body either.

Afterward, the three of us left the house directly to ask others about the body.

The information we finally gathered was that Old Man Wu's corpse had simply been buried in a hastily dug hole in the ground, without even a coffin.

Because he hadn't prepared a coffin for himself and didn't get along well with the villagers, no one bothered to prepare one for him either.

Dead bodies should not come into direct contact with the earth. The earth holds heavy yin energy, and absorbing it directly through the soil would increase the corpse's yin energy, making it very prone to corpse-transformation.

Upon learning the location where Old Man Wu's body was buried, the three of us set off "grandly."

Old Man Wu was buried in a graveyard. As soon as we arrived, the first thing we saw was a pile of fresh yellow soil, standing out particularly conspicuously here.

"That must be the grave," I pointed to the newly made mound and walked toward it.

The mound was very small, covering a tiny area—only about a meter and a half in diameter.

Normal graves should be pointed, but Old Man Wu's grave was round.

We stood at the edge of the grave. Old Man Wu was right beneath this. In such a small pit, he must have been curled up. Staring at the grave, that thought inexplicably popped into my head.

Three people could have finished digging this grave in fifteen minutes. The shoddy workmanship was breathtaking. No wonder Old Man Wu was so strange in all four aspects of his life; if I died and my grave looked like this, I wouldn't rest in peace either.

"Is Old Man Wu really in there?" I asked.

Huang Ying looked at the grave, frowned, and said, "There's nothing in here at all!"

Huang Ying's perception of yin energy was stronger than anyone else's present. If she said there was nothing, then there was nothing.

"There's nothing inside!" Stone also chimed in. He was born with the ability to see things we couldn't. Growing up, his courage had gradually grown because he was already jaded by these sights.

After just a brief look here, we left and went into the village to call over a dozen people, telling them to dig up the grave.

Normally, to dig open a grave like this, a single person with a hoe would suffice, but some matters required everyone to witness them firsthand.

If you just went ahead and did it yourself, no one would believe you. Their attitude toward Old Man Wu had actually made me quite angry. Bringing them all to look at Old Man Wu's grave was meant to show them that even the dead have awareness, and things shouldn't be taken too far.

I arranged for a few men to dig the grave while the others watched from the edge.

When the grave was dug down to the bottom, their jaws all dropped, and they began to buzz with heated discussions.

Having already guessed their reaction, I stepped forward and said, "Old Man Wu is gone. We went to check his house today, and there was someone inside!"

As soon as I finished speaking, the murmurs rose again.

"The reason I called you here today isn't to scare you. To be honest, it's to teach you a lesson. I hope you won't look at anyone in the village through colored glasses. Good and evil will eventually be rewarded; as you sow, so shall you reap. Treat people well, and you will ultimately reap the benefits yourself!"

I wasn't good with words, and after spouting those disjointed sentences, I had no idea if they understood anything or not.

Having said my piece, I left the place. There was nothing left to do here anyway; my original purpose had simply been to see if Old Man Wu was still around and what his situation was, yet I still hadn't the slightest clue.

And what about the turning point Grandpa had mentioned?

By now, I hadn't figured out a single thing. Since arriving here, my biggest achievement had been sleeping in the same room as Huang Ying for a night without doing a single thing.

Afterward, Stone went home, and Huang Ying and I returned to Grandpa Ke's house. Grandpa and Grandma Ke had gone out to farm the fields, so the door was locked.

Unable to enter the house, Huang Ying and I simply went out for a stroll. There was always a chance we might stumble upon the turning point Grandpa had mentioned.

Next to Grandpa Ke's house stood an apricot tree, though its branches were now bare. Grandpa Ke had said that no one ate the fruit anyway, and fearing that greedy children might climb up and fall, he had stripped the bark in a ring around the lower trunk, killing it.

I sighed inwardly. That tree was innocent...

Huang Ying and I walked along the narrow ridge of a paddy field. The ridge was so narrow that a single person couldn't even place both feet on it side-by-side, so I walked in front with Huang Ying following behind.

Originally, I should have asked Huang Ying to walk in front so I could fully admire her back, but when we reached the ridge just now, I had completely forgotten about it, leaving Huang Ying to look at my back instead.

Well, looking was looking; sooner or later, I'd get to look back. I continued walking forward.

The ridge was very long. Halfway across, it formed a sharp, sixty-to-seventy-degree bend. As Huang Ying and I reached the corner, we spotted Grandpa Ke and Grandma Ke working over there.

Grandpa Ke was in the field digging with a hoe, while Grandma Ke followed closely behind, dropping seeds into the holes Grandpa Ke had just hoed.

Bathed in the sunlight, the scene was deeply harmonious. The endings in fairy tales were always too fake and unreal; casting aside the dust of the mundane world, finding one's own tranquility in this little patch of heaven and earth, untainted by the murky mortal realm, and living self-reliantly by one's own desired lifestyle—now that was a fairy-tale ending.