Chapter 370: Curse

January 25, 1985, I was grounded, so I could only ask my mother's side to help inquire about news of Manjun, agreeing to talk about it at night before bed.

But it was no longer needed; I saw Father return from outside, his expression panicked. I had never seen him look like that, as if he had just seen something extremely terrifying.

Seeing him in this state, Mother also hurriedly asked what had happened.

And Father, in a confused jumble of words, shouted: "Dead, he... the child, Liwen, Liwen's wife."

"You, you said who is dead?" Mother understood, and she widened her eyes in shock.

"Liwen's wife, she was cursed to death by her daughter-in-law!" Father steadied his mind slightly and said with deep sorrow.

Hearing this, I immediately ran out of the room and asked what exactly had happened.

It turned out that just last night, after I was taken back, Zhang Manjun had gone completely insane and said many hair-raising things.

She pointed at her nominal mother-in-law, then pointed at her nominal father-in-law, and her nominal husband, saying coldly that they would all die, she would also die, and everyone would die!

As it turned out, who would have thought that a mad remark, like a joke, would actually become a prophecy; Wang Liwen's wife, Zhang Manjun's nominal mother-in-law, really died a bizarre and sudden death.

"This is just an accident, right?" I wanted to stand up for Zhang Manjun and said to Father.

But Father widened his eyes and said tremblingly: "If it were really an accident, that would be fine! But clearly it is not!

If you had seen with your own eyes the appearance of their family's child who just died, that twisted and deformed look, as if it had been melted from the inside by something... and today she died the same way, and it was the day after that woman cursed her.

This is not a normal death at all; it is clearly a Curse!"

Looking at Father's expression of extreme terror, I momentarily held back the words I wanted to use to refute him, and could not help but be shaken by it.

I had wanted to use this as an excuse to go to Manjun's house to see what was going on, mainly out of worry about how Wang Liwen's family would treat Zhang Manjun after this incident, fearing that something would happen to her because of it.

But I knew that I still hid another fear in my heart, a fantasy built upon my trust in Father and my distrust of Manjun.

But seeing Father's gaze begging me to stay, I still could not bring myself to be cruel.

January 26, 1985, I didn't sleep all night, tossing and turning. Actually, our whole family was the same; Father, because he had experienced the day's events, failed to fall asleep many times. He would be suddenly startled awake by some terror and then let out a muffled, strange cry. Mother could not sleep because of this, and I was the same.

Perhaps it was around four in the morning when I slowly could no longer endure the drowsiness, temporarily pulling my soul out of my wild thoughts and sinking into a dream.

This sleep was very short, but I felt it was very real and long.

I dreamed that I was running in the village, sprinting under the deep red night sky. All around me were strange, black shadows chasing me endlessly, attempting to stretch their demonic claws toward the small and fragile me. All around were the most hateful and terrifying cold sneers of crows, mocking a weak human like me for my powerless resistance.

Despair and fear almost drove me mad. At the point where I was about to reach the threshold of collapse, like waking up in a fright as Father had, or becoming completely trapped in the cage of the nightmare, I heard a scream that resounded through the entire village in advance, and was startled awake by it.

I rushed out of the room door and saw Father being supported by Mother as he walked. His hair had turned white overnight, and he had aged a lot, to the point that his body seemed like a dying man, fragile and swaying as if he might fall.

"It was Erwa's voice," Father said to me tremblingly, his eyes filled with incredible firmness and a crazily blooming fear. "Something must have happened at Liwen's house, Liwen has met with disaster, that sinful witch has cursed Liwen to death again, it must be so!"

This time I could not hold back; I rushed all the way to Uncle Liwen's house. When I was still thirty or so paces away from the house where Manjun lived in the north of the village, I heard Wang Zhicheng's heartbreaking cries and terrified, strange roars, and my heart instantly turned cold.

When I ran to their home and saw the scene before me, I only felt that a bullet named Fear had struck me.

A lame man sat slumped on the ground, wailing at a body inside the room that was no longer in human shape, its flesh melting away.

Although the body could no longer be recognized, one could still identify from the clothing on the already rotting corpse that it was Wang Liwen.

I held my breath, trembling, urgently searching for that pitiful figure.

Finally, I found her in a dark corner.

A dirty woman covered in wounds, wearing a tattered white dress, huddled in the woodshed, silent. She only glared with a pair of bloody eyes from her disheveled hair, without sorrow or joy, just coldly watching the death and the crying.

Behind, other people in the village also arrived upon hearing the sound; they, like me, were so frightened by such a scene that they were struck dumb.

The only doctor in the village drew a conclusion about the successive death tragedies at Wang Liwen's house. Regarding that strange and bizarre way of death, he declared that everyone should believe in science; this was just an unknown plague that had broken out in Wang Liwen's house, and the source of the plague lay in the insane Zhang Manjun.

Consequently, the villagers threw Zhang Manjun into the room and locked her up, while Wang Bozi, Wang Zhicheng, who had been foolishly stunned after he stopped crying, was isolated in the ancestral hall at the head of the village.

This proposal was made by Father. He and the doctor were at odds with each other; one insisted it was a scientific disease, the other firmly stated that it was a Curse. In the end, neither could outdo the other, but they reached a consensus on the matter of isolation.

Since it was a disease, it had to be isolated, but what if the disease hadn't found Wang Bozi?

Out of this consideration, Wang Bozi could no longer be kept under the same roof as Zhang Manjun, so he would be locked in the ancestral hall.

This was very reasonable; after all, the ancestral hall was protected by ancestors and also sheltered by the gods worshipped there, immune to all evil and all magic. Locking someone here could both guard against the disease and drive away and shake off the Curse.

I only felt it was absurd, and at the same time felt deeply dissatisfied with the villagers' vastly different attitudes toward Wang Bozi and Zhang Manjun. I asked back, what if the root cause was not Zhang Manjun, but someone else? Don't wrong a good person.

The villagers naturally braced themselves to excuse Wang Bozi, but thinking of the tragic deaths of Wang Liwen and his wife and their grandson, they could not help but retain a shred of suspicion toward Wang Zhicheng.

After some weighing by the village chief and several elders in the village, they also made a concession, allowing someone to deliver food to Zhang Manjun during the isolation period.

No one would go, so I volunteered.

When I delivered the food, I tried to strike up a conversation with Zhang Manjun, but she ignored me. It was not until I closed the door and left the room where she was trapped that I vaguely heard her say, "Run quickly."

I did not know if it was an auditory hallucination, because when I looked back, Zhang Manjun remained taciturn, and her gaze had never been on me, just intently staring in a certain direction.

This state of hers was truly hair-raising, and I also ran away in fear.

Now thinking back, the direction she was looking at seemed to be the ancestral hall, the place where Wang Zhicheng was currently locked up.

January 27, 1985, Wang Zhicheng died.