Chapter 5: Old Stories of the Countryside

Du Zhengyi did not tell Luo Qi where they were now, but Luo Qi did not need to ask him either. He only needed to take out his phone to look at the map to know that they were currently in a coastal city not too far from home, and he could also see that Du Zhengyi was driving toward the seaside. Look, this is human Magic, how convenient, and without any burden on the brain. By the way, he could also tell Du Zhengyi not to keep driving straight down the main road; it was congested ahead, the lines on the map were red to the point of turning purple, didn't he see?

By the time they reached the seaside, the sky was completely dark. As Luo Qi followed Du Zhengyi walking uphill along the coastal road, on the left was the brightly lit city, and on the right was an endless expanse of ink-colored darkness. The vast ocean, having lost the sunlight, was like a void of the Abyss. Luo Qi could not say whether he liked the sea or not. If the sea only had its intoxicating azure blue under the illumination of sunlight, then was the sea a total pervert with a huge dark side? Oh my, perhaps it was a bit like Du Zhengyi, a man with an oceanic nature.

Luo Qi caught up to Du Zhengyi, "Can you read minds?"

"In principle, yes, but it has no practical value," Du Zhengyi said. "It consumes a massive amount of energy, and it must be directed at surface Yajian; that is to say, I must generally know the scope of what the other person is thinking, and what the other person is thinking must also be simple, concrete things."

Luo Qi felt much more at ease, and suddenly felt the world broaden.

He followed Du Zhengyi into a shop by the seaside; when entering the door, he was thinking about these sneaky matters and didn't notice the sign. Behind the door was a very retro shopfront; facing them was a marble screen, and along the walls on both sides were shallow stone water channels, keeping a few swimming fish.

After rounding the screen, a hostess walked over. She was an elfin girl, thin and small, with bright eyes, and she moved with very nimble grace. She wore a modified retro dress with a diagonal collar and toggle buttons, her hair parted in the middle and symmetrically coiled into two buns above her ears, with a red tassel hanging behind one ear. Luo Qi's eyes lit up at the sight, and he couldn't help but recite, "The girl on the swing outside the mulberry and paper mulberry trees, her double-crow buns slanted with flower branches." The girl indeed looked at him with a charming smile, and Luo Qi felt particularly spirited, feeling that he truly was cultured.

Caught off guard, Du Zhengyi slapped him on the back of the head, "Fox Immortal, hurry up and follow the young lady."

Luo Qi's old face flushed red, and he followed the little girl with double-bun hairstyles into the hall full of ancient charm, and was led with Du Zhengyi to a platform surrounded by winding water. There were four tables on the platform, three of which had reservation signs on them, and they sat down at the remaining empty table.

Who would have thought that crises always appear at the most careless moments? As soon as Du Zhengyi sat down, he ordered Tieguanyin tea, and he felt something was a bit wrong, but at this time, protesting was already too late. He couldn't just stand up in front of a pretty girl and say he wouldn't eat and would change to another shop. Men only learn to refuse women after reaching a great age, experiencing many years, and paying many prices; Luo Qi didn't know where he had read this sentence, but now he felt it was particularly correct.

He watched Du Zhengyi order some more food; this shop would undoubtedly fleece him of quite a bit of money tonight, but when he asked Luo Qi if he wanted to add anything else, Luo Qi didn't even have the desire to fleece him. He thought for a moment, and with a last glimmer of hope, asked the girl, "Do you have mooncakes with meat filling?"

The girl with the double buns almost laughed out loud, "I'm sorry, sir, we don't have those here."

"How about meat pies?"

"No, sir. We are... a teahouse here."

"Can flaky pastries with meat filling count as tea snacks?"

The girl looked at him silently.

Luo Qi sighed and waved his hand. Plates of delicate tea snacks were soon placed on their table. Luo Qi glared at these things that looked better than they tasted, smoldering with anger; a hungry grown man could only think of eating meat at this time. "Is this how you treat your mascot? Do you still want me to protect you or not? I'm just puzzled, afternoon teahouse, evening is still a teahouse, and you've even grown into this place, are you a teapot spirit?"

"Isn't seeing a pretty young lady enough to soothe your soul?" Du Zhengyi said unhurriedly, pondering a plate of teacups and saucers.

"Can I eat her meat if she's pretty?" Luo Qi snatched the teacup Du Zhengyi was holding, set them together, scalded them with hot water, and skillfully began to brew Kung Fu tea.

"Do the work first, I'll treat you to a meal after the work is done," Du Zhengyi placated him, reaching out to take a cup of tea.

"What work?" Luo Qi was stunned, looked around; it was dinner time, and there weren't many people in the teahouse. There were only a few scattered tables of people drinking tea and chatting, most of them middle-aged or elderly people who had achieved some success in their careers; human youths mostly didn't like this kind of place. The teahouse had hired a young girl to play the guzheng in the middle of the hall, appearing and disappearing behind an antique shelf. Along the east wall was a corridor, inside which there were vaguely some private rooms, and it was unclear what kind of people were inside.

"Look at the one playing the zither," Du Zhengyi said in a low voice.

Luo Qi moved, finding a position where he could see the girl's face. The girl's head was slightly lowered, her features could not be seen completely, but that clear and faint feeling still allowed him to find a sense of familiarity in his memory. He watched her for a while longer, and suddenly realized who she was; she was one of the subjects of this investigation. She had cut off the pink tips of her hair, which had caused him not to match her for a moment.

"Isn't this that..." Luo Qi thought for a moment, reached into his pocket to take out his phone to flip through the data, "What was her name again?"

"Guan Xinyue," Du Zhengyi said. "Sixteen years old, a first-year high school student, a music major. There is no mother in the family, she lives less than five kilometers from here, and works here in her spare time."

"Oh," Luo Qi put his phone on the table a bit embarrassedly; Du Zhengyi remembered much more clearly than he did.

"Alright," Du Zhengyi said, "Eat some of this... Yang Gany, and then go up bravely."

"Me?" Luo Qi said in surprise.

"Otherwise why did I bring you here? You can't just eat for free, right? Hurry, kid, demonstrate some of your value, find a way to trick her over to talk. You're self-studying anthropology, aren't you? The learning method is still experiential, now is the time to send you on an expedition." Du Zhengyi cajoled him with a mix of praise and pressure, carrying that kind of smugness of an older brother toward a younger brother that made Luo Qi's teeth itch.

Luo Qi didn't talk back; he turned his head and looked at the girl named Guan Xinyue for a while longer, gathered his courage, stood up, and walked toward the antique shelf.

Up close, Guan Xinyue's skin was very white; for her age, that skin tone exceeded the degree of fairness and was a bloodless paleness. One side of her long hair was tucked behind her ear, and one could even see a pale blue vein on the skin near her temple. How strange, she looked very immature; her photo was more mature than the real person.

At this moment, her slender fingers were wearing fake nails, plucking rapidly on the strings. The proficiency of her technique went without saying, but she herself did not look very immersed in the music. She revealed the same micro-expression several times; that expression was slightly strange, and each time it was accompanied by her gaze being cast toward the fingertip of a certain finger. Although Luo Qi was not good at music and was not familiar with the guzheng, he could still guess that she must have played wrong, and quite frequently at that. It was just that those minor technical errors did not affect the fluency of the music much, and the diners here didn't care at all.

When the song ended, she let out a breath, raised her head, and discovered a boy leaning on the antique shelf looking at her. She couldn't help but be startled, her face turning a bit red, which restored a healthy flush to her pale complexion. "Can I request a song?" the boy asked her, his eyes carrying a frankness that was very rare among recent boys. She observed him cautiously; he looked very kind, without that kind of eager, Teddy-like appearance of someone hitting on people everywhere. Moreover, those eyes were unusually black and pure; girls sometimes had no way to deal with boys with deer eyes. She blurted out without realizing it, "Yes."

After saying that, she hurriedly added, "If I know how to play it."

The boy nodded, "Do you know 'Thousand Cherry Blossoms'?"

She laughed out loud all of a sudden. She had neat bangs, long and straight black hair, paired with a habitual head-tilting movement, which was quite cute; it wasn't hard to see that she was an anime girl.

He could tell that she understood what he meant, "You must have uploaded videos on Bilibili?"

"No." She laughed again, a bit embarrassed.

"Why?" The boy looked at her in surprise, "You play much better than them, you are too humble."

Du Zhengyi watched from afar as Luo Qi quickly started talking to Guan Xinyue and even made the girl giggle non-stop; it seemed that they were not far from actually getting information out of her. Du Zhengyi didn't eat anything, just leaned back against the chair to make himself more comfortable, and heard the girl start playing a high-pitched, strange tune for some reason, which was completely out of place here. He shut out the noisy music, like sinking into water, bringing everything around him into a piece of silence, and gradually sank into the world of Yajian. He didn't know how much time had passed, but when he came back to his senses, Luo Qi and Guan Xinyue were standing next to him, looking at him.

"Are you okay?" Luo Qi asked him, his expression strange; it seemed he was really a bit worried about him.

The girl glanced at him and blushed, her gaze hurriedly turning away, and then she gathered her courage to glance at him quickly again.

He shook his head at Luo Qi.

Luo Qi solicitously pulled a chair over for the girl, "Please sit."

The girl sat down cautiously, tugged at her skirt, and smoothed the hem. Looking at Luo Qi's appearance, he practically wished he could go over and help the girl pull her skirt; Du Zhengyi teased him with a smile.

Luo Qi didn't see it; he sat back in his old seat opposite, raised his head, looked at the girl with a serious expression, and lowered his voice to say one sentence, "This is my friend, the Ghost Catching Master Du Zhengyi."

What the hell?

Du Zhengyi was stunned for a moment, raised his head and pointed his chin at Luo Qi—he was quite daring to say that. Luo Qi met his gaze for a second, his eyes sneaky, and a smile suppressed at the corner of his mouth.

"Hello," the girl said to him politely, her expression very hard to describe. Du Zhengyi could see it; she might be a shy girl, but that didn't mean she was stupid. Her not exposing Luo Qi's scam didn't mean she had fallen for it.

But Luo Qi didn't care; he poured a cup of tea for Guan Xinyue as well, and started talking. "I haven't known Du Zhengyi for long, but my family and I trust his abilities very much. The opportunity for how I met him is like this. I have a younger sister, named Luo Dan."

This was a load of crap; Du Zhengyi sipped his tea slowly. He had briefly looked at Luo Qi's resume and knew he was an only child. But Luo Qi had the ability to keep rambling on, "My sister is much younger than me, only seven years old this year. Usually, if a family has a boy as their first child, they don't have any more, but our family is different; my parents wanted a girl more. When I was young, I was particularly annoying, a wild child at three or four, a neighborhood nuisance at seven or eight, so my parents didn't like me very much, feeling that I definitely wouldn't be reliable in the future, and that they still had to have a daughter. At the very beginning, my dad was a civil servant, and the family planning policy was particularly strict for families like ours, with no room for having extra children, so they could only think about it. Later, when I was ten, my dad resigned and went into business to improve our lives, and after struggling for two years, he luckily achieved a little bit of success, at least enough to afford the social maintenance fee. My parents then had the idea of wanting a daughter again, and this time the dream really came true; my sister is very cute."

Du Zhengyi watched Luo Qi's nonsense with interest; he could see that Guan Xinyue was completely attracted by his words. Yes, even he, who completely knew that this whole passage was nonsense, hadn't he listened to it just the same? When Luo Qi told stories, those eyes were very bright, and the entry point he chose was a story that would make an innocent girl feel favorable; Guan Xinyue looked at him as if he were a peerless warm man.

"My sister is a particularly kind little girl. We would bring snacks to kindergarten for her, and she would share more than half of them with the other children. When she was six and understood what was going on with the beggars on the road, she cried her eyes out, and from then on, as long as she saw a beggar, she would definitely take out her own pocket money to give to them. When she encountered stray cats on the road, she would also insist on feeding them, and even wanted to take care of those injured little ones." Luo Qi smiled when he said this, as if briefly falling into some kind of warm memory, and the girl smiled along with him. Du Zhengyi felt a trace of doubt; he realized he couldn't judge that the girl Luo Qi described definitely didn't exist at all.

Who knew that the smile on Luo Qi's face disappeared for some reason, and his brows furrowed; he said in a low voice, "But I don't like this about my sister."

The warm atmosphere came to an abrupt end; Guan Xinyue was stunned for a moment and asked in confusion, "Why?"

"Because the little bastards in the kindergarten always forced her to give up more snacks, the beggars on the road were mostly fake, and she was even scratched by a stray cat until she bled, and we had to take her to get vaccinated, which made her cry loudly from the pain." Luo Qi's gaze was gentle yet helpless.

Guan Xinyue's doubts were dispelled; she sighed as if she felt the same way. As a girl, being bullied and deceived when young because of being innocent and kind, this kind of experience was always unavoidable; everyone grew up like this. Du Zhengyi could understand after a little thought; Luo Qi himself was a master at deceiving girls.

"Kind people are always bullied," Guan Xinyue summarized the point for Luo Qi with a bit of arrogance, her demeanor revealing that natural arrogance of a pretty fifteen or sixteen-year-old girl.

Luo Qi immediately expressed his agreement, and then said, "But it's not just that; later, Du Zhengyi told me, and I only then knew that my sister's constitution of overflowing sympathy is too easy to attract things."

Guan Xinyue didn't have any reaction to this sentence; her face seemed to be covered by a mask. She instinctively entered a defensive state, subconsciously resisting what Luo Qi was about to say. When she heard Du Zhengyi's name mentioned, she hurriedly raised her head to look at Du Zhengyi, who was sitting alone opposite the table, and turned her gaze away as soon as it made contact. She was very curious about Du Zhengyi, but the easy-going Luo Qi made her more relaxed; Du Zhengyi was simply too cold and unfathomable, and she didn't dare to have direct contact with him yet.

Luo Qi seemed not to have noticed Guan Xinyue's reaction, but he did not go on to say anything absurd or terrifying either; he began to ramble about miscellaneous things again. "When I was on summer vacation last year, my parents were too busy with work, so they dumped my younger sister on me and told me to take her to our grandfather's house in the countryside. My grandfather's house is in the mountains. I don't know if you've ever been to the countryside, but the mountains are quite nice in the summer. The breeze blowing out of the valley is exceptionally cool. The village, tucked away in a small mountain hollow, only had about a hundred households. My sister and I were the only guests in the whole village; whenever anyone cooked something good at noon, they would think to send some over to us."

Guan Xinyue nodded very slightly. "My hometown is also in the countryside. When I was little, I often spent my winter and summer vacations at my grandparents' house."

Luo Qi smiled even more cordially, as if this could count as meeting an old friend in a strange land. But his cheerful expression was quickly put away, his brows furrowed again, and he continued, "At first, everything was fine. My grandparents were very indulgent with my sister and me, not as strict as our parents. I could sleep in, my sister didn't have to go to cram school, and every now and then I could ride the broken motorcycle my second uncle kept at home to take my sister to a larger village or town to play some games and buy some snacks. Country life was leisurely and casual; it might have been a little boring for me, but it was very suitable for a child my sister's age."

Luo Qi paused to finish the tea in his cup in one gulp, then continued, "The only drawback was that there were no children of my sister's age in the village. She could never find a suitable playmate and could only pester me to play. So, one afternoon when I woke up from a nap and heard my sister tell me she had made friends with a little girl, I was quite happy. At the time, I didn't think much of it, assuming that someone else's grandchildren had also returned to their hometown for the summer vacation. My sister said that the little friend was very pitiful and couldn't speak, and that she wanted to be best friends with that poor little friend. I even put my two cents in and asked my sister why she didn't bring her little friend home to visit. Just like that, my sister went out to play with her new friend every day during my nap, and it was like that for three days in a row, all safe and sound. It wasn't until the fourth day at noon that my sister took a lot of snacks out with her, because that was the day before we were to leave the countryside and go home, so I thought she probably wanted to go say goodbye. That day I didn't take a nap; I was busy helping my Nainai pack our luggage. About less than twenty minutes later, while I was talking to my Nainai, my sister suddenly came back crying. I was startled and hurriedly asked her what was wrong. She told me that she had invited her little friend to come home to play, but she hadn't expected that the little friend would suddenly lose her temper and push her to the ground. I was really angry when I heard that. If it were my parents, they might have felt that things between children were trivial, but I didn't have such good cultivation. I just took my sister's little hand and wanted her to take me to find that little friend; I just felt that I should get justice for my sister."

When Luo Qi reached this point, he suddenly looked at Guan Xinyue and stopped, which made Guan Xinyue's hair stand on end. She couldn't help but look back, wanting to see if Luo Qi had seen something behind her.

Luo Qi, however, smiled. "I was thinking, now that I've said this much, you must think this is a cliché ghost story, and that my sister must have led me to a graveyard outside the village."

Guan Xinyue did not answer him; her complexion was very poor.

Luo Qi laughed at himself and continued, "I was indeed very surprised at the time, but that was because my sister had actually led me to the crossroads at the entrance of the village and told me that the little friend waited for her at this spot every time. But I knew the two households living at that intersection. One was the village's old loner; he had a strange personality, never wanted to associate with anyone, and his relatives had long since cut ties with him, so there wouldn't be any children in his house. The other household's old grandmother was on very good terms with my Nainai and would come to our house every day to gossip with my Nainai; if there had been an extra child in her house, she would have brought her over to play long ago. So I felt that I really couldn't understand the world of children, and I didn't understand why the two of them had to specifically meet and play in this place every day. My point is, that was just a crossroads, bare and with nothing there, and the village was very isolated; at noon, there wouldn't even be a shadow of a person at the village entrance, nor would there be anything lively to see. If the two children had gone to find a place with little flowers, grass, chicks, or ducklings to play, I could have understood that better. But the world of children is always hard to explain. Since I hadn't found that bad-tempered little friend, I had no choice but to take my sister home. Who knew that my sister would start running a fever that night? At the time, we thought my sister just had heatstroke. The countryside has its own set of folk methods for treating children's illnesses, so my Nainai decided to give my sister a gua sha treatment. Just as my Nainai took off the little vest the child was wearing, I suddenly saw a small, black handprint on her back."

Guan Xinyue shifted backward to lean against the back of her chair, trying to stay as far away from Luo Qi as possible. "Why are you looking at me again? Keep talking!"

Luo Qi smiled lightly. "Things in this world, sometimes they are just words without proof, and no one will just believe them. But sometimes things in this world are just that bizarre; even as society keeps developing, there are always things that cannot be explained. So, in order not to let you think I'm someone who just talks nonsense, I'd better use some facts to prove the existence of the netherworld."

Luo Qi picked up a napkin from the table and spread it out on the table in front of Guan Xinyue, then took a pen out of his own schoolbag and placed it on the napkin.

He raised his head to look at Du Zhengyi and Guan Xinyue; both of them were staring at him. He smiled. "I would like to ask you to write a character on the paper."

Guan Xinyue looked at Luo Qi vigilantly, then looked at Du Zhengyi, revealing a trace of a sarcastic smile. She said straightforwardly, "And then the master is going to read my fortune? This is a trick used by fortune-tellers at the temple gate, isn't it? Don't you have any new ideas? How about this: I'll write a character, and let the expert guess what character it is."

Luo Qi wasn't angry when he heard this. "If you say it like that, you really don't understand Brother Du. When I first met him, I really did want to ask him to tell my fortune. You aren't interested in the future, but I want to know. Unfortunately, Brother Du told me that ghosts are real, which is why they can be caught and broken, but the past is vast and the future is dim, so it is truly unpredictable. Right, brother?"

By the time he finished speaking, he turned to Du Zhengyi, his eyes full of smiles. Du Zhengyi suddenly understood what Luo Qi meant, and he nodded.

Luo Qi turned to Guan Xinyue. "Let's do as you say; you write a character, and let Brother Du tell you what character you wrote."

Guan Xinyue was greatly shocked, not expecting them to dare to do it this way. She had originally suspected that they were some kind of con artists with tricks; if they had pulled out a deck of cards now and asked her to draw one to guess the suit, she would have definitely turned on her heel and left. But writing on paper was different; there are at least three thousand common Chinese characters, so what method could possibly guess one in three thousand correctly in one go?

She thought for a while and finally said, "I want to change tables to write."

Luo Qi looked up at Du Zhengyi, and seeing Du Zhengyi nod, he smiled. "Girl, you really are cunning, then go ahead and change tables to write."

Guan Xinyue walked to the table diagonally behind Luo Qi, with her back to Du Zhengyi and Luo Qi, using her body to block her hand.

She wrote a character on the napkin, folded it up, and returned to the chair next to Luo Qi to sit down. "I've already written it."

Du Zhengyi looked at her with slight confusion. "What?"

Luo Qi was stunned. "Why are you speaking English? You've suddenly become trendy."

Guan Xinyue's face turned deathly pale in an instant, and she put down the napkin.

Luo Qi immediately took it to look. "What!" He glared at Guan Xinyue. "What? English? Sister, aren't you being too cunning?"

Guan Xinyue's hands were twisted together, trembling uncontrollably. She raised her head and looked at Du Zhengyi with eyes that could no longer hide her terror; those eyes were filled with both fear and hope, making them look even larger than before. "Why were you able to…"

Du Zhengyi did not speak, appearing all the more unfathomable. He just waited for Luo Qi to answer; the copyright for this lie belonged to Luo Qi.

Luo Qi was very satisfied with this situation. He first stared at Du Zhengyi, who had indeed lived up to his expectations, thinking that this man really didn't lie, and even humbly said that this bit of psychic ability wasn't practical—well, it just depends on how you use it. Du Zhengyi indeed could not detect the complex panoramic view of the other person's mind, but tricking the other person into focusing on a concrete image, such as a character, was exactly the corner of the mind that Du Zhengyi could glimpse. He was self-satisfied with his own genius performance, and half-heartedly turned to Guan Xinyue, saying without even thinking, "Because the master also keeps a little ghost; just now the little ghost was next to you watching and told the master."

The girl gasped sharply in fright, her spine straight and pressed tightly against the back of the chair, one hand clutching her skirt tightly, as if she had even forgotten how to breathe.

"Hey, don't, don't, don't be afraid." Luo Qi realized what was happening and hurriedly comforted her; he hadn't meant to scare the girl. "It's okay, it's not anything bad, look, I don't even care at all."

Guan Xinyue was still scared pale. He awkwardly reached out and patted her shoulder lightly, looking at Du Zhengyi in embarrassment. Du Zhengyi inhumanely refused to help, hiding in the safe zone on the other side of the table to watch the fire from across the river. Luo Qi had no choice but to stammer and coax the girl. Fortunately, after a while, Guan Xinyue finally calmed down. Luo Qi hurriedly poured her some water, and the girl drank the water but declined the Walnut Cake Luo Qi handed her.

After a while, she asked, "Can you still tell me what happened to your sister later? Did she recover her health?"

"Are you… really sure you want to hear?" Luo Qi looked at her cautiously. "Won't you be even more scared if you keep listening?"

"If you don't tell me what happened later, I'll be even more scared," Guan Xinyue said.

"Alright, then I'll make a long story short." Luo Qi had no choice but to say, "It was also my sister's good luck. When I was taking my sister, who had a persistent high fever, back to the city, I met this Mr. Du on the train. He saw that there was a problem with my sister and persuaded me, and we returned to the little village in our hometown. As soon as we arrived at the village entrance and looked at that crossroads on the dirt road, he understood where the problem lay. That's right, it was the same crossroads where my sister played with that so-called little friend. At the time, we first poured water at the intersection, then took a shovel to dig a hole. After a few shovelfuls, we saw a small shoe worn by a child, and after digging for a while longer, we found a woven bag commonly used in the countryside buried underneath. We dug the whole bag out, pulled it up, and opened it to see that it was wrapped in rags, and there was a foul stench. Once the smell dissipated, we used a shovel and pickaxe to poke around and look, and inside was actually the skeleton of a three or four-year-old child, the bones of all four limbs were broken, and two steel nails were stuck in the eye sockets."

Guan Xinyue shuddered. "What kind of person would torture and kill a child, and bury them at a crossroads where people come and go? Weren't they afraid of being discovered?"

"Sigh, that was a small village in the mountains. It was very quiet on weekdays, and it was even more secluded where the people at the village entrance lived. If you caught a time in the dead of night, it wouldn't take much effort for an adult to dig a hole and bury such a small corpse. So the key point of this matter is why it had to be buried under the crossroads at the village entrance. And this matter was very miraculous later on. My first reaction at the time was to call the police immediately, but after my grandfather and Nainai found out, they tried their best to stop me. I then realized that there were only about a hundred households in that village; everyone in the village actually knew whose child it might have been, why they died, and why they were secretly buried at the village entrance."

"Then why?" Guan Xinyue asked him in a low voice, as if speaking any louder would attract the child's vengeful spirit.

Luo Qi looked at her and said, "Because the one who died was a little girl."

Guan Xinyue didn't react; Luo Qi realized she didn't understand. He leaned forward a bit, pressing his elbows on the table, as if it were somewhat difficult to continue, but in the end, he still said, "In some places, people think that the reason they can't give birth to a son is because a female ghost is rushing to be reincarnated. So the more miserably they kill a daughter, the more they can scare off the female ghosts who want to come and be reincarnated later, making them afraid to enter this family, and then their family can give birth to a son. So the situation at the time was clear as day; someone had followed such a custom, not only breaking the daughter's limbs but also using steel nails to pierce her eyes and drive them into her brain to kill her—this method of death was truly miserable. But it didn't end with her death; her family even buried her under the crossroads at the village entrance to be stepped on by ten thousand people."

Guan Xinyue gasped, unable to say anything at all.

"I was also almost speechless when I found out about this. Grandfather said that the police in this area were also locals and could all understand these things; killing someone else's child is a crime, but killing one's own child…" Luo Qi shook his head. "I didn't know what was the right thing to do, so I just stood there stupidly watching Brother Du perform a ritual to deliver the child's soul. After that, my sister's fever did indeed break, and the child's handprint on her back disappeared. I was terrified afterward and hurriedly took my sister away. Although that is our hometown, I think I will never take my sister back to that place again."

He finished telling the story, and for a moment, no one spoke. Such a tragic story made even Du Zhengyi feel uncomfortable when he heard it. He was silent for a while and looked at Luo Qi; to his surprise, he actually saw a genuine sense of sorrow on Luo Qi's face. He suddenly understood that the part of this story about him and the ghosts and spirits wasn't true, but the rest of it wasn't necessarily false.

He was at a loss for a moment, but Luo Qi suddenly recovered, tilting his head to look at Guan Xinyue with a lively expression. "My story is finished, now it's your turn."

Guan Xinyue wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes and nodded.