Chapter 80: The Will

The space beneath a stilt house is generally not a good place; it is usually used to stack miscellaneous items or trash, and some people even enclose the area with bamboo fences to raise pigs. In short, it is not a place for people to live.

Placing a coffin containing an elder beneath a stilt house was already unfilial enough, not to mention that there wasn't even a single piece of paper money, wreath, or pine branch to signify mourning around the coffin. Leaving a bare coffin tossed under the building was as sloppy as it could get.

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe shed his owl feathers in the forest, transformed into a young man in a trench coat wearing a hideous ghost mask, and walked to the open ground beneath the stilt house. He crouched down and tapped the side of the coffin lightly with his knuckles.

*Thump, thump. *

The crisp, hollow sound indicated that the coffin boards were very thin—likely less than two centimeters thick.

Traditional Chinese culture emphasizes elaborate burials. If the poor have no means, they can only wrap the body in a straw mat, while emperors traditionally used nine layers of coffins and caskets. Although Ji Bochang was not a feudal emperor, he was not a destitute man either; did his coffin really have to be this shabby?

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe pinched the surface of the coffin, and his fingernails sank directly into the wood.

"Paulownia wood?" Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe's confusion deepened.

Paulownia wood is a fast-growing timber; if managed well, it can mature in as little as five years. Its lightweight nature makes it suitable for cheap, practical furniture—useful and inexpensive, but not exactly high-end. Using such cheap wood for a coffin was only slightly better than wrapping the body in a straw mat.

Ji Bochang was a somewhat well-known calligrapher and painter in Yunzhou, and he was suspected of being an Ascender. Even if his children were unfilial, they shouldn't have fallen to this extent.

Upon further reflection, Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe felt he might have been biased:

【Ji Bochang holding a funeral at Chuyun Villa ≠ The person lying in the coffin at Chuyun Villa is Ji Bochang.】

The inequality was solved. This coffin might not be Ji Bochang's at all. But if it wasn't his, whose could it be? Had someone else died in this villa?

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe knew that some elderly people with little time left would prepare their own coffins in advance and store them in a separate warehouse. However, he had never seen anyone casually toss a coffin—an inauspicious object—beneath their own house without even putting up a shed.

"The sheep statues standing at the gate, the strange couplet in front of the stilt house, the coffin tossed around at will beneath the building..."

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe stood up from before the paulownia coffin painted with the character "Lu" (Prosperity) and frowned slightly.

This Chuyun Villa was filled with strangeness everywhere. Every flower and tree gave Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe a sense of inexplicable dissonance. It was only a few dozen minutes' drive east to the bustling Yunzhou City with its population of nearly ten million, and there were many other villas and manors nestled among the mountains and waters nearby. Only this Chuyun Villa had such an exceptionally bizarre style.

It seemed as if this villa did not belong to this world from the very beginning, but had been forcibly cut and pasted here from somewhere else.

It was like forcibly photoshopping a cat-head onto the helmet of the Emperor Armor; this was a sign that a Strange World event was about to occur.

"No wonder Ji Bochang's children sent out black invitations to invite Yu Zi—an Ascender—to attend the funeral..." Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe thought as he turned to look at the vast lake in the distance.

Just as he turned, a piece of something that looked like a tree branch or a wooden stick suddenly fell from the sky, landing precisely where Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe had been standing just a moment ago with a *thud*. Fortunately, Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe had good luck today, or it would have hit his head.

"Hmm?" Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe instinctively looked up and saw that a window on the second floor of the stilt house had opened at some point. A slender, graceful silhouette leaned against the window, her beautiful profile illuminated by the bright light.

"Damn, Pan Jinlian."

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe exhaled in relief. He realized it wasn't a wooden stick, but a large wolf-hair brush.

"So she's cosplaying Pan Jinlian."

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe exhaled in relief. The person upstairs waved at him, so he waved back. He picked up the brush and walked around the small hillside to the upper floor, where the person was already waiting at the main entrance.

Greeting Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe was a charming young woman with eyes like flowing water and a face as beautiful as a painting. Her delicate figure was beautiful indeed, but it felt somewhat unreal—even plastic surgery couldn't achieve this; she looked more like someone who had stepped out of a painting.

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe's hideous ghost mask did not frighten this pretty lady in the slightest. A polite smile appeared on her face as she said softly, "So it's Mr. Yeyao. The memorial service doesn't start until tomorrow, and the others haven't arrived yet. You've come a bit early."

As her voice fell, the rules of *Taiyi* were triggered quietly, and a stream of information flowed into Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe's mind. The person before him was Ji Bochang's daughter, born in his later years, who took her mother's surname: Shi Yurou.

Shi Yurou was an ordinary person. She had never encountered any Strange World events and did not know Yu Zi; she had only seen Yu Zi's photo in the will left by Ji Bochang.

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe reached into his bosom, took out the invitation, and handed it to Shi Yurou along with the brush he had just picked up. "Early or late, it's all the same. Also, my surname isn't Ximen; don't throw wooden sticks at me for no reason."

Shi Yurou giggled. "Mr. Yeyao, you're joking. Come upstairs with me first."

"Alright."

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe glanced sideways at the couplets on both sides of the gate and walked into the building with Shi Yurou.

The interior of the stilt house was decorated in an antique style, with a massive root-carved tea table in the center of the living room that was very eye-catching. The four walls were covered with solid wood, adorned with calligraphy of idioms written in a flowing, dragon-like hand. From the decor to the furniture and even the rounded transitions at the corners, everything was in a traditional Chinese style—very standard for a wealthy person in Yunzhou.

But as mentioned before, Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe didn't see anything related to a funeral in this building.

"Whose coffin is that downstairs?" Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe asked.

"My father's," Shi Yurou replied truthfully.

【=9+Book_Bar】

It really was Ji Bochang's...

"Then you lot are truly unfilial," Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe said softly.

A father dies, and they just use a cheap wooden coffin to collect his body, tossing him in a place where pigs are raised? This wasn't just ordinary unfilial behavior; this was how one treated an enemy.

But Shi Yurou shook her head. "These were all my father's personal requests before he died."

"You mean to say, he asked you to toss his corpse into a pigsty yourself?" Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe's tone became subtle.

Shi Yurou nodded. They reached the second floor, and she led Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe into a study. From her account, Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe learned the general situation in Chuyun Villa.

Before Ji Bochang died, he left a will, instructing Shi Yurou and Ji Yunying to follow it strictly:

1. Ji Bochang requested that a thin coffin be used to collect his body, placed beneath the stilt house, and that nothing else be done.

2. Ji Bochang requested that they keep everything and every object in this entire building in the state it was in before his death, and not to move anything rashly.

3. Before he died, Ji Bochang gave the siblings a list, instructing them to use black invitations to invite these people to attend his funeral.

The name and contact information for "Yeyao" were on the list, but the siblings knew nothing about the true identities of these people.

"Also, last night, my brother and I were keeping vigil for Father downstairs."

Shi Yurou stopped in front of the desk where her father used to write and looked at the ghost mask on Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe's face, saying in a low voice, "Suddenly, there were a few knocks from inside the coffin, as if someone were tapping the wooden boards from within... I remember clearly: three long knocks, two short ones. This sound only occurred once and never appeared again. I thought it was a hallucination at the time."

"But when my brother and I finished the vigil the next day and returned upstairs to wash up, we discovered that the copper coins we were carrying had each lost one."

Speaking to this point, Shi Yurou's expression became solemn. "Upon further inspection, we discovered that my father's corpse in the coffin had also disappeared."

(End of Chapter)