Chapter 970

The human heart is noisy!

All living beings are in turmoil...

Lao Guangming stood on the Jin Tang Bridge, watching the dense mass of corpses floating in the river, flowing upstream like small boats. The members of the Wuhe Corpse-Retrieval Team were also standing on the bridge, but facing this scene, no one dared to go into the water to retrieve the corpses.

The Haihe River seemed to have become a road to the underworld, the River of Three Crossings!

Lao Guangming stood on the Jin Tang Bridge as if standing on the Naihe Bridge.

But he knew clearly that these corpses were not fierce ghosts, yet they were even more terrifying than fierce ghosts; they were all parts of one 'person'...

The people of Zhigu on the riverbank were discussing it heatedly, the restlessness of the human heart rendering an atmosphere of panic.

Some people were already scattering paper money, burning incense on the bank to appease the wandering souls, but Lao Guangming knew that these were not wandering souls, but a living, newly born 'life'.

Although they were corpses, they were also 'alive'.

Cui the Daoist, who was swindling people on the street, was invited over. He took one look at the hundreds of floating corpses in the river and turned to leave: "Uncle, if it were ordinary zombies or water ghosts, I would drive them away for you. Just feed me two meals, but this scene—does it look like something I can afford to provoke?"

Saying so, Cui the Daoist still invited the senior brother from the Tianhou Palace over.

Facing this horrifying scene, the senior brother didn't say anything, just took the red rope hanging on the Mud Doll Mountain and tied it from one end of the Jin Tang Bridge to the other, blocking the floating corpses behind on this stretch of the river.

Strange to say, the floating corpses were going against the current, but no matter how rapid the current was, they just couldn't pass the Sancha River mouth.

And on the Jin Tang Bridge, once the red rope was tied, the other floating corpses that were continuously coming upstream were all blocked...

But the senior brother from the Tianhou Palace only shook his head and sighed: "This red rope for tying dolls is a red line from death to life. It ties the doll like an umbilical cord. Originally, if it were a ghost from the underworld, once this red rope was tied, no matter how great its ability, as long as it couldn't violate the principles of the Heavenly Tianhou Niangniang, it couldn't step over this line."

"The day before yesterday, that Deacon Wu from the Xuanzhen Sect blocked the ghost ship and borrowed the red rope from us; that is the reason."

"But these floating corpses are neither alive nor dead. Although they are somewhat similar to ghosts, their essence is that of demons. My red rope can block fierce ghosts, but it cannot block corpse demons for too long. Moreover, demons are evil and strange! Once they are allowed into the city, something extremely terrifying will inevitably happen."

The old captain of the Wuhe Corpse-Retrieval Team made a salute of the river folk to the old Daoist and said, "Many thanks to the old immortal for your help. I wonder if there is a way to ward off evil and remove the strange for our brothers, so that they can go into the water to retrieve the corpses."

The old captain's son next to him slowly raised his head and pulled the old captain: "Dad, they said that thing is a corpse demon!"

"You can't touch it!"

Other village elders also slowly came up to stop them.

"We make our living by retrieving corpses... although we earn the underworld money of the dead, retrieving floating corpses and letting people return to their roots so they don't end up in the mouths of fish and shrimp, I think it is also a meritorious deed."

The old captain said sincerely: "Everyone doesn't dislike us, because they know we are making an honest living."

"Now that the demon corpses are coming upstream into the city, there must be a great disaster. And since these floating corpses are on the Wuhe, it should be our responsibility. One is to prevent this great disaster, and the other is our job. It's like, everyone has to give gifts to the Water God every year during festivals, but when there's a fire, we retreat... that makes no sense!"

Hearing this, everyone was moved.

Immediately, the corpse-retrieval team selected the eighteen people with the best swimming skills, changed into water gear, lit incense to ward off evil, worshipped the Fire God and the Nine Rivers Dragon King, and prepared to go into the water to retrieve the corpses.

Cui the Second carefully took out a stack of tattered yellow paper and shouted: "Don't be in a hurry, I'll write a 'List of Calamity' for you, maybe it can deceive the old King of Hell."

The senior brother from the Tianhou Palace also tied a red rope on everyone's wrist.

Cui the Second asked for everyone's birth date and time, calculated the current hour, and took out a small, bald brush and a box of ink sticks with only a little left.

The old Daoist next to him saw this and also sighed.

"Little Cui, you are willing to use this underground Yin ink dug out from an Eastern Han tomb? Didn't you say you wanted to save it to write your own Yin contract?"

Cui the Second sighed: "I don't have that fate! Second Master is generous, I can't be stingy, right!"

The old Daoist thought for a moment, found a copper box, opened it, and saw bright cinnabar ink: "This Longquan Eight-Treasure seal paste was bestowed by the Emperor when he came to the Tianhou Palace to pay homage to the Heavenly Tianhou Niangniang last time. Later, he had evil thoughts of immortality and didn't dare to come again! You use it... if it's not enough, I'll ask, my junior brother should still have some."

Cui the Daoist smiled, called the members of the corpse-retrieval team one by one, wrote the List of Calamity in black ink on yellow paper, and then everyone pressed their handprints with the seal paste.

This is something only done when writing a List of Calamity for the living; hoodlums sign and press their prints to show their courage, and it also has the meaning of a life-and-death contract. In case someone goes back on their word and it becomes a lawsuit, they take the List of Calamity with their handprint to show the government, to confirm that they acknowledged this life themselves.

In ordinary times, who would write a List of Calamity for the living!

So all procedures were done according to the hoodlums' ways.

Liu Daoyuan, who handled ghost lawsuits in Zhigu City, held his hands in his sleeves and watched the fun from the side, seeing the men of the underwater corpse-retrieval team all dressed in water gear, holding ink-soaked ropes in their hands, about to enter the water.

He stretched his neck and shouted loudly: "Don't be afraid! If you really die down there! I will go to the Bone Tianhou Niangniang to file a lawsuit and ask for your souls back!"

Everyone knew that although this person had a foul mouth, he had no bad intentions and was a very loyal person.

So they didn't argue with him, and one by one, with a splash, they jumped into the river like ducks.

The old captain took the lead, swam to a floating corpse, circled behind it, and used the ink rope in his hand to wrap around its head. It was a male floating corpse, likely a porter from the wharf, with a sturdy body; although somewhat bloated in the water, his features could still be seen.

This job was dangerous, so they started with the easy ones and moved to the difficult ones.

Retrieving floating corpses is actually not afraid of male corpses; male floating corpses are all face down and won't suddenly open their eyes to look at you. But women have heavy Yin energy, and children are fine if nothing happens, but if something does, it could be fatal. Both of these types of corpses are face up, and once they open their eyes and see you, there is no chance of survival.

Whether it's a water ghost or looking for a substitute, or a floater turning into a zombie, the old captain's ancestral corpse-retrieval trade has ways to solve it.

Once a floating corpse opens its eyes or a sunken corpse closes its mouth, those are all signs of great ominousness.

But if a floating corpse opens its eyes and they are all white, and a sunken corpse closes its mouth and holds its breath, then even an immortal cannot save it.

The old captain had just wrapped around a corpse when he felt a hand grab his ankle under the water, but he was calm, held his breath, and sank into the water, and sure enough, he saw a pair of blue hands grabbing his right ankle.

He tied a red thread to that hand, and soon that hand let go of his ankle and sank straight into the Haihe River.

Just when the old captain thought the matter was solved and was about to poke his head up, he found a rope of unclear color tied to his ankle, with a copper coin attached to it.

He found it familiar, so he reached out to touch it, rubbed off the green algae on it, and saw four inscriptions on the round-sky-square-earth coin: "Ward off evil and drive away the wicked!"

The old captain's brain went blank...

This coin is a flower coin, also called a suppression coin, originally imitated by people from copper coins to ward off evil and pray for blessings. It originally came from the palace, used gold and silver, and was inscribed with auspicious words, so it was also called a palace coin.

And this "Ward off evil and drive away the wicked" coin, the old captain happened to know, was a "womb coin" that flowed out of the palace.

It was during the Jiazi Great Year that the Emperor ordered the Imperial Observatory to create a batch of coin mothers, used as molds for casting gold and silver palace coins. One of them somehow flowed into the hands of a small eunuch, and when he left the palace, he spent it as an ordinary copper coin.

After several twists and turns, it flowed into the hands of the old captain's father.

When he was young, his health was poor.

His father always said he would give him the coin, and he grew up wearing this evil-warding palace coin. But every time he went out to work, no matter where he was playing, his mother would find him and hang the palace coin back on his father.

He had touched these patterns no less than eight hundred times, if not a thousand, when he was young.

At this moment, the old captain struggled violently under the water, clutching that flower coin tightly, diving downward, wanting to find the hand he had tied the red thread to.

The biggest regret of his life was that he had retrieved corpses for a lifetime but never retrieved his own father.

But as he looked around under the water, he found shadows of people everywhere, as if this were not under the Haihe River, but the crowded Dongcheng Gate. The corpses on the river surface were dense and terrifying, but those under the river were ten times more so.

The old captain's movement was slightly intense, and his breathing became unstable, spitting out a string of bubbles under the water.

At this moment, the corpses around him that had closed their eyes and were going against the current all... opened eyes that were pale and pupil-less.

The corpses around him stretched out their hands, dense and numerous. The pale hands swayed like water grass at the bottom of the river. The old captain felt the water current wrapping around him, heading toward the forest formed by those arms.

He couldn't help himself, falling toward the corpse forest at the bottom of the river.

The red rope on his wrist had already turned black...

At that moment, the evil-warding palace coin he was clutching tightly suddenly shattered, and the water current holding him also became chaotic. The old captain's whole body spun, and in the chaos, he was lifted to the river surface by a hand.

The members of the corpse-retrieval team had just tied up a few corpses when they saw the old captain rush out of the river surface, gasping for air, looking around in horror.

"Run!"

"Get to the shore quickly... let's think of another way, drain the water! We can't go into the river again!"

The old captain shouted loudly.

But at this moment, the hundreds of corpses on this corpse river suddenly flipped over, one face after another lying face up on the river surface, regardless of gender or age. Those corpses tied with ropes circled around like small boats.

The entire Jin Tang Bridge was trembling, the piled stones shaking, large amounts of dust falling from the gaps, the wooden structure groaning, the wooden frame making creaking sounds.

The red rope tied on it was pulled tight, as if a huge, invisible thing was impacting it.

The senior brother from the Tianhou Palace on the bridge had a solemn expression, and people were screaming and fleeing from the boats...

A whirlpool appeared on the surface of the Haihe River at some point, dozens of corpses rotating around it. They collided with each other, their hands raised toward the river surface, like a tree growing out of the river.

The whirlpool grew larger and larger, revealing the dense mass of corpses at the bottom of the river...

At this moment, everyone's heart finally sank.

The corpse-retrieval team members held hands, circling in a ring on the river surface, their legs constantly kicking the floating corpses, but they also gradually and irreversibly approached the whirlpool.

Those dense corpses were like a forest, their arms waving, as if the whirlpool had opened a door to another world.

Cui the Second threw his own tattered banner toward the whirlpool. The banner moved without wind, and the four characters "Iron-Mouthed Divine Calculation" on it gradually faded, revealing four large characters: "Calamity God Bu Er."

The whirlpool's expansion immediately stopped.

But at this moment, a pale ghost hand suddenly grabbed out from the whirlpool, grabbing the pole of the banner.

Immediately after, it was the second, the third, dense hands stretching out from the whirlpool, grabbing the banner, sinking it into the whirlpool bit by bit.

Cui the Second untied his Daoist robe and sprinkled it with his hand. The Daoist robe grew in the wind, landing on the river surface and spreading into a floating yellow cloth three zhang square. He shouted to the people below: "Climb up, quickly!"

At this moment, the shape of a hand under the yellow cloth became more and more obvious, followed by a head tightly wrapped in wet cloth, then the second, the third hand. The head slowly rose, revealing a human figure with arms spread, facing the crowd, wrapped in the yellow cloth, tightly pressed against the body, like a long robe.

Behind him, the second, the third hand stretched out, dense hands like a dharma wheel, growing out from behind him, under his ribs, on his shoulders.

On the river surface, he was wrapped in the Daoist robe, the earthy yellow Daoist robe tightly pressed against him, shaping that highly impactful image.

Like the King in Yellow!

At this moment, only Lao Guangming recognized that strange image; it was precisely that bishop in the foreign church—Menor.

The only path to survival had instead become the most terrifying evil.

The corpse-retrieval team members stood back to back, pressed tightly together, and were finally entangled by the dense corpses next to the whirlpool. Each person had seven or eight hands on them, the floating corpses rolled by the whirlpool, circling them, like a huge corpse ball wrapping them.

Under the witness of tens of thousands of people by the Haihe River, these people were about to be dragged into the whirlpool by this corpse ball...

All the onlookers felt a chill in their hearts, and some were already crying out loud.

At this moment, the people blocking the Dongcheng Gate were suddenly pushed away roughly. Just as someone wanted to curse, seeing the person who came, they all obediently closed their mouths.

The Dongcheng Gate led directly to the Jin Tang Bridge. The crowd running down from the bridge was about to squeeze into the city gate when they saw the crowd in front of them separate like a tide.

Dense crowds were pushed to both sides.

It was a group of Xuanzhen Sect disciples wearing red and black dharma robes, wearing ghost and god masks, and wearing cloaks. They held the Xuanzhen Seal in their hands, and the other hand waved the cloak like a black flag. Everyone they touched felt their bodies lighten, and then they were inexplicably squeezed to the side.

They just squeezed through the crowd step by step from the city gate, coming toward the Jin Tang Bridge.