VL Chapter2

(If you don’t understand, you can forget about chapter 1 for now…)

Yan Jiang had once been merely an ordinary scholar in this remote and destitute corner of the country, no different from the most unremarkable background figure in a tale. He was of low birth, possessed mediocre natural talent, and had absolutely nothing remarkable about him from head to toe. Both of his parents passed away the year he passed the entry-level civil service exam, leaving him without even half an acre of land upon their deaths. His family circumstances were exceptionally wretched, so he had never married and lived alone in a small, dilapidated cottage at the edge of the village.

—He ate the cheapest coarse grains, wore the lowest-grade coarse cloth, and had no other skills, relying solely on selling his calligraphy and paintings to eke out a living. He pinched and saved every copper coin he earned, yet even after all these years, his savings remained meager. Still, he clung to a faint hope, believing that once he had put aside enough silver for the journey, he could travel to the provincial capital to sit for the metropolitan examination, earn an official post, and finally fulfill the wishes his late parents had left behind.

He was an honest person with little strength of character; in kinder terms, he was steady and conscientious, but in harsher ones, he was dull-minded and good for nothing. Moreover, his disposition was extremely cowardly, and he often didn’t even know how to defend himself when bullied by others.

This year marked both the fifth or sixth year since the Yan parents passed away and the twenty-first year of Yan Jiang’s life in this village. With his impoverished imagination, he had never imagined that a calamity would descend upon this land and appear by his side.

It was likely during the most sweltering days of the entire summer that Old Woman Huang’s madness suddenly took a turn for the worse. She pattered around barefoot all day long on patrol, constantly muttering something about “it’s coming, it’s coming.” The villagers only took it as crazy talk and never paid it any mind. Several days later, an eerie change settled over the village. For nights on end, the temperature plummeted without warning after sunset, and the chickens kept in every household’s courtyard no longer crowded before dawn. While someone did mention it, everyone just dismissed it as abnormal weather and didn’t pay much attention… Then, at last, on a particularly quiet night, just as the night watchman had begun making his rounds and Yan Jiang had extinguished his lamp to retire for the night, that “filthy thing” truly appeared beside his bed, leaning over his pillow and exhaling a breath so cold it seemed capable of freezing one to the bone.

“Hmph…”

A soft chuckle drilled into his skull like an awl, exceptionally distinct in the pitch-black darkness where one couldn’t see their own hand in front of their face.

The young man’s shrill, miserable shriek pierced the night, only to be abruptly cut off midway as if choked dry of life. The thing hidden in the dark gripped Yan Jiang’s throat with a loose yet firm hold. His entire body locked up. His mouth hung open, frozen before it could close, yet forget shouting; even drawing a breath had become a struggle.

“Shh—” The thing “kindly” tapped his pale lips as a reminder.

Clang—Clang—Clang—

Outside, the watchman’s gong sounded through the night, drawing steadily closer from afar. It seemed he had heard the earlier scream and was making his way toward the source of the disturbance. “That thing” released its grip, and Yan Jiang instinctively recoiled to the side. Unable to see a thing in the pitch-black darkness, he tumbled awkwardly from the bed and, scrambling on hands and knees, desperately made for the main room.

Humans are always exceptionally agile and nimble when fighting for survival, except for Yan Jiang. He burst out of the bedroom headfirst while clutching his neck in an attempt to cry out for help, but his foot suddenly tripped over something. Overcome by panic, he lost his balance completely and crashed heavily to the ground, striking it face-first. A small wooden stool overturned and went rolling into the corner, crashing into a pile of scattered timber.

The watchman’s gong abruptly fell silent for a moment, then quickly shifted direction and came to a halt right beneath the window of the dilapidated shack.

Clang—

Accompanied by the lingering echo of the gong, Yan Jiang heard the faint, indistinct sound of a ballad rising out of thin air from the bedroom behind him. It sounded exactly like the soul-hooking ditties played by families when a child died young, and also like a resentful lamentation. Bearing an icy chill, it slowly drifted out of the bedroom, inching closer toward the scholar’s feet.

Yan Jiang could even smell the odor of rotting meat.

“Aaah—!” A barely perceptible sliver of moonlight filtering through the gap in the window happened to shine on the left side of his face, making it look utterly bloodless. “A ghost! There’s a ghost—! Help! Don’t come over here—Help—”

An intense desire to survive took over his body. Mobilizing his final ounce of strength, he threw himself against the window, forcing the shutters open with his body.

Clang—

Sure enough, the watchman was right outside the window. The sound of the gong rang out again, exploding right next to his head which was half-extended out of the window, deafening him with the vibration.

The bright, glaring moonlight stung his eyes until they teared up. Yan Jiang narrowed his eyes, and before he could even manage to open them, he could already tangibly feel the icy chill crawling up his back rapidly recede at this very moment. The relief of narrowly escaping death washed over him in a crushing wave, draining all strength from his body until he could do nothing but slump against the windowsill, supporting himself with his upper body.

Night watchmen were invariably men with exceptionally potent yang energy, the sort that ghosts and other malevolent beings instinctively avoided.

He wiped away a handful of tears and lifted his head, just about to ask the watchman to pull him out of the house. Unfortunately, before a sycophantic smile could fully form on his face, it froze instantly.

“Aaaaah—!”

This time it was truly a soul-shattering shriek, his voice cracking violently at the tail end. Yan Jiang tumbled straight back into the house, prostrating on the ground as he writhed his body to get away from the windowsill.

Where was there any night watchman outside the window?

Tonight was a full moon with clear skies for thousands of miles. In the silvery-white light, there clearly… clearly stood a headless male corpse! It was still dressed in a tattered burial shroud with fresh soil clinging to the cuffs of its sleeves. It just stood there quietly outside the window with its stiff-arm joints bent awkwardly, barely managing to hold up a bronze gong.

Even though it had no head, Yan Jiang could feel “its” gaze falling upon him; cold, sinister, without a shred of vitality, like cancer that seeped into the bones, causing the blood in his entire body to congeal into lumps.

There was a ghost inside the house, and another waiting outside.

Under extreme panic, Yan Jiang’s soul was scared right out of his body. The lone flesh-and-blood mortal could do nothing but let out pitiful, incoherent screams, curling up and writhing across the floor like a maggot, wishing he could burrow straight into the earth and disappear. A foul, pungent stench spread across his crotch, and in a few moments, a wet patch soaked beneath him, staining his underpants yellow.

Further up, his face, hidden away in the darkness, was a chaotic mess of tears and snot. The originally clean and refined image of a scholar was utterly obliterated. The scholar’s hair was completely disheveled, and a continuous “he-he” sobbing sound came from his throat. The sound was so hoarse and feeble that it did not carry the slightest hint of menace.

The eerie, otherworldly melody rose once more, and in the moonlight, the shadow of the headless male corpse stretched slowly into the room. Even though it was summer, it was brutally cold as if the house had already been dragged into purgatory. The space was too small; having crawled to the corner furthest from the window, there was nowhere left to retreat. Yan Jiang felt the only wooden cabinet in the main room, so he curled himself into the nook between the cabinet and the wall, hugging himself tightly. He buried his messy face into his knees, not daring to look up again as his broken crying grew from small whimpers to loud sobs.

Upon reaching a certain peak, the noise gradually subsided, leaving only low whimpers. The fragile human had been terrified to the point of delirium, on the very verge of shock.

This was already the most isolated house at the end of the village, and at this moment, it was completely forgotten by the world. Set securely upon the cabinet were the spirit tablets of the Yan couple, yet they offered no protection whatsoever to their pitiful child.

A raven, flown in from who knew where, settled outside the window and let out harsh caws one after another, its cries sound especially ominous in the dead of night. Consequently, the soul-hooking ditty stopped, while life-claiming curses from the underworld rose and fell in succession. The freezing air came alive again, surrounding the only living person in the dead silence.

The moonlight also carried a lifeless, cold white hue. Filtering through the half-open window, the moonlight brightened the room ever so slightly. Had Yan Jiang dared to raise his head, he would have seen that the freezing air was in fact a swirling mass of black mist. It dispersed and reconvened as if with a conscious mind, and after a few chew-like churns, it spat out a humanoid figure from within.

That figure was slightly more solid than the black mist, yet it was still ethereal. Ringed by the black mist, it floated in midair off the ground, silently drawing close to the scholar in the corner. At the slightest twitch of its fingertips, the black mist coiled upward like a serpent around his filthy, bare feet, sending a bone-deep chill through him and making him instinctively curl into himself even more tightly.

A shallow cut marked the bridge of Yan Jiang’s foot, scraped open when he had stumbled over the stool earlier. After all this tossing and turning, messy bloodstains were left on the fair skin that rarely saw the sun. The black mist bored into the scholar’s body along the wound, quickly vanishing without a sound or trace.

“This soul…”

After savoring it for a moment, the dark shadow clicked its tongue in dissatisfaction. “Inferior.”

Its voice was utterly inhuman; less a single sound than the overlapping, fractured wails of countless wronged souls, as though they had been torn apart and stitched back together into one shrill cry. It was a stroke of luck that Yan Jiang had already fallen into a semi-conscious state and could not hear a thing; had he been awake, he would have been unable to withstand the resentment within it and would have had his soul scattered on the spot.

Clang—

The headless male corpse standing beneath the window struck the gong stiffly once more, presumably in response to something.

The dark shadow shifted. Although its facial features were invisible, judging by its silhouette, it seemed to look back for a glance before turning back around.

With a wave of its hand, the black mist darting wildly all over the room suddenly fell still. It stagnated for an instant and then rushed back toward the dark shadow like mad. The whipped-up airflow caused the window shutters to slam shut with a bang, plunging the inside of the house back into a pitch-black darkness where one couldn’t see their own hand in front of their face.

In just the blink of an eye, all the sinister things, including the male corpse and the raven, vanished completely. The dark shadow retracted its power, gradually changing from ethereal to solid, transforming into the appearance of a deathly pale man.

The surrounding scenery clearly hadn’t changed a bit, yet it had obviously returned to the realm of the living, no longer as freezing cold as before.

But Yan Jiang was completely oblivious to it all.

With his eyelids half-drooping, his face was pulled upward by a completely ice-cold hand gripping his hair. His hollow, lifeless pupils couldn’t even reflect the figure of the man in front of him. The mucus, tears, and saliva that had earlier coated his face had either been wiped away or dried in place, leaving behind a disorderly web of streaks. Fortunately, his features were not entirely obscured.

“You look decent enough. This venerable one shall spare your life to serve as an attendant.” When the ghost spoke again, his voice was no longer that terrifying tone from before, but the voice of a normal man. By human standards, it could even be considered pleasant to the ear; delivering a tone of great mercy, yet inherently devoid of any emotion.

He pulled his hand away. Deprived of any support, the curled-up person went limp and collapsed onto the ground, the side of his forehead striking the floor heavily as he lost consciousness entirely.