Chapter 28: Human Thralls (Part 1)

Little Tanshi Village was extremely run-down, with a poverty that did not belong in this era.

The village was not large. It had been built on yellow earth, and along the outer edges stood scattered remnants of broken walls. The houses closer to the center of the village were clearly still inhabited, but they were mud houses made from yellow clay mixed with straw stems.

The whole way in, there was not even a flat stretch of ground underfoot. Twisted, curled, uneven yellow mud rose and fell beneath them. Wild grass by the roadside grew half as tall as a person. A skinny yellow village dog shot out, all bones under its fur, and when it saw them appear, it bared its teeth and barked wildly. It made as if to lunge and bite, yet was too frightened to actually come forward.

Even the best houses here were worse than the red-brick houses that were about to be phased out in Lishui Village. Amid the dilapidation was an indescribable desolation and chill.

The blazing sun hung high overhead. The village was not entirely empty. Rural people relied on the livestock and fields at home for their livelihoods, so even during the day, some people still hurried back to feed pigs and chickens.

As soon as they entered the village, dogs began barking. Faces peered out from courtyard gates or behind enclosing walls, watching them in fear and nervousness.

“Are all the ones coming back women?” Pang Xiaolei was the first to notice that something was off.

Captain Zhang thought for a moment and said, “So far, all the dead have been men. They probably think the women are safe. The livestock at home still needs feeding.”

“Where are the families where the incidents happened? Take us there.”

“This way. This is the first one.”

Chen Yi walked at the back. His attention was not on the house they were about to investigate. He was waiting for noon to pass. Once it did, the Aura Observation Technique would be able to trace the root of the red clouds and find the birthplace of the bizarre magnetic field. Maybe they would be able to resolve the crisis without fighting at all.

Of course, even if he did have to fight, he was not afraid. At his current level, he had a relatively accurate assessment of an aberration’s strength. Judging from the bloody moon platform disk that had still been gestating in the red clouds last night, this aberration was indeed the fiercest one in history, but it was still far from being his match.

Destroy the aberration, send it off to truly reincarnate, then deal with the place that had caused the mutation. Job done!

The Demon Suppression Bureau was building its headquarters, with a secret base extending who knew how many meters underground, plus the sealing talismans Chen Yi had sent over. The chance of these aberrations waking up again and causing trouble was practically nonexistent... No, one guarded against fire, thieves, and protagonists. A thousand-li dike could collapse from an ant hole. Wherever the protagonist was, something was bound to happen. He needed to find time to personally see what the protagonist looked like and guard against him with the strictest defenses.

Chen Yi was walking absentmindedly and gradually fell to the very back. When he came back to himself, he discovered that not far away, behind the enclosing wall of a farmhouse, a face with disheveled hair and a beggar-like appearance had peeked out.

Her hair was a tangled mess, her face pitch-black. Her eyes stared fixedly at Chen Yi. They should have been very beautiful, large eyes with double eyelids, but the whites were filled with dense blood vessels, and deep within her pupils was an indescribable twisted ferocity.

In the end, as if she had thought of something, the madness rising across her face vanished without a trace, finally turning into indifference.

“Pah!”

She spat on the ground and turned away.

Chen Yi: “?”

She was a woman from the village.

Rural people had to work in the fields, and most were dark and thin, but dark was dark. They still tried their best to keep themselves clean and hygienic. Even the relatively poor people of Lishui Village did not have hair so filthy it looked like it had never been washed. It was not as if they were mad.

When he realized this, Chen Yi discovered that most of the women he could currently see were not very clean. And toward their arrival, they did not show the excited hope he had imagined. Instead, there was an indescribable wariness and resistance.

Was this what Captain Zhang had meant by xenophobia?

Chen Yi thought about it, came up with no answer, and simply gave up.

Following the sound of voices, he entered the house in the courtyard before him.

This red-brick house counted as one of the better buildings in the village. It even had two floors. Once he walked inside, an indescribable smell flooded into his nose, like the stifled stuffiness of a place sealed for a long time, and also like some kind of suffocating decay.

His vision abruptly darkened, then slowly recovered.

This was a bedroom.

Captain Zhang was saying, “The deceased disappeared in this room. Zhang Xiao was the head of this household, forty-three years old. Living with him was his son, Zhang Lin.

“According to Zhang Lin, his father had very serious gout and hadn’t gone down the mountain in many years. Everyone in this village receives minimum living support. By relying on the chickens and ducks raised at home, plus half a mu of farmland in the back mountain, they could just barely make a living.

“Zhang Xiao was the first victim. On the day of the incident, he drank at the home of Liu Laizi from the same village, then came back drunk and went into the room to sleep.

“Zhang Lin personally saw Zhang Xiao come back, but the next day, there was still no movement from the room by ten in the morning. When he entered, there was no one inside.

“But the disappearance was only confirmed three days later. When two more victims appeared, Zhang Lin realized his father had also gone missing, so he called the police.

“In Zhang Lin’s description, on the day Zhang Xiao disappeared, the smell in the room was not like a hangover. In a closed environment, it takes at least four hours for the smell of alcohol after drinking to fully dissipate.

“In other words, by the time Zhang Lin confirmed Zhang Xiao was not in the room, Zhang Xiao had already left at least before six o’clock...”

Chen Yi listened carefully for a while, then discovered he was not cut out to solve cases. While absentmindedly listening to Captain Zhang describe the case details, he wandered around the room, touching here and there, slightly disgusted.

It was just quite dirty.

Every utensil he could see had a thick layer of grime inside, built up from who knew what. On furniture that was rarely moved, dust had piled so high that one breath could raise a sandstorm.

And then there were the bedsheets on the bed. They had been slept in so long they were practically glazed over. This father and son had fully demonstrated, through personal practice, what life looked like when there was no woman around and one simply muddled through the days.

Compared to Chen Yi’s disgust, Pang Xiaolei fully displayed what it meant to be a professional.

The officer from the Criminal Police Brigade very carefully examined the entire room. Even the limescale-coated teacup that Chen Yi found extremely disgusting was picked up and sniffed by Pang Xiaolei.

This was why people said every profession had its own specialty.

Pang Xiaolei quickly and methodically searched the inside and outside of the house, even feeling all over the bed and beneath it. Finally, he crawled under the bed and knocked on the floorboards.

Soon, his searching movements stopped. He felt the wooden bedframe’s headboard again and again.

His movement drew everyone’s attention. When Chen Yi walked over, he instinctively activated the Delusion-Piercing Eye Technique and glanced at the place Pang Xiaolei was touching.

No mechanism, no aberration. Aside from the red paint having peeled quite severely, that section of the bedpost showed nothing unusual.

“What is it?” Chen Yi asked.

Pang Xiaolei looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure yet. I want to look at the next victim’s house.”

“Let’s go.” Captain Zhang walked in front.

The second victim’s home was not far. Once again, Captain Zhang reported the situation while Pang Xiaolei felt around the headboard in the room.

This household did have a female head of house, as well as two adult sons. The two sons were six years apart. The eldest was already twenty-six. Similarly, neither had gone out to work, nor had they studied. They had stayed in the village to farm and raise pigs.

This family was a little poor. They lived in mud houses, two buildings in total. The adults had one room, and the sons had another.

Pang Xiaolei chose to investigate the children’s room first, and his purpose was very clear as he searched above and below the bed.

In the end, he stopped in slight confusion and headed toward the adults’ room.

Chen Yi confirmed that he really was not cut out to be a detective. Pang Xiaolei’s actions had made his curiosity itch, so he simply said, “Just say it directly. What are you trying to find? I can help.”

Pang Xiaolei did not stop walking. He entered the main house’s bedroom and, while feeling around the headboard, said, “Although this matter might have nothing to do with what we’re investigating right now, since we’ve run into it, we can’t pretend we didn’t see it.

“For us criminal protection officers, aside from going on missions, the work we do most every day is organizing case files and studying all kinds of cases from ancient times to the present. Motives, methods, clues.

“When it comes to cases that easily appear in mountain villages, aside from some accidents and murders born of personal grudges, there’s another type of case that’s actually quite easy to associate with it. After all, this sort of thing doesn’t happen in cities.

“I found a very obvious clue in the previous victim’s house just now. I’m going to keep looking here. Once I find it, I’ll know...”

“Ahhhhh!”

While he was still speaking, a shrill scream came from outside. In the quiet mountain village, it instantly raised a storm.

Even though it was noon, the fact that there was an aberration causing trouble still made everyone’s hair stand on end.

Then they hurriedly ran out the door.

“I’ll go take a look.” Captain Sun from Shanghai volunteered.

Pang Xiaolei was afraid something might happen, so he called out to stop him. “Other than me and the Sect Master, take everyone with you.”

“Got it.”

In an aberrant mountain village, caution came first.

One side had fewer people, but extremely high individual combat strength.

The other side had more people, guaranteeing that a flurry of fists could beat a master to death.

Pang Xiaolei’s on-the-spot judgment of the situation was accurate. He was, after all, from the criminal investigation system.

The group instantly split into two. Pang Xiaolei watched Captain Sun of Shanghai and the others leave, but there was a hint of joy between his brows. He said to Chen Yi, “A pretty typical lure-the-tiger-from-the-mountain move. I may have found the key clue.”

Chen Yi raised his brows.

Pang Xiaolei beckoned, then lowered his voice and said two sentences by Chen Yi’s ear. When he looked at Chen Yi again, he nodded once.

Chen Yi’s face sank completely.

“I’ll go back inside and keep looking. This reaction proves my direction is correct. Once the evidence is all collected, we can summon people for questioning.”

As Pang Xiaolei spoke, he could not wait to return inside the house and continue feeling around the bed.

He was still muttering, “I know this has nothing to do with the thousand-year-old corpse, but since I ran into it, I have to investigate it to the end. I can’t just ignore it because too much time has passed and the litigation period is over. The victims are still waiting for their grievances to be redressed.

“Found it! Here!” Pang Xiaolei’s eyes lit up. He looked at Chen Yi as if asking for credit and gestured for him to come look.

Just as Chen Yi was about to move closer, the light in the room suddenly dimmed.

The mud house already had poor lighting, with only a bit of light filtering in through the doors and windows. Now it was so dark it was as if evening had arrived, like the uncanny hour when dusk closed in from all sides.

In an instant, Chen Yi had already raised his hand to touch the sword case on his back.

“Who’s there?”

Pang Xiaolei also touched the grip of his gun at the same time.

They focused their eyes and saw a dark, thin, dried-up woman lying against the window, smiling at them.

It was the same woman who had spat at Chen Yi earlier.

The woman spoke warmly. “Comrades, still busy? You haven’t eaten yet at this hour, have you? I cooked a meal at home. There isn’t much meat, but it’s all young bok choy freshly picked from the fields. It’s very fresh. You can’t eat this kind of thing in the city. Come have a taste.

“Oh, why are there only the two of you? Where are the others? Call them all over too. There’s plenty of food.”

With this attitude so different from before, Chen Yi might have had to think for a long time and been confused if Pang Xiaolei had not just whispered his guess by his ear.

Now that he had the answer and worked backward from it, the other party’s earlier arrogance followed by current respect became clear at once.

Pang Xiaolei jumped down from the bed and walked to the bedside, looking deeply at the woman until her eyes began to dodge.

As if he had seen through everything, he said earnestly, “Ma’am, confession brings leniency. If you voluntarily confess now, your sentence can still be reduced.”

The woman smiled awkwardly. Her weathered face was covered in wrinkles, but if one looked at her brows and eyes, one could still tell that she had been a beautiful woman when she was young.

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