It is easy to talk when you are not the one involved. Zhou Qi’an maintained a smiling, polite facade. The guests’ faces grew darker and darker.
If Zhou Qi’an had brandished the sacred artifact from the start, he would never have been able to suppress these people. But now, with the wind at his feet, he would periodically appear by the bride’s side with the speed of lightning, as if planning to use her as a shield. The guests, secretly armed with weapons, did not dare to act rashly.
Finally, an elder stroked his beard and said, “One must be a person of integrity. Young man, you must follow through on what you were paid to do.”
Zhou Qi’an asked, “What did I agree to?”
The elder gave him a look as if he were feigning ignorance and lowered his voice. “To cooperate with this wedding, of course, and to appease the bride’s resentment.”
Through their conversation, Zhou Qi’an finally understood the whole story. It turned out the bride was once an ordinary woman. The villagers, disdaining her for what they considered promiscuous behavior, had drowned her in a pond. Afterward, the woman transformed into a vengeful ghost and began to retaliate. The villagers suffered terribly. To appease her resentment, they devised the method of a paper effigy wedding.
Because the woman had a weakness for handsome men in life, they hired a paper effigy artisan to create a paper bride during the Ghost Festival in the seventh lunar month. The paper effigy was sealed with the woman’s eight characters of birth time, and a handsome man was chosen to marry into her family.
The elder reassured him, “Don’t worry, we’ll let you go as soon as the wedding is over.”
“…” Bullshit.
Since the setup was that he had taken money to do a job, Zhou Qi’an decided to maintain this persona.
“Not a single coin less than the agreed-upon price,” he said fiercely. “And besides that, the bride’s entire dowry will be mine.”
The elder concealed the mockery in his eyes and agreed readily, “Of course.”
“No!” Zhou Qi’an’s eyes darted around. “I want to see what’s in the dowry first. I’m not doing this if it’s a bunch of worthless junk.”
With that, he walked toward the wooden chest.
The paper bride suddenly moved. Her body began to shift slightly, and the guests immediately moved to stop Zhou Qi’an.
Zhou Qi’an quickly said, “Just a peek. I promise I’ll cooperate obediently with the wedding afterward.”
The bride’s movements were slow; it would take her some time to turn around completely. For now, Zhou Qi’an clung to the sacred artifact, repeatedly threatening to have the bride toast the guests. With his roguish demeanor, no one wanted to be the first to stick their neck out and earn her ire. Everyone was just hoping for this wedding to be over with quickly.
The guests stared regretfully at Zhou Qi’an’s chest. They should have just carved out what was inside him from the beginning and paired him in a ghost marriage.
“Just one look,” the elder finally compromised.
Under the watchful gaze of the crowd, Zhou Qi’an approached the large wooden chest as he wished. The surface of the chest was bone-chillingly cold. It was rectangular and rather long and flat, looking more and more like a coffin. He suppressed the chill and opened it. Inside were a red ruler, a vanity mirror, a silver-plated copper plate… all rather traditional dowry items. There was no jade pendant.
His eyes swept over the contents quickly, finally landing on a makeup box. By his estimation, this was the only object that could hide something inside.
The elder was already urging him, “That’s about enough.”
Just then, the master of ceremonies shouted, “The couple shall bow to each other.”
The paper effigy beside him had completely turned around. In just a short while, its blurry facial features had become much clearer. Its red lips were vividly colored, and its nose had become more defined. The white paper was transitioning to red. A chill continuously seeped into his body, and Zhou Qi’an’s teeth chattered uncontrollably from the cold.
The paper effigy took a step.
Clenching his jaw, Zhou Qi’an refused to move. He fumbled with the surface of the makeup box and felt his heart sink the moment he found the keyhole. It was locked? Where was he supposed to find the key?
The paper effigy was becoming more and more lifelike. Once it grew eyes, he would probably die a miserable death.
The master of ceremonies shouted again in a stern voice, “The couple shall bow to each other—”
The pressure from the sacred artifact was weakening. Seeing that he still wasn’t bowing to the bride, the guests all left their tables and walked toward Zhou Qi’an. This time, Zhou Qi’an didn’t have the courage to use the bride as a shield again; his act of opening the chest had clearly angered the paper effigy.
Taking a deep breath, he suddenly raised his hand. The Little Hammer appeared out of thin air and smashed directly onto the exquisite makeup box.
Crack.
Worried about damaging the contents, Zhou Qi’an didn’t dare to use too much force. With a dull, frightening sound, a crack appeared in the makeup box. A small sliver of jade color was visible inside. He aimed at the crack and struck again with controlled force.
Suddenly, a rustling sound came from behind him. It wasn’t the footsteps of the guests, but a scraping sound, like paper dragging across the floor. The scraping sound grew closer.
Zhou Qi’an steadied his nerves. His index finger deftly slipped through the hole he had smashed open, and with a slight hook, he finally got the jade pendant! The moment he turned around, the paper effigy was practically pressed against his face. The bride was even a bit taller than him. Her pupils had not yet formed, and a gelatinous, murky substance appeared in her eye sockets.
Zhou Qi’an held his breath and raised the jade pendant with one hand. Instantly, the black blood stopped dripping from between the paper effigy’s brows.
“It works,” Zhou Qi’an sighed in slight relief.
According to the instructions, he just needed to say “eternal union,” and the mission would be complete.
“Eter—” The word was on the tip of his tongue, but as he looked at the dark mass of guests, the bride so close to him, and the expectant master of ceremonies, Zhou Qi’an felt a strange hesitation.
The difficulty of this mission, so far, had been dealing with the guests and obtaining the jade pendant. Compared to the artifact world of the wedding gown, the difficulty seemed a bit low.
Zhou Qi’an subconsciously looked again at the half-jade pendant in his hand. He was certain it was a pair with the one on the paper effigy. If the jade pendant wasn’t fake, it should be… fine?
The bride’s pupils gradually took shape, and she began to move again. The foul stench of a rotting corpse wafted from the paper. Just before Zhou Qi’an was about to speak, he reviewed the mission content one last time, his brow slowly furrowing.
【You can interact more with the guests in the wedding hall. They will provide you with very good help.】
This mission hint was completely superfluous. He had interacted, but all he got was information about the bride’s past, which seemed to have nothing to do with finding the jade pendant.
The rotten smell grew stronger. The paper effigy moved forward, and Zhou Qi’an retreated backward until his back hit the chest, blocking his path. As he was re-examining every detail, his gaze suddenly tightened. His focus was no longer on whether the curve of the jade pendant matched the one on the paper effigy’s waist.
He focused on the pattern carved on it. It was a bird. But it was not the traditional mandarin duck.
“A… a water pheasant?”
He looked again and confirmed he hadn’t seen wrong. Zhou Qi’an’s expression wavered. Although mandarin ducks weren’t exactly symbols of lifelong fidelity either, water pheasants were even more unrestrained, being classic practitioners of polyandry.
The guests’ words from earlier resurfaced in his mind. “Promiscuous” was the guests’ subjective judgment, but if the woman truly had a personality where she fell for every man she saw, then holding a wedding for “one couple, one life” would only be stepping on her toes.
“Am I the first one to have a wedding with it?” Zhou Qi’an murmured.
If not, did the grooms who married it before him also hold half a jade pendant? The mission required him to find the other parts of the jade pendant, not the other half. The more he mulled over that sentence, the more it felt wrong.
His peripheral vision caught the rectangular, coffin-like chest, and this time it was Zhou Qi’an’s turn to swallow. With a forceful sweep of his hand, he pushed all the scattered items on top to one side. Underneath, a flattened, lifelike paper effigy was exposed to his view.
It wasn’t entirely paper. Zhou Qi’an reached out and touched it. The texture was soft, with a unique grain. It seemed the main material for this paper effigy was human skin. He lifted one, and there was another one underneath. It was missing a pair of eyes, but its expression was still vivid. One could tell that the human skins these paper effigies were made from had belonged to exceptionally handsome men in life.
“Fuck!” So the villagers’ real method of appeasing the ghost was to continuously send her new grooms. …He was just one of them.
If he had just shouted “eternal union” to the paper bride, he likely would have been judged as having failed the mission and turned into a paper skin.
As Zhou Qi’an was flipping through the paper skins, the facial features on the paper bride’s face fully emerged—a pair of charming phoenix eyes, upturned at the corners. The lanterns in the wedding hall grew brighter.
An unprecedented stench of corpses emanated, the smell rushing straight to his head with every breath. The once-rough paper hands now had the delicacy of slender jade hands, provided one ignored the red bridal veil that had appeared in them at some point.
Holding the veil, the paper bride’s face took on a ferocious expression. Without a word, she moved with nimble feet and swiftly brought the veil down toward today’s groom’s head.
Zhou Qi’an reacted instantly, swinging the Trident at her. He only wielded it like a club. The paper bride’s true body was clearly not here; even if the spear pierced through, it would only cause partial damage.
“Stop him!”
The guests rushed over but didn’t dare get too close to the paper bride. In the end, they formed a tight circle around Zhou Qi’an, three layers deep inside and three layers deep outside. Being surrounded by a group of ghosts, the sheer density of the yin energy in the air was about to condense into water droplets. If not for the worry that burning this paper bride would likely summon the real ghost’s main body, Zhou Qi’an would have sung them a fiery tune today.
“The couple shall bow to each other—”
The master of ceremonies repeated the four words over and over, his voice growing louder each time. Eventually, it seemed only Zhou Qi’an could hear those four words. The people around him remained impassive, while he alone received the excessive decibels, his eardrums feeling as if they would tear.
On the high platform, the two elders had already stood up, their voices in perfect unison, “Why are you not bowing?”
As the paper bride was about to lower the veil for the second time, Zhou Qi’an suddenly put away his Trident, and a dagger appeared in his hand.
“Don’t move. If you come any closer… if you come any closer, I’ll disfigure myself!”
Every word was delivered with force.
“…”
Probably not expecting someone to use self-disfigurement as a bargaining chip, everyone present, including the paper bride, was stunned for a moment.
Zhou Qi’an seized the opportunity to pull out a human skin from the bottom of the chest. The moment he truly pulled it out, his vision went dark. What kind of bride brings a whole family with her to her own wedding?
Sure enough, a half-pendant of the same gossamer-thin jade was tied around the handsome man’s skin’s waist. Zhou Qi’an swiped it with the utmost speed.
The initial shock dissipated, and the bride and guests quickly started moving again. Zhou Qi’an’s breathing became ragged. Pulling them out one by one was too time-consuming, and there were still many things pressing down on them. Tipping the chest over directly might shatter the jade pendants.
“Time.”
He had to buy time.
Seeing no escape from the encirclement, Zhou Qi’an steeled himself, slashed his palm with the dagger, and mimicking how he had dotted the eyes for the Ghost Market’s manager, he dipped his fingers in blood and quickly dotted two red spots on the handsome man’s skin.
The human skin was wrinkled and hardly beautiful. These handsome skins were mixed with materials like cotton, linen, and paper to achieve their current lifelike expressions. The unfilled eyes were now complete.
The handsome skin slowly stood up. The two blood dots that were its pupils filled with resentment upon seeing the paper bride and the guests.
Zhou Qi’an said, “Big brother, the time for revenge has come!”
To his surprise, the handsome skin slowly turned its head. A tongue suddenly extended from within the skin, drooling as it stared at Zhou Qi’an’s chest.
“…”
Zhou Qi’an’s expression instantly turned cold. The moment the handsome skin tried to entangle him, he said, “I still have to dot the eyes for the other brothers. Otherwise, we’ll all be having a reunion today.”
As he spoke, he cast a meaningful glance at the paper bride, who was once again rushing over with the red veil.
The handsome skin had a natural fear of the paper bride, its surface trembling unnaturally. Zhou Qi’an decisively took out the sacred artifact, forcing the advancing handsome skin to instinctively retreat, bumping right into the paper bride’s chest.
The handsome skin: !
Using this gap, Zhou Qi’an immediately dotted the eyes of the second paper skin. The guests, who were about to step forward, began to back away again upon seeing the second skin come to life.
Zhou Qi’an repeated the process, dotting the eyes of the skins one by one as fast as he could. His technique became more and more practiced. With each one he dotted, he would smile and issue a threat, “Want to become a flatbread?”
The sacred artifact was very effective against these things. Any skin that showed malicious intent could be scorched into one of Da Lang’s flatbreads.
The eyes weren’t dotted for nothing. As soon as each human skin awakened, Zhou Qi’an would immediately snatch the water pheasant jade pendant. The handsome skins were utterly disgusted by this symbol of their status and paid it no mind, focusing more on the young man’s heart.
When there is strength in numbers, courage grows. The handsome skins, having regained their mobility, gradually lost their initial fear of the paper bride. Some even looked like green-faced demons, their mouths opening wide as they tore into the paper bride’s body.
The advantage had reversed. Just as the scene was becoming ‘prosperous,’ the nail in the paper bride’s forehead suddenly fell out. Sticky blood flowed endlessly onto the ground, about to reach Zhou Qi’an’s feet in an instant. A fierce wind howled outside the wedding hall, the ground loosened, and something seemed about to break through the soil.
The elders on the high platform were horrified. “The seal! She’s broken the seal and is coming out!”
The seal left by the Daoist priest back then was not strong. For a long time, they had maintained a balance by continuously using marriages. The ghost got what she wanted and stopped harming them. Now that all her “collectibles” had run out, the ghost was clearly enraged and was willing to suffer losses to break free.
An elder shouted, “Stop her!”
“Find the nail, and seal the coffin again!”
There were shouts of all kinds. Amidst a chorus of terrified screams, Zhou Qi’an tilted his head back and roared, “Eternal union!”
“???”
The master of ceremonies, who was scrambling to run outside, nearly tripped and fell.
Zhou Qi’an, holding a string of jade pendants, shouted it again. As the two words landed, the stench of decay in the air was instantly cut off as if by a barrier. All the screams and roars became distant. Zhou Qi’an could feel himself gradually detaching from the artifact space.
“Congratulations on finding all the other parts of the jade pendant.”
The moment he heard the notification tone, Zhou Qi’an, almost seamlessly and with a grim face, slammed the jade pendants in his hand hard onto the ground. The mission was complete, so there were no more restraints.
The white silk, which had been waiting for some time, pulled down the lanterns overhead. Zhou Qi’an used the fire to ignite the last bit of gasoline he had. The flames erupted with explosive speed, instantly turning the entire wedding hall into a sea of fire.
However, Zhou Qi’an didn’t have time to admire such a vibrant scene for long. Everything before him plunged into darkness first. All the unpleasant smells disappeared, and beneath his feet was soft soil.
“Pfft—”
The light of day reappeared. As Zhou Qi’an forced his eyelids open, he saw the slender woman spit out a mouthful of blood.
“A glamorous ghost?!”
Before he could even steady himself, a startled cry came from not far away.
Perhaps because the core of the artifact world was destroyed at the last moment, the groom’s wedding robe was still on Zhou Qi’an. The hem of the robe was burned with irregular patterns, but the remaining part was still an extreme shade of red. He had suddenly appeared outside the museum, dressed in blood-red robes with long, flowing hair. The few players still outside who saw him abruptly nearly had their souls scared out of their bodies.
You’re the glamorous ghost.
Zhou Qi’an didn’t look back, coldly scrutinizing the slender woman.
The system notification continued:
“You have successfully viewed the exhibit—Jade Pendant.”
“Successfully viewing four exhibits will grant you the qualification to purchase merchandise from the Xishi Pavilion Pavilion.”
“Current progress 2/4.”
【Hidden side mission—Escape from the Tiger’s Maw has been completed.】
【You have gained access to the Data Resource Library.】
“Do you think you’ve won?” Blood continuously overflowed from the woman’s mouth, her once-clear eyes now tinged with a murky quality.
Zhou Qi’an just watched him silently. Compared to He Yang, the slender woman was clearly more severely injured after the artifact world’s core was destroyed. It seemed that even plundering an artifact’s power could cause rejection reactions. The severity of the reaction varied from person to person; it was even possible that some members of the Whaling Association had died when they first used this method.
Why bother? Zhou Qi’an didn’t understand. However, he was certain of one thing: the woman wasn’t just spouting angry threats. This meant the Association might have some trick up its sleeve.
He looked at the slender woman and suddenly asked, as if talking to himself, “Do you think that you, having transplanted artifacts, can also be considered a type of artifact?”
A thief who stole artifacts ultimately became a new artifact. Zhou Qi’an’s eyes suddenly flickered.
“Data Resource Library.”
This place should be where information about artifacts is recorded. If the members of the Whaling Association were indeed considered a type of artifact, perhaps he could find information about them in the resource library. He had a faint premonition that this place was hidden so secretly because it must contain something extremely detrimental to the Whaling Association.
At this thought, Zhou Qi’an felt a little excited. It was worth entering the artifact world twice in one day. The initiative was slowly returning to his hands.
The air fell into a brief silence. Zhou Qi’an was lost in thought, while the slender woman’s expression changed inexplicably. Her eyelids, which had already begun to droop slightly, started to tremble. She stared intently at Zhou Qi’an, not because of what he had just said, but as if she had discovered something incredible.
“Pfft—”
Mouthful after mouthful of blood gushed from the corner of her mouth. The players not far away were stunned. Some who had briefly teamed up with the slender woman had wanted to go over and see what was wrong, but then the “glamorous ghost” in red did nothing, and the woman just started spitting up blood on her own. How was that not terrifying?
Just as his mood improved, Zhou Qi’an, who had been deep in thought, was also taken aback.
“What’s wrong with you?”
He hadn’t done anything yet. Why did she suddenly start spewing blood?
When Zhou Qi’an noticed where the slender woman’s gaze was fixed, a look of realization flashed in his eyes. “So that’s how it is.”
Just as Shen Zhiyi had warned him, this instance had been incredibly unlucky. The moment he entered the jade pendant’s artifact world, his heart, which had been in a dormant period, had completely opened for business. If the slender woman’s power level had previously been unable to sense the existence of the five-star fish eye, now that the five-star fish eye was back in business, she could sense it to some extent. She must have discovered that he also had a parasite inside him.
Zhou Qi’an suddenly smiled and pointed to his chest. “This heart, isn’t it great?”
What transplanting Xun beast organs, what transplanting artifacts… all these things would only turn a normal person into something neither human nor ghost. In a sense, he was the only one who had perfectly adapted to a monster’s organ. This extra heart was more like an experience coordinator, supplying energy while also helping his other organs level up.
“You… how did you do it?” Her bloodshot eyes looked like they were about to pop out of their sockets. The slender woman simply couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The method they had paid so much to find… how on earth did this person do it?!
Zhou Qi’an patted down a strand of hair that had been blown up by the wind. Entering the artifact world so frequently had left him looking a bit dazed from exhaustion.
Still, he answered her seriously, “I took it orally.”
He just swallowed it in one go.
