When Gan Tang arrived, Uncle Zhang Er’s house was already crowded with people.
Most of them, like Gan Tang, had been startled awake by the screams from Uncle Zhang Er’s house and had hurriedly thrown on clothes to come over.
Uncle Zhang Er’s courtyard, which was considered grand even by countryside standards, was now packed with people. Yet, despite the large crowd, the atmosphere in the night air was filled with unease and restlessness. At the very least, these people did not give Gan Tang any sense of security.
The moment he stepped through Uncle Zhang Er’s gate, he caught a heavy stench in the air. Though it was slightly weaker than the one at Uncle Xijiao’s house earlier in the day, it was still far from pleasant.
His heart skipped a beat.
Instinctively, he scanned his surroundings, fearing that he would once again see a corpse laid out on a bench, covered with a white cloth.
Fortunately, after a quick look around, there were only villagers with darkened expressions and anxious faces in the courtyard. The village’s electricity supply was weak, and the lighting fixtures were old. Even when the lights were on at night, they always seemed to be covered in a layer of dust, casting a dim, yellowish glow that made everyone’s faces look waxy and pale.
Uncle Zhang Er’s main door was wide open, with many people crowding in the courtyard, craning their necks to look inside.
The wailing that had startled the villagers awake in the middle of the night continued to spill intermittently from within—
“Murder! There’s been a murder in my house! Help—help—!”
“Dear heavens, that woman killed someone—!”
…
Gan Tang found something odd about their words. Just as he was about to push his way through for a clearer look, a villager turned around and spotted him.
“Damn it, what the hell are you squeezing for—huh? Oh, it’s you. Tang Kid, why are you here alone?”
The villager, who had been cursing in frustration from being jostled, changed his tone upon seeing Gan Tang and asked him instead.
Under the night sky, the boy was dressed only in his sleepwear, his face deathly pale, with a faint sheen of cold sweat on his forehead. Although boys his age in Fengjing Village would already be expected to marry, have children, and start working, Gan Tang still gave the villagers the impression of a naive, innocent child.
“Ah, my—my grandma was too tired.”
Gan Tang pursed his lips and mumbled vaguely.
Logically speaking, since his house was right across from Uncle Zhang Er’s, just separated by a single street, he should have arrived long ago.
But after finally getting the chance to escape from Cen Zibai earlier, Gan Tang had knocked on his grandmother’s bedroom door, only to find that she was in a deep sleep.
Normally, the old woman would be deeply concerned about the happenings in the village, yet tonight, she remained unresponsive to Gan Tang’s calls.
Under normal circumstances, without his grandmother by his side, Gan Tang would never have gone out to meddle in others’ affairs.
But right now, he didn’t dare stay at home—”Cen Zibai” was still watching him intently from the shadows.
Even though, after the earlier interruption, Cen Zibai’s eerie and sinister aura had suddenly withdrawn, Gan Tang didn’t dare stay alone with that thing any longer. His only option was to steel himself, pretend to be genuinely concerned about the village’s affairs, and rush out of the house.
Thankfully, Cen Zibai didn’t follow him.
However, when Gan Tang left, Cen Zibai did lean against the doorframe and mutter a series of bizarre, cryptic words at him.
[“Be careful, they like you too.”]
[“It’s the perfect time for your transformation…”]
[“Only I can protect you. They wouldn’t dare touch what’s mine.”]
…
Those words were spoken in an erratic, delirious manner, yet they made Gan Tang’s nerves tighten instinctively.
Even now, he couldn’t shake off that tension.
Staying home alone with Cen Zibai was terrifying.
But coming to Uncle Zhang Er’s house was an entirely different kind of suffocating dread.
By now, the situation inside Uncle Zhang Er’s house had descended into complete chaos.
The villager who had spoken to Gan Tang earlier shifted slightly to the side, allowing him to get a clear view of what was happening in the main hall—and the sight made his skin crawl.
A woman, emaciated to the bone, was being held down by several burly men. Thick hemp ropes bound her wrists and ankles. Her sunken, bulging eyes stared unblinkingly at everyone in the room.
Her clothing—her collar, hands, and skirt—was soaked in dark, viscous blood, so thick it was nearly black.
An old woman, veins bulging on her forehead in rage, squatted in front of her, slapping her across the face with the sole of her shoe.
That woman was Uncle Zhang Er’s mother—Old Madam Zhang.
“What did you do? Tell me, what did you do—?!”
Old Madam Zhang’s voice was hoarse, her expression twisted in fury.
The blood-covered woman stared at her with an eerie intensity.
She didn’t seem to grasp her current predicament at all. After a moment, she suddenly curled her lips into a smile.
“Your son killed my brother.”
The moment those words left her lips, Old Madam Zhang’s expression changed. Amidst the gasps of the onlookers, she shrieked “Nonsense!” and lunged forward to silence the woman.
But in the very next second, Old Madam Zhang let out a blood-curdling scream—louder, more agonized than before.
“AAAAAAH—WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!”
When she finally yanked her hand back, her index finger was dripping with blood—one of her knuckles was missing, gnawed clean off.
That severed piece of flesh was now inside Chen Li’s mouth.
Chen Li smiled.
Her teeth were stained with blood.
“Your son killed my brother, so I killed him to avenge my brother.”
Her mental state was clearly unstable. Gan Tang noticed that even though Chen Li was smiling, her face was drenched in sweat, her pupils dilated, giving her eyes a vacant, empty look.
But more importantly—no ordinary person, even a killer, would confess their crime so openly, so eerily, right in front of the victim’s family.
“I slit his throat open, and inside—there were only worms…”
As she spoke, Chen Li suddenly let out a giggle, her shoulders trembling with laughter.
“No, no, that’s not right, he’s dead. He’s dead. I didn’t kill him. Your son has been dead for a long time. Look, worms, they’re everywhere…”
Chen Li’s hands were tied behind her back, yet she kept gesturing frantically with her blood-soaked hands.
“He kept twitching and writhing, and after I cut off his head, he ran away.”
…
The woman mumbled to herself.
She was truly insane.
Standing among the crowd, Gan Tang could easily hear the murmuring of the others.
And their conclusion was unanimous: this woman had gone mad.
From their tone, it seemed that a newlywed wife suddenly going insane and hanging herself wasn’t all that rare in the village.
“Aiya, I knew it, you can’t pick a wife just because she’s pretty. The more money you spend, the more temperamental she is…”
“Exactly.”
“Poor Zhang Er, taking a knife for nothing.”
“I’m telling you, you can’t treat your wife too well. His family was too hasty, letting a woman handle a knife so soon.”
“Isn’t that the truth—”
…
Amidst these hushed discussions, Chen Li kept rambling on about the “worms” she saw.
“…He really… I made sure to cut him open, I looked carefully, his stomach was full of worms! All of it! His insides were completely eaten away, hehe!”
By now, no one cared about Chen Li’s crazed words anymore.
Except for Gan Tang.
Gan Tang’s face turned deathly pale. As Chen Li spoke, vivid images formed in his mind.
He could even see Uncle Zhang Er slowly crawling up from the ground, cupping the thread-like worms that spilled from his stomach in his hands.
He could clearly “recall” the sensation of those worms slithering and writhing on his skin. Even though he had only felt it in nightmares, Chen Li’s sobbing narration made the feeling eerily real.
“I was so scared I couldn’t move. I thought he was going to kill me, hahaha, but he just looked at me… and left… My brother was calling him from outside…”
And then there was the head.
A head that had been forcibly severed from the body.
Worms squirmed out of its eye sockets and mouth, wriggling so thickly that they obscured its face, turning it into nothing more than a mass of entangled worms.
Dragged by the pull of the crawling worms, the head swayed slightly against the courtyard wall.
Even though it no longer had eyeballs, it still stared fixedly at the man who staggered out of the courtyard.
“They weren’t speaking human words. They were speaking ghost words… and then… then he left… I wanted to chase after him, I had to kill him, but I was afraid of the worms… They were everywhere, so many, so many…”
As Chen Li spoke, she began to cry.
She seemed to have completely broken down, but the people around her had already lost patience.
Especially Old Madam Zhang.
She had been woken up in the middle of the night by Chen Li’s screams about worms. When she rushed to her son’s room, she was met with a horrifying sight—blood smeared across the bed, the floor, even the courtyard.
And in Chen Li’s hand was a knife, covered in congealed blood.
Old Madam Zhang immediately realized something was wrong and let out a bloodcurdling scream.
Now, hearing Chen Li repeatedly claim she had killed Zhang Er, the old woman no longer cared about worms or brothers—her face twisted in fury as she lunged at Chen Li to beat her once more.
“Enough!”
A thunderous shout interrupted the one-sided beating.
The village chief, his face ashen, staggered out. He scanned the gathered villagers with a solemn expression before taking a deep breath.
“Something happened in broad daylight today. Maybe Second Sister-in-law got scared. Just because she says she killed someone, does that mean she really did? Zhang Er isn’t lying motionless in his room, is he? If you ask me, maybe he’s just injured, dizzy, and trying to hide somewhere.” As he spoke, he pointed to a distinct trail of bloody footprints in the courtyard. “Look, Zhang Er could still walk, and there’s not that much blood. If we go search for him now, we might still be able to find him and save him.”
The village chief’s decision was final, and he immediately mobilized everyone present to search for Uncle Zhang Er nearby.
Even Gan Tang, caught off guard, was roped in as extra manpower. He was handed an ancient, nearly antique-looking flashlight and sent off with the villagers to look for the missing man.
Gan Tang had originally come here just to gather some information; he hadn’t expected to be running around the village in the dead of night.
Compared to the locals, his stamina wasn’t great to begin with, and after listening to Chen Li’s crazed ramblings, his body felt unexplainably unwell… His skin itched all over, as if—somewhere deep in his memory—his own body had once been covered by countless crawling worms.
Lost in his thoughts, Gan Tang only snapped back to reality when he realized something was off.
The villagers who had been searching alongside him had disappeared without a trace.
The pitch-black, eerie forest had, without him noticing, become completely deserted.
In theory, with so many people carrying flashlights and searching the area around Fengjing Village, even if Gan Tang had accidentally fallen behind, he should still be able to see some lights or silhouettes.
Besides, as far as he was aware, he had only spaced out for a moment—there was no way he could have wandered too far from the village.
Yet now, standing motionless in the forest, he found himself surrounded by nothing but a thick, swamp-like darkness.
Gan Tang shone his flashlight around, but all it revealed were twisted, gnarled branches. The trees themselves looked unnatural—serpentine, deformed, their surfaces rough and uneven. Under the flashlight’s dim glow, the knots on the trunks almost seemed like distorted, snarling faces.
A cold sweat broke out on Gan Tang’s back instantly.
“Tha—”
Gan Tang instinctively opened his mouth, wanting to shout.
But as soon as he did, he was stunned to realize that he didn’t even know the name of the villager he had supposedly been paired with… When the village chief had just assigned the task, Gan Tang had still been in a daze, and someone had very naturally grabbed him, smiling as they pulled him along.
At the time, Gan Tang had already been feeling unsettled, so he hadn’t thought too much about it and just followed. He had assumed he could just go through the motions and go home, but now—not to mention the villager’s name, he couldn’t even recall their face. All he could remember was the feeling of that person’s hand.
Cold. Clammy. The skin slightly sticky…
Like a dead person’s hand.
Gan Tang’s body trembled slightly.
He tried to reassure himself—there was no way he had wandered too far from Fengjing Village in just that short amount of time. If he walked a bit, he’d find his way back.
And besides, with everything being so chaotic tonight, that villager who had paired up with him had probably just accidentally gotten separated. There was no need to overthink it…
Rustle, rustle…
Rustle, rustle…
…
In the pitch-black night, a strange, sticky sound suddenly rang out—like a mucus-covered body sliding across the underbrush.
The noise wasn’t exactly soft. Just from listening, Gan Tang could tell that whatever it was, it wasn’t small.
A wild animal?
But if it were a wild animal, its body wouldn’t be covered in mucus.
The incident had happened too suddenly—Gan Tang hadn’t even fully reacted.
Instinctively, he turned his head toward the source of the sound.
And then, he found himself staring straight into a swollen, bloated face.
That face was wet, covered in the mucus left behind by the wriggling worms that squirmed out of its eye sockets and nostrils.
It was Uncle Zhang Er.
And at that moment, Gan Tang suddenly realized—
Everything Chen Li had said before—those words that had seemed like the ramblings of a mentally broken woman—
Hadn’t been “madness” at all.
She had only been describing exactly what she had seen.
For instance, she had indeed cut open Uncle Zhang Er’s stomach.
Which was why, right now, the body in front of Gan Tang had its ribs splayed open like a dried squid, lying flat on the ground.
And beneath its completely exposed abdominal cavity—
Was a writhing mass of worms, tangled together in thick, squirming clumps.
The worms continued to writhe, dragging Uncle Zhang Er’s body little by little out of the underbrush as it crawled toward Gan Tang.
Fine, pale worms peeked out slightly from beneath the man’s body. At first glance, it looked as though countless white filaments—or perhaps tendrils—were growing out from under his torso.
Stay calm.
Gan Tang told himself.
But the moment he laid eyes on Uncle Zhang Er, his body betrayed him, trembling uncontrollably.
He stared straight at the man, carefully inching backward.
Yet the moment he moved, Uncle Zhang Er tilted his head toward him.
The strange thing was, despite having no eyes left, Gan Tang still felt as though he was being stared at—intensely.
“Hiss… ssshh…”
Uncle Zhang Er let out a strange, low groan.
A thick, wet, maddeningly repulsive sound of friction echoed once more.
The worms dragged the body forward with increasing urgency, inching closer to Gan Tang. A low gasp squeezed out from his throat.
He couldn’t take it anymore.
He turned abruptly, ready to run.
But just then, from the darkness, a hand suddenly shot out and hooked tightly around his neck.
“Shhh—don’t run.”
Just as Gan Tang instinctively struggled in fear, a voice—one so familiar it sent chills down his spine—sounded right beside his ear.
It was Cen Zibai’s voice.
“The hungrier they are, the more they’ll want to chase you if you run.”
After a pause, the boy continued speaking.
“But you don’t have to be afraid. I’m here.”
Gan Tang was certain—it wasn’t his imagination.
In that moment, Cen Zibai’s voice was filled with a chilling sweetness, one that made his skin crawl.
And sure enough, in the next moment, he heard the thing whisper an unsettling addendum:
“Just let me lick you, and it’ll be fine. With my secretions on you, they’ll never dare come near.”
