“I feel terrible.”
Li Bo sat in the car, looking at Yang Siguang, his voice trembling slightly.
“But we don’t have any other choice.”
Yang Siguang lowered his gaze and reached out to gently press his chest.
As the invisible and untouchable evil spirits drew closer, Yang Siguang’s body grew colder and colder.
By now, it seemed that within his shell of a body, only a small patch of skin retained a hint of warmth.
And in fact, it was just as Yang Siguang had said.
They had no other choice.
Outside the car window, a thick layer of frost had already formed. On the frost, overlapping handprints densely covered the surface, crisscrossing in chaotic patterns.
It was as if countless “people” they couldn’t see were surrounding the car, incessantly slapping and clawing at it.
Under the pale sunlight, faint, distorted, semi-transparent shadows occasionally flickered in the air.
At first, there were only a few scattered ones.
But soon, they multiplied, growing so numerous that they almost engulfed the car where the two of them were hiding.
Yang Siguang and Li Bo quickly had enough of this mental torment.
With a loud “bang,” the car door was flung open.
Both Yang Siguang and Li Bo jumped out of the car simultaneously and strode toward the old Li family mansion.
“Ding-ling-ling—”
Just as they got out of the car, Yang Siguang faintly heard a soft jingling sound.
But the sound was as delicate as a thread, extremely gentle.
Yang Siguang froze for a moment.
“Siguang?! Did you notice something?”
Li Bo’s tense inquiry immediately reached his ears.
Yang Siguang snapped back to his senses and then awkwardly tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“Nothing.”
There were far too many strange occurrences, so many that they had become “normal” in a sense.
At this moment, Yang Siguang unexpectedly calmed down.
The closer they got to the old Li family mansion, the more distinct the faint cacophony within became.
Amid the indistinct murmurs of human voices, the piercing sound of a suona was the most prominent.
Even though the music remained intermittent and off-key, it still evoked in their minds the image of a traditional wedding banquet.
Recalling the scattered white “double happiness” characters they had seen everywhere earlier, the same word surfaced in both of their minds simultaneously.
Ghost marriage.
For some inexplicable reason, Yang Siguang had a strong intuition that the bridegroom in the ghost marriage orchestrated by Mirror Immortal was very likely himself.
“He certainly dares to think so…”
Li Bo’s face turned ashen.
The cold air still pervaded the surroundings. As Li Bo spoke, a puff of white mist rose from his lips, as if they were in the dead of winter.
Yang Siguang fixed his gaze on the mist at the corner of Li Bo’s mouth before quickly looking away.
“The thoughts of malicious spirits are inherently strange,” Yang Siguang replied in a low voice. Then, steeling himself, he walked straight up to the Li family’s main gate.
It was a pair of extraordinarily thick, exquisitely crafted bronze doors. The doors weren’t locked. Yang Siguang felt as though he hadn’t even exerted any force before they opened on their own.
In fact, as he pushed, they felt as light as two sheets of paper.
“Creak—”
As the door swung open, the indistinct murmurs that had been lingering around their ears abruptly vanished.
What greeted the eyes of the two was an expanse of thick darkness.
The entire old mansion was shrouded in gloom—no lights were turned on, and all the curtains were tightly drawn. The only light came from the faint beam spilling through the open door, stopping just at the tips of Yang Siguang and Li Bo’s shoes.
Beyond that, the daylight seemed to have been swallowed entirely by the darkness, leaving only faint, indistinct outlines of the mansion’s interior.
Once Yang Siguang and Li Bo stepped inside, the door behind them slammed shut without warning.
*
The darkness in the room was overwhelming.
Li Bo frowned deeply and rushed forward to pull open the curtains. However, when he did, he found that a thick layer of wooden planks had been nailed behind them at some unknown point in time. Just minutes ago, they had clearly seen the mansion brightly lit, with faint silhouettes visible from the car.
“I was just here not long ago,” Li Bo said, his voice unusually heavy. “It wasn’t like this before… Be careful, Siguang. Something is really off here.”
“Yeah, I can tell,” Yang Siguang replied with a sigh, his face tense.
He turned on the flashlight function on his phone, casting a dim, hazy light.
Although it was the latest model, the flashlight barely illuminated the ground at his feet.
Yang Siguang swept the light around, scanning his surroundings.
The floor was covered in a thick layer of dust, and faint traces of rust could be seen on the wall lamps. To Yang Siguang, even the carpets and furnishings seemed far too outdated—so outdated that they didn’t seem like something a family like the Lis would allow to remain in their mansion.
Of course, the strangest thing wasn’t the boarded-up windows, the dim foyer, or the faintly damaged wallpaper.
The most unsettling were the paper effigies piled in the corners of the room.
The paper figures were crudely made, with most of them already damaged. Their construction appeared shoddy, almost careless. Yet, despite their cheap and fragile appearance, the roughly sketched faces were disturbingly lifelike. The wide, staring eyes and twisted expressions were vividly rendered with just a few strokes, as if they had once witnessed some incomprehensible horror, leaving them frozen in a state of ultimate despair and agony.
Now, all that remained of them in this world were these fragile, weightless specimens.
When Yang Siguang first caught sight of them, cold sweat broke out on his back.
The sensation of being watched in the darkness was far too intense.
And when he finally discerned that those dark, staring gazes came from the paper figures, the feeling of dread only grew stronger.
Everything here was just too strange.
Yang Siguang’s heart pounded faster and faster.
His head swam, and his thoughts became muddled.
Occasionally, he had fleeting moments where he felt as though he had forgotten something again…
But as always, when he tried to recall it, nothing came to mind.
At this moment, Li Bo also noticed the paper effigies.
“Damn it—”
He cursed under his breath.
Under the flashlight’s beam, his face appeared pale.
They stood at the doorway for a few seconds, quietly waiting for the mirror ghost to appear.
But even after several seconds had passed, the entire house remained pitch-black and eerily silent, enveloped in a deathly stillness.
Yang Siguang could even hear his own breathing, growing more rapid in the darkness.
Then he heard Li Bo’s hoarse voice break the silence.
“We can go to the second floor first. Back when I injured my hand, I hired several masters and left behind some protective charms. I don’t think they’ll be of much use, but something’s better than nothing, right?”
“Mm.”
After quickly discussing their plan, Yang Siguang and Li Bo prepared to head upstairs.
“Cough, cough, cough—”
From the drawing room directly across from the main door came a faint yet unsettling noise.
“Screech, screech—”
It sounded like nails scratching against a hard, smooth surface, or perhaps someone mumbling incoherently. Finally, in the darkness, a series of hacking coughs echoed, so violent it seemed as though the person might cough up their very lungs.
Yang Siguang glanced at Li Bo under the dim flashlight beam.
Without much hesitation, the two held hands, bracing themselves as they cautiously stepped toward the source of the coughing sound.
The drawing room was even darker and more shadowy than the foyer.
Even with the flashlight, Yang Siguang couldn’t make out the furniture and décor in the distance.
The darkness here felt almost tangible, as if it could swallow any light that entered.
One step, two steps, three steps…
As Yang Siguang entered the drawing room, he vaguely saw a pale face flash by in the darkness. Just as he tried to get a better look, the sound of a wheelchair turning came clearly from behind them.
An elderly man, hunched and frail, slowly emerged from the shadows, curled up in a creaking wheelchair.
Hanging from the armrest of his wheelchair was a camping lantern, casting a sinister light upward onto his deeply wrinkled, gaunt face, so thin that the contours of his skull were clearly visible.
The old man’s eyes were clouded, like two rotting eggs stuffed into his sockets. Loose skin sagged from his neck to his shoulders, and his face was covered in dense age spots.
If the wheelchair weren’t moving, he would look entirely like a corpse—a corpse that had died in the wheelchair and gone undiscovered for a long time.
Yang Siguang immediately sensed Li Bo’s sudden tension the moment the old man appeared.
Li Bo stood up straight, as though he hadn’t noticed the old man’s terrifying visage at all. He even bowed slightly toward him.
“Mr. Li—”
He murmured softly.
But the old man, addressed as Mr. Li, didn’t look pleased to see him.
The flesh on the old man’s face seemed to droop as if it were melting.
His body was so emaciated that his skin clung tightly to his bones, the waxy yellow surface folding into countless creases.
“What happened here? What’s going on? Mr. Li… I haven’t been gone long, but now this place looks like… like a haunted house! Where is everyone else? Why are you the only one here?”
Li Bo rattled off a series of questions in one breath.
Hearing these questions, the old man slowly cracked a smile—a chilling, unsettling grin.
“The Mirror Spirit is angry…”
He croaked hoarsely.
“Hee hee… so… we’ve ended up like this. I told that old woman long ago to stop worshiping the Mirror Spirit. See? All that worship, and now everyone is neither human nor ghost. It’s not worth it. If you want to get rid of someone troublesome, you can just spend some money. Why bother worshiping the Mirror Spirit? But she wouldn’t listen—she was obsessed, hee hee hee, thinking that as long as she worshiped, she could have anything… She forgot, though—that’s the Mirror Spirit! No matter how many people you sacrifice, that mirror is never satisfied. It demands far more than it gives…”
“Otherwise, just look at the state we’re in now. The people who were supposed to die didn’t, and the death curse even backfired… So I told them all to leave, to avoid ending up like me and the old woman… like us…”
Mr. Li trailed off, his voice becoming vacant and repetitive, as if he had fallen into a stupor, mumbling the same words over and over.
Li Bo took two steps forward.
“What happened to you and your wife?”
He asked softly, his voice trembling.
At the same time, Yang Siguang instinctively took a step back.
He couldn’t explain why, but his instincts told him to stay away from Mr. Li.
It was precisely because of this that when the pale face flashed behind him again, he noticed it. Raising his phone, he shone its light backward.
In that moment, the beam revealed the contents of the drawing room’s depths.
There were two memorial portraits.
The faces of two elderly people stared blankly, their vacant gazes piercing through the portraits and locking onto him.
One of the elderly people, though slightly better preserved than the man in the wheelchair, was unmistakably the same person.
Beneath the portrait of the old woman lay a mutilated corpse.
The woman’s neck was twisted at an unnatural angle, and her body was torn into pieces. Her internal organs had clearly been gnawed on, nearly consumed entirely.
Yang Siguang felt his blood freeze in that instant.
“Li Bo—watch out!”
He spun around and shouted at the man.
Almost simultaneously, the hunched, emaciated “Mr. Li” suddenly pulled back his lips, revealing crooked, yellowed teeth. Then, like a rabid monkey, he let out a guttural screech and leapt from the wheelchair, lunging at Li Bo.
“Kill! Kill them all! Sacrifice everyone to the Holy Spirit, and everything will be fine! Kill them, kill them, kill them—”
The old man’s shrill cries were incoherent.
But in that instant, Li Bo, who had appeared so concerned for Mr. Li just moments ago, moved without hesitation.
He grabbed the old man’s head and twisted it forcefully.
Crack—
In the darkness, the crisp sound of the old man’s neck snapping echoed clearly.
