Chapter 12 The boundary between life and death, the laws of nature
It turns out that the first person we see when we enter the village is a dead person?
Recalling the strange look in the old man's eyes when he looked at them, Yu Xing felt enlightened.
It's reasonable and expected.
Another person might have some emotions such as "fear" and "terrible after thinking about it", but for Yu Xing, this is just a piece of valuable news.
really interesting.
The information obtained from the Xu brothers combined with his own speculation gave him a complete understanding of Guanjiacun. At the moment, he continued to ask:
"Why did Zhou Facai bury him? Was he buried after death or..." buried alive? Yu Xing hid the last two words, knowing that the old lady could understand his question.
Continuous questioning can easily be perceived as urgent, thus making the person being questioned feel wary.
Swallowing the last few words will make the other party subconsciously think that they have been consulted and recognized, which will further induce the other party to tell the truth.
The old lady's skinny fingers clenched on the crutch, and finally turned her gaze from the sky to Yu Xing: "In our village, the village chief is special. He protects us, eats and lives with us... We really love him
Village chief, but the village chief’s family has also been cursed.”
"What curse?"
"The village chief's child will be sent out as soon as it is born, and will come back thirty-five years later. On the day he comes back, the child will be the new village chief, and the original village chief will be buried under the locust tree at the head of the village."
The wife was obviously a little sad, "The boy Fu Cai is good, but I am an old man. In my memory, the old village chief is more kind..."
Yu Xing said "Oh" and tapped his two fingers slowly and rhythmically on his legs.
"What if the new village chief comes back and can't bear to bury the old one?"
"Can't bear it? No, most of them are very willing to do this." The old lady thought of something, but it was difficult for her stiff and aging facial muscles to express her emotions at this time. Yu Xing vaguely felt that she was sarcastically saying, "If there is
If he doesn't want to, the villagers will help him bury it."
Aha, that is to say, in a village, there can only be one bloodline of the village chief's family at the same time.
Yu Xing suddenly became excited and asked: "Besides me, has anyone asked you this question?"
"Yes...it seems that a young man came to ask last night."
After receiving the news, Yu Xing curled up his lips. He already knew where the missing Carlos had gone.
…
At daybreak.
The small town separated by a mountain from Guanjiacun is quite lively, with many businessmen coming and going buying game and medicinal materials.
Carlos yawned loudly and took a hot bath in the hotel in the town to wash away some of the fatigue from traveling all night.
He changed his clothes and walked out of the bathroom. There was a towel on his wet gray-blue hair. As soon as he stretched out his hand to wipe it, he heard a "wuwuwu" sound coming from the ground at the other end of the bed.
Walking slowly over, Carlos's green eyes became darker and darker. He lowered his head and looked emotionlessly at the young man whose limbs were bound and his mouth was gagged.
He didn't speak until the young man realized something, stopped struggling, and looked at him in horror.
Only then did Carlos smile with satisfaction: "Zhou Qinghai...are you hungry?"
"Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu" The young man didn't dare to provoke this cruel pervert. He just resisted in surprise before, and his legs were almost broken.
"It's okay if you're hungry. We'll go eat later." Carlos smiled and took the cloth from the young man's mouth, and said before the young man spoke, "You will eat well, right? I'm very tired now and don't want to deal with more flying attacks."
The moth came here... I guess you don't want to involve other innocent people?"
His tone was gentle, like the young man's friend, but the young man was trembling all over and nodded desperately.
"Okay, I really like straightforward people." Carlos glanced at him one last time, then concentrated on wiping his hair, "After dinner, I will take you to a good place, and you will see what you have been looking for.
...Haha, thank me."
In his character's memory, he stayed in this small hotel one night before entering the mountains.
The guest next door was a young man named Zhou Qinghai, who had a cheerful personality and was not wary of others. They just had breakfast together, and Zhou Qinghai told him that he was an orphan and had been looking for his parents.
Originally, he had paid more attention to the events that were so clear in the character's memory, but after hearing what the old lady said last night, he understood.
Zhou Qinghai, the son of village chief Zhou Facai... is in the town.
He only needs to take Zhou Qinghai back to make the village chief disappear.
Of course, at the same time, Zhou Qinghai will also become the new village chief and be bound by Guanjia Village.
But what does this have to do with him? He just needs to complete the deduction.
A happy smile flashed in his green eyes.
…
After getting the clues he wanted, Yu Xing said goodbye to the old lady and planned to go back to Xiao Xuechen and Wei Fan to consolidate the information.
They did not choose to meet at the village chief's house, but made an appointment on the hilltop near the ancestral hall. It was relatively hidden and would not be discovered by the villagers in advance.
After tidying up her short, messy and fluffy hair, Yu Xing walked briskly into the short hill to the east of the village.
Logically speaking, the air in the mountains should be very good, but the trees on this mountain are dry, and the upper trunks are showing their teeth and claws. The weirdness at night has turned into a wasteland during the day, and it seems that some dead air has been inhaled in the breath.
When he arrived at the agreed place, the other two people were already waiting there.
"San!" Xiao Xuechen was talking to Wei Fan when he saw him from the corner of his eye and smiled and waved to him.
"Good afternoon." Yu Xing nodded, and the three of them found a cleaner place to sit down together.
"Let's start integrating the information. What did you find?" He picked up a branch in his hand and played with it, touching the weeds on the ground one by one.
"Then let me tell you first." Wei Fan had already heard about Yu Xing's ability from Xiao Xuechen, and he put away all his contempt for the young painter, "I asked a disabled villager in the village to find out, and I found out
There are some villagers in the village who don’t go out. They are hidden and available resources, and their attitudes towards outsiders are much better than others.”
"Yeah." Yu Xing nodded, indicating for him to continue.
"After someone in the village dies, a so-called funeral will be held on the eighth day, at which time everyone will go outside the ancestral hall to bear witness." Wei Fan tried his best to simplify the information he collected, "However, the disabled villager told me,
Almost everyone in the village was the protagonist of the funeral."
"That is to say, they all died once!" Xiao Xuechen didn't look scared, but rather excited. Her voice was as cold as a spring and became hoarse after half a day of probing. "This is consistent with what I heard. Guanjiacun
The villagers are all dead. During the day, they are no different from ordinary people, but their thinking is crueler and more twisted than humans. At dusk, they light candles to maintain their human form. If there are no candles, they will turn into malicious monsters."
Pushing back the curly hair that ran forward, she continued: "The only exception is the village chief. According to my guess, the village chief is the only living person in Guanjia Village. He should play the role of a mediator, responsible for communicating with
Communicate with living people from outside.”
"It's not a medium, it's a guardian." Yu Xing added coolly.
It's good that these two people were able to find out this important information. It seems that they are capable of action.
"Oh? What do you mean?" Xiao Xuechen was very interested in the words in his mouth.
"It means..." Yu Xing squeezed the branch's hand and expressed his analysis.
The information he exchanged with the two Feng Shui masters, the Xu brothers, was that Guanjiacun was located in a deep ravine, and the mountains formed an encirclement, surrounding the lowland, sealing it off from all sides, with no way out or in.
The layout of the houses is in a grid shape. To borrow a sentence from "The Story of Peach Blossom Spring", this place is indeed a place with "fine roads and traffic" and "the houses look like each other."
After calculation, it was found that there was no life here. Instead, it was filled with the air of death, which was incompatible with the modern world.
"That is to say..." Xiao Xuechen opened his beautiful eyes wide, and there was some hesitation in his tone.
"Well, we must have been blinded by some kind of blindness or something else that interfered with our perception." Yu Xing felt that the sleeves were in the way, so he rolled up his long velvet sleeves to his elbows, and a smile flowed from the end of his eyes, "There are no living people here.
The place of activity is...an underground tomb."
"Think of the place where we enter the village as the entrance to the tomb, the flat road as the tomb passage, and the room where we sleep is the tomb hole where the coffin is placed, so——"
"The coffin is our bed."
The reason why Coffin Village is called Coffin Village is that it cannot only have one black coffin in the ancestral hall.
It can be said that there are many coffins placed in every house, but their shapes have been changed by blinding methods, making it difficult for living outsiders to recognize them.
"We slept in a coffin last night!?" Wei Fan was stunned.
This news was so out of the blue that he had doubted whether Yu Xing had guessed it wrong, but when he thought about it in conjunction with the rules of not leaving the room at night and not allowing others to enter the room, it seemed to make sense.
The tomb has its own rules. If night is the time when the monster side of the village wakes up, then they lying in the coffin can be considered a member of the "corpse". There are two coffins in one tomb and cannot be disturbed.
If you don't keep it properly and allow other corpses to break into your tomb, the rules will be broken and other corpses will be able to take advantage of it.
On the contrary, if you keep it, then the rules of the tomb are here, and other corpses cannot forcefully break in, and there is nothing you can do against them.
Moreover, there is an explanation for the food and various supplies that have no source in the village... maybe they are just some weird specialties in the tomb...
Thinking of this and recalling the food he had eaten, Wei Fan turned pale.
Xiao Xuechen also looked at Yu Xing with difficulty. She remembered that several deducers didn't want to have dinner at that time, but San happily said it was delicious and asked everyone to eat together.
Is it too late for her to vomit now?
Do you think she still has a chance?
Yu Xing pretended not to see the resentful expressions between the two of them. He didn't care what he was eating. Even if he was told clearly that the soup contained rotten insect corpses, he would still eat it as long as he could eat it.
He put his hand in front of his mouth and coughed twice, then turned his head.
"Sister, don't look at me like that, I'll be shy."
Xiao Xuechen: "..."
Wei Fan: What about me? What about me? Am I not worthy?
Fortunately, Yu Xing did not continue the double standard, but continued to talk about analysis, which gave Wei Fan some comfort.
"The village chief is different from other corpses. He is a living person. I think he should be similar to the role of a gravekeeper."
At the moment, he repeated the old lady's words.
Since she was a living person, the woman had already lit the candle just after dusk, but the village chief did not use it.
The transformation of the corpses during the day and night is affected by the rules, and the village chief... just relies on his acting skills. He is different from the corpses whose minds are irreversibly distorted. He knows everything, but still chooses to help the corpses harm outsiders.
Therefore, sometimes living people may be scarier than ghosts.
Fortunately, the village chief is not without weaknesses. Deducers who want to kill the village chief will most likely be stopped by a corpse, and the death condition may be triggered. However, there can only be one tombkeeper in the tomb at the same time. If there is one more, the corpses will be killed.
The original one will be buried alive.
Yu Xing knew that he didn't have to worry about the village chief. The magician... should be back soon.
"Then, I still have a question about this." Xiao Xuechen looked at Yu Xing with a flash of light in his eyes.
Yu Xing: "Huh?"
"If all the villagers in the village are corpses, what was Zhou Yongsheng before?" Guanjiacun is Zhou Yongsheng's hometown.
"Have you not noticed that there are no children in this village?" Yu fortunately looked at her leisurely, hoping that Miss Yu could start her own thinking.
Not only did Guanjiacun have no children, there was no one under the age of twenty at all.
Wei Fan also said that from time to time a new villager would "die" here and a funeral would be held.
Therefore, although this is a tomb, the corpses in the tomb... change from time to time.
"Could it be that these corpses still have the ability to reproduce? After giving birth to children, they will send the children away, and when they are old, they will take the children back and kill them to become new villagers!?" A group of clues were fighting in Xiao Xuechen's mind, and after going around for several times, they finally
She sorted out a logic.
"Not stupid." Yu Xing praised, and then said, "The villagers are no different from living people during the day. Since they are no different, then if living people can do it, they can also do it."
He guessed that whenever a child was born, the village chief would send the child outside the mountains to let the children grow up in the outside world.
During this period, the children outside may not know what is going on in their own homes. Until they are old enough, they are tricked into returning to Guanjia Village and then killed by the village chief or other corpses.
For example, Zhou Yongsheng.
Due to the special rules, or curse, here, the children born from the corpses are undoubtedly living people.
This kind of thing that breaks the boundary between life and death goes against the laws of nature and is certainly not allowed by the world. Therefore, the villagers can only be trapped in this small land and can no longer go out.
The old lady was once a living person. After she was killed by the villagers, she was trapped in the village and was forever attached to the life outside.
"The funeral time is at six o'clock in the evening, when night is approaching. This time is the fixed funeral time in Guanjia Village. Villagers usually don't go out and only gather on days when there are funerals. This is the moment from yang to yin, which symbolizes
An original living person was buried through a ceremony and officially became one of them." Yu Xing said calmly.
The funeral is the key to the continuation of this village's curse.
Dusk is no longer daytime, but there is no need to light candles. It is the time when the boundaries between life and death are most blurred for Guanjiacun.
In today's funeral, the protagonist is Zhou Yongsheng.
This young man's original normal life was completely ruined.
Therefore, Yu Xing, Carlos, and the Xu brothers were all called here by Zhou Yongsheng. Zhou Yongsheng did not want them to die together, but just wanted them to destroy the funeral ceremony and break this endless vicious curse.