Dawn had barely broken, and before the courtyard gate had even opened, Chen Wuya was already standing just inside the threshold. He did not move, merely stared at the shadow on the ground, dampened by dew—not his own.
Someone had come. Their footsteps were light, yet they snapped a dead branch.
He remembered that sound. When that person had left yesterday, their sole had crushed a thin twig by the woodpile with the same sharp crack—brief and crisp, not like someone hiding from pursuit, but like someone hurrying onward on the strength of a single breath.
The gate was pushed open a crack, revealing Villager B's face, sallow and swollen, his eye sockets deeply sunken. He leaned on a crutch made from a dead branch, the veins on the backs of his hands crawling like tangled vines. At the sight of Chen Wuya, his knees buckled, and he dropped straight into the mud.
"Chen... Young Master Chen, Miss Bai!" His voice was hoarse. "It's happened again! Three men vanished last night—one went to fetch water, and two were talking behind a house. Then, in the blink of an eye, they were gone. The elders said they saw black shadows crawling past the corners of the walls again. There was a stench in the wind, exactly like last time!"
Chen Wuya neither helped him up nor told him to rise. He merely lowered his head to look at his left hand. Beneath the cloth strips, his fingertips twitched faintly, as though something had tugged on them.
He remembered that sensation. Last night, when the wind chime rang for the third time, that very spot had spasmed for an instant, as though an invisible thread had reached out from afar and pulled.
"Did you hire a Daoist priest?" he asked.
"We did!