"Incense offerings."
The phrase surfaced in Jiang Qiao's mind.
What kind of god needed such an enormous incense stick as an offering, and why was it lying flat?
Even if it was not a true deity.
Anything connected to deities could not be treated lightly.
Especially something as sensitive as incense offerings.
Everyone knew.
From ancient times to the present, incense and candles had been offered either to ancestral tablets or to Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and deities.
But the reality was.
When people died.
They did not become ghosts.
Ordinary people simply died, leaving nothing but dry bones. Dust to dust, earth to earth.
A small number of people who died in supernatural events might suffer supernatural erosion and become ghost slaves, existing as walking corpses.
These ghost slaves.
If, by some chance, they broke free of the source supernatural power controlling them.
They would become new vicious ghosts.
However.
These were not ghosts in the traditional sense.
Nothing about them had any connection to who the corpse had been in life.
It was rather like...
After a cow was slaughtered, a scientist placed a machine inside its body.
That machine could move around wearing the cow's identity.
But.
It was only a machine, not that cow.
Wearing a piece of clothing outside did not mean you had become that piece of clothing.
Evolvers were much the same. Once a vicious ghost took over their bodies, their own lives were over.
In the years that followed.
Although the vicious ghost carried their memories from life, it was still not the person they had once been.
In fact.
Because vicious ghosts hunted the living.
They would prioritize killing people who had been close to their hosts in life.
After all.
Those people were already in their memories.
They were easy to find.