When he emerged from the well.
The first thing Jiang Qiao saw was the sky.
Dark clouds, gloomy as ink, pressed down overhead like a massive slab of lead, nearly touching the rooftops of the village houses. The air was thick with a strong burnt stench mixed with the smells of earth and rot.
Twinwood Village was in complete chaos.
Villagers with bloodied faces were everywhere, panicking wildly.
They no longer looked numb and hollow as before. Their faces were filled with terror, as though they had just awakened from a long nightmare, only to discover that reality was even more horrifying.
"Corpses..."
"So many corpses..."
"Oh my God! The corpses climbed out of their graves!"
"The back mountain! All the graves on the back mountain have collapsed!"
"They're all behind the village. They must be trying to get in..."
"Ah—"
"It's Third Great-Uncle..."
"He died last month... Why is he at the village entrance..."
"Oh no..."
"It's a Vicious Ghost... Everyone, run..."
Screams, shouts, and curses intertwined, rising and falling through the village without end.
Jiang Qiao followed their gazes.
Toward the back mountain, the graveyard was in utter ruin.
Countless grave mounds had collapsed, coffins had shattered, and dirt had been churned up. Even more scalp-tingling was the fact that countless corpses lay densely packed from the back mountain all the way to the rear of the village.
Some were still relatively intact, while others had rotted into piles of mud.
Some were nothing but skeletons.
Part of some bodies still remained in their burial pits, while others had already reached the village entrance.
However.
These corpses now resembled discarded puppets.
They lay on the ground.
Completely motionless.
But that did nothing to lessen the villagers' fear.
After all, it was genuinely horrifying.
What dead person casually came