Funeral (12) - Infiltration

A burst of laughter was swallowed up by the endless wailing.

The prolonged grief seemed endless; amidst the turmoil of emotions, whether joy or sorrow, all that ultimately reached the eardrums was numbness.

The emotions of others ultimately became the absurd background music, echoing in the gloomy house, ending up forgotten and ignored.

"Was he watching us the whole time?" Zhao Ruru caught the fading laughter and suddenly asked.

Yu Xing looked up and glanced at the gray sky.

Gloom and oppression were the dominant colors here. At first, he thought it was just to create a more terrifying atmosphere, but after figuring out all the clues and looking at the sky again, he had a different understanding.

It's more like a photograph that has lost its color; even if it tries to present vibrant colors, it can only continue to appear powerless and pale.

Like some hazy dreams that exist deep in people's minds, when recalled, only a vague concept remains, barely piecing together something that can be called a memory.

For some reason, at that moment, he suddenly fell into a very strange thought.

Do the dead see the world as such a bleak place?

Does it all feel like a dream?

It's still a nightmare from which I can never wake up.

In the nightmare, everyone was colorless, just like the white mourning clothes they were wearing. At first glance, it was as if they were trapped in a narrow, vicious circle, and a sense of suffocation swept over them. Everything was filled with malice.

Special items will have a strong color, but when this color appears, it means danger is coming.

For example, the paper figures' colorful clothes.

And the red nail polish on those hands in the closet.

The consciousness of ghosts is forever imprisoned in this state, so they are chaotic, irritable, and insecure, and then they attack any consciousness they see.

In a way, Yu Xing suddenly began to understand ghosts.

When he finally looked away from the sky, he realized that he had, unusually, become lost in thought.

However, Zhao Ruru had only just raised the question, and his glance at the sky seemed more like a natural action.

He paused for a moment, then replied, "Every word we say should be under his watchful eye."

Zhao Yijiu watched as the floor plan she had spent so long drawing was blown away, and secretly breathed a sigh of relief.

He believed that with the intelligence of Yu Xing and Zhao Ruru, memorizing the floor plan wouldn't be difficult. Once the floor plan was completed, its value would cease.

He didn't really want to face those crooked lines; they didn't fit his usual aesthetic.

He then used the rag to completely wipe away the traces and asked, "Is it alright for us to talk so much under his gaze?"

Yu Xing gave a subtle smile, "His stance is still quite ambiguous... but the fact that he's created so many clues shows that he doesn't intend to keep us outsiders locked up here for long."

Perhaps to this ghost, they are far more endearing than the monotonous, cramped world.

"The groom, the young master of the ancestral home, probably only has two expectations of us: either leave with an interesting final performance, or die on the way to the performance." As Yu Xing said this, Zhao Yijiu looked up at him, her eyes subtly shifting.

Zhao Ruru was at a loss for words. In her opinion, ghosts with complicated minds were even more difficult to deal with than people with complicated minds.

Fortunately, after some analysis, it can be concluded that the ghost groom is not the SS of this phase, because his existence in this supernatural space is more like a creator-like consciousness, rather than a corresponding symbolic entity.

All she could say was, "It would be best if the groom didn't get in our way..."

Zhao Ruru believed that their current confusion stemmed from a lack of information. Once they obtained more details about the matter, they would surely understand what these people and ghosts were each seeking.

She sensed that all the clues at this stage should have been uncovered.

So, the only remaining key point is the "door".

"So, you should already know where the door is?" Zhao Ruru wasn't holding out much hope; she was just asking jokingly.

What Yu Xing that amazing, and solves the mission just by sitting at the stone table?

Yu Xing didn't answer directly; he simply said, "Let me explain what we need to do next."

The two teammates became serious.

Yu Xing: "We need to find the door. During that time, we'll definitely be attacked by the men in white. Then we'll seize the opportunity to enter and complete our mission."

"Sounds so simple... my foot!" Zhao Ruru said expressionlessly, "That's the result, what about the process?"

"Where did you go with all that? The location of the door, how to avoid attacks, whether there's a key to open the door... You've omitted all of that very skillfully."

Yu Xing glanced at her seemingly surprised, then said matter-of-factly, "I've never even been to a haunted house, how would I know what happened? You, who have received so many clues from me, should tell me the details."

Zhao Yijiu: "..."

Zhao Ruru: wdnmd.

Seeing the numb expressions on their faces, Yu Xing felt a surge of pleasure. He chuckled, "Just kidding. I have a guess. Come with me."

Perhaps the most important quality for being Yu Xing's teammate is the ability to remain calm even after being manipulated.

It's a bittersweet experience.

"Waaaaah..."

The cries, intended to express grief, increasingly resembled the wails of ghosts in the night, mournful and eerie, matching the atmosphere of the black mourning hall filled with people in white.

White fabric rubbed against the floor, and everyone in the room was hunched over, their heads and faces covered by wide white hats, making them look like deformed people with protruding spines.

In all the other rooms, the people in white were standing; only here, before these dozen or so coffins, were they kneeling, trembling, and weeping incessantly.

The coffins lay quietly on the ground, some of them moldy.

Although the suona has no source of sound, it resonates as persistently as the sound of mourning.

It is true that suona horns are played during funeral processions.

As the suona horn sounds, the person is placed in the coffin. Gold and silver paper money are offered, and the funeral procession is grand and elaborate. Finally, the dust settles, and the person is laid to rest. On earth, one less living person is lost, but underground, one more decaying soul is gained.

But in this room, the deceased lying in the coffins did not seem peaceful. Some coffins had deep scratches, some were twisted and deformed, and there was a steady chiseling sound coming from inside, as if someone was tirelessly hammering the inner walls from the inside.

Some coffins were seeping water, which spread far down the bottom of the coffins and wet the knees of those who were kneeling in worship.

There were also several coffins covered with red handprints and dense scratches.

The people in white seemed oblivious, standing like statues, motionless except for weeping.

The door to the room opened and closed briefly, and a man in white walked in with unsteady steps, wandering from one end to the other like a ghost. Then, as the other men in white looked up at him, he squeezed into the crowd and knelt down in front of a coffin.

He sobbed like everyone else, his back hunched, quickly becoming part of the mourning troupe.

The man in white beside him turned his head and stared at him for a long time from less than twenty centimeters away. Seeing him lower his head and remain silent, only faintly revealing a sob, he finally turned back.

Everything seemed to have returned to stillness.

Three minutes later, the door opened and closed again.

Zhao Ruru's hair was loose, her lips were pale, and she looked very haggard.

She casually wrapped a piece of white cloth that she had torn off from the room where there was no person in white on her head, and at first glance it looked no different from the wide hat on the person in white's head.

Recalling the image of the white-clad figure walking in her mind, she stiffened and dejectedly walked step by step into the group of white-clad figures gathered together.

At the same time, she got a close look at the room's layout.

There were many coffins, more than she had imagined, but there were only five portraits corresponding to each coffin.

These five images are hung on the wall in the center of the room, corresponding to the coffin below.

On the far left is a beautiful young woman. Even in black and white, her radiant smile cannot be concealed. However, in this photo, her smile is faint, replaced by an unyielding sorrow and grief, and a touch of despair that is contagious.

Hanging to her right is a handsome young man, who appears to be wearing an overcoat, the collar of which is slightly turned up in the photo. He has a bright smile, as if he saw something amusing when the photo was taken.

In the middle is a refined-looking middle-aged man wearing gold-rimmed glasses, who bears a striking resemblance to the young man on the left. Time has not diminished his good looks; although wrinkles have appeared around his eyes, most people would still find him very young at first glance.

To the right of the middle-aged man was the butler, who looked old and haggard, but whose posture was respectful and whose square face was expressionless.

On the far right, a face that Zhao Ruru recognized appeared.

He's a cunning devil.

His characteristic meanness is fully displayed in this photo. Compared to the abacus devil who crawled out of the well, soaking wet and looking somewhat pitiful, the middle-aged man in the photo is more in line with Zhao Ruru's imagination of Liu Bingxian: sharp, ignorant, and uncomfortable.

She could match the people in the five photos one by one: Liu Xue, the groom, the master, the butler, and Liu Bingxian.

Among them, the frames for Liu Xue and Liu Bingxian's portraits were indeed the same, not as exquisite as the frames for the three people in the Yinzhai, and they looked cheap when compared.

The other coffins did not have any photos, so it was not possible to tell who was lying inside.

Joy shone in Zhao Ruru's eyes, because everything before her was exactly as Yu Xing had described outside, meaning they might have truly found a way to leave.

She randomly found a place to kneel down, head bowed, imagining herself going bald at a young age because of calculating this and that every day, compiling statistics, and dealing with all sorts of cunning people. The immense sorrow made her lips tremble, and she let out an uncontrollable sob.

The person in white beside her noticed the extra person and looked at her.

Upon seeing this, the man in white did not turn his head back. Instead, he remained kneeling and moved a little distance toward Zhao Ruru, craning his neck.

Suddenly, they were almost only two fists apart.

Zhao Ruru's heart started pounding; she could feel the man in white right next to her face.

I can't see it... I can't see it... It's better to just pretend it doesn't exist...

It's not that the more capable a divination practitioner is, the less afraid they are of ghosts. On the contrary, after experiencing many divinations, they will all have things they are most afraid of.

Stress disorder, physiological aversion, and a host of other problems followed.

These are all psychological traumas, inflicted by being scared by ghosts.

It can be said that no matter how many simulations were conducted, the fear of the ghosts among the simulation participants never changed, because while the simulation participants were exchanging physical attributes and obtaining offerings and props, the ghosts were also moving forward on another path.

Zhao Ruru is the type of person who would rather engage in a killing-type deduction than encounter ghosts, and among the types of deduction involving ghosts, Chinese horror is the one she least wants to encounter.

At this moment, she had no curiosity whatsoever about the face beneath the white-clad man's hat.

But the man in white didn't care what she thought. It wasn't enough to just look at him from the side. His face slowly moved, from the side to right in front of Zhao Ruru's face.

In Zhao Ruru's peripheral vision, half a face appeared, then more and more, growing larger and larger, until it became a whole face.

She didn't feel the white-clad figure move at all; in other words, it merely stretched its neck and then, with an extremely contorted motion, presented its upright head to her.

She didn't know whether she should close her eyes or not; in her hesitation, she had already seen it all.

The person in white... is a paper figure.

Unlike the paper effigy on the street, the lower half of the white-clad man's face was covered by the veil of his hat, revealing only his eyes and half of his nose.

It is pure white.

The features are deeply defined; they are not the artificial eyes painted on with ink, but two black cavities that conform to the growth pattern of human bones and are the same size as human eye sockets.

With prominent brow bones, slightly rounded cheekbones, and sunken sides of the nose, Zhao Ruru could tell at a glance that this was the result of covering a real face with a thick layer of paper.

There are no ventilation holes.

The person in white was a real person suffocating from the paper.

This discovery left Zhao Ruru completely frozen. She couldn't ignore the horrifying face before her and could only suppress the urge to scream for a moment.

Then, without even having to imagine herself going bald, just thinking about all the people around her who had suffocated to death and were made into paper dolls made her cry genuinely.

Tears streamed down its face. The white-clad figure before it seemed to have finally confirmed that Zhao Ruru was its companion. It slowly withdrew its head and continued its mourning.

Zhao Ruru breathed a sigh of relief, telling herself to stay in that crying state and wait for the signal from outside the door.

During this time, she looked up again.

The five portraits hanging high on the wall all stared at her.

Etc??

Zhao Ruru's pupils contracted, confirming that she wasn't seeing things. The portraits that had looked normal just moments ago were now all staring at her with a ferocious and savage gaze!

The beautiful young girl, the handsome young man, the refined middle-aged man, the respectful butler, and even the mean-spirited Liu Bingxian lost their original appearances. Their angry malice was identical, making them look less than human.

Not at all like it.

They looked at her as if she were a laughing mourner at a grave. Zhao Ruru was quite certain that if it weren't for some kind of rule, everyone up there would have an aura that wanted to come down and tear her to pieces.

She stared motionlessly at the portraits of the deceased, silently thinking:

Zhao Yijiu, Yu Xing, I'm so scared.