Life and Death Boundary, Natural Law

It turns out the first person we saw when we entered the village was a dead person?

Recalling the old man's strange gaze when he looked at them, Yu Xing understood.

It was only logical, and within expectations.

Another person might have felt emotions like "fear of the future" or "chilling to the bone," but for Yu Xing, this was merely a piece of valuable information.

How interesting.

Combined with the information he'd obtained from the Xu brothers and his own deductions, he now had a complete understanding of Guan Family Village. He continued to ask:

"Why did Zhou Facai bury him? Was he buried after he died, or..." Buried alive? Yu Xing omitted the last two words, knowing the old woman would understand his question.

Continuous questioning could be perceived as eagerness, making the person being questioned wary.

Swallowing the last few words would make the other party subconsciously feel that their opinion was being sought and agreed with, which would better induce them to tell the truth.

The old woman's skin-and-bones fingers tightened on her cane, and she finally shifted 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 truly love our village chief, but his family is also under a curse."

"What curse?"

"The village chief's children must be sent away as soon as they are born and return after thirty-five years. On the day they return, that child becomes the new village chief, and the old village chief must be buried under the locust tree at the entrance of the village." The old woman was clearly a little sad. "Facai is a good child, but I am an old woman. In my memory, the old village chief was more familiar..."

Yu Xing let out an "Oh," his two fingers tapping rhythmically and slowly on his leg.

"What if the new village chief who returns can't bear to bury the old one?"

"Can't bear it? No, they are mostly very willing to do so." The old woman seemed to think of something, but her stiff, aging facial muscles made it difficult to express her current emotions. Yu Xing vaguely felt she was being sarcastic. "If there is someone unwilling, the villagers will help them bury the old one."

Aha, so that means only one bloodline of the village chief's family can exist in the village at any given time.

Yu Xing suddenly became excited and then asked, "Besides me, has anyone else asked you this question?"

"Yes... it seems it was last night, a young man came to ask."

Upon receiving this news, Yu Xing's lips curled. He already knew where the missing Carlos had gone.

At the crack of dawn.

The small town on the other side of the mountain from Guan Family Village was still quite lively, with many merchants coming and going to buy wild game and medicinal herbs.

Carlos let out a big yawn and took a refreshing hot shower in the town's hotel, washing away some of the fatigue from his all-night journey.

He changed his clothes and walked out of the bathroom, a towel draped over his wet, ash-blue hair. Just as he reached out to dry it, he heard a muffled "woo woo woo" sound from the floor by the head of the bed.

He walked over slowly, his emerald eyes darkening. He looked down emotionlessly at the young man tied up at the limbs and gagged.

He remained silent until the young man realized something, stopped struggling, and looked at him with terror in his eyes.

Only then did Carlos smile with satisfaction. "Zhou Qinghai... are you hungry?"

"Mmmph." The young man didn't dare provoke this ruthless pervert. He had almost had his leg broken just for a moment of surprise and resistance earlier.

"It's okay if you're hungry, we'll go eat later." Carlos smiled and removed the cloth from the young man's mouth. Before the young man could speak, he added, "You'll eat obediently, won't you? I'm very tired right now and don't want to deal with any more moths fluttering towards me... I'm sure you wouldn't want to implicate other innocent people?"

His tone was as gentle as if he were the young man's friend, yet the young man trembled all over and nodded in despair.

"Good, I really like decisive people." Carlos gave him one last look before focusing on drying his hair. "After we eat, I'll take you to a wonderful place where you'll meet the person you've been looking for... Heh, be grateful to me."

In his character's memory, he had stayed at this small hotel the night before entering the mountains.

The guest in the next room was a young man named Zhou Qinghai, who was cheerful and unsuspecting. They had only had breakfast together, and Zhou Qinghai had told him he was an orphan and had been looking for his parents.

He had already paid extra attention to such a clear event in the character's memory. Last night, after hearing the old woman's story, he understood.

The village chief Zhou Facai's son, Zhou Qinghai... was in town.

He only needed to bring Zhou Qinghai back to make the village chief disappear.

Of course, at the same time, Zhou Qinghai would become the new village chief and be bound by Guan Family Village.

But what did that have to do with him? He just needed to complete the deduction.

A pleased smile flickered in his emerald eyes.

With the clues he wanted in hand, Yu Xing bid farewell to the old woman and planned to go back to find Xiao Xuechen and Wei Fan to consolidate the information.

They didn't choose to gather at the village chief's house but met on the hill near the ancestral hall, which was more hidden and wouldn't be discovered by villagers in advance.

Tidying his slightly messy, fluffy short hair, Yu Xing strode with light steps onto the low mountain east of the village.

Logically, the air in the mountains should be good, but the trees on this mountain were dry, their upper branches clawing wildly. The eeriness of the night had all turned into desolation in the daytime. As he breathed, it felt as if he were inhaling death.

He arrived at the agreed-upon location, where the other two were already waiting.

"san!" Xiao Xuechen was talking to Wei Fan when she saw him out of the corner of her eye and waved with a smile.

"Good afternoon." Yu Xing nodded, and the three of them found a relatively clean spot and sat down.

"Let's start consolidating the information. What did you discover?" He picked up a twig and played with it, idly tapping it on the ground's weeds.

"I'll go first then." Wei Fan had already heard about Yu Xing's abilities from Xiao Xuechen, and he put away all his condescension towards the young painter. "I inquired from a disabled villager. I discovered that there are some villagers in the village who never go out. They are hidden, exploitable resources, and their attitude towards outsiders is much better than others."

"Mm." Yu Xing nodded, signaling him to continue.

"After a villager dies, they hold a so-called funeral on the eighth day, and everyone will go outside the ancestral hall to witness it," Wei Fan simplified the information he had gathered as much as possible. "However, that disabled villager told me that almost everyone in the village has been the protagonist of a funeral."

"Meaning, they've all died once!" Xiao Xuechen didn't seem scared. Instead, she looked a bit energized. Her clear, cool voice, usually like a mountain spring, was a little hoarse after half a day of investigation. "This matches what I've heard. The villagers of Guan Family Village are all dead. They're no different from normal people during the day, except their thoughts are more cruel and twisted than humans. In the evening, they light candles to maintain their human form. Without candles, they turn into monsters full of malice."

Tucking a stray curl of her hair behind her ear, she continued, "Among them, the only exception is the village chief. I guess the village chief is the only living person in Guan Family Village. He should be acting as a medium, responsible for communicating with outsiders who are alive."

"Not a medium, a guardian," Yu Xing interjected coolly.

It was good that these two had gathered such important information; their efficiency was quite commendable.

"Oh? What do you mean?" Xiao Xuechen was very interested in his choice of words.

"What I mean is..." Yu Xing paused, his hand gripping a twig, and then explained his analysis.

The information he had exchanged with the Xu brothers, the feng shui masters, was that Guan Family Village was located in a deep ravine, surrounded by mountains that formed a basin, sealing it off with no way in or out.

The houses were laid out in a grid pattern. To borrow a phrase from "The Peach Blossom Spring," it was indeed a place where "paths crisscrossed" and "houses stood in neat rows."

After calculations, the area was devoid of life, instead filled with a pervasive deathly aura, completely out of sync with the living world.

"So, you mean..." Xiao Xuechen's beautiful eyes widened, her tone hesitant.

"Mhm, we must have been affected by some kind of illusion, or something else that interfered with our senses," Yu Xing said, finding his long, plush sleeves bothersome. He rolled them up to his elbows, a slight smile playing at the corners of his eyes. "This isn't a place for living people; it's... an underground tomb."

"Think of the place where we entered the village as the tomb entrance, the road as the tomb passage, and the houses where we slept as the burial chambers where coffins are placed, so--"

"The coffins are our beds."

Coffin Village wasn't called Coffin Village just because of the single black coffin in the ancestral hall.

It could be said that every household had numerous coffins, but their forms were altered by an illusion, making them unrecognizable to outsiders.

"We slept in coffins last night!?" Wei Fan exclaimed in shock.

This news was too outlandish. He hadn't ruled out the possibility that Yu Xing was mistaken, but when he connected it with the rule that they couldn't leave their rooms at night or let others in, it seemed to make a strange kind of sense.

Tombs had their rules. If nighttime was when the village's monstrous side awakened, then they, lying in coffins, were considered part of the "corpses." Two coffins in one burial chamber couldn't be disturbed.

If they didn't guard it well and allowed other corpses to intrude into their own burial chamber, these rules would be broken, giving other corpses an opportunity.

Conversely, if they guarded it, the rules of the burial chamber were in place. Other corpses couldn't force their way in, and they couldn't do anything about them.

And the unexplained food and various supplies in the village also made sense... perhaps they were just strange local products from the tomb...

Thinking of this, and recalling the food he had eaten, Wei Fan's face turned pale.

Xiao Xuechen also looked at Yu Xing with an unreadable expression. She remembered that when the other deducers didn't want to eat dinner, it was san who happily declared it delicious and urged everyone to eat together.

Could she still throw up now?

Did she even have a chance?

Yu Xing pretended not to see their resentful expressions. He himself didn't care what the food actually was. Even if he were explicitly told that the soup contained rotten insect corpses, as long as it was edible, he would still eat it.

Covering his mouth with his hand, he coughed twice and turned his head away.

"Missy, don't look at me like that; you'll make me blush."

Xiao Xuechen: "..."

Wei Fan: What about me? What about me? Am I not worthy?

Fortunately, Yu Xing didn't continue his favoritism and went on with his analysis, offering Wei Fan some small comfort.

"The village chief is different from the other corpses; he's alive. I think he's probably like a tomb keeper."

At this, he repeated what the old woman had said.

Because he was alive, the woman lit candles just after dusk, but the village chief didn't need to.

The corpses' transformation between day and night was influenced by rules, but the village chief... he relied solely on acting. Unlike the corpses whose minds were irreversibly twisted, he knew everything but still chose to help the corpses harm outsiders.

So, sometimes, living people can be more terrifying than ghosts.

Fortunately, the village chief wasn't without weaknesses. If the deducers tried to kill him, they would likely be stopped by the corpses, and might even trigger a death condition. However, only one tomb keeper could exist in the tomb at a time. If an extra one appeared, the corpses would bury the original one alive.

Yu Xing knew he didn't have to worry about the village chief; that magician... should be back soon.

"Well, I have another question about this," Xiao Xuechen's eyes flashed with brilliance as she looked at Yu Xing.

Yu Xing: "Hm?"

"If all the villagers are corpses, then what was Zhou Yongsheng before? Guan Family Village is Zhou Yongsheng's hometown."

"Didn't you notice that there are no children in this village?" Yu Xing looked at her leisurely, hoping she would figure it out herself.

Guan Family Village didn't just lack children; there wasn't a single person under twenty.

Wei Fan had also mentioned that new villagers "died" from time to time, requiring funerals.

So, although this was a tomb, the corpses within it... changed frequently.

"Could it be, could it be that these corpses still have the ability to reproduce, and after giving birth, they send the children away, only to bring them back when they're old enough to be killed and become new villagers!?" A flurry of clues collided in Xiao Xuechen's mind. After several turns, she finally pieced together a logical thread.

"Not bad," Yu Xing praised, then added, "The villagers are no different from living people during the day. Since they're no different, they can naturally do whatever living people can do."

He guessed that whenever a child was born, the village chief would send the child outside the mountains to grow up in the outside world.

During this time, the child outside might have no idea what their home was truly like, until they reached a certain age and were tricked back to Guan Family Village, only to be killed by the village chief or other corpses.

For example, Zhou Yongsheng.

Due to the special rules, or rather curse, of this place, the children born from corpses are undoubtedly living people.

This kind of event, which breaks the boundaries of life and death, goes against the laws of nature and is naturally not tolerated by the world. Thus, the villagers are trapped in this small area, unable to leave ever again.

That old woman was also once a living person. After being killed by the villagers, she was trapped in this village, forever longing for life outside.

"The funeral is at six in the evening, as night approaches. This is the fixed funeral time for Guan Family Village. Normally, villagers don't go out, only gathering on days when there's a funeral. This is the moment of transition from yang to yin, symbolizing a living person being formally buried through a ritual and becoming 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, yet candles are not needed. For Guan Family Village, this is the moment when the boundary between life and death is most blurred.

The protagonist of today's funeral is Zhou Yongsheng.

This young man's normal life has been completely ruined.

Therefore, Yu Xing, Carlos, and the Xu brothers were all called by Zhou Yongsheng. Zhou Yongsheng didn't want to harm them and cause them to die together; he just wanted them to disrupt this funeral ritual and break this endless vicious curse.