Bloody Candle Tears

The sun sank behind the western hills, and dusk fell.

Yesterday evening, the village had been deserted. Today, with the funeral about to begin, the villagers had all come out of their homes and were heading east under the village chief's direction.

They carried identical candleholders in their hands. Unlit candles rested quietly on them, seeming to wait for night to come.

The deducers were mixed in among them, surrounded by villagers. Now that they knew the truth, they felt like prisoners being escorted to the execution ground, accompanying a crowd of terrifying things.

Well, candles and I sure do have a connection... Yu Xing thought as he walked. The last deduction had involved a corpse party where a bunch of corpses lit candles, too. What kind of unspeakable fetish was this?

He moved forward with the crowd. Xiao Xuechen walked beside him, warily watching their surroundings.

Suddenly, a figure seemed to appear in the corner of her eye.

The next moment, it quickly ducked behind a house. It had moved fast, but she had still caught sight of it.

It definitely hadn't been her imagination.

Xiao Xuechen tugged at Yu Xing's sleeve and whispered, keeping her voice low so the villagers nearby wouldn't hear. "There seems to be something over there..."

One of the villagers looked over at them suspiciously.

"Shh." Yu Xing raised a finger and gently pressed it to the philtrum beneath Xiao Xuechen's nose. He didn't touch her lips, yet effectively stopped her from speaking.

"Isn't it normal to see blood?" Several words for common things like insects flashed through his mind and were quickly dismissed, leaving behind one word that would be anything but normal elsewhere.

Sure enough, when the villager heard that Xiao Xuechen had meant blood, he lost interest and turned away.

"Don't worry, miss. There'll be a good show." Only then did Yu Xing wink at Xiao Xuechen, whose face had turned bright red. Wei Fan stood beside them, unable to bear the sight.

What was the world coming to?

Had an iron tree really blossomed?

If the deduction game weren't something he couldn't tell his ordinary coworkers about, he'd love to announce to the world that Xiao Xuechen, who always coldly turned down the advances of her male coworkers, had blushed for another man!

He was a rare, peerless pretty boy. They didn't stand a chance!

Yu Xing withdrew his hand, his gaze drifting toward the spot Xiao Xuechen had pointed out.

The corner of his mouth curled slightly. He knew the surprise he wanted to see was hidden there.

A little over ten minutes later.

The procession was a grand sight. At last, the crowd reached the ancestral hall, an ancient building that stood quietly before them, looking so small beside the mass of villagers.

As Yu Xing stepped through the unfamiliar weeds, he keenly sensed a chill emanating from the ancestral hall in the dusk.

When he had come here last night, it had seemed like nothing more than a somewhat gloomy little building. But now, in the afterglow of the setting sun, its aura was like a vortex, as if it would swallow everyone who approached.

There was no doubt that this place had triggered the negative effects in his body. His legs had stiffened a little, and his face had gone pale, as usual.

"Here it comes again..."

Thanks to his unusual constitution, he could judge how closely things around him were connected to the supernatural and ghosts just by how weak his body felt.

It seemed some force within the ancestral hall, where the funeral was about to be held, had awakened.

Breathing out in discomfort, Yu Xing waved away Xiao Xuechen's concern and continued forward with the procession.

"Help me..."

In a daze, Yu Xing seemed to hear Zhou Yongsheng pleading again.

He looked around. Nobody else seemed to react, so they probably hadn't heard it. Yu Xing concentrated, trying harder to listen, but the voice had been too faint. It didn't come again.

It's not that it stopped. I can't hear it anymore... he sighed inwardly.

If this had happened before, he would have been able not only to hear it, but to see it, too.

Too bad—never mind.

Everyone stopped in front of the ancestral hall and looked toward the village chief, waiting for his next instructions.

"Guests, since you're Xiao Sheng's friends, you can stand in the middle." The village chief cheerfully ushered the deducers over and positioned them by the entrance to the ancestral hall.

The other villagers spread out of their own accord, surrounding them like stars around the moon and leaving no gaps.

The village chief stepped in front of Yu Xing and gave him an inscrutable look. Nearby, the chief's wife touched the scar over her eye and stared at him with the same strange expression.

Yu Xing felt as if two venomous snakes had fixed their gaze on him. Fortunately, neither the man nor the ghost posed the slightest threat to him. He couldn't even be bothered to teach them a lesson. Instead, he quietly sized up the inside of the ancestral hall.

What had changed?

Where was the force that made him feel so awful coming from?

"Let the funeral begin!" When Yu Xing ignored him, the village chief got no response. His warm smile from their first meeting returned as he told the deducers to wait where they were, then turned toward the villagers and raised his voice in a shout.

All the chatter along the way fell silent. The villagers closed their mouths and followed the chief with their eyes.

The village chief slowly went to stand in front of the black coffin, then knelt across from the rows of blank memorial tablets. The other villagers followed suit, and in an instant, a vast sea of people knelt before the ancestral hall.

"Those who have passed do not wander; beyond life and death, they neither fade nor die. With the eyes of the living and the breath of the dead, bear witness to the returning soul..." The village chief's low voice had completely reverted to the oldest dialect of Guan Family Village, making it almost impossible for the deducers to understand what he was saying.

The dialect was hard to make out, and its drawn-out tones sounded like incantations from an ancient ritual. Its rises and falls stirred a mysterious, hypnotic power.

"Should we kneel, too?" Wei Fan asked hesitantly.

"Heh. I don't think there's any need." Xiao Xuechen looked at the moving corpses, a flash of pride and coldness passing through her eyes.

Make her kneel? These things were nothing but ghosts. Did they deserve it?

She turned to look at Xu Hong and Xu Yuan. They exchanged glances, then shook their heads together.

She turned again... Huh!?

Xiao Xuechen happened to see Yu Xing lowering himself. Her heart skipped a beat. Surely San wasn't—

Oh, she'd worried for nothing.

The next moment, she saw Yu Xing sitting cross-legged on the ground, casually propping himself up with his arms at his sides. The sight of him lounging there to watch the show cut off the thought that had barely begun to form in her mind and scattered it into utter chaos.

She really was an idiot.

She'd never be able to guess what the big shot was thinking.

Noticing everyone looking at him, Yu Xing raised his head and asked in confusion, "I'm tired, so I sat down to rest for a bit. What are you all looking at me for?"

"..."

Fortunately, the villagers around them didn't pay them any attention. They were all prostrate on the ground, looking deeply reverent toward the ancestral hall.

As the village chief repeated his chantlike words again and again, the sky gradually darkened.

Here, the transition from daylight to night was all too brief. The warm colors in their field of vision were slowly devoured, until at last everything was shrouded in cold tones...

With a sharp rattle—

Inside the ancestral hall, the matching candle stands on either side shook violently. The next moment, the candles on them lit by themselves, and flickering flames sprang to life.

At the same time, the candles in the villagers' hands were also lit by some unseen flame. Their scattered candlelight swayed in the dark, prompting Yu Xing to remark at a completely inappropriate moment:

"Beautiful..."

Hey, hey, hey?

Xiao Xuechen had watched the change with her own eyes, and then he came out with that. The trepidation in her heart instantly vanished.

Yu Xing might have been admiring the sight, but the waves of cold that kept surging through his body were still tormenting him.

He had really sat down to conserve his strength. Otherwise, his vision would probably have gone dark by now, and he'd be ready to pass out at any moment.

In these circumstances, passing out and kicking the bucket probably wouldn't make much difference.

Whoosh...

A cold wind blew in from all directions. Strangely, even though there were no narrow passages or caves nearby, the wind still made a mournful sound like a ghost wailing.

So cold... Yu Xing couldn't help shivering and raised a hand to cover half his face.

Cold sweat seeped from his body. He drew in a deep breath, then suddenly felt his heart give a powerful thump. The cold reached its peak, and his mind went blank for a moment. A desperate roar exploded beside his ear:

"Stop him!"

It was Zhou Yongsheng's voice!

Yu Xing gritted his back teeth and stood amid waves of dizziness. When he looked up, the village chief had finished his long chant and was placing an unlit candle on the black coffin.

It was the same candleholder the woman had used in the kitchen, except this time the candle inside looked a little unusual.

It was white wax, just like the others, but it wasn't new. Though unlit, drops of wax had already hardened along its side, and the character "Lu" was carved into its body.

Some of the wax had already run into the candleholder, becoming a liquid that wouldn't harden.

That liquid was the red of fresh blood.

"Now, I invite the guests from afar to open the coffin with me." The village chief hadn't heard Zhou Yongsheng's roar. Looking over the candlelight, he nodded with satisfaction, then fixed Yu Xing with an ill-intentioned stare.

"How about you... You seem to have a good relationship with Xiao Sheng."

So he'd set his sights on me. Fine by me.

Yu Xing smiled and did his best not to show how weak he was. Ignoring Xiao Xuechen and Wei Fan's warnings to "be careful," he stepped toward the village chief without hesitation.

"Don't open it!" Zhou Yongsheng's voice rang in his ears again. The cold that surged into Yu Xing's bones left his face as pale as paper, nearly as colorless as the white candle.

His ink-black pupils were darker than usual, a sickly depth showing through their pure black.

"Come on, open the coffin with me." The village chief mistook his expression for fear and smiled smugly as he urged him on.

"Village chief..." Yu Xing's colorless lips curved into the faintest smile.

At the sight of that smile, the village chief's hair suddenly stood on end. His heart tightened, and numbness spread through his limbs.

Even Yu Xing's fingers were trembling, yet his voice remained steady, smooth as that of a cold-blooded demon. It was as if the pain in his body couldn't affect his emotions at all. "I don't want to open the coffin with you. How about we make a deal and send someone else instead?"

"Someone else?" The village chief sensed something was wrong, but couldn't figure out what. "Heh. As Xiao Sheng's friend, you're unwilling to do even this little thing for him?"

"Fool." Yu Xing let out a low laugh. "I don't mean someone else instead of me. I mean... someone else instead of you."