The old man patted the woman's hand with his withered hand, then continued, "I don't know what he was thinking, or where he heard it. He seemed to think that if he killed us, he'd become more powerful. There used to be quite a few people in this complex, but they were all old men and women like me. There were very few young people. Xiaomi was killed by him back then. After he killed Xiaomi, he still wouldn't stop. He wanted to kill her completely. We ran everywhere in those days, hiding from him."
The old man paused, seeming to sink into his memories. His face was filled with the pain of something he couldn't bear to recall.
"Kill someone, and you can become more powerful?"
I could almost hear Sun Bin's heartbeat speeding up.
His mind was full of ideas, many of them ridiculous. He imagined ghost kings and vengeful spirits from movies and novels, as if he wanted to become the kind of great villainous overlord you'd see in anime.
The old man looked up at him.
The woman raised her head, too, her face plainly showing her disgust.
"I don't know," the old man said. "I didn't think Lao Lin had gotten much more powerful. He did kill quite a few people, but they were all people like us. I don't know how Ye Qing heard about it, but after he came here once, Lao Lin disappeared. The others said Ye Qing used to catch ghosts, and after he died, he seemed to keep at it. He was very powerful. There aren't many ghosts in our neighborhood, but things have gotten worse and worse elsewhere over the years. There's a high-rise complex beside the road, and an old man there told me he'd been dead for