"Are these really Qilin scales? Do Qilin really exist?"
Liu Miao's voice pulled me back to my senses.
I was back in front of the desk. A notebook lay open before me, with a USB drive plugged into it. The video was still playing on the screen.
In the video, Ye Qing turned the scale over and over in his hands for a while, then shook his head.
The temple keeper chuckled twice. "I don't want to believe it either. But after we dug this thing up, the Three Ancestors River flooded and submerged the whole island. The island sank, and there were more than a dozen people on it at the time. In the end... I was the only one left. The others... were all gone."
The camera tilted up, moving from the scale to the temple keeper's face.
I felt my heart seize.
That face was exactly the same as the ghost's!
My thoughts fell into disarray.
People could look alike. This had been proven countless times in the internet age. Leaving science aside, you could find all kinds of celebrity lookalike compilations on social media with a quick search. People could look alike across continents and oceans, across nationalities and races. It was astonishing. Add plastic surgery to the mix, and lookalikes became an even more "everyday" occurrence.
Even so, the moment the supernatural was involved, it was hard to explain the resemblance before me as mere coincidence.
Ye Qing and Liu Miao didn't seem to have noticed anything strange about the temple keeper. Through the video, I couldn't see anything unusual about him either. He had no trace of yin energy about him. He looked like an ordinary person.
"When you say 'gone,' do you mean dead?" Ye Qing asked calmly.
"We should all be