"By the time the woman found the old village chief, his house was already packed with people. Every one of them had a family member who'd gone missing. From them, the woman learned she wasn't the only one. Every household with a missing person had dreamed the same strange dream. The details varied, but every dream mentioned the treasure and that lake, and showed their loved ones being slowly swallowed by its icy waters right before their eyes."
"One woman said something even more astonishing. She'd seen it—she'd seen countless people standing in the lake. Their heads were covered with cloth, so she couldn't see their faces, but she knew they were the missing villagers, just like her own husband!"
"And when they saw her husband approaching the lakeshore, they stiffly raised their arms and pointed as one toward the depths of Spring God Lake, as if guiding him."
"And that was how her husband walked, step by step, into the icy water, until he vanished into the darkness."
"But everyone was skeptical of her story. After all... after all, she shouldn't have been able to see anything. She was blind, and had been for many years. Her husband had always taken care of her."
Jiang Cheng didn't think much of Manager Qian's explanation. There were things you could see even if your eyes weren't working properly. He was more interested in the "people" in the lake.
"What were those people standing in waist-deep water doing?" Jiang Cheng asked.
"Their heads were covered, and they were pointing toward the depths of the lake. Right, their covered heads were facing that way too. I remember now—I later asked someone about it, and apparently it's called a 'row of headless corpses.' Their faces all point in the same direction, which is a