"What did you mean by abandoned?" the fat man pressed.
"It means everyone in the village disappeared, but the houses and fishing tools were all still there. It also seemed like they'd left in a hurry, since they'd left many things behind in their homes."
"Not long after that, I heard there were reports of hauntings in the abandoned village. They said a hunter from the mountains had taken a wrong turn in the rain. It was the middle of the night, and he saw the village from a distance, with lights shining in every house. But after he went around the mountain and reached it, he realized there weren't any lights at all. The empty houses had been abandoned for a long time, and there wasn't a trace of life in the entire village."
"After that, no one dared go there. The local mountain folk and hunters avoided the area, and over time, the rumors grew wilder and spread the story of the ghost village."
The long-buried memory stirred the fear deep in Manager Qian's heart. He kept wiping the cold sweat from his forehead; it didn't look like he was putting on an act.
It was unlikely that everyone in the entire village had died. From Manager Qian's description, it sounded more like they'd suffered an unprecedented disaster, and the survivors had no choice but to leave their homes and flee the fishing village.
Needless to say, this had to be connected to the ghost building deep in the lake.
But more than these bizarre stories, Jiang Cheng cared about the timing. The fishing village's catastrophe had begun on the night the treasures were exposed after the great ebb tide.
On the first night, the villagers went to collect the underworld wealth, and someone disappeared.
On the second