Lodging

About a minute later.

Faint footsteps came from the direction of the crumbling stone archway. Two groups arrived at the edge of the low-lying ground almost simultaneously: Green Wolf and his men, who had abandoned their pursuit of Chen Mo earlier, and another group led by Ghost Eye.

The two groups stopped some distance apart. The stench of blood in the air made everyone tense in an instant.

At the center of the hollow, the bodies of Lao San and two others lay sprawled. The blood around their wounds had not yet fully congealed, and gleamed with a chilling hue beneath the dark red moonlight.

"Lao Zhuang and the others..." one of Green Wolf's men, a fierce-looking fellow, murmured. His hand immediately went to the weapon at his waist.

Green Wolf raised a hand to stop his subordinate from doing anything further, then walked forward and crouched beside the stocky man's corpse to examine it carefully.

The wound was narrow and deep, its surface exceptionally smooth. It could not have been made by an ordinary blade or axe.

He examined the fatal wounds on the other two corpses as well. They had been inflicted in exactly the same way, precise and efficient.

"The wounds are strange." Green Wolf rose, his brow furrowed. "A thin blade, moving incredibly fast. They barely had time to react. And..."

He surveyed the area. Aside from signs of a struggle and traces of blood, the hollow was strangely pristine.

There were no additional, tangled footprints. That meant the fight had ended very quickly. It might even have been a one-sided slaughter.

"Nothing's been touched."

He meant that any valuable possessions on the bodies had been left exactly as they were.

One of Ghost Eye's men had finished inspecting the scene as well. He returned to Ghost Eye's side and reported in a low voice, "Boss, they're all dead. Each was killed with one or two strikes. Their belongings are untouched."

Ghost Eye said nothing. His eyes, as if capable of discerning the most elusive things, swept slowly over the scene.

Along with the stench of blood, the air seemed to hold a trace of an exceedingly faint, chilling aura.

His gaze finally settled on the depths of the Mass Grave Mound, in the direction where Chen Mo had disappeared. The darkness there was thicker, and the graves and withered trees loomed indistinctly, like a gaping maw ready to devour anyone who approached.

"Green Wolf," Ghost Eye suddenly said, his voice hoarse and flat. "What do you make of this?"

Green Wolf returned to his men and brushed off his hands, though there was no dust on them. The hearty smile he usually wore had vanished, replaced by a grave expression.

"We misjudged him. He's no fat sheep. He's a baleful star. Lao San and the others weren't exactly tough opponents, but whoever took them down did it cleanly. They barely had a chance to fight back. The one who did this... isn't ordinary."

He paused and looked at Ghost Eye. "More importantly, they killed the men but didn't take their belongings. Either they didn't think those things were worth anything, or..."

"Or they had something more important to do and just wanted to leave as fast as possible. Either way, it means our initial estimate was off by a mile."

Ghost Eye slowly nodded. His sinister face betrayed little, but a rare hint of apprehension flickered in the depths of his eyes. "Those methods are unheard of. Someone from the Rain-Listening Pavilion... Hmph. Hu San's courtesy might not have been mere courtesy. These waters are murkier than we imagined."

He turned away, no longer looking at the three corpses, and paid no heed to the depths of the Mass Grave Mound. "It's not worth crossing someone whose background we don't know for money we might never get. Lao San and the others brought this on themselves. They were fools who went ahead to test the waters."

At that, Green Wolf let go of his last glimmer of wishful thinking.

He had made a name for himself on the outskirts of the Ghost Market not only through ruthlessness, but also through caution and knowing how to read the situation.

The scene before him and Ghost Eye's assessment both confirmed the unease in his heart.

"Brother Ghost Eye is right." Green Wolf let out a breath. "We'd best not join in this excitement. Let's go. This place gives me the creeps."

The two groups had arrived quickly, and they left just as swiftly.

Without the slightest hesitation, they each led their men out of the blood-soaked hollow and headed back the way they had come. In no time, they had disappeared along the edge of the Mass Grave Mound.

Silence returned to the hollow. Only the night wind's wailing through the weeds and over the grave mounds, along with the cooling corpses, bore witness to what had happened.

The dark red moonlight flowed silently, making the pools of blood look even darker.

The wind had stopped at some point. Even the faintest insect chirp had vanished completely. Only the sweet, metallic stench of fresh blood lingered in the air.

The first sign of something strange came from the moonlight itself.

Moonlight spilled over the blood still wet on the corpses, and the dark red liquid began to writhe faintly, as if it were alive.

Wisps of chilly, yin earth energy seeped from the gaps between every grave in every direction. They gathered into visible streams of gray-black air, spiraling as they burrowed into the open wounds, mouths, and nostrils of the corpses.

Then, a sudden transformation took place.

The outlines of each corpse began to melt beneath the interwoven ghostly green and dark red moonlight.

It was not their flesh and blood that melted, but their shadows.

On the blood-soaked earth beneath them, the shadows that had been indistinct moments before suddenly turned black as ink!

It was as if an invisible brush, dipped in the thickest resentment, had forcibly sketched the flat shadows into twisted, three-dimensional forms.

Three writhing human-shaped shadows slowly peeled away from the backs of the three corpses.

They were pitch-black from head to toe. Only at the spots where their eyes should have been, two pinpricks of ghostly green phosphorescent fire glimmered, fixed on the direction Chen Mo had gone.

Chen Mo, leaving the Mass Grave Mound, knew nothing of what was happening behind him.

By the time he had fully left the Mass Grave Mound's territory, the night was still as dark as ink.

The dark red moon hung in the middle of the sky, its light eerie as it cast looming ghostly shadows from the sparse withered trees and desolate paths.

In the distance, toward Jin City, only a few scattered yellow lights were visible.

About half an hour later, a smattering of low, irregular silhouettes appeared ahead.

This was already the outskirts of Jin City, a borderland commonly known as the place no one governs.

The streets were empty and silent in the dead of night, utterly unlike their noisy daytime selves.

On both sides, the uneven gray-tiled houses and crooked wooden shacks had their doors and windows shut tight.

There were no rickshaw pullers, no vegetable sellers carrying shoulder poles, no beggars or idlers.

Only the occasional muffled sleep-talk or stifled cough drifted from the alleys, along with the faint nighttime wail of some neighbor's baby.

One or two stray dogs scavenged beside a garbage heap. Their green, gleaming eyes watched him warily from the darkness before they slipped away without a sound.

Chen Mo glanced over the dark doorways and side streets on either side, then turned into an even narrower alley. The faded paper lantern at its entrance was still lit, casting a hazy circle of yellow light that revealed the shadow of the character for "lodging."

The two wooden doors of the Yuelai Inn, the third house inside the alley, stood ajar. A faint glimmer seeped through the crack, as if the oil lamp on the counter had not yet gone out.

Chen Mo pushed the door open, and the smell of cheap tobacco and mildew hit him.

The room was dim. An old, battered counter stood against the wall, and behind it sat a gaunt old man in his fifties, puffing on a long-stemmed tobacco pipe.

At the sound, the old man lifted his eyelids. His cloudy eyes roved over Chen Mo, his expression blank. In heavily accented Mandarin, he mumbled, "Need a room? A bed in the shared room's five copper coins a night. A private room's fifty."

"A private room." Chen Mo took a handful of copper coins from his clothes and set them on the greasy counter, then pushed them toward the old man.

The old man pocketed the money, opened a drawer and tossed it inside, then fished out a brass key tied to a wooden tag and dropped it on the counter.

"The last room at the end of the second floor. Make your own bed. Get your hot water from the kitchen."

Chen Mo picked up the key. The wooden tag was engraved with "A-3."

He said nothing and turned to climb the steep, narrow wooden stairs beside the counter.

The stairs creaked as if they might collapse at any moment.

The second floor had a dim corridor, with small rooms divided by thin wooden boards on either side. Similar wooden tags and locks hung on each door.