Ten Thousand

But what difficult or complicated illnesses could there be in the slums? Even if there were, they would have died of sickness long ago. How could they still be alive now?

"No, there is, but... that person doesn't live here."

Wen Xu immediately turned toward the voice. "Doesn't live here? Then where does he live?"

The speaker was a thin, frail-looking beggar with a tangled mess of hair. Stared at by those eyes, he unconsciously told the truth. "In a small village outside the city. Anyway, it's pretty eerie. These past few days, none of us have dared pass by there."

"Eerie? Interesting. Tell me about it."

The beggar scratched his head. "It's just really strange. Back when we couldn't beg enough food, we'd often go into the mountains to pick wild fruit to eat. The road into the mountains passed through that village. One night, I was too lazy to come down and fell asleep in the mountains. In the middle of the night, I heard a female ghost screaming! It was miserable, far more miserable than a woman screaming while giving birth."

Hearing that, Wen Xu revealed an intrigued expression. "So the patient you mentioned lives in that village? What illness does he have?"

"This person has Old Sickness. I only heard it from someone else, actually."

"Old Sickness?"

"Yeah. He should only be nineteen this year. He used to be a famously handsome young gentleman throughout the nearby villages, but do you know what? Now he's practically older than a fifty-year-old man. All his teeth have fallen out, barely any hair is left on his head, and they say he looks terrifying now."

"You make it sound so real. Have you seen him yourself?"

"A friend of mine saw him, but that friend fell to his death