The weather was a little cold.
Li Gao's father folded his arms and rubbed them, then looked up at the sky.
He exhaled a cloud of white mist.
The moon had risen.
It was a full moon, too.
Under its light, the surrounding branches looked like ghostly shapes, their shadows mottled and indistinct.
Who knew what was hiding in that darkness?
After one glance, Li Gao's father looked away in fear.
He claimed he wasn't afraid, but when it came down to it, his nerve still faltered.
He had his own doubts about the secrets of the Li Family Ancestral Shrine.
Especially the location of the Li Family's clan shrine.
Other families' ancestral halls were either in the countryside or in urban villages within large cities.
After a family became wealthy, it wasn't unusual for its members to renovate an ancestral hall in the city center.
But...
The location of the Li Family's ancestral hall was far too unusual.
Their ancestral hall was in the mountains, deep in the mountain forests outside the city.
Even though a road had been built up the mountain decades ago, the Li Family Ancestral Hall remained deep in the woods.
After leaving the road, they still had to hack through brambles and clear a small path to reach it.
Although Li Gao's father didn't really believe in God or ghosts, seeing this ancestral hall still filled him with unease.
That unease mainly came from the contrast of seeing the Wilds-desolate ancestral shrine and its low, gloomy shrine while standing "outside civilization."
A clan shrine was a product of civilization, yet the Li Family Ancestral Shrine stood beyond civilization's reach.
He felt like someone banished from the mortal world.
His ancestral shrine existed in a place where it should never have existed.
Even the craftsmen