"Rustle, rustle, rustle~"
Ye Qianfan quickly crawled out of the yurt and entered the cave.
Soon, he saw countless Human-Skin Ghosts floating in midair, just like the Human-Skin Lanterns he had seen in Ghost Village.
But Ye Qianfan soon discovered...
Most of the human skins did not seem to be floating at all. Instead, they were hanging in midair, one after another, like strips of meat hung out to cure.
Most of the human skins already had designs inscribed on them. Ye Qianfan took a cursory look and found that most of the designs were quite intricate, rather like comic-strip illustrations. They seemed less like individual pictures and more like something telling a story!
Yet the more Ye Qianfan looked at those Human-Skin Paintings, the more alarmed he became!
Some of the pictures were incomplete, and there were no written explanations on the Human-Skin Paintings, so Ye Qianfan could only guess at the broad outlines!
The gist seemed to be this...
A band of fugitives wanted by the imperial court had fled to this remote place. The villagers here were simple, honest folk, and at first, they had no idea that these people were practitioners of sinister arts wanted by the court!
But the mountainous land here was barren, and their water supply depended entirely on a single village well, barely enough to keep them going!
Even getting enough food and drinking water was a struggle in their daily lives...
How could the villagers possibly spare that precious water to irrigate the barren, drought-stricken land?
Thus, both Riverside Town and Lower River Village under its jurisdiction barely scraped by growing hardy plants such as sweet potatoes and cacti.
Fortunately, they had a kind of cactus fruit here, with red skin, green leaves, and gray flesh.
If Riverside Town had not