"Hey, look! That corpse floating in the river-doesn't it look like the Corpse Retriever?"
After the thick fog dispersed, some spectators who had not managed to flee suddenly noticed the extra corpse in the river.
As more and more people looked over, someone noticed that the Corpse Retriever was no longer on his boat.
Meanwhile, the corpse he had been retrieving lay sprawled over the bow.
An uproar immediately broke out along the riverbank.
But it was not over yet. Soon, everyone witnessed something eerie.
The Corpse Retriever floated motionless in the river, yet his boat gradually approached the bank.
The dead person's family hesitated for a long while before gritting their teeth, boarding the boat, and carrying the corpse ashore.
Then they ran off with the corpse without looking back.
More and more people seemed to realize something and fled one after another, as though the corpse in the water would latch onto them if they were too slow!
What no one noticed was that one of those leaving did not head toward town, but followed the riverbank instead.
The person walking along the bank was none other than Chen Miao.
After dealing with the Corpse Retriever and his Water Ghost, Chen Miao had kept Water Binding active, weaving the hair into a huge net spanning the river's entire cross section, much like casting a net to catch fish.
After following the riverbank like this, stopping and starting for a little over an hour, Chen Miao left the riverside.
Not long afterward, Chen Miao saw the rewards for this side story in his notebook.
``` [Chapter twelve · Side story · Retrieving Ghosts (complete). Received: two taels and one mace of yin virtue, Water Ghost Memory Fragments ×6, Jiang Fan's (Corpse Retriever) Memory Fragment, one handful of incense sticks