"": 200,
"": "",
"": "Within Nanping City stood a mountain surrounded by urban development.
A cemetery occupied its front slope, its graves arranged in neat rows, the orderly gravestones giving off a faint gleam in the night.
Phosphorescent flames flickered where the yin energy was heavy.
The wind hissed, sweeping up a few sheets of spirit money that crackled in the air, adding a hint of unrest to the night.
A gravekeeper was making his nighttime rounds through the cemetery.
Behind the mountain, a three-meter-high wire fence divided the cemetery from the ordinary land beyond it.
Partway down from the summit, just above the mountainside's midpoint, a cluster of villas stood among the trees on the slope.
Inside the villa at the very center.
Eight people sat around an oval table.
Their builds varied wildly: tall, short, fat, and thin.
Without exception, they wore hoods of different designs.
A black-and-white skull, a cat's face covered in scratches that looked like torn flesh, a dog's face with its lips peeled back to expose sharp fangs, a strange, featureless face like a tightly stretched layer of skin... and more...
The person at their head was the strangest of all. His hood bore the cheek of a young child. The hood was large, and the face looked as though it had been pasted onto it, stretched taut.
"Number 9 has returned to the city. She's staying with someone from a collateral branch of a Judicial Executor's family under the Nether Market. His name is Luo Feng. His entire family disappeared thirteen years ago."
"The whole family came back together, and they brought her with them."
The speaker was the man wearing the cat-face hood.
These hoods were not woven from cloth. They were actual cat and dog faces.
That included the child's