After Know-It-All left, the woman beside him calmed down again.
She continued murmuring softly to soothe the empty piece of cloth in her arms.
Meanwhile, Qin Siyang kept turning over the words Zhao Longteng had spoken, as relayed by Know-It-All.
Every word of that sentence conveyed Zhao Longteng's anxiety and anger, but it was not entirely devoid of information.
Qin Siyang focused on the last two words.
Ghost den.
"So, did Elder Uncle Zhao somehow figure out that everyone in Patterned Fox Village was dead?"
Qin Siyang had once suspected that everyone here was a phantom, but he had abandoned that idea after confirming that this was not an illusory realm.
As for them all being dead... that possibility had never even crossed Qin Siyang's mind. The people before him breathed, had heartbeats, sweated through their pores, and had blood flowing through their veins. Nothing about them looked dead.
Yet Zhao Longteng must have had a reason for saying that.
So Qin Siyang stared at the middle-aged man before him, studying him again and again.
"Outsider, why are you staring at me?"
Even after his stare made the middle-aged man uneasy, Qin Siyang still found no signs of a dead person on him.
He did not know what Zhao Longteng had noticed that prompted those words.
But Zhao Longteng certainly had more experience than he did, and his knowledge was much broader.
Qin Siyang decided to trust Zhao Longteng's judgment.
It was not that Qin Siyang distrusted himself in a life-or-death situation. A conclusion supported by clues was simply more reliable than one drawn without any leads.
Still, even assuming everyone before him was dead, it did not make sense.
The woman had said that after Zhao Longteng initially gave up on touching the fox, he had wandered around Patterned