Worship the Lady (18)

Bo Yi's breath caught.

He stared into those deathly pale, bloodless faces for a few seconds, then began slowly backing away without betraying any reaction.

Thud. His back struck something.

The dull impact echoed eerily. Only then did Bo Yi notice that he seemed to have fallen into a cave. It was pitch-black inside, with only a little light slipping past the leaves through the small opening overhead, barely illuminating the cave's contours.

Once his eyes finally adjusted to the darkness, Bo Yi realized that what he had bumped into was an enormous coffin. The faces densely covering the walls were not actual human faces, either, but black-and-white memorial portraits.

Those pale faces hung on the semicircular rock wall, gazing silently ahead without expression. That was why Bo Yi, standing in the middle of the cave, had gotten the impression that all those "people" were watching him.

Beneath the black-and-white photographs stood enormous coffins. None had been buried; they were simply lined up out in the open on the ground.

Bracing himself against the coffin he had bumped into, Bo Yi got up off the ground. But as he withdrew his hand, his fingers seemed to brush against something on its surface.

Hm? He slowly moved his fingers back. It seemed to be... a small, round hole...

A hole?

And a hole in the surface of a coffin...

A realization suddenly flashed through Bo Yi's mind-

This was a hole left by a nail!

So... He slowly lowered his head, feeling the smooth coffin beneath his palm.

Although the white cloth covering it had already been removed, after circling the coffin in the dark and finding several nail holes on its surface, Bo Yi confirmed his suspicion-

It seemed the coffin they had seen in the villagers' funeral procession had been brought here.

"Hey? Bo Yi?"

A round object suddenly appeared at the cave's only opening, blocking its sole source of light. "Bo Yi, are you in there?"

It was Song Yunyi.

Bo Yi answered him.

Song Yunyi audibly breathed a sigh of relief. "Phew... as long as you're all right... How did you suddenly fall down there?"

"Whoa, it's pretty deep in there." His head moved away from the opening as he looked around, presumably searching for something he could use nearby. "Hang on. I'll go find something to get you out."

The footsteps gradually faded, and the cave fell silent again. Bo Yi looked at the coffin beside him, then at the shovel that had fallen down with him a short distance away. Since I had nothing else to do...

Why not open a coffin?

He walked over, picked up the shovel, and chose a coffin at random to work on. Only once he actually started did he realize that these coffins were in a completely different league from those in the woods outside. Though he could not see very clearly, he could tell by touch alone that the materials were far better. Their surfaces had been carefully polished and felt exceptionally smooth. The wooden boards fit tightly together without a single gap; Bo Yi had to feel around the edges and corners for quite some time before he even located the lid.

The dull scrape of shifting wood echoed through the cave. With some difficulty, Bo Yi pushed the heavy lid aside, and a somewhat sickly-sweet smell drifted out.

The smell was even a little familiar. Puzzled, he turned to look inside the coffin.

"!"

There was no body laid inside this finely crafted, heavy coffin. Instead, it was filled to the brim with clear, transparent liquid. Floating in that liquid was a pair of arms so fresh they looked as though they had just been chopped off a body. Disturbed by the opening of the coffin, the arms bobbed on the surface as though they were alive.

Was this an isolated case... or were arms the only things buried in these coffins?

He turned his gaze toward the other coffins nearby.

This coffin contained arms...

This coffin contained arms, too...

This coffin also-huh?

Bo Yi stared at the coffin before him in surprise.

This one actually contained an entire corpse! "Entire," rather than "intact," because there were two separate things inside the coffin-a pair of arms and a body without arms.

Perhaps because he had already seen this liquid restore shriveled corpses-or arms-to their original state, Bo Yi was not surprised by how lifelike the body looked, as though it were merely asleep.

What surprised him was that he had seen this face before.

Just last night.

Since this was someone I "knew"... He remembered the other memorial portrait hanging beside this one, along with the only two empty coffins in the graveyard outside, and slowly turned his gaze toward the adjacent coffin.

Before pushing the lid open, Bo Yi deliberately ran his hand around its edge. Sure enough, he felt signs that it had been opened before. And once he pushed the lid aside, he found exactly what he had expected: another "familiar" face he had seen on the wall.

In that case... those two unusual empty coffins in the graveyard outside belonged to this married couple.

Bo Yi casually perched against the side of the coffin and began reviewing and analyzing the clues he had gathered that day:

There were two graveyards on the village's Back Mountain. The one outside was rather slapdash, used to hold bodies whose arms had been chopped off. The "graveyard" the villagers actually patrolled and guarded was probably this cave, where the severed arms were buried. And the villagers took the arms to the Lady's Temple... Wait!

Bo Yi slowly furrowed his brow.

If the arms behind the Maiden Statue in the temple came from here, then the numbers didn't add up-

There were too many arms.