Xu Taiping reached out and lightly tapped the bubble. A voice then came from the Jade Disc-
"The sky has darkened. Follow the plan we agreed on earlier: disguise yourselves as vicious ghosts and make those refugees spend the night in Maplewood Forest."
Hearing this, Xu Taiping immediately raised his head and looked at everyone with a solemn expression.
"They're here."
"Ah!"
An incense stick's worth of time later, in the dim Maplewood Forest, a refugee scouting ahead with a torch saw a corpse hanging from a tree up ahead. He screamed in fright and stumbled backward.
"What happened?"
The refugees behind him came forward to ask.
"Y-you... look for yourselves!"
The refugee scouting ahead pointed at the corpse in the tree.
Everyone followed his finger, and their expressions changed at once.
"Th-that isn't... isn't that Old Li? Old Li was right behind me just now. How... how did he end up hanged from a tree?!"
Someone recognized the corpse.
Once they recognized the corpse, even some of the refugees who had remained fairly calm began to panic.
"We... we should go back. Back to that abandoned residence we passed earlier. We can wait until daylight before trying to find a way out!"
Amid the panic, one of the refugees made a suggestion.
"Wait, look! There's writing in blood here!"
Just as everyone was about to retreat, a refugee standing beneath the tree with the hanging corpse suddenly pointed at a patch of trunk stripped of its bark and shouted.
Hearing this, everyone mustered their courage and looked back. Sure enough, there was a line of bloody writing on the tree.
"My household celebrates a joyous occasion. The mountain is closed for one day. Trespassers... die!"
Someone read out the bloody writing on the tree.
"Ah!"
Before the refugees