Had he seen through me?
"When did you figure it out?" Qin Manjiang asked.
"Just now." The gloomy daylight fell across Shen Hai's face, making his already ill-intentioned expression even harder to read.
Qin Manjiang was speechless.
He bluffed me?
Still, it didn't matter.
"It's almost dark. Based on what you found out, was the Director telling the truth?" Qin Manjiang asked.
This was the question that concerned him most.
He had been in the Nursing Home the whole time and had learned practically nothing.
Shen Hai nodded and continued walking. "More or less. Everyone in this village is already dead. The Nursing Home you were in is very likely the only place with living people."
Shen Hai gave a rough account of his discoveries, as well as... the story he had heard from Xu Tingfang.
"Sick Village Records?" Qin Manjiang kept pace with Shen Hai, but his heart jolted. "That's the book Xu Tingfang found in the village Library?"
"You noticed it too?" Shen Hai seemed quite pleased with Qin Manjiang's reaction. He nodded. "That's right. Although we can't yet tell whether those books were hallucinations Xu Tingfang saw or things that really existed, the very fact that it could be preserved and made into a book is already wrong."
"Every Ghost Story must have begun at a point in time when something departed from the ordinary. For Sick Village, that point lies in the Nursing Home, with that missing old man," Shen Hai continued.
"I found a record in the Supermarket's account book. An old man went there and bought a large quantity of alcohol. According to Sick Village Records, alcohol can kill the 'Frog Eggs' virus before it infects a human host. But once it has infected a human, alcohol only becomes a catalyst, rapidly turning it