Double Happiness (VIII)

Yang Jian looked long and hard in the direction Ye Zhen had left. He knew what Ye Zhen was going to do, but he had to ensure that nothing went wrong in the process.

The next second, a full eight scarlet Ghost Eyes emerged on the enormous Ghost Shadow, and endless cold lake water poured rapidly out of them.

The Ghost Shadow stood immersed in lake water. Yang Jian was trying to overlap the eight Ghost Eyes. He wanted to restart this area, save Zhang Wei, and reverse everything.

During the incident in Dajing City when he had lost control, Yang Jian had used the Dead Man's Banner to briefly perform an area restart of four seconds, so he had long since made his calculations about opening an eighth-layer Ghost Domain.

But this time was different from what had happened in Dajing City. He was relying entirely on his own supernatural power.

The eight Ghost Eyes were about to overlap. Yang Jian was digging into the deepest, most forbidden power of the Ghost Eye. The red light around him was so dense it almost solidified, its redness utterly unnatural.

However, a sudden stabbing pain came from the eight Ghost Eyes before they could fully overlap. The pain was exceedingly strange.

Yang Jian was now an anomaly, with the Ghost Shadow as his body and a tattoo as his face. By rights, he should have felt no pain at all, yet he genuinely felt an abnormal stabbing pain coming from the Ghost Eyes.

The next second, without any warning, an uncontrolled red light erupted from Yang Jian, expanding wildly as though it had gone mad.

This supremely scarlet radiance blotted out the sky and earth, swallowing the graveyard and the village. Supernatural power filled this stretch of heaven and earth in a completely unreasonable fashion, and the red light was so thick it seemed about to drip like blood.

But this was not what Yang Jian wanted to see. The larger the Ghost Domain, the more it stimulated the Ghost Eye's revival. Yang Jian had to control its range, or he would die from ghost revival before he could even begin the restart.

His consciousness blurred. On the headless Ghost Shadow, the tattoo bearing Yang Jian's face grew dimmer and dimmer as he struggled to control the range of the Ghost Domain.

Gradually, the uncontrolled red light seemed to quiet down. No longer restless, it began slowly drawing back toward Yang Jian, bit by bit.

Yang Jian stared fixedly, calculating the Ghost Domain's range. Slowly, under his control, its range came to cover precisely this graveyard.

"That should do it..."

The next moment, the eight Ghost Eyes overlapped completely, and the forbidden act of reversing life and death began.

The scene began to rewind. The sound of the suona turned strange, and Zhang Wei slowly took a step backward.

Within this thick scarlet light, the entire world was like a film playing in reverse. Everything kept moving backward.

"A seventh-layer Ghost Domain can restart oneself, while an eighth-layer Ghost Domain can affect the things around me, just as I predicted."

His consciousness seemed on the verge of dissipating. Even under the Ghost Lake's suppression, the Ghost Shadow was gradually tearing apart. This forbidden power that could reverse life and death clearly demanded an enormous price.

In the first second, Zhang Wei's corpse took a step backward.

In the second second, the lifeless female corpse seemed unaffected by the restart and remained clamped tightly to Zhang Wei's back.

In the third second, the livor mortis on Zhang Wei's face rapidly disappeared.

In the fourth second, "Are you kidding me?!"

Just then, something bizarre happened. The female corpse that had been clinging to Zhang Wei's back actually climbed off him and walked toward the ornate dark-red bridal sedan chair.

From Yang Jian's perspective, the entire world was moving backward. Only that horrifying female corpse was walking toward the bridal sedan chair, step by step, as though the restart that could reverse time were nothing but a joke.

But the female corpse's behavior confirmed one thing for Yang Jian: Ye Zhen had succeeded.

"That's enough."

The red light dispersed, and the Ghost Eyes abruptly shut, falling dormant.

The enormous Ghost Shadow returned to his body. Water kept seeping from Yang Jian, leaving his entire body soaking wet, as though he had just been hauled out of the lake.

Yang Jian was in terrible condition. His entire body was filled with lake water, and there were faint signs that it was gradually beginning to dissolve.

The Ghost Lake's supernatural power was almost out of control, rapidly eroding him. But without its supernatural suppression, the Ghost Eye would revive during the area restart, killing him instantly.

Although Yang Jian was now an anomaly, that did not mean he was a ghost through and through.

As long as someone was a ghost rider, no matter what state they used a ghost's power in, they were never a true ghost. There would always be an upper limit.

Unless... someone could use some unknown method to become a special kind of existence. But that was a miracle almost impossible to bring about...

"Brother Leg!"

Zhang Wei sat slumped on the ground.

"I felt like I was about to die just now! Where's that female ghost?"

"She went to find Ye Zhen..."

"Then hurry up and save Brother Ye! I told you ages ago, even female ghosts care about looks when they get married."

Yang Jian stood where he was, doing everything he could to control the agitation inside his body. He needed time to settle the toll the restart had taken on him.

At the very same time Yang Jian performed the area restart, inside Ye Zhen's lounge on the top floor of Pearl Tower in Dahai City,

a huge transparent glass display cabinet against the wall held all sorts of anime characters.

The figurines on the top shelf had all rotted beyond recognition. Only those on the lower shelves still retained their original forms.

At that moment, dark-red blood was flowing from the remaining figurines.

The faces of the previously normal figurines all became hideously contorted at that moment. They began twisting and struggling eerily, as though suffering immense pain.

The next second, with a crash, blood burst through the entire pane of glass and splashed down...

Inside a room in the village courtyard.

Ye Zhen was holding the old Marriage Certificate, on which five large characters stood out starkly.

"The groom is Ye Zhen."

Ye Zhen was in terrible condition. His skin had rotted completely and was falling to the floor bit by bit, exposing sinister bones. Those bones were no longer white, but dark red, like bones on a dead person, like a corpse that had been dead for a long time.

The price for altering the contents of the Marriage Certificate so crudely was that Ye Zhen had to keep enduring its sure-kill attacks.

Although the Substitute Ghost kept transferring these sure-kill attacks away, Ye Zhen had used his supernatural power far too many times. As a result, the speed at which the Substitute Ghost transferred damage could no longer keep up with the Marriage Certificate's backlash at all. This could be described as an alternative, bizarre form of ghost revival unique to him, to the Substitute Ghost.

But Ye Zhen had survived. Despite his terrible condition, he had ultimately withstood the Marriage Certificate's backlash.

Ye Zhen stood up and tried to leave the room. But the moment he stepped outside the doorway, his consciousness blurred. When he came back to his senses, he was back inside the room.

Just then, footsteps so synchronized it was appalling rang out beyond the courtyard, mixed with the hurried sound of a suona, approaching the courtyard.

With so many people stepping on the ground at once, those synchronized footsteps produced dull thuds like a heavy object smashing into the ground.

Thud, thud! Thud, thud!

Thud!

The footsteps and suona abruptly stopped. Outside fell deathly silent. Ye Zhen could not see what was happening beyond the courtyard and could only crane his neck to look.

Suddenly, a shrill cry came from beyond the courtyard.

"The bride has arrived~!"