Opera Lady
Amid the wreckage that littered the compound, the main hall alone was spotless.
Facing the entrance stood an offering table, set before a wall as white as a snow cave.
Behind the table, an ancestral portrait covered almost an entire wall. On the great painting, portraits of the Zeng clan's ancestors, from the most distant forebears to the present, were arranged in order.
An ancestral portrait was a painting of one's forebears, ancestors and fathers.
Such portraits were usually hung in ancestral halls for descendants to pay their respects and make offerings, and were rarely shown to outsiders.
Yet the owner of this "Zeng residence" had hung the ancestral portrait in the front courtyard's main hall, a room meant specifically for receiving and seeing off guests.
The surrounding rooms had either collapsed or been left in disarray. Only the main hall had been swept perfectly clean, lending it an air of strangeness.
The main hall, which should have been used to receive and see off guests, was also plainly serving as an ancestral hall, making the place even stranger.
Standing inside the central hall, Ding Ling felt a chilling draft sweep around her.
She managed to suppress her instinct to turn and flee. Following Mr. Zhou's instructions, she picked up the "Zeng clan genealogy" from the offering table and leafed through it as she listened to Zhou Yang speak:
"How strange...
"The writing beside the ancestral portrait on the wall says that it depicts the Zeng clan's ancestors.
"The genealogy belongs to the Zeng clan too, so why is there a spirit tablet for 'Lady Ding Jiu' on the offering table?
"Who is this Ding Jiu? Why is she called 'Lady'?"
The pages of the genealogy turned one by one.
Ding Ling glanced up without thinking and looked at the spirit tablet on the offering table, red as rouge.
Her gaze tightened, then hesitantly moved upward.
Behind the tablet, the last figure in the ancestral portrait was a man with a fair, unadorned face and long, slender brows and eyes.
The man listed last in the ancestral portrait was named "Zeng Laifeng," with the courtesy name "Guiyun." Beside the other ancestors' portraits were written their generation and rank within the Zeng clan.
Only beside Zeng Guiyun's portrait was there nothing but his name, with no generation or rank.
There was no portrait of a wife or partner beside Zeng Guiyun, either.
The tablet of "Lady Ding Jiu," however, stood just to the right of his portrait.
"Zeng Laifeng, courtesy name Guiyun, eighth-generation descendant of the Zeng clan, aged eighteen, entered in the genealogy, no illness, no calamity..." At that moment, Zhou Yang slowly read out the writing on the last page of the Zeng clan genealogy.
He paused, then sharply drew in a breath. "No, that's not right!
"This Zeng Laifeng was entered in the genealogy-he didn't die!
"The genealogy lists the names of all the men of a clan, whether they're alive or dead. If someone dies young or passes away, that's recorded in the genealogy too, but there's nothing like that for Zeng Laifeng!
"Either he was the last of the Zeng family, and after he died, there was no one left to add anything to his entry, or he's still alive today!
"If he died and left the Zeng clan without an heir, how could his portrait have been included in the ancestral portrait?
"And if he's still alive, how could his portrait have been included in the ancestral portrait?!"
Whether "Zeng Laifeng," the last man named in the "Zeng clan genealogy," was dead or alive, his portrait should not have appeared in the ancestral painting before them!
Looking through Ding Ling's eyes, Zhou Yang abruptly raised his gaze to the Zeng clan's ancestral portrait that covered the wall. The appearance and bearing of everyone in the painting seemed full of a sinister, uncanny air!
Zeng Laifeng, at the very end of the painting, seemed especially sinister to him!
The portrait of Zeng Laifeng, rendered with less than masterful brushwork, now seemed to Zhou Yang to have its eyes open, as though it were about to come alive!
A piercing chill swept over Ding Ling's back in an instant, and Zhou Yang felt it with her!
The chill even threatened to freeze their thoughts!
"Ghost Rhyme..."
In this compound, where no Ghost Rhyme had clung before, it suddenly became overwhelmingly strong!
Zhou Yang's mind shook, and in an instant he took control of Ding Ling's body!
"Waaaaah-"
Pitch-black anthills appeared all over Ding Ling's body, and the sound of weeping ghosts burst from countless holes!
"She" spun toward the entrance. The door to the central hall had closed at some unknown point.
A figure stood in the darkness outside.
Snatches of conversation drifted in through the crack in the door.
Listening closely, the speech had a measured cadence-it even employed the stylized recitation of opera!
"Once you've put up the Opera Lady's tablet, you have to listen to and learn more opera. Only then can you bring the Opera Lady's skills over to yourself...
"Have you learned any new operas lately?"
The man's voice was unhurried, every word as clear as a pearl dropping onto a jade plate.
A woman's voice began to sing in lilting tones:
"'My beloved dwells within my heart, while I am left heartbroken; the moon alone knows my aggrieved state...
"'Meeting is hard, parting easy, ah, and regret comes too late;
"'Do you not recall the joy of being paired like phoenixes that day...'"
Though the woman's voice was melodious, traces of a man's voice kept slipping through unwittingly.
The faintly discernible man's voice was somewhat similar to the one that had spoken earlier.
Listening to the operatic voice, neither quite male nor female, the man spoke with deep feeling. "There's already a woman's quality to that voice.
"We're almost there...
"Almost ready to exchange ourselves for that Opera Lady."
The voice that sounded both male and female replied, "It's still a pity, though. A pity our comprehension is too poor and our horizons too narrow. Otherwise, we could blend all the schools of opera together, devise something original, and compose a new opera the Opera Lady has never heard before. If we could captivate her, we could turn this skin of ours inside out and wear our clothes in reverse much faster.
"Once we've turned this skin inside out, our voice will sound entirely like a woman's..."
Zhou Yang poked a hole in the paper covering the window.
Through the little hole, he saw a figure in the debris-strewn courtyard, dressed in a huadan's gaudy opera costume and wearing kingfisher-feather ornaments and tassels on her head. With her back to him, she faced the empty air, painting her brows and touching up her lips.
Every movement she made was exquisitely graceful, imbued with a completely natural bearing.
That bearing even masked the stench of a corpse emanating from "her."
As well as the man's build and frame that the opera costume could not conceal.
The voices of the man and woman in conversation had both come from "her" mouth.
"She" did not seem to have noticed Zhou Yang hiding in the main hall.
"She" finished painting her brows and eyes and was adjusting the round ornaments at her temples when her shoulders suddenly twitched.
A man's voice, deliberately pitched high to imitate a woman's, came from "her" mouth, with a touch of operatic cadence. "Who-is it?"
As "she" spoke, "she" turned her head a hundred and eighty degrees.
A face with peach-colored cheeks and almond eyes looked straight at Zhou Yang behind the doors and windows.
The beauty smiled charmingly.
"Bang!"
The sound of something heavy hitting the ground scattered the flowerlike beauty beyond the hole in the window paper.
The huadan beauty, whose face had been turned toward Zhou Yang, suddenly turned her head back into place and began to sing mournfully. Before Zhou Yang could make out what it was singing, a faint, unreal sound rang out in the distance:
"Bang!"
Once again came a sound like something heavy hitting the ground!
The sound rippled in his ears, overlapping in layers like waves!
His vision went black in an instant!