Chapter 1 God of Joy
[There is something wrong with our world.]
As soon as Xia Bai opened the [Never Contact Each Other Again] group, he saw this message from Lao Wang in the group.
His eyes were blank, and he didn't know what he was thinking for a minute. When he looked down again, a lot of messages had popped up in the group, and almost all the elders in the group had popped up.
Lao Li: [You old fool, you usually don’t say a word, but when you come out you start talking nonsense.]
Lao Liu: [What’s the problem? Aren’t there already a lot of problems?]
Lao Qian: [I just put on my reading glasses, why are you talking again?]
Lao Wang: [I am very frugal with words, I don't usually say nonsense! Did you guys really not notice? Or are you just playing dumb?]
As soon as Lao Wang sent the message, there was a brief and meaningful silence in the group.
Xia Bai also fell silent, as if he was thinking a lot.
Lao Li: [Lao Wang, is this true?]
Lao Wang: [Really, the problem is getting worse and worse. Quanguang City should be closed tomorrow afternoon at the latest. You are already old, be careful and don’t let anything happen to you before you die.]
Lao Qian: [Quanguang City? Doesn’t Lao Xia live in Jiangqi City next to Quanguang City?]
Several elderly people in the group who knew how to tag others tagged Lao Xia, and those who didn’t know how to tag others also shouted at Lao Xia, asking him to pay attention.
Xia Bai came to his senses and responded immediately.
Lao Xia: [I see!]
After hearing what was going to happen in Quanguang City, their first reaction was to call Lao Xia who lived nearby. After seeing Lao Xia knew about it, they began to discuss why Quanguang City was being sealed off. Sealing off a city is by no means a trivial matter and will immediately cause an uproar in society.
Lao Lin: [I heard that many people died in Quanguang City recently. Is it because of some infectious disease that the city was closed?]
Lao Li: [Heard? Where did you hear that? Oh, you smelled a dead body, didn’t you?]
Lao Liu: [What era is this? Stop talking nonsense.]
Messages from the [Never Contact Each Other Again] group popped up at the top of the phone. Xia Bai searched for information about Quanguang City on the Internet for a while. When he clicked back to the group, Lao Wang was busy with something else. He only left a link and never appeared again.
The remaining few people probably didn't even click on the link and started arguing again.
Xia Bai was used to it, so he clicked on the link and started reading.
The link left by Lao Wang leads directly to a post with a simple date in the title: September 2, today’s date.
In the post, the original poster didn't say anything, just posted a few pictures, and the other people who followed the post also didn't say anything, just posted pictures. There was not a single word in the entire post, only pictures.
Based on the information about Quanguang City that he had just seen, as well as basic license plate numbers, landmark buildings, etc., Xia Bai found several photos of Quanguang City among these photos.
Lao Wang is right, Quanguang City may be closed.
The latest one was posted five minutes ago, just a few minutes later than when Lao Wang said this. It was a photo of the entrance to a national highway in Quanguang City.
Quanguan City is an ancient historical city. This entrance is built very much like a city gate, with two tall arched doors, one for entry and one for exit.
In the dark night, there were no bright lights on, and someone had already secretly laid a fence at the entrance.
There is no exit there, which seems to mean that from now on, people can only leave Quanguang City but not enter.
This photo happened to capture some people coming out. Some of them had calm eyes, some were excited, and some were ecstatic. Each of them was covered in blood. One person was soaked in blood from head to toe, with even blood dripping from his hair. He looked like a bloody man.
It was hard to imagine if he had bled so much, or if the people around him had bled so much, would they have turned into mummies, but each of them was intact, without even a scratch.
In the second photo, a dozen people were holding down something at the entrance of a popular internet restaurant. From the exposed hands, it looked like they were human beings, but their fingers were gray-purple and did not look like those of a normal person. One of them was injecting something into the wrist.
The third photo shows that outside the Quanguang City Wax Museum, many people are carrying things that look very much like human bodies. Those things are wrapped in black cloth bags, and it is hard to see what they are. This photo just happens to capture the scene of blood dripping from one of the black cloth bags.
Xia Bai looked at these photos carefully one by one. When he searched Quanguang City on the Internet just now, he saw that a lot of things happened in Quanguang City in the past six months. Many stores closed down one after another, and there were many deaths. Some people on the Internet said that Quanguang City was cursed.
In fact, you don't need to look online. As a neighboring city of Quanguang City, people here also discuss some bizarre events in Quanguang City. However, most of them are just gossip, which may make people nervous, but not panic.
These photos and Lao Wang's words opened a door for Xia Bai, allowing him to glimpse another world that had been tried hard to cover up, but was about to be uncovered.
Except for the ones in Quanguang City, the photos of other places in the post are the same, bloody and weird.
He entered this forum from this post. The name of this forum was also very simple, called September. There were only two posts in the entire forum, one was September 2nd, which Xia Bai had just read, and the other was September 1st.
It was the same on September 1st. There was no text, only photos like this posted by different people. Some of the photos showed the city location, but for most of the photos, no one knew where they were taken or where they took place.
There is a September forum, but are there any for August and July? When is the earliest time to start?
Xia Bai searched online, but found no trace of previous months.
When he returned to the [Never Contact Each Other Again] group, the quarrel was still going on. Xia Bai skillfully and calmly broke up the quarrel.
Old Xia: [It’s not an infectious disease. People are not allowed to enter Jiangqi City today, but people from Jiangqi City can leave.]
Lao Qian: [Right! If it is an infectious disease, it should be the opposite, only allowing entry but not exit.]
Lao Lin: [Why has Lao Xia become a little more reliable recently?]
Lao Liu: [In this case, Lao Xia, you have to prepare well.]
Without them saying anything, Xia Bai, with his mind full of those photos, had already run to prepare.
Instead of preparing food and water or taking any safety precautions, he went straight to the innermost room on the second floor.
The room was dark, the curtains were closed, and only a faint light shone through the door that had just been opened, which could not reach the depths. The cool air in the room, mixed with the smell of a special cinnabar, slid out against the light.
Xia Bai walked quickly to the bed and called out "Grandpa".
The person on the bed was extremely stiff, and a barely detectable spot of corpse was revealed where the light fell. Naturally, he was unable to respond to him.
Xia Bai was used to it and didn't expect him to respond.
He carried the old man on the bed and ran to the yard on the first floor, leaned him against the wall, went back to the room, pulled out a coffin, and skillfully placed the old man in the coffin.
He turned around and walked into the next room, and came out with a hoe. Standing at the door of the room with the hoe in hand, he looked up in the direction of Quanguang City in the night sky.
At nine o'clock in early September, the night was silent and the moon was hidden in the gray mist. The starlight was barely visible, and the thick darkness almost covered the sky and the earth.
Xia Bai gripped the hoe tightly, ran to the yard in a hurry, and started digging in the northwest corner of the yard.
The soil was not hard, much softer than outside, and with the humidity of the mountain village at night, it was easy to dig. A small pile of soil was piled up higher and higher at the feet, and the hoe suddenly stopped on a dark coffin.
They immediately changed the digging spot, and twenty minutes later, they stopped at a coffin.
They dug in another place and found another coffin.
He paused for a few seconds, then continued digging without giving up, disturbing another person.
Xia Bai opened his eyes a little wider. He didn't know when the moonlight leaked out from his eyelashes, lingering on his light brown pupils, dispelling the brief dullness in his eyes. He gripped the hoe tightly and started digging in another place.
Under the pale moon in the black sky, the thin boy dug in the yard. Small mounds of earth appeared one after another like graves. Finally, he found a hiding spot for his grandfather on the left side of the yard gate.
After burying his grandfather, he leveled the other piles of dirt he had dug out and used potted flowers to press down on everyone to hide them. Xia Bai finally breathed a sigh of relief at around one in the morning.
There is no new message in the [Never contact each other again] group. No matter how fiercely the elderly people quarrel, they can't last until 10 o'clock and have gone to bed long ago.
Most of the previous news was about how to prepare with Lao Xia. Xia Bai took a look, thought about it in his heart, and prepared to go into the house to wash up and go to bed.
As he stepped over the threshold of the house, he moved his ears and seemed to hear a rustling sound. The sound did not come from the grass or the treetops, but from underground.
Xia Bai slowly turned his head, and a gust of night wind blew past his face. After the wind passed, the yard was quiet. Several pots of old roses and osmanthus flowers with heavy branches lay steadily on the ground.
Still worried, after washing up, Xia Bai moved the tent located in the center of his room to the window, lay on the windowsill and watched for a while before slowly crawling into the tent.
A quiet night.
The next morning, before dawn, Xia Bai got up and rummaged through the drawers looking for money.
There was a paper bag in the bottom drawer of the closet, with tuition fees written on it. Xia Bai touched it, put it back, and locked it. He smashed the pink piggy bank that had been with him for several years, sorted the money inside, and put it into the small crossbody bag in front of him.
Last night in the [Old and Dead] group, they all asked Lao Xia to stock up on food and water, just in case. There was no shortage of food, there was grain at home and vegetables outside.
However, he was about to report to school, and it was not easy to bring these. So, although he didn't have much money, Xia Bai decided to go to the town to buy some instant food. In case something really went wrong, food might be more valuable than money.
Xia □□ was thinking carefully about what to buy, but when she opened the door, she was dumbfounded.
It was just daybreak and the morning mist at the foot of the mountain had not yet dissipated. A large earth pit was clearly visible in the yard through the mist. All the coffins in the pit were opened, and there was nothing inside.
Only the pit where my grandfather was lying was still intact; the bodies in the other coffins had disappeared.
Xia Bai hurried to the second floor, took out a string of copper bells, and stood at the second floor window and shook them. There was silence all around, and no one responded.
This morning, he searched the back hill and asked the neighbors tactfully, but there was no news about the dead body.
He still rode his electric stove to the town, but he didn't go shopping, but to the police station.
Qiaoyan Town is not considered a poor town in Jiangqi City. The infrastructure in the town center is well built, with supermarkets, hospitals and catering centers. There are two- and three-story buildings everywhere. The police station is in a three-story building with gray tiles and white walls.
The small building has a good height, and you can have a panoramic view of the entire street in front of the door from the second-floor window.
Old Yang was sitting here drinking tea and saw that the young man had been hesitating at the door of the police station for more than half an hour. The bark of the old poplar tree in front of the police station was almost peeled off by him, but he still didn't come in.
It's obvious that there's something urgent going on but he's embarrassed to speak up, which is why he's hesitating like this.
Old Yang walked down with the thermos cup in his hand, "Bring in the boy at the door and save the old poplar tree."
Xia Bai walked into the police station and sat in front of Lao Yang and a beautiful sister.
The beautiful sister asked him: "Little classmate, do you need our help with anything?"
Xia Bai sat obediently, with his hands on his knees, his head slightly lowered, not looking at their eyes, and nodded.
The beautiful sister looked at him and her tone became gentler, "What's the matter?"
Knowing that he had been standing outside for a long time without coming in, she thought that something must be bothering him, so she said gently, "Don't be afraid. You can tell us anything. We will help you as soon as possible if we can."
Perhaps this sentence touched him, Xia Bai spoke up, "I lost something very important, can I come to you?"
"Of course." The matter was not as complicated as the pretty sister thought. She thought that the boy was reluctant to come in because he was bullied, such as being harassed by gangsters outside the school and threatened not to tell anyone. She still asked enthusiastically: "What's missing?"
Xia Bai: "Mine... is lost."
The two words in the middle were spoken very lightly and quickly, and neither Lao Yang nor the beautiful sister heard them clearly.
Pretty sister: "What's missing? A child or an old person? What's his name?"
Xia Bai rubbed his index and ring fingers on his knees and lowered his head, "God of Joy."
Old Yang didn't react for a moment, and the beautiful sister asked patiently: "God of Joy? Is it the name of a person who has lost his temper? Very unique. Oh, Xi is not a surname, right? What is your surname?"
Xia Bai stopped talking.
"puff!--"
Suddenly, Lao Yang spat out a mouthful of tea. He spat out the tea residue in his mouth and asked loudly, "God of Joy? You mean your...God of Joy?...left? Lost?"
Xia Bai nodded obediently.
Old Yang opened his eyes wide, "Where did your God of Happiness go missing?"
Xia Bai: "Home, No. 152, Minshi Village, in the yard."
Old Yang was at a loss for words, "You put the God of Happiness in the yard?"
Xia Bai nodded again, keeping his hands on his knees obediently, like an obedient elementary school student.
Old Yang looked at him strangely, "Is there anything good around the God of Joy?"
Xia Bai finally stopped nodding and shook his head.
Lao Yang asked: "How do you know it was lost and not stolen?"
Xia Bai answered seriously: "From the scene, it seems that they came out on their own, and there are five gods of joy. If someone came to steal so many, I should be able to hear it."
This supplement was drowned out by Lao Yang's loud voice, "What? You have five happy gods?!"
He looked at Xia Bai with difficulty in explaining.
The pretty sister had not been on the same wavelength with them for a long time, and now she finally had the chance to interrupt, "Wait, what are you talking about? What exactly is this God of Happiness? Why are there five of them?"
Xia Bai opened his mouth, but still couldn't say anything.
The pretty sister pulled Lao Yang's sleeve, "Teacher Yang?"
Old Yang looked at Xia Bai with strange eyes and said to the beautiful sister: "Have you heard of corpse chasers?"
The beautiful sister nodded, "I heard that there were many corpse chasers in Jiangqi City in the past?"
"Yes." Old Yang said, "The corpse drivers in Jiangqi City usually respectfully call the corpses they drive the God of Joy."
"Huh?" The beautiful sister didn't react. She turned to look at Xia Bai blankly, "What are you talking about? Five of you are missing?"
Xia Bai lowered his head even more, "Corpse, my corpse is lost."
The beautiful sister was even more confused. Her hands on the keyboard got stuck in the gap between the keyboards, and a series of h's were typed out, and a bunch of "HAHAHAHAHAHA" was displayed in the input method.
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