Bai Liu looked up at the last mural on the ceiling.
This last mural is a long painting with a blood-red background and is rather blurry. It seems to string together the things that have appeared in the previous paintings.
The bride in the coffin jumped out, covered with a veil, and rode on the shoulders of some dark-faced people, walking somewhere with her wedding scarf swaying. Some ghosts with distorted faces were crawling on the ground beside the bride. Bai Liu looked back and saw some bamboo racks lifted high by the ghosts, on which were piled many wine jars like the one under Bai Liu's feet.
The wine jars seemed to be opened, and white arms were clinging to several of them.
Some of the pictures in the middle are blurry and it is hard to tell what is drawn. One can only see the inscription next to the picture: […In the Gengzi year, the Renchen month, the Gui ugly day, all things are not auspicious, the night wandering spirit leads the night patrol officers to kill anyone who enters the village…]
A line of small print next to it reads [Specific details are listed in the village calendar.]
The last one is the Taoist zombie. His left hand holds a peach wood sword pointing to the sky, and his right elbow is resting on the dust. Half of his face is that of a compassionate Taoist, pitying all living beings, and the other half is that of a fierce zombie with a green face and fangs.
Yiduan sat on the altar, and below the altar were countless twisted wronged souls and fierce ghosts. These resentful ghosts twisted and roared in the black smoke below the altar, and their swollen and drowned faces emerged one after another, pushing the altar forward towards the village entrance.
Countless people were vaguely standing at the entrance of the village. They were holding swords, axes, oil pans, torture instruments, and dragging iron chains. They wore some strange round-top hats and short black boots designed in the style of cows and sheep feet. They grinned and had hideous faces. They looked more like devils running out of the eighteenth level of hell than human beings.
Judging from their appearance, these little ghosts are the same ones who had previously taken the men from Yinshan Village away.
These little ghosts rushed straight towards Yinshan Village, and met the zombie Taoist priest who was coming out of the village entrance. The zombie Taoist priest frowned and glared, raised his sword and chopped down. The bride and her ghost minions also rushed forward and held down those little ghosts.
The two groups of people and horses seemed to have engaged in a fierce fight at the entrance of the village.
The painting behind became blurred again, and Bai Liu looked to the end of the mural.
The entrance to the village was filled with blood, and corpses and bones were everywhere. Only the Taoist priest was left, who had turned into a zombie. He supported his body with a sword, and stood in the middle of the village with a sinister and ferocious face. Black hair grew on his hands and feet, his fangs were bared, and his mouth was covered in blood.
The inscription on the side reads [The descendants of Yinshan Village abandoned their ancestral tomb and built this tomb for the (indistinct) Taoist priest and their ancestors.]
When Bai Liu finished looking at the last mural, there was no place for him to stand. The wine jar was pressed tightly against Bai Liu's calves, and he could kick it down with just one move.
The wine jar has a narrow mouth and a thick body, and the paper used to seal it is extremely thin. It has been left there for so long that if it falls to the ground, the paper will probably tear and the things in the wine jar will crawl out.
It's a secret room, and it's surrounded by wine jars. It seems that there is no way out.
Bai Liu calmly held up the candlestick and looked around, then suddenly stepped on a wine altar.
The wine jars that surrounded him shook a few times, gathered in the middle, and after colliding with each other, the wine jars seemed to feel that Bai Liu had disappeared from among the millions of them, so they stopped moving.
Bai Liu also stood there without moving. After a while, a human face appeared on the sealing paper of the wine jar.
The nose on the person's face on the paper was moving, as if it was sniffing Bai Liu's scent, and then the wine jars slowly moved towards the wine jar where Bai Liu was standing.
Bai Liu waited until these wine jars came close to the one he was standing on again, then he changed to another wine jar and continued to stand. He looked at these wine jars calmly and said to himself, "As expected."
These wine jars are filled with the corpses of drowned people, which are the "bodies" of the ghosts. The ghosts that escaped are just ghosts, and hundreds of millions of real corpses are still here.
According to Taoist theory, after the soul leaves the body, the corpse is just a corpse and will not take on a new form to do evil. In short, it is safe.
As soon as Bai Liu and his companions entered the tomb, they encountered many ghosts near the hinged door. This means that there must be many wine jars in the tomb that are "empty", that is, the wine jars after the ghosts left their bodies.
In other words, these wine jars will not move.
Bai Liu screened out the moving wine jars and chose the one that didn't move and stood on it. It didn't matter even if he stepped on the sealing paper of the wine jar and broke it, because there was only a dead body without a soul inside.
The moving wine jar was obviously trapped inside by the red string of the sealing paper. According to Taoist theory, these things are yin objects and need the help of the yang energy of a living person to break the mouth of the jar and see the light of day again. Therefore, the Yi people tried to use Bai Liu, a living person, to break the jar or the sealing paper.
If an ordinary person entered this side tomb chamber, as long as he moved a little, the wine jars would unknowingly block the other person's path and be kicked over. As long as the jars fell over, the things inside would come out as expected.
As long as there is a lackey coming out, in order to avoid this lackey, the people coming in will move more quickly and break more wine jars.
After this person's yang energy is exhausted, he will be consumed to death here by the ghosts and turned into a wine jar here.
This means that once you enter this tomb, you cannot move.
Bai Liu was a strange guy. After he came in, he looked at the murals for more than half an hour. No matter how close the wine jars were moved, he didn't move his feet at all. Only after Bai Liu had seen all the wine jars that had been moved in the tomb clearly did he calmly choose one of them and slowly stepped on it.
If you move it left or right, it will hit the wine jar, but if you move it up or down, it won't.
And now Bai Liu was moving on a plane higher than these wine jars. It was as if these wine jars were chasing him. The more these wine jars moved, the more conspicuous those immobile wine jars became.
Bai Liu remembered that when the candles went out when he entered the tomb, five ghosts imitating him appeared, five ghosts imitating Mu Sicheng.
Assuming that these ten ghosts all left from this side tomb chamber, we can infer that there are about ten altars in this tomb chamber that are safe.
Bai Liu scanned the immovable altars in the tomb chamber and found that there were exactly ten of them.
Although the possibility that his inference was wrong could not be ruled out, if one of the ten altars just didn't like to move, Bai Liu would be dead instantly if he stepped on it. However, Bai Liu felt that he didn't seem to care about this risk when doing things. He always went in the direction of the greatest possibility and the greatest benefit, and didn't care much whether he would die halfway.
Bai Liu felt like he was a consequentialist.
He glanced at the ten altars, connected them into a line with his eyes, and then paused.
These ten jars put together form a Chinese character "出", but this character is missing a dot, and has no protruding head. The dot is in the southeast direction, and moving jars keep "walking" back and forth at the position of that dot.
This feels like an institution that requires an altar in every location, but there are only ten immovable altars, and one is still missing.
Bai Liu raised his eyebrows slightly - was this forcing him to step on an altar with something on it?
As if they realized that Bai Liu was stepping on the altar, these dynamic altars became more and more restless. Deformed human faces kept appearing on the sealing paper, with their mouths wide open and roaring silently.
A chilly wind blew back and forth in the sealed tomb, and a disgusting odor of rotting corpses emanated from the altar.
Bai Liu took another step and turned onto a new altar.
The wine jar that Bai Liu had stepped on before was pushed by other moving wine jars the moment he raised his foot, and the seal was broken, revealing a twisted corpse curled up in the water.
The body was lying face up, its face so decayed that only a pair of eyes were intact. The eyeballs were misty, as if covered by a layer of gauze, and its swollen blue lips were open, staring outside with its eyes open in death.
These should be the corpses of those minions.
The power of the ghosts is doubled with the corpse. If these ghosts are allowed to directly drill out of the altar with the corpse...
After imagining the scene, Bai Liu estimated the fighting ability of each other. He objectively felt that he would most likely die here.
Bai Liu kept changing the wine jars as he was chased by them. The seals of the jars were damaged one after another. Bai Liu finally approached the southeast corner of the last missing point of [Out].
The wine jars were like a school of fish that had smelled bait, almost trembling and filling up in the direction of the last point of the exit.
Bai Liu stood calmly on the wine altar closest to the gap, looking around for a way to escape.
If he steps on the wine jar and there is no exit, and the things in the wine jar crawl out, Bai Liu needs to pay attention to the direction when chasing on these ten jars and not knock down other jars during the chase.
Bai Liu stared at the wine jars that were shaking in the southeast corner of the room. He quickly stepped on a jar and then turned around and stood on a jar in the corner, with his back pressed against the two walls.
The altar that was stepped on by Bai Liu shook twice, stood still, and then began to tilt slightly and irregularly in one direction. Five pale fingers slowly stretched out from the torn red sealing paper and slowly grasped the edge of the altar.
A head appeared. Yi's head was bent at 90 degrees and stuck horizontally in the altar, as if it was completely separated from the body. There was a sinister smile on the deathly pale face, and long, black, wet hair protruded from the altar. The rest of Yi's body and limbs were pulled out of the altar at a twisted and strange angle.
Bai Liu could hear the sound of bones creaking and deforming even when he was standing diagonally. He glanced at the walls on all four sides and sighed with regret in his heart.
It seems he guessed wrong, it's not what he thought.
At least for now, there is no mechanism in this side tomb that can provide Bai Liuteng with a door.
Bai Liu didn't think he had guessed wrong about the meaning of "out", as the hint was quite obvious.
But there is no [way out] now, unless... something is missing.
Bai Liu looked up at the ceiling. The platform where he was standing was right below the hinged door. The hinged door above him made a clanging sound.
Pitiful faces popped out from behind the trapdoor, and minions crawled in on all fours from outside the trapdoor.
Bai Liu clicked his tongue and thought to himself, as expected.
These eleven altars can only be opened if they are altars containing ghosts, so not long after he steps on that altar, the ghosts that have left will come back.
These returning ghosts were originally preparing to crawl towards Bai Liu, but not long after they came in, they seemed to smell something, and bloody cuts appeared on their faces, revealing a strange smile, and then they quickly crawled towards the ledges that were stepped on by Bai Liu.
Then, the ten altars that were stepped open by Bai Liu stretched out their pale arms and feet one after another and slapped the vermilion altar, and their twisting heads made a clattering sound of joints interlocking in the altar.
The eyes on the rotten face of the drowned corpse were staring straight at Bai Liu who was standing in the center, and the smile on the corners of his mouth was getting bigger and bigger.