Chapter 57: Happy Event in the Mountain Village 17 Forced in the dim yellow curtain...
"I wonder where the family tree is hidden," An Rao looked up at the plaque, "Do you think it might be behind the plaque?"
"What do you think?" A rare faint smile appeared on Baichuan's face.
"But I always feel that it will be very dangerous in there..." After being ridiculed for being naive, An Rao began to try hard to save his face.
"Indeed, but there is nothing we can do about it," Baichuan said, looking at the door, "But there won't be so many death rules."
"The death rules are all in the Zheng family mansion. There shouldn't be any here," An Rao added. "Even if there are, they won't appear during the day."
"Yes," Bai Chuan nodded, put his hand on the door and looked at An Rao and warned, "Be careful."
"Squeak--" The heavy red lacquer door was pulled open, dim sunlight poured into the room, and the disturbed dust flew in the bleak light. There was a stale aroma unique to burning incense and candles in the room. An Rao squinted his eyes for a long time to adapt, and was barely able to see the scene inside.
The ancestral hall was very spacious, with golden silk curtains tied to four thick dragon-patterned pillars. On the wall facing the main gate were at least ten-layer stepped racks filled with vermilion tablets. On the altar in front of the tablet racks were placed food for ancestors, the same fruits as those placed on the square table in the main hall of the Zheng family: apples, peaches and bananas.
"There are only three kinds of fruits. Isn't that a bit too perfunctory for the ancestral temple?" An Rao bent over and stared at the six apples stacked in front of him like a pagoda and said, "Why is there blood on this apple?"
"Creaky-bang!" The wooden door was closed again, and the ancestral hall instantly fell into darkness. Only the flickering candlelight could barely illuminate the small space in front of them.
"Here they come." Baichuan and Anrao stood back to back, looking around vigilantly.
Only dust was dancing in the dim candlelight, and the empty ancestral hall was eerily quiet.
"Tick." A drop of cool liquid dripped onto An Rao's head. An Rao touched it and found that his hands were stained red.
An Rao looked up suddenly, only to find that the ancestral hall, which was so high that he could not see the top, was densely packed with corpses! White strips of cloth were tied around the necks of the corpses, neatly arranged above the ancestral hall. All the men and women had their hair loose, their heads drooped weakly due to broken cervical vertebrae, their mouths open with purple and swollen tongues hanging out, their eyes dazedly looking at the two people on the ground.
The breeze brought by the closed wooden door of the ancestral hall caused the corpses to sway gently, as if they were countless wind chimes hanging in the wind without their bells.
An Rao was stunned. Suddenly, in the dead silent ancestral hall, there was a faint sound of cloth strips breaking.
"Be careful!" An Rao pushed Bai Chuan away, and almost at the same time, a corpse fell from a height and hit the place where the two had just stood with a "bang". The whole corpse was instantly torn into pieces. His pale face was full of resentment, and he looked at the two people who broke into the ancestral hall with resentment in his eyes.
"Huh... Now we know why there were no outsiders at the wedding banquet of Village Chief Zheng." Bai Chuan got up and said as he looked at a card that fell from the clothes of the corpse.
"Bang!" Another corpse fell down, and blood splashed on the back of the hand of the previous corpse, immediately turning the pale back of the corpse's hand black.
"Run! They are poisonous!" An Rao shouted, looking up at the corpse hanging from the ceiling.
The corpses on the ceiling began to sway more violently, making rustling sounds, as if they were mocking the two weak humans in the ancestral hall who overestimated their own capabilities.
"Bang!" Another corpse fell down. Fortunately, Baichuan was quick to pull An Rao into his arms and escaped.
"The Zheng family is really xenophobic." Baichuan said coldly.
"With so many corpses, how can we possibly hide?" An Rao shouted.
"Bang!" Blood splattered everywhere, and black and red began to spread on the floor.
"Let's go to the memorial wall!" Baichuan said loudly.
"Xingfu Village is so xenophobic that it doesn't allow outsiders to enter, so the Zheng family ancestral hall must be even more forbidden to outsiders. The ghost bride killed all the outsiders and used their corpses to desecrate her own ancestral hall. The ghost bride must hate the Zheng family very much!" An Rao shouted while dodging the corpses falling from the sky.
"In that case, we don't have to be polite with the spirit tablets," Baichuan said, turning around and rushing to the stacked tablet racks. He picked up a tablet and threw it at the corpse hanging in the sky. "Instead of dodging them, it's better to knock them all down. Watch your step!"
The vermilion wooden tablet hit the head of a corpse, and the head and body were immediately separated. The corpse fell down with a "bang", and a severed hand almost fell at An Rao's feet.
"Good idea!" An Rao shouted, "Can you play billiards?"
"What?" Baichuan frowned.
An Rao didn't say anything. He flew over, picked up a spirit tablet and smashed it at a hanging corpse. He found the angle very cleverly, and the corpse was shaken to the side, and three corpses fell down with him!
Baichuan praised sincerely, "Great!"
"It's a must!" An Rao raised the corner of his mouth, standing in the safe area where the bodies had been dropped, holding a stack of spirit tablets in his hand, "I'll smash the bodies to protect you, you go find the family tree!"
For a moment, the ancestral hall was filled with the heavy sound of falling corpses, and soon it was filled with a strong smell of blood. Baichuan continued to move forward on the safe path that Anrao had opened up for him.
One concentrated on finding the family tree, the other concentrated on beating the corpses, and before they knew it, the two were being separated further and further by the falling corpses.
Suddenly, in the dim candlelight, An Rao inadvertently saw a severed hand on the ground slowly swimming towards another broken limb in the blood all over the ground, and then they unexpectedly stuck together in this unreasonable way!
An Rao:!
He immediately raised his head and looked into the distance, and found that the body parts originally scattered on the ground were now randomly moving towards the nearby body parts through the blood. The blood on the ground seemed to be some kind of strong glue, which strangely and illogically pieced together the various body parts, as if there was an invisible naughty child who was whimsically playing with building blocks.
Then, a large mass of corpses, which were pieced together in a hodgepodge, stood up shakily. There were three heads stuck to its body, and its only arm was covered with hands like tree branches. Its two twisted legs were covered with feet stuck to them. It walked towards Baichuan heavily and blankly.
"Baichuan, squat down!" An Rao shouted to Baichuan in the distance, then swung a spirit tablet towards the pile of corpses.
"Bang!" The corpse fell heavily to the ground, and the three heads let out a mournful wail at the same time.
This seemed to be some kind of signal. The corpses in the ancestral hall stood up crookedly one after another and walked towards An Rao and Bai Chuan. Soon, the two were separated further away by the strange-shaped corpses.
"Baichuan, I'm sorry I can't cover for you. Although I don't know you, I'm honored to have fought alongside you." An Rao only had two spirit tablets left in his hand. Staring at the horrific corpses that were gradually closing in on him, An Rao felt that he was in big trouble.
"Stop talking nonsense!" Suddenly a strong wind blew, and a ball of bright golden light swept down several horrific corpses in front of An Rao so domineeringly and brutally. Before An Rao could understand what was going on, Bai Chuan, who was hanging on the curtain, kicked away the last corpse in front of An Rao, picked up An Rao by the waist, and the two of them swung along the direction of the curtain's rotation to a pillar of the house.
"They are made of pieces of corpses and can't jump. If we are in mid-air, they will have no way to stop us. Hold on to me and wrap your legs around me!" After saying that, Baichuan kicked the pillar hard, and the two of them were pulled into the curtain and used the force to pass by the countless swollen and rotten hands that were stretched out to them in both directions, and swung towards the gate of the ancestral hall.
"Swish——" The curtain began to tear under the weight, it was bad!
A second before the curtain was completely torn apart, Baichuan stretched out his foot towards the vermilion lacquered door and, using the inertia of the torn curtain, kicked the door open.
"Plop plop!" The two of them flew out directly from the door.
"Cough, cough, cough!" An Rao's lungs were almost broken by the shock. He wanted to stand up but couldn't move. Then he realized that he was well protected by Bai Chuan when he landed. The two of them were tightly wrapped in a golden satin curtain, and were forced to touch their noses and rub their ears against each other in the dim yellow curtain.
An Rao: ...
Baichuan was only dizzy for a moment before he forced himself to wake up. He stretched out his hand with great effort and pulled the curtain hard: "I got the family tree. Let's get out quickly. This is too dangerous."
However, the curtain was wrapped too tightly and the fabric was too thick, so it was impossible to tear it apart.
"I'll do it!" An Rao quickly pulled out the golden dagger from his wristband, and the sharp dagger instantly cut through the curtain, but the moment he saw the light of day again, a pale, swollen hand grabbed An Rao's neck. In a flash, Bai Chuan snatched the dagger from An Rao's hand and stabbed it into the head of the corpse stuck to his chest.
"Puff--" The corpse trembled violently, and then broke into several pieces on the ground again.
“It seems that the only thing that can defeat magic is magic…” An Rao muttered to himself as he stared at the scene in front of him in amazement.
Bai Chuan didn't get the gag. He just quickly got up and ran back to the ancestral hall. He glanced at the various corpses that were still trying to get out and quickly closed the door that had been kicked open. Then, amid the heavy knocks on the door, he turned around and shouted to An Rao, "Come and help me hold the door!"
The banging sounds inside the door became louder and louder, making An Rao feel like his internal organs were about to shatter. It was not until Baichuan brought in several large stone pillars to block the door tightly that it stopped.
“Huh…” An Rao looked at the ancestral hall with lingering fear, “We have destroyed the ancestral hall like this, the villagers will not hunt us down, will they?”
"No, since the ghost bride hates the Zheng family so much, destroying the ancestral hall will only make her happy and won't make her angry."
"By the way, how did you find the family tree?" An Rao and Bai Chuan did not rush back to the Zheng family. Instead, they walked into the dense grove near the ancestral hall and watched Bai Chuan take out a piece of neatly folded yellowed paper and a small thread-bound notebook from his clothes.
"When you knocked the spirit tablets all over the place, I found it behind the top one," Baichuan said as he carefully unfolded the paper. "It was placed behind Taizu to beg for blessings for the whole clan."
A large piece of paper was unfolded, showing the Zheng family tree from the original Zheng couple to the bustling descendants of the Zheng family after they branched out. It was a spectacular sight.
"Village Chief Zheng is in his prime. Just look for the names in the second to third row from the bottom." An Rao's finger slid directly to the bottom of the family tree.
"Zheng Dafu... Wang Xueli... found them!" An Rao pointed at the names of a couple in the second to last row at the bottom of the family tree. "They have a son and a daughter. Judging from their ages and surnames, they must be these two!"
"A daughter, Zheng Baodi, and a son, Zheng Zhenbao." The names of the two children sounded even colder under Bai Chuan's cold voice. "Without Zheng Duoyu and Zheng Zhenzhu, this grand wedding is probably just a fantasy of the ghost bride."
"I agree with your original idea. This is all the fantasy of the ghost bride Zheng Baodi. She hates her brother, so her brother Zheng Zhenbao has become the hated fool Zheng Duoyu here, while she, who is not valued, has become the apple of everyone's eye, Zheng Zhenzhu." An Rao stared at the two names on the paper, and a cruel truth was revealed.
"But if it's just a fantasy, why can we find clues to the truth?" An Rao didn't understand.
"Because she is a ghost, not a god, she can only create illusions but cannot change the world. She cannot change the basis of the illusion, just like she cannot change the real walls and the scope of the village out of thin air, nor can she change the existing family tree." Baichuan's amber eyes looked even colder at this time, "She can't even change the appearance of her own house."
"But she changed everyone's mindset. She transformed a remote village that favored boys over girls into an open-minded society where men and women are equal and where daughters are favored." An Rao frowned.
"Because she killed everyone," Baichuan's voice was cold. "It's not difficult for ghosts to manipulate the dead. Have you forgotten the old woman who wanted to introduce you to a girlfriend?"
"Indeed, her anger is almost bursting out," An Rao nodded. "Since we are in the illusion created by the ghost bride, then where is the real Zheng residence?"
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