Chen Ge crawled out of the tunnel and looked around.

There were no windows in the house, and not far from the tunnel entrance were a few poultry that had just died.

"She used poultry blood? Can this fool evil spirits?"

Chen Ge could faintly hear the cry of a baby and walked up the stairs to the second floor.

It is obvious that this is a woman's room. There are simple furniture in the room. The difference from other houses is that there is no coffin in this room, but a wooden bed.

Lifting the thick bed curtains, several bamboo baskets were placed side by side on the wooden table, and a piece of grass leaf was placed in the mouth of each baby in the basket.

The grass leaves seemed to have a calming effect. Although the babies were separated from their parents, they did not cry too much.

"This woman surnamed Zhu takes the child away every time. Is she actually trying to protect the child?"

Soon Chen Ge found a notebook under the pillow of the bed. When he opened it, he saw a name and address written on it.

The person who wrote these things may have a limited knowledge of characters, and symbols were used to replace many places.

"The woman surnamed Zhu outside looks to be in her thirties or forties, but this book is yellowed and worn, and it feels like it is from many years ago." Chen Ge held the book, but he couldn't understand the words on it. They looked like Chinese characters, but most of them were unrecognizable. "The address is very blurry, but I can make out a few names. Could they be the children who were rescued?"

"You are right, they are all the children I sent away." An old lady's voice suddenly came from behind him, and Chen Ge immediately turned around with the tape recorder in his hand.

"I'm the one you should be afraid of, right? Or do you think I, an old man with one foot half buried in a coffin, can pose a threat to you?"

The sound seemed very strange because of the lack of teeth. Singer Chen took the recorder and walked into the house. He saw an old lady with a severe hunchback and wrinkles on her face in the compartment on the second floor.

She lay sideways on the wooden floor of the cubicle, her leg muscles atrophied and only her head and one arm could move with some effort.

"Who are you?" The old man looked very old, and Chen Ge couldn't help but address him as "you".

The old lady looked at Chen Ge and grinned: "I am a person favored by evil spirits."

Chen Ge's head buzzed when he heard this. The words the old man said were very familiar to him!

"You make me feel very close to me, kid. You must have dealt with them before." The "they" the old man was referring to were naturally evil spirits.

"Yes, not only have I interacted with them, I have also built a home specifically to house them."

"Then you are much better than me." The old man tried hard to express his kindness: "Sit down, I didn't hear the door open, you must have run in from the ancestral hall tunnel, I guess you were planning to take the baby away secretly during the sacrificial ceremony?"

"Yes, I have this plan." Chen Ge did not approach the old man, but put down the recorder in his hand.

"Just as I thought, people who are favored by evil spirits must have qualities that even ghosts recognize." The old man's voice was flat, but it made people feel comfortable listening to it.

"Qualities recognized by evil spirits?"

"kindness."

The old woman nodded with difficulty, and under Chen Ge's questioning, she recounted exactly what happened that year.

It was basically the same as what Ah Qing said, the difference was that the evil spirit the old man was talking about was not one that killed and retaliated without restraint, and there seemed to be a trace of residual emotion.

The old man had saved the female ghost three times, and the female ghost agreed to help the old man do three things that were not excessive.

Normally, she would treat the elderly specially. For example, she would never enter the elderly’s house. When other evil spirits appeared in the village, as long as they threatened the life of the elderly, the female ghost would appear and kill them.

"She massacred the village, killing all the evildoers. I can understand all of this, and even feel happy about it. But what happened later made me feel that something was wrong." The old man was in poor health and had to take a break after speaking for a while: "A red door appeared in the house where she originally lived. Only she could push open this door."

"After slaughtering the village, she let go of her obsession and was about to leave. Before leaving, she wanted to go inside the gate to take a look, but that's when she saw something wrong."

"When she came out of the door again, she was full of hatred and her eyes were full of malice. She had completely become a different person."

"I don't know what she encountered inside the door, but I know that she is full of malice towards everything. She plans to imprison the descendants of evildoers here, so that they can only be monsters for the rest of their lives. Even all normal people are unforgivable in her eyes."

There was a hint of deep pain in the old man's voice: "I don't have the ability to stop her. I can only use my own methods to save some innocent children when she goes crazy."

"As you saw today, she wakes up once a year and enters the world behind the door. If these children were left anywhere else, she would kill them. They can only be guaranteed to be safe here with me."

"Just get through this night, and when she comes out of the door she will fall into a deep sleep again."

The old woman didn’t know what was behind the door. She only knew that the female ghost would go to the world inside the door at this time every year.

"Then why don't you run away? Leave the village." Chen Ge said.

"Anyone who drinks the water from the well cannot escape it and will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives. That's why I only save newborn babies."

"Lifelong entanglement? But I heard that more than ten years ago, some people in your village escaped, and nothing happened to them." Chen Ge was talking about Jiang Ling's father and others.

"It was an accident. One day more than ten years ago, she went through the door and did not come back that night."

"The villagers spent a month in fear, and when they found she hadn't returned, some thought she might have died on the other side of the door."

"There were two opinions in the village at that time. One was to stay in the village peacefully, and the other was to take the opportunity to escape."

"Later, some people whose physical deformities were not obvious secretly escaped. On the third day after they escaped, she came back."

"Among those who escaped were my descendants. I begged her to let them go, and I spent two favors to keep them safe for twenty years."

The old man's cough became more and more severe. Chen Ge did not dare to ask any more questions. He had already learned enough from the old man.

"Grandma, you should have a good rest. I won't disturb you. I want to take one of those children away. This is an agreement between me and someone in your village."

Chen Ge turned around and prepared to go to the bedside to look for Aqing's child. Before he took a few steps, the old man's voice came from behind him: "Actually, I called you here for another reason."

"Is it related to the female ghost who jumped in?" Chen Ge had already found the baby with a copper coin hanging around its neck. It looked very cute.

The old man shook his head and stared at Chen Ge's face: "Have you noticed that your body temperature is slowly getting lower?"