Chapter 65 The wrongful death summons must mean something bad has happened!
Already enraged, Huang Dashan, upon hearing this seemingly logical but also inflamed argument, had no time to ponder it. He flew into a rage, vowing to tear Old Zhang apart: "I'll kill you!"
"Hold him down!" Bai Yuan ordered, and Zhou Yaren used half her strength to subdue Huang Dashan to the ground.
Seeing his uncle being beaten, the young man next to him grabbed a weapon and stepped forward, shouting, "What are you doing?!"
Zhou Yaren reassured everyone, "Please don't act rashly. We can't just stand by and watch him kill someone, can we?"
Bai Yuan said, "Huang Xiaoyun has been dead for more than two years. According to common sense, her body should have turned into bones long ago, but this severed arm has not decomposed much."
These words calmed Huang Dashan, who was filled with grief and indignation, down to a degree. He stared intently at the severed limb.
Zhou Yaren bypassed Old Zhang, who had wet his pants, and approached Bai Yuan, pointing with her bamboo cane: "This severed hand..."
Bai Yuan dodged Zhou Yaren's outstretched hand, holding the severed arm away to prevent her from touching it: "This severed hand was tortured before it died."
Zhou Yaren grabbed at empty air and withdrew her hand, hearing Bai Yuan say, "The needle is still stuck in the finger bone and hasn't been removed yet. It was also subjected to a clamp during this time. All the fingernails have been pulled out and are completely ulcerated, but the bloody, mangled fingers are mixed with dirt, indicating crawling on the ground. Furthermore, there are several deep ligature marks on the wrist," Bai Yuan judged, "Perhaps during the torture, the person whose arm was severed struggled violently, and the rope tore through the skin of their wrist and neck..."
Having endured such cruel torture with just one severed hand, the original owner is probably no longer recognizable as human.
Bai Yuan stared at the trembling Old Zhang, his eyes sharp as blades: "Did you do it?"
Old Zhang was shocked: "What?!"
"Did you and your husband do it?"
Old Zhang's bulging eyes seemed to be held back by countless bloodshot veins woven into a net: "Of course not! It wasn't us!"
"Who else could it be but you?" Bai Yuan glanced at the severed limb, which had clearly been chopped off with a sharp weapon. "After you tortured him, you chopped off this hand while he was still alive."
"My God!" The villagers were in an uproar, and Huang Dashan was even more incredulous, unable to believe that Old Zhang would do such a cruel thing.
"I...I...I..." Old Zhang was both excited and afraid, and could barely speak.
Bai Yuan pressed his advantage: "Why did you chop off her hand?"
"She...she...she..." Old Zhang seemed to have been stabbed in the heart, and was on the verge of collapse.
"What's wrong with her? Do you really want to chop off her hand?"
Old Zhang could no longer hold on and burst into tears: "She was grabbing Tiezhu's mother, grabbing Tiezhu's mother, grabbing her tightly, refusing to let go, her hands were covered in blood, I..."
As expected, Bai Yuan calmly continued to ask, "Why is she grabbing Tie Zhu's mother? And where is she grabbing her?"
"Why? Why... Yes, the day we returned after finding the matchmaker, we passed by the mass grave at night, and suddenly a hand reached out from the grave and grabbed Tiezhu's mother's ankle tightly. We were terrified, and we couldn't kick it off no matter what we did." Old Zhang's face contorted with rage as he recalled the scene, his mind reeling. "I tried my best to drag Tiezhu's mother, but that thing was firmly attached to her leg, and I dragged it out of the grave with her."
Old Zhang's face turned pale and then red. He held his head in his hands and uncontrollably pulled at his hair: "It's a ghost. She crawled out of the grave. It's a ghost, and then it haunted us."
Bai Yuan frowned slightly, speculating and guiding the other party: "She is not a ghost, but you made her a ghost."
Old Zhang shuddered as if in shock: "No! No!! That's a ghost!! It's a ghost! It crawled out of the ground and kept bothering us, so, so I..."
Old Zhang stared wide-eyed at the ground, as if witnessing the scene again. Before him lay the thing he had dragged out, utterly inhuman. It had no face, completely covered by tangled long hair, and kept trying to climb onto Tiezhu's mother. The couple were terrified, as if Tiezhu's mother would be possessed by this evil spirit at any moment. So Old Zhang drew the wood-chopping knife strapped to his waist and swung it down hard on the hand. He didn't cut it off the first time, so he swung it a second time, a third time…
He tensed up and vaguely heard screams, but he couldn't tell if it was his own scream, his wife's scream, or the scream of that thing.
Old Zhang was splattered with blood all over his head and face. He finally swung his machete and chopped off the hand. Unexpectedly, the other hand clamped down hard on his wrist, and the ghostly thing on the ground suddenly leaped towards him.
Old Zhang's mind went blank for a second, and he fell to the ground with a thud. When he came to his senses, he saw Tie Zhu's mother holding a large rock and frantically smashing it against the thing's head.
Tiezhu's mother smashed the skull while crying and screaming, until the flat, round skull collapsed, like a broken watermelon.
The long, blood-soaked hair and large chunks of scalp fell off, revealing the scarlet flesh inside, and the lower half of the face covered in blood, its mouth wide open as if screaming, but no sound came out.
In that gaping, blood-red maw, the upper and lower rows of teeth had been sparsely pulled out, the gums were swollen and red, and the mouth reeked of a foul, disgusting bloody odor.
Blood splattered into Old Zhang's eyes, turning his vision bloodshot. Under the intense stimulation, he began to feel disoriented and had difficulty discerning what was happening.
Finally, they smashed it to death—no, finally, they got rid of the persistent, vengeful ghost—and the two of them fled home in a daze.
What happened afterward, Old Zhang was in a daze and not very clear-headed. He couldn't even recall that night at the mass grave. It was as if his brain had short-circuited, and he couldn't remember it clearly until last night—Old Zhang rolled his eyes wildly in terror, as if looking for a hole to hide in, but he had nowhere to hide.
“We need to make a bone for Tiezhu, make a bone for Tiezhu, last night, last night,” Old Zhang muttered twice, struggling to sink into his terrifying memories, and painstakingly organizing his thoughts, “Last night when we were making a bone for Tiezhu here, that thing came again, it came to us again, with its blood-red mouth wide open, twisting half of its bloody head, crawling sideways toward us, as if saying, ‘My hand, my hand.’”
Such a vivid description sent chills down everyone's spines. When they looked at the severed limb in Bai Yuan's hand, their hair stood on end. It was as if the hand would come to life and grab people everywhere, just like when it pushed Tie Zhu's mother and Huang Dasao off the cliff. The villagers had already imagined the scene of the severed limb causing the murder. This calamity was obviously caused by a vengeful ghost.
Everyone instinctively backed away, but someone accidentally dropped a shovel, hitting their foot and causing a cry of pain that startled them. The crowd could no longer contain themselves and wanted to flee the area.
"How dare she still grab that severed hand? Does she have a death wish?!"
"Let's leave quickly. This place is a mass grave, full of lonely graves and wandering ghosts. We can't stay here any longer."
As they spoke, people began to evacuate in groups of three or five, no one wanting to stay even a moment longer, almost as if they were fleeing in panic.
Even the hot-tempered Huang Dashan was terrified by the bizarre story Old Zhang told him, and grabbed his nephew to collect his wife's body.
As the crowd began to disperse, Old Zhang looked around in terror and shakily crawled towards Tie Zhu's mother, struggling to pull the corpse onto his back: "Help, help me..."
No one was willing to lend him a hand; instead, they all avoided him like the plague, afraid of getting tainted by bad luck.
Looking at the trembling and clumsy Old Zhang, Bai Yuan finally understood what was going on with the room full of blood-stained talismans in his house.
Being entangled by something that has smashed half your head off would terrify anyone.
Tie Zhu's mother was pulled onto Lao Zhang's back, her head drooping on his shoulder, her eyes wide open and dead.
Bai Yuan noticed Tie Zhu's mother's injured and bleeding left eye and walked over.
As soon as she got close, Old Zhang was so frightened that he almost abandoned the corpse and ran away, but he managed to pull Tie Zhu's mother onto his back and ran away as Bai Yuan was about to get close.
Bai Yuan tried to stop her, then remembered the crow that had pecked at him earlier: "Her left eye looks like it's been pecked..."
Bai Yuan suddenly stopped mid-sentence, a resentful and shrill cry of "Injustice!" echoing in her soul, freezing her firmly in place.
Zhou Yaren noticed and asked, "What did you say?"
Bai Yuan paused for a few breaths, forcing himself to remain calm, and said, "Tie Zhu's mother has an injury to her left eye. I suspect that she was pecked in the eye by a crow, which is why she fell off the cliff..."
Injustice—
It's a grievance!
Her words came to an abrupt halt once again.
Zhou Yaren sensed something was wrong. The next moment, she saw an ominous whirlwind suddenly rise where Bai Yuan was standing, whipping up her clothes and hair.
Zhou Yaren showed a rare look of helplessness, because the ominous wind swirling around Bai Yuan played the tune on the pipe at his waist, mournful and desolate—it was the sound of death again!
Immediately afterwards, the whirlwind gradually contracted to form an umbrella, slowly covering Bai Yuan, whose figure was becoming increasingly ethereal.
"The death umbrella." The word suddenly flashed through Zhou Yaren's mind, and she blurted out in a panic, "What happened?"
"The Underworld Trial." Bai Yuan's voice was as soft as a sigh, as if she were shrouded in another time and space by an umbrella. She could not break free in the end and had to obey the laws imposed by fate. "The dead can summon me."
"What?" Zhou Yaren saw an indistinct inscription condensing under the umbrella. The ancient inscription, like pieces of platinum lettering, shimmered and floated. Each inscription, like a sharp blade, pierced into Bai Yuan's brow, leaving a gold-stamped scar.
Until the whirlwind-like umbrella completely enveloped Bai Yuan, like a sudden gust of wind that swept everything away, Bai Yuan disappeared before his eyes, leaving only a severed limb behind.
Zhou Yaren stared with wide, astonished eyes, rushing forward but failing to even touch the other person's clothes: "Innocent! Innocent!"
The only response he received was the lingering sound of the bell at his waist. Zhou Yaren belatedly realized that the injustice she had just uttered was a lawsuit in the underworld. She said: "The wronged can summon me."
Combined with the deathly sound played by the pipes, Zhou Yaren immediately realized what this might mean. At the same time, the scene of Sun Xiuniang sacrificing herself in the Ghost Bureau flashed through his mind. That was the first time he had encountered Bai Yuan, who was carrying a false umbrella to report death.
The one who blows the flute is the one who summons the wronged and the dead.
Something must have happened!
What happened?
"Bai Yuan!" He didn't even know which way to go. "Bai Yuan, where are you?"
Of course, no one answered. Bai Yuanjing, summoned by the injustice of death, was taken by the Death Umbrella to a damp and smelly dungeon. Snakes and rats swarmed there, and insects and ants crawled around. Hanging upside down from the beam was a blood-soaked person. No, to be precise, hanging upside down from the beam was a dead person who had been whipped and was covered in blood.
Fresh blood dripped, flowing from an unknown wound, pooling in the uneven ground.
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