Chapter 48: Baby Room
The room was silent for a while. There was no doubt that the craftsman who made this thing could not escape responsibility, and the store owner might also have problems.
"So what exactly is the 'thing' being supplied?" Tu Lanxun realized that he had asked a nonsense question. Of course it was a ghost.
N denied it: "Not necessarily, it could be a human or a ghost."
But in any case, the expensive paper-made products in that store are related to the golden mirror, which also plunders ghosts, and the principle is somewhat similar to that of the paper-made products.
Tu Lanxun also cared about one thing: Tao Si's bronze lynx statue was not only the flagship product of the Black Forest high-end department store, but also a paper-made version of the same model was found at the Hei family's funeral ceremony.
She suddenly had a guess. Could it be that the Hei family's goods came from the same source as the Black Forest? That's why they were in duplicate.
Because the customer base of expensive paper products is still small, if we make personal items that can truly attract living customers, wouldn’t it be very popular?
The bronze lynx statue that Tao Si received was most likely something like a golden mirror.
They decided to disguise themselves and go to explore the source of goods for the Hei Family Mingji Department Store.
The disguise was mainly Tu Lanxun's task. She changed her clothes, and Liu Maosheng also put on a coat with a smile. N was very neat. He went into the bathroom and came out, changing from black to white.
Tu Lanxun couldn't help but say, "It looks like the Black and White Impermanence... Speaking of the Black and White Impermanence, what were those two white and black ghosts last time?"
N turned around and smiled: "I don't know either."
lie.
The group sneaked out of the house. There were shared bicycles in the town. Tu Lanxun put on a hat and rode forward, with two ghosts floating beside her.
They soon returned to the vicinity of Heijia Mingji Department Store. There was a food stall around the corner. There were neither too many nor too few customers. Tu Lanxun picked a plastic table covered by a large umbrella. This time, N planned to go in alone.
"Won't it be exposed?" she asked, flipping through the greasy menu.
"I'm just afraid of not being exposed." N grinned, his smile as warm as spring breeze.
When Tu Lanxun started to put the fried noodles into the pot, N had already left. She and Liu Maosheng sat opposite each other and ordered a plate of fried snails and noodle soup for each other. The incense burned under the table for as long as his knuckles. Liu Maosheng picked the meat directly from the snail shells and ate it. The noodle soup was even more of a piece of cake. As long as he ate it discreetly, he would eat more and more of it.
But from the outside, it looked like Tu Lanxun was a proud glutton as he ordered a whole table of dishes by himself.
While N was away, Tu Lanxun whispered, "Uncle Liu, you knew N before. What did he do when he was alive?"
Liu Maosheng said gently: "Don't ask, I know it won't do you any good."
The same goes for Liu Maosheng and N. They are usually very good-tempered and kind (this point refers specifically to the former), but when this kind of topic is mentioned, they always seem to become a different person.
"However." Liu Maosheng's expression turned gossipy, and he lowered his voice mysteriously: "If you are interested in him, I can tell you about his past."
That happened before Liu Maosheng met N, long before their acquaintance and death, and was most likely an experience from N's teenage years.
In order to hear the gossip, Tu Lanxun did not deny the word "interested" and listened quietly to what Liu Maosheng said next.
N is a native of Lucheng. When he was alive, people didn’t call him N. His surname was Nan.
He was an orphan since childhood and didn't know who his parents were. He lived in an orphanage before he grew up. However, according to the laws of his country, N could work and study part-time after the age of fourteen, so he moved out of the orphanage and rented a house by himself, but he had to contact community workers regularly.
Liu Maosheng didn't say what school N attended, but N wasn't just that school; he was one of the most academically gifted students in the entire city. Tu Lanxun nodded in agreement; he looked like someone who wasn't a pushover, in every way.
Liu Maosheng focused on exaggerating the hardships and tragedy of N's early life, making him resemble the poor but handsome white-shirted academic teenager in a novel. But then he changed the subject and said, "Did you know that N never went to a domestic university?"
Tu Lanxun guessed: "He was recommended to go abroad?" That would require a lot of scientific and technological competitions and many difficult awards to win, and it would not be easy to get full coverage with scholarships.
Liu Maosheng shook his head: "It's not that he was recommended for admission, it's that he didn't take the college entrance examination."
N did not take the college entrance examination that year. For some unspeakable reason, he was delayed for two months and then was taken out of the country directly. He was not there to study, but to work, and while working he was "studying" in another sense.
Tu Lanxun was very perceptive: "Is he your boss?"
Liu Maosheng was shocked and confused: "How do you know?"
Of course she knew what kind of relationship N could have with Liu Maosheng. They were a big age difference and looked completely different, except for being neighbors, but they were both very secretive about their past experiences.
Either they had carried guns together or they had divided the loot together.
Tu Lanxun continued to reason, "That boss took N, who was eighteen years old at the time, away. What did he promise? Money? Education?"
Liu Maosheng did not deny it, but there was no sign of confirmation either.
Tu Lanxun's mind instantly connected, "And look for his family?"
Only then did Liu Maosheng nod heavily.
As the fried noodles were being stirred around on the plate, Tu Lanxun couldn't help but ask, "Why didn't he take the college entrance exam? And why didn't he repeat his year?"
Judging from N's current situation, the business he joined when he was eighteen was the direct reason why he became a ghost today. If his brain is really as useful as Liu Maosheng said, why didn't he repeat his studies?
Tu Lanxun doesn't believe that the big boss of the gray market would do charity for free. Whatever N gets from the boss, he will eventually have to pay it back double.
"I'll just say one thing. I don't know the specifics." Liu Maosheng glanced around and said in a voice so low it was almost inaudible, "N was injured before the college entrance exam. It was serious, enough to be examined at a forensic center."
The noodles on Tu Lanxun's chopsticks slipped off: "Car accident?"
Liu Maosheng quickly mouthed, "Being beaten..."
Before Tu Lanxun could recover from his shock, N walked back out of the night, his chair automatically moving backwards. Fortunately, no one noticed. He sat down, looked at Tu Lanxun, who had already composed himself, and said, "I found out where they source the goods. But it doesn't look real."
Tu Lanxun caught a glimpse of blood on the back of his gloves, which he was wiping with a white handkerchief. It turned out to be someone else's blood.
N laughed: "I talked to the ghost with half a face."
Was it just a conversation?
After being beaten, the Half-Faced Ghost almost lost the remaining half of his face. He was unable to speak, so he dipped his finger in blood and wrote down the answers to N questions and a string of addresses.
No. 1, Lamei Street, Guihua Town, Pu'er Township.
Tu Lanxun sat up straight, his mind spinning rapidly. No. 1 and his friends had passed by that gray yard that looked like a residential building, with wintersweets inside. He hadn't noticed anything wrong with it at the time.
N's face was filled with cold amusement. "That friend with half a face admitted that he was sent here by Yard No. 1 to keep an eye on the young man in the store and prevent him from doing anything untoward."
Tu Lanxun didn't want to ask where half of his face had gone.
"Did he tell me why Courtyard One sells those soul-sucking things?"
N replied: "The living and the dead, the flesh and the bones."
Tu Lanxun: “Ah?”
The resurrection of flesh and bones is just a metaphor, but absorbing the souls of the past is indeed a tonic. It can help seriously injured and sick living people recover, and it can also make weak ghosts become stronger.
It can even stimulate the regrowth of disabled limbs and repair damaged appearance, making aging people look younger again.
The whole thing is actually a scam-style sacrifice. Those paper products and objects are circulated to various people, extracting their souls, and eventually all flow to the same place to become nourishment for others.
Cannibalism.
Tu Lanxun quickly took two mouthfuls of noodles. N had no intention of eating the food from the street stall. He slowly picked up a jam bread from the convenience store and ate it. She realized later that N might only like sweets.
The next step is to explore Yard No. 1.
It will be even more dangerous than the Hei family's Mingji Department Store.
#
Hei family's funeral department store.
A spirited young man sat behind the counter playing games. He didn't turn on the lights, and he seemed to be unable to see the paper figurines and gold ingots in the store. He focused on shouting, "Move, move, help me!"
In the darkness, a ghost quietly passed by the store door, bringing up a gust of cold wind, and the young man was unaware of it.
Suddenly, a caller ID popped up on his phone. The young man quickly gave up his game, picked up the phone, and said with a smile, "Mr. Li, you finally called back."
I don't know what was said on the other end, but the young man nodded in agreement neither humbly nor arrogantly. His eyes swept across the pair of paper figures at the door. One of them was blown over by the wind, as if turning around and looking into the store. The young man greeted the paper figure, his eyes shining slightly in the darkness.
"Okay, don't worry, I know." The young man smiled, tugged at the collar of his logo-emblazoned shirt, and lit a cigarette. Smoke curled upward like incense. He said simply, "They've already gone over there. Tell them to get ready. But there's one more thing I need to report to you."
Someone spoke on the other end of the line. The young man dusted off his cigarette and concluded with two final sentences:
"There's a tough guy on the other team. I don't know who it is, maybe that woman, or an old man or a pretty boy. I can't say for sure."
"I'm useless. My face is broken. Please send me another beast."
…
#
When Tu Lanxun and his group arrived near the small courtyard, the moon was already at its zenith.
There were few people on the street, and the light from the street lamps could only illuminate a palm-sized area. The wreaths and paper people on the entire Wintersweet Street were pale and shivered miserably in the night wind.
Standing at the back of Courtyard No. 1, Tu Lanxun clenched his monocle. They climbed over the wall and went in. N quietly came to the gray-tiled house and looked in the window. "The curtain is drawn, but there's no one inside."
When N said there was no one there, there really was no one there. Tu Lanxun felt relieved, but there was still an unspeakable existence lurking in the darkness, making her nerves buzzing. She couldn't let her guard down and could only stare around blankly like a wild animal that smelled any movement.
What went wrong?
Liu Maosheng crouched down and said, "Do you want to go in and take a look? They may be off work at night and not staying here."
As he said this, he was about to reach out to touch the window glass.
They stood there without saying a word. Just before Liu Maosheng's hand touched it, Tu Lanxun and N said at the same time:
"Don't go."
"wrong."
The two exchanged glances, and Tu Lanxun first pointed at the gray-tiled house in front of them. They had sneaked in from the side, so it was difficult to get a full picture of the gray-tiled house. She gestured for everyone to step back three steps and said, "Look at this house. Does it look like a human face?"
The gray-tiled house had two windows, one on either side of the door, both with curtains drawn. A row of dry straw was oddly stuffed on the eaves, and in front of the dark red door stood a gourd-shaped water jar, blocking the door, its front edge slightly encroaching on the space below the lintel.
There were five wooden stakes on each side of the yard, arranged in different lengths.
This principle is like looking at an oil painting. You need to have a suitable viewing distance to see the details. If you look closely, it is difficult to connect all the details.
Tu Lanxun whispered, "It not only looks like a human face, but also like a baby's face."
For some reason, this strange thought crept into her mind: "The straw on the eaves is the baby's hair, the windows are the eyes, the door is the mouth, and the gourd-shaped water tank in front of the door is the pacifier. The wooden stakes on both sides are the hands."
Now the "baby" is sleeping with its eyes and mouth closed.
Liu Maosheng's expression became more and more shocked, and the way he looked at Tu Lanxun was different.
Just now, they almost broke in through the window, which was where the baby's eyes were.
So, does opening the windows and drawing the curtains count as forcibly lifting the baby's eyelids so that it can see them?
“Shh, don’t wake it up.” N mouthed, “Otherwise… it will cry…”
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