As the monkey finished telling Lao Tian's story, I became even more confused.
At first, I thought that what Monkey said about Zhou Peng's symptoms was similar to those of Lao Tian's teammates who had gone crazy.
Unexpectedly, at this point in the story, it turned out that it was Old Tian who went mad.
Even Song Laosan couldn't help but ask, "After all this talk, whose symptoms does Zhou Peng have the same as?"
I waved my hand to interrupt Song Laosan and asked the monkey, "What happened to the story later?"
"The strangest part of this story is that when Lao Tian told it to me, it took me a long time to sort out my thoughts."
The monkey licked his lips: "After the police found the tunnel based on Lao Tian's account, they discovered that he was not the mentally ill person they had imagined, so they took him into custody. At the same time, based on Lao Tian's confession, they began to call for reinforcements to go into the mountains to investigate and search for the missing woman. They also took Lao Tian away, preparing to arrest him and interrogate him."
As the police car was descending the mountain, Lao Tian glanced out the window and saw his lover lying on the roadside. He went berserk, pushed aside the police officer beside him, and jumped out of the car.
When Lao Tian saw the woman lying naked on the roadside, her lower body covered in blood, he went into a frenzy, fighting with the police like a madman, cursing them for not saving her and for not arresting the murderer.
I frowned and asked, "Can't those police officers see the body?"
The monkey sniffed: "Old Tian was already heartbroken. Seeing his lover dead, he was prepared to fight the police to the death, hoping they would shoot him dead on the spot so they could die together! But he was only one person, and he was handcuffed, so he was no match for the police. He was quickly pinned to the ground."
Immediately afterwards, the man who had taken him up the mountain to the Taoist temple appeared at some point and slapped Lao Tian across the face, making him realize what he had been doing!
It was this slap that made Lao Tian realize the true nature of the earth god temple where he had lived for more than half a year, and that there was no woman by the roadside at all, only a red fox covered in blood.
According to Lao Tian, at that moment he suddenly had a sudden realization, feeling that everything he had experienced before was like a dream, and he even lost his sense of logic in many things. After all, how could a tomb raider take the initiative to call the police and tell them what happened?
Recalling what had happened to him during this period, Lao Tian broke out in a cold sweat. Although he had always felt that he was living a normal life for the past six months and remembered what had happened, looking back, many of his decisions seemed to have been made by another person living inside his body, which was completely inconsistent with his own logic. It was as if an invisible force was determining his life.
The moment the police lifted him up, Lao Tian looked at his reflection in the car window and felt that the person inside was completely unfamiliar. In just a few months, his eye sockets had sunken and his body had become extremely thin, like a skeleton without flesh and blood. Before this, he had been completely unaware of this.
Later, Lao Tian was taken to the police station and confessed everything that had happened at Daxian Mountain.
Since a case had been filed, the police naturally had to investigate further. However, the more they investigated, the stranger the matter became. According to Lao Tian's confession, the police found the forest ranger and his accomplices, but these people were living their normal lives as usual and did not admit that the things Lao Tian had described had ever happened.
Ultimately, Lao Tian was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, paranoia, and intermittent psychosis, and was sent to a mental hospital for treatment. A year later, the court ruled that he had committed the tomb raiding while mentally sound, and sentenced him to eleven years in prison for multiple crimes. However, due to good behavior and significant meritorious service, his sentence was reduced to eight and a half years.
After the monkey story was told, I had a particularly uncomfortable feeling: "Didn't you say before that Lao Tian took a lot of people up the mountain? Did these people actually go up the mountain with him?"
"Probably not. Didn't Lao Tian say that one of their companions was killed by a fox in the tomb? That's a murder case, and the police will definitely investigate it thoroughly. If someone really died, the case won't be that simple."
Song Laosan paused for a moment: "Lao Tian said that the police investigation confirmed that all the people he contacted denied their involvement in the matter. Didn't he verify this after he was released from prison?"
“I asked Lao Tian, and he said that after he was released from prison, he wanted to find those people to prove that he was not mentally ill, but during the time he was in prison, those people all died one after another. In order to prove all this, he also went to the policeman who arrested him back then, wanting to ask the Taoist priest who saved him what happened, but the policeman said that he did not know any Taoist priest, and Lao Tian did not mention this when he made the statement.”
The monkey paused for a moment: "Old Tian visited many people, and everyone said they had indeed seen him living in the mountains, but no one knew where he lived. And the person who woke him up was just an ordinary farmer. He's gone now, and his relatives and friends all said he had never studied any Taoist arts, and they had never heard of any Taoist temples around that town."
The only thing that is certain is that the police did see the old farmer slap him, but the police believed that the old farmer only came to help because he saw him assaulting a police officer.
Old Tian spent nearly ten years in jail, thinking about this matter constantly. But when he finally got out, he found that there were no clues to trace back. More importantly, although he was diagnosed with mental illness, he had never had a relapse since that incident. Because there was no evidence, he lived in a mystery his whole life, and he couldn't fall asleep without drinking half a jin of liquor every day.
This incident greatly hurt Lao Tian. From then on, he completely withdrew from the tomb raiding business and developed a deep fear of women. He decided to remain unmarried for life and opened a small food stall to make a living. If it weren't for his father's death and the need for money for his burial, he would never have passed on this skill to me.
Zhou Peng's situation reminded me of Lao Tian's story. Regardless of whether Lao Tian was really entangled by a fox spirit, he still lived in the mountains during the time he was entangled, and villagers often saw him coming and going in the mountains. This means that although Lao Tian saw things differently from normal people, he was still living in this society.
Do you think Zhou Peng might really be possessed? Even though he's in our group, what he's seeing is different from what we're seeing, like the hallucinations Duan Gongzi had back in the Demon Monk's Tomb?
After the monkey finished speaking, I was the first to empathize, since such strange things had happened to me before.
Old Song was skeptical: "In Chinese mythology, humans can only become gods or ghosts. I've never heard of a savage becoming a spirit. How could Zhou Peng be haunted by a dead female savage? Is this place haunted?"
Upon hearing this, I suddenly remembered what Zhou Peng had told me: a fortune teller had once examined his destiny and said that he had an extremely yin destiny, making him most susceptible to attracting unclean things.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com