Chapter 3

As soon as Xie Yuchen had finished speaking, the Chinese-speaking priest next to him suddenly started bleeding from his seven orifices. No one knew what had happened; he just fell to his knees and then collapsed on the ground.

Xie Yuchen immediately went over to help him, but when he reached the other man and checked his pulse, he knew that he was dead.

He immediately broke out in a cold sweat. It was obvious that whatever had happened here was a terrible situation beyond anything they had imagined.

He immediately turned to order all of the onlookers back, but as soon as he turned his head, he saw that everyone was already bleeding. They fell to the ground one by one, dying without making a single sound.

It only took about four or five seconds before everyone in the chapel—except for him—was dead. He immediately turned to look at the dome, but found that the Taoist priest’s body was gone.

Oh no, this isn’t good.

“Black Glasses,” he shouted. “Don’t come up here! Leave quickly!”

At this time, all of the lights in the chapel suddenly went out and the huge space was instantly shrouded in darkness.

He suddenly felt something behind him and smelled the pungent odor of rotting flesh. He knew right away that the Taoist priest seemed to be lying on his back. Xie Yuchen didn’t even spare a second’s thought. He instantly bent over and rushed out for six or seven meters while reaching behind him and grabbing two glass beads in both hands. He then tossed them directly to the spot where he had just been standing.

Since he hadn’t been allowed to bring any iron balls or weapons on the plane, he had stopped by a flea market on the way here and bought some glass marbles. If he had known things were going to be like this, he would’ve asked his Russian friends to buy him two AKs.

He couldn’t see where the glass beads ended up falling, but he definitely heard them hitting the marble floor and breaking to pieces. Unfortunately, it didn’t sound like he had hit anything.

When Xie Yuchen stood up, he suddenly felt dizzy and found that his nose had started bleeding. Almost at the same time, he felt the corpse come up behind him again. He couldn’t figure out how it was doing it. By this time, he’d reached the edge of the hole in the floor and a strange feeling was spreading from his back to his whole body.

He was going to die.

Resentment. The whole space was full of resentment.

At this time, he felt someone jump up from the hole behind him and grab the corpse on his back. This person must’ve caught the corpse’s hair, because he felt the corpse slowly get pulled away from his body.

Then, he heard a loud noise, which seemed to be the sound of a stone slab hitting the marble floor.

It was so loud that all of the cicadas were scared into silence.

After about three or four seconds, the lights in the chapel came back on one by one. Xie Yuchen saw that Black Glasses had his sunglasses back on and was stretching his neck while keeping his back to him. He didn’t know when Black Glasses had climbed out of the hole, but a huge stone coffin lid was now lying in shattered pieces on the ground. The Taoist corpse was nowhere to be seen, but based on the direction Black Glasses was looking, Xie Yuchen felt as if he knew what had happened just now. Black Glasses must have used the coffin lid as a door panel and crushed the corpse underneath it.

“It was fine if you wanted to haunt people, but why did you have to turn off the lights? Why be so considerate?” Black Glasses asked.

“Is the problem solved?”

“It should be. Otherwise, that thing will look just like a piece of paper if it stands up again. I bet it’ll be just like a cartoon character and I’ll end up dying of laughter.”

Black Glasses squatted down and looked at the small fragments of cicada wings that he could see in the air. With the lights shining here, these small fragments glowed like diamonds, making the whole space look like it was raining diamonds.

“Didn’t I tell you to leave?”

“The plane ticket back is too expensive. How can I possibly let you have an accident? I also want to have a prosperous year.” At this time, Black Glasses suddenly fell to the ground.

Xie Yuchen went over to check on him, and felt a little uneasy when he saw that Black Glasses was starting to bleed.

“What’s going on?”

“There’s another one in that basement. It’s up to you now. I lack the physique to do anything other than hold on. The thing below can’t kill me for the time being, but I won’t last for long.”

Xie Yuchen sighed, walked a few steps away, and grabbed one of the cell phones that was still recording. He then turned on the phone’s flashlight function before jumping into the nearby hole in the floor. “Tell me what you know,” he said.

“This is a pair of immortal lovers. The man has been flattened, but the woman is still below. It must have been two people cultivating together so that they could become immortal together. But they were both sent to Russia because someone didn’t want them to succeed. Moreover, the woman’s corpse was nailed to coffin and covered with cement and cicadas so she couldn’t transform. This ensured that the man would see that his woman couldn’t transform and couldn’t turn into a corpse, and the two would never see each other again.”

Xie Yuchen frowned. “So cruel. This seems like an act of jealousy.”

“Yes, there’s definitely a story here; a story of humble love.”

“How humble?”

“It’s similar to the kind of humbleness of not being able to buy a plane ticket back.”

Xie Yuchen lifted the cell phone up and saw that a lot of changes had taken place in this basement area.

There were cicadas everywhere, but they were all dead. Xie Yuchen took a closer look and found that a kind of white multi-petaled flower was emerging from their carcasses. They were very lush like peach blossoms, and their refreshing fragrance filled the air.

A female corpse sat in the center of these flowers, a sarcophagus behind her back. She was wearing white Taoist robes that were very clean and tidy. Except for her pale face, there weren’t any signs of decomposition.

“Should I follow your method and flatten it directly?”

“It’s up to you how you want to handle it. What do you see?”

“Flowers. Lots and lots of flowers.”

“Then you’re lucky. I didn’t get to see flowers. I’m counting on you now. If you die, I die as well.”

From Black Glasses’ position on the ground, he could just barely see a gap between the floor and the coffin lid that he had used to smash the Taoist priest to death. And from this gap, he could also see a part of the Taoist priest’s squashed face. Those murky white eyes were now looking at Black Glasses.

Black Glasses smiled and said to it, “Let’s just watch the fun.”

<Chapter 2><Table of Contents><Chapter 4>

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1st pic added 4/15/2023, 2nd pic added 1/16/2023 (fan translation courtesy of me)

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