Chapter 17

Black Glasses ignored it.

Before dawn, he was invincible.

A servant came to open the door for them. He had a disgruntled look on his face and kept saying something repeatedly. Zheng Jingyin told Black Glasses that the servant was saying that if he entered the house at night, the owner would be very angry so he could only open the door for them but he dared not enter himself.

Behind the door was a huge building complex made up of countless ancient wooden structures. It was said that there were at least six temples and more than a hundred old villas from the Meiji period at the latest. Not only was there a lot of space, but the doors of the Japanese-style buildings extended out in all directions, the structure was complex, and the light was very dim so it was very easy to get lost.

At the same time, these rooms were connected to dozens of courtyards, the smallest of which was only the size of a coffee table while the largest contained huge ancient trees. The courtyards and these trees had also been collected from all over Japan, and many of the courtyards had master-level gardeners. With the exception of the ones that the owner particularly liked, the others were all overgrown with weeds and were practically deserted.

After walking through the door, the first room, at first glance, appeared to be the Buddhist hall of a small temple. There were many wooden Buddha statues placed against the wall that were half as tall as a person, and gold-plated woodblock prints with various themes on them were hanging on the empty walls. The beams overhead, which hung very low, were also covered in woodblock prints with various themes on them.

In the main spot where the Buddha statue would usually be placed was a strange ceramic statue of a figure belonging to the Orthodox Church. To be honest, he didn’t know who this person was, but he figured the Russian huckster must have been the one who set it up here.

“To tell you the truth, we don’t live here,” the servant said from the doorway. “So if there’s something abnormal going on, we wouldn’t know.”

Moving past the Buddhist hall, there were two doors leading to rooms on the left and the right. Black Glasses pointed to the left one, “Let’s separate.”

“I should stick with you,” Zheng Jingyin said.

“If I want to get rid of you, all I would need is two seconds to disappear. So save your breath and don’t argue with me.”

“No way, this—” The words had barely left Zheng Jingyin’s mouth when he suddenly found that Black Glasses wasn’t in his original spot.

He turned and looked around but Black Glasses had completely disappeared, leaving him all alone in the room.

“Hello?”⁽¹⁾

No one responded, leaving Zheng Jingyin feeling puzzled.

“Hello? I understand, I won’t talk anymore,” Zheng Jingyin said. “You can come out now.”

But no one appeared. There were only those blackened wooden Buddha statues looking at him from all around. The flashlight could only illuminate up to a distance of about four or five square meters so the surrounding Buddha statues were outside of its halo of light, looking like a bunch of demons and monsters hiding in the darkness.

“Hello?” Zheng Jingyin shivered, suddenly feeling that the air in this room was cold.

The left. That man just said he was going to the left and he asked me to explore the room on the right.

He pointed his flashlight to the room on the right, where it was pitch black. He swallowed a mouthful of saliva, unable to decide what to do. But in the end, he decided to follow Black Glasses so he went to the left.

At this time, in the room on the right, Black Glasses had taken off his sunglasses. The room here was very dark, which made him feel extremely comfortable.

He walked silently, listening to the sound of Zheng Jingyin’s footsteps moving further away. He then lit a cigarette and started walking deeper into the building. With his body as the center, every puff of smoke was like a sonar wave. No matter what was in the area—whether it be evil spirits or something else—it wouldn’t be able to hide.

He walked for more than an hour like this in the darkness and soon reached the deepest part of the building.

One of the first things he noticed was that in many places, there were porcelain statues of figures from the Orthodox Church. These porcelain statues were facing the previous ones so that they could be used as a kind of road marker.

The route was very clean, which made it obvious that there were servants who cleaned it. It was probably a route they used often. But outside of the route, some rooms had dust deposits that were more than ten years old.

The house was clearly too big to take care of.

Most of the rooms were filled with things that looked like daily necessities. They were gathered into piles that were covered in dust. He could see that there were toys, washbasins, and other various things. Were they purchased at that time and just never discarded? He couldn’t speculate on it now.

Finally, he came to a room that was very large. It was probably the room in a large temple where scriptures were read.

He walked in and found that it was absolutely dark inside. But he could still see the situation inside with the help of the sparks and the smoke coming from the cigarette butts.

The floor of the room was covered in tatami mats, but they were all rotten since nobody took care of them. They felt very squishy to step on, almost as if there was some kind of slime covering them. He took a step further inside to better observe the room.

But it was with that step that he found that the darkness in the room suddenly started surging up.

He immediately realized that this room was full of cockroaches, and thousands of them had been disturbed by his entry.

They were eating the rotten tatami mats here.

Black Glasses exhaled a mouthful of smoke and saw that a huge Chinese coffin had been placed at the dark end of this room.

It was an ancient coffin from the Ming Dynasty with copper horns on it. It had been placed up against the wall and surrounded by more of those porcelain statues, which were all looking at it.

<Chapter 16><Table of Contents><Chapter 18>

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TN Notes:

(1) This hello (and the others) are in English.