Chapter 23

The two people stood in front of the ancient coffin, neither one moving.

Xie Yuchen was thinking that any evil cult would ensure that their altar was protected before they offered themselves up as a sacrifice so that was probably why Zheng Jingyin had been acting like that. He probably fell into a trap in the area close to the altar. Something was preventing people from approaching this room, but he and Black Glasses weren’t affected.

Why? Where they immune to this power?

It was possible that Black Glasses was immune—after all, he wasn’t very normal anyways—but Xie Yuchen believed that he was the same as everyone else.

Moreover, they were in front of the ancient coffin and could destroy it at any time. In this case, any strange phenomenon should have already happened, but there wasn’t any movement in the room at all.

That albino had told him that there were three rules. Did they have something to do with this? What was their significance?

In the meantime, did he want to open this coffin?

Xie Yuchen hesitated as he fell into his own unique thoughts. Even Black Glasses remained motionless. They were both probably thinking the same thing: at present, it seemed that they were able to get close to this place because the power here had acquiesced to it.

Then that meant that the power should also acquiesce to them opening the coffin. But it could also be argued that opening the coffin was part of the overall ceremony.

So, it was best not to open it.

Xie Yuchen turned on his flashlight and looked around while Black Glasses stared at the coffin.

The two of them looked at things in different ways. Black Glasses could see a lot of things that he couldn’t see, but he could also see things that Black Glasses couldn’t see.

He soon saw that a huge Russian word had been carved on the wall of this room.

The notch marks were very large and had been carved into the fixed frame. It looked like they had been frantically scratched into the wood with a knife. Without a flashlight, Black Glasses would have just seen a damaged wall. But with a flashlight—and a little overall aesthetic vision—you would find that this was actually a huge word.

He took out his cell phone and looked it up in an offline dictionary.

In Chinese, this Russian word was “xingchou”, which meant fishy odor.

As he slowly moved the flashlight down, he saw that a rotting fish was lying on the square tatami mat at the base of the wall. It had obviously been prepared with a special potion and was the source of that strange smell he had noticed as he walked along the corridor.

“There’s something special about this evil god,” Xie Yuchen said.

Black Glasses didn’t leave the coffin—he had a particularly good habit where he wouldn’t stray too far from a possible threat—and simply asked, “What do you mean?”

“The place where you’re at is the altar while this place is the area of worship. This is the typical arrangement of evil Chinese cults. You’re at the altar, this is the sacrifice, and the place where the sacrifices are piled up should have the evil god’s image. If there’s no image, then they use the god’s name instead. The name of this evil god is Xingchou.”

“Can an evil Chinese god even understand Russian?”

At this time, Xie Yuchen noticed a nail on the wall.

“There was originally a Chinese spirit tablet hanging here but someone took it away.” He had a vague intuition in his heart so he lowered his flashlight and said to Black Glasses, “I’m going to Yuri’s living quarters.”

“Ok.”

Black Glasses turned around, slung Zheng Jingyin over his shoulder, and then the two of them walked out of the room without looking back.

Xie Yuchen never needed to explain anything to him. In fact, there was still another option at this time—leave the area and let the police deal with it first thing in the morning. But to be honest, he didn’t know if they would encounter anything strange on their way out.

If they left and encountered strange things, then they would probably encounter them when they went deeper. If that were the case, then their situation was the same no matter what they did. But if the situation was the same as when they entered and they didn’t encounter any strange things when leaving, then he needed to go to the place that had the most written materials. Otherwise, there would be a lot of people here tomorrow and tourists like them wouldn’t be able to touch anything.

“We need to be careful around all the rooms that have jars in them. There are things in the jars that crawl around but I don’t know what they are.”

“Could it be those orphans from before?”

“Those jars are ancient Japanese coffins but I’m not familiar with them,” Xie Yuchen said.

The two continued to follow the porcelain Orthodox Church statues. There were rooms on both sides of the corridor, with the occasional courtyard making an appearance. After passing through the courtyards, they would enter an area with more rooms. They walked for about ten minutes before a light appeared in front of them. In this particular area, all the lights in the rooms were on.

They walked inside and immediately felt cool air coming from the air conditioning system. They opened the doors one by one and found various exercise rooms, storerooms, and food storage rooms.

The smell here was very strong. They followed the corridor down to the bottom floor, where they saw that the porcelain statues had changed into a Madonna statue that was as tall as a person. They could also see that they had reached the end of the corridor, which led straight to a door.

When they pushed the door open, a strong stench assaulted their noses. The inside was a huge, brightly lit Japanese-style room but it was completely furnished in a European style. There were tons of bookshelves with piles of books on them.

In the very middle of the room was a large dining table that was very long and which had a huge tropical fish on it. They didn’t know what type of fish it was, but it looked a bit like a mahi-mahi⁽¹⁾, was very ugly, and was about four meters long.

This kind of tropical fish wasn’t uncommon. It had obviously been marinated in a special medicine like the other one and was giving off a foul stench, but this stench wasn’t just the fishy odor of rotting fish.

All the other daily necessities were there. Black Glasses went in, opened the refrigerator, and found that it was full of fish. He seldom turned his face away from such things but the overwhelming smell had obviously hit him head-on.

He found a few bottles of wine sitting among the fish, took one out, and then pulled out a wine glass from the cabinet. He poured a little into the glass, smelled it, and then poured out a larger serving.

Xie Yuchen looked around and saw that the Chinese characters for “Xingchou” had been written all over the wall.

There were also many scattered pages written in Chinese that were pinned to the wall with thumbtacks. They were all pages from ancient books, and he could also see many manuscripts with annotations in Russian on them.

He read through each page very patiently.

Black Glasses walked over to the big fish on the table and found that all of its entrails had been removed. He wondered if the internal organs hanging from the beams in that room had come from this fish. He suddenly felt that something was wrong and used the opening of the wine bottle as a wrench to lift the big fish’s stomach up.

There was a person’s hand inside.

Black Glasses pulled the person out of the fish’s stomach and found that it was a naked young man. He was dead but it didn’t look like he had been dead for long.

Black Glasses noticed that something was stuffed into the young man’s mouth so he pulled it out, opened it, and found that it was a copy of the threatening advertisement Xie Yuchen had spread among the Tokyo media outlets.

“I believe we’ve found the spellcaster who wanted to cause problems with our plane,” Black Glasses said. “He died less than ten hours ago. He probably saw your threat, was afraid to keep casting the spell, and was then killed.”

“Yuri has been dead for a long time but this guy has only been dead for ten hours. There are still living killers in this house,” Xie Yuchen said while looking at the body. “If they’re not attacking us now, then they must think that we’re as good as dead so they’re not in a rush to kill us.”

After he finished speaking, he suddenly laughed. Things were getting very interesting, especially the things recorded in these ancient books. It was rare that he would find something so interesting.

“You know, the evil god that Yuri believes in is very special. That god is an ancient Chinese god, a local god that appeared in the Neolithic Age. It’s one of the gods of the Bon religion. Its body isn’t represented by an image but by a strong, foul odor.”

<Chapter 22><Table of Contents><Chapter 24>

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TN Notes:

(1) Mahi-mahi (or common dolphinfish) is a surface-dwelling ray-finned fish found in off-shore temperate, tropical, and subtropical waters worldwide. Also widely called dorado and dolphin. Info here.

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Bon religion?!

Does this mean Queen of the West’s Ghost Banquet is starting soon?! Is this why Xiao Hua and Black Glasses went to that place?! (it’s been so long I’ve forgotten what it’s called. God help us, you’re in terrible hands lol)