Ghost Detective Records

Chapter 128

The middle-aged man tried his best to suppress his terrified screams, but I could still see the muscles on his face twitching terrifiedly in the moonlight.

"Do you want to go out?" Fang Lei gripped my hand tightly.

"Absolutely not!" I immediately shook my head. I didn't even know if those snakes would break in, and we might be going out to our deaths.

Then look at the middle-aged man. He reached out to grab the snake that had crawled onto his body, but when he tried to grab it, he missed. I saw with my own eyes that his hand passed right through the snake's body!

Those snakes... could they be... without physical form?

A shadow snake...? Is it really a shadow?

Just as Fang Lei and I were surprised, something even more surprising happened: I discovered that the snakes didn't bite him! In my memory, snakes, except for pythons, would always bite their prey once they attacked, so that the venom in their fangs could enter the target's body.

However, these snakes didn't bite; they simply coiled tightly around the middle-aged man. Such an attack method seemed to be reserved for large pythons! But these shadow snakes weren't particularly large; why would they use this method? Moreover, they didn't seem to be in a hurry to kill him; they simply kept their arms around him tightly. Because a shadow snake was also coiled around his throat, the middle-aged man couldn't make a sound. Only his tongue was protruding, and his eyeballs seemed even more bulging than before, almost half a sphere.

However, what disturbed me was that I felt waves of spiritual fluctuations, seemingly right in front of me, making a buzzing sound that made me a little dizzy.

"What's wrong with you?" Fang Lei gently nudged me.

"Is that buzzing sound coming from the snakes?" I shook my head in frustration.

"A sound? What sound? I didn't hear anything!" Fang Lei replied, puzzled.

No? How could that be? These sounds weren't very loud, so how could she not have heard them? Could it be... the sound of soul fluctuations?

Suddenly, a loud bang rang out, as if someone had struck a steel urn with an iron stick! I was startled and involuntarily flinched.

"Look!" Fang Lei grabbed my hand tightly.

Looking up, the man was actually being pulled out... pulled out of his own body? These shadowy snakes, as they coiled around him, were actually dragging the middle-aged man's soul out of his body!

The middle-aged man's face began to show a crying expression, then he laughed strangely. In the constant switching between crying and laughing, his soul was slowly peeled away.

His soul was a darker color than his body, but almost identical. Slowly, the shadow snakes, writhing, dragged the soul completely out of his body. With a thud, the body fell heavily to the ground, its expression frozen in that fleeting moment of overlapping tears and laughter—a truly eerie sight.

Only after my soul was completely ripped away did I realize why the Shadow Serpents stopped biting: they couldn't bite the body, they could only bite the soul!

In an instant, the venomous fangs in the open mouths of the shadow snakes gleamed even more brightly in the moonlight, truly chilling to the bone!

The bitten soul began to twist strangely in an unbelievable way, and small bumps slowly swelled up on the surface of the soul's skin, like the bumps that appear after being bitten by mosquitoes, becoming redder and redder.

Looking at the man's face again, it was covered in bumps, making one's skin crawl! His eyeballs seemed to have bulged out of their sockets from fear! As the bumps grew redder and larger, his two eyeballs were the first to burst, like water droplets being squeezed and burst, with blood even splattering out.

*Smack!* Half of his ruptured eyeball flew into our window, and a black and white object stuck to the glass. I immediately felt Fang Lei next to me let out a soft "ooh" and cover her mouth.

One after another, the skin blister began to burst, popping like firecrackers. What splattered out wasn't just blood, but also fragments of broken skin and muscle tissue. For a moment, it was like a blender.

Once the bulge broke, the shadow snakes rushed to burrow into the body through the holes. In a short while, the middle-aged man's soul seemed to have grown countless black tentacles, twisting and writhing in the air.

Those shadow snakes must have been constantly gnawing and eroding his soul. In the blink of an eye, his soul lay sprawled on the ground like a lump of rotten flesh, and his head went limp like a deflated balloon.

As the moon was gradually obscured by drifting clouds, its light faded, and the shadow snakes, originally black, began to turn gray. The instant the moon was completely hidden, I saw the shadow snakes, along with the remnants of the middle-aged man's soul, slowly seep into the ground!

After the clouds drifted away and the moonlight shone on the earth again, there wasn't even a shadow of a snake left in my yard. All that remained was the body of the middle-aged man, lying quietly on the ground. Perhaps he would never know what had happened until his death!

But my gaze was drawn to something else on the ground—what I had initially thought was a handkerchief! Now, it was lying relatively close to my line of sight. It wasn't a handkerchief, but rather…

A piece of... human skin...? A piece of human skin with strange patterns!

Volume 4, Chapter 9: The Human Skin Map

Volume 4, Chapter 9: The Human Skin Map

After confirming that there was no trace of the Shadow Snake in the yard, I carefully opened the door and slowly walked out.

"Lin Xiao!" At this moment, Li Yang, A Bao, and his older sister Lin Yao all opened the door and came out.

"Don't move." Li Yang stopped A Bao, who wanted to touch the corpse. By the moonlight, I discovered that the corpse was rapidly drying out at an incredible speed. In more scientific terms, the corpse was slowly mummifying.

"What happened?" I asked my older sister, Lin Yao. "Can the Crying and Laughing Machine turn into a mummy?"

"I don't know," said Lin Yao, the older sister, shaking her head. "Professor Zhang's body wasn't like this yesterday."

The middle-aged man's body turned black and hardened in a matter of moments, then slowly turned to dust, and in the blink of an eye, it turned into a pile of black powder, with only a set of clothes lying quietly on the ground.

"Never mind that for now." I picked up the piece of human skin from the ground. Upon closer inspection, I could tell that it was part of a map. Although it was a large, densely packed area, it was still clear that the person who drew it was very meticulous and had a certain level of artistic skill. It was quite realistic.

"There are words on the back!" Fang Lei reminded me from the side.

I turned the human skin over, and on the reverse side were engraved the words: "Moonlit Ancestral Hall, Amidst Layered Shadows." These eight characters were probably the reason why this middle-aged man chose to break into our house on a moonlit night. But who left this? Was it someone from the Lin family? Or someone else? And where is the map drawn on the front of this human skin map? "Is it a treasure map?" Li Yang's eyes sparkled like stars, looking like a greedy person.

"I don't know. This map was obviously divided into several parts by human hands. Now, you can't tell what place it is at all, let alone whether there is any treasure hidden in it." I weighed the human skin map in my hand. What interested me more were the eight characters on the back: "Inside the ancestral hall? The place of overlapping shadows?" What exactly is hidden there? Could it be... the remaining human skin map?

"Could the rest be hidden in the ancestral hall?" Abao voiced my thought.

“We can’t go in now. Didn’t you see those snakes just now?” My older sister, Lin Yao, immediately interrupted us.

"How will we know if we don't go and see?" I put away the human skin map and said, "The Shadow Serpent is gone now, so let's go and take a look."

“Okay, okay,” Li Yang was the first to agree.

"No, that's too dangerous!" My older sister, Lin Yao, still objected.

“So the woman stays,” I said.

"Lin Xiao!" Fang Lei, A Bao, and my older sister Lin Yao called out to me as soon as they saw that I was going with Li Yang.

"Stop talking." I glanced at them and said, "Some things can't be avoided, and I don't think the Shadow Snakes have any intention of harming us. They didn't go into the room just now, did they? Li Yang and I just went to check, there won't be any danger."

After much persuasion, we convinced the women to go back to their rooms and keep watch. Li Yang and I immediately went to the ancestral hall at the back, but to our disappointment, we found nothing. There wasn't even a shadow of a flying insect, let alone a shadow snake. Furthermore, we couldn't understand the meaning of the last four characters: "overlapping shadows." Aren't overlapping shadows still just black shadows? So, Li Yang and I could only leave disappointed, which relieved Fang Lei and the others.

The second half of the night passed peacefully; the snakes seemed never to have appeared. Fang Lei and I collected some of the corpse powder from the yard and put it in a bottle; the rest was disposed of. As for the clothes, Li Yang burned them, leaving only the human skin map in my hand, a reminder of the horrors of the first half of the night.

In a dimly lit room, a middle-aged man angrily slammed a small box onto the ground. Inside the box were several maps made of human skin, but upon closer inspection, they turned out to be identical.

"What's the point of you smashing the box?" Another man hidden in the darkness mocked the middle-aged man with a disdainful tone, saying, "I didn't expect your brother to be so clever, actually using a fake to switch the contents."

"He took the most important piece. Without it, how can we find General Lin's exhibition back then?" the middle-aged man said angrily.

"General Lin? Haha, you still call him General Lin? If you respect him so much, why did your father betray him back then?" the man asked.

“My father didn’t betray him; he betrayed us. But he was still a good general, and that can’t be denied,” the middle-aged man said.

"Think what you want, but I've already memorized the last few words anyway, so missing this part won't make a difference," the man said nonchalantly.

"But how can we piece together a complete map when one piece is missing?" the middle-aged man asked, puzzled.

"Don't worry, even if your brother turns to ashes, the map will be fine. At most, it will fall into the hands of the Lin family," the man said casually.

"What? You mean something's going to happen to my brother?" the middle-aged man asked anxiously.

"The Moonlit Ancestral Hall isn't a place you can just walk into. Back then, for outsiders, entering was like entering hell!" The man continued, "But if the human skin map ends up in the hands of family members, it'll be different. They can help us find the piece that Old Man Lin has, and then we can find a way to get it back." "You...you..." The middle-aged man's face turned bright red as he said, "Did you already know my brother would go to the Lin Family Ancestral Hall by himself?"

"What do you think? Otherwise, do you think this map is so easy to switch?"

"You...you bastard, you deliberately sent my brother to his death so that the Lin family could take over that map."

"Stop yelling. You know what kind of person your brother is. This cumbersome fellow is only good for this much!" The man paused, seemingly wanting to appease the middle-aged man, and said, "Anyway, you've disliked him for a long time, haven't you?"

The middle-aged man didn't speak again, but you could vaguely see his tightly clenched fist. He seemed to be very wary of the man, and in the end, he held back.

"The Nuo dance ritual is in one day, you'd better hurry up and prepare," the man said. "I don't want the whole plan to be ruined by you."

"Don't worry, there won't be any problems." The middle-aged man glared fiercely at the man hidden in the darkness, then turned and left the room.

The next day, everything seemed as if nothing had happened the night before; no one came knocking, and we began to slowly relax. Perhaps the man from the previous night was someone who couldn't be brought into the open, so his accomplices naturally didn't dare to come knocking openly. However, the situation of the enemy being in the dark while we were in the light still made us feel a little uneasy.

"Tomorrow is the Nuo dance festival, how about I take you to see it beforehand?" I suggested, feeling a bit bored.

"Okay, but where to?" The restless Abao couldn't sit still any longer and asked immediately.

"In the village temple, the tools used for each Nuo dance are enshrined. The day before the ceremony, they are taken out and offered incense in worship," I explained.

"Oh, okay, let's go take a look together," Li Yang chimed in.

"I won't go. I've watched it every year before anyway. I'll just clean up the house and prepare dinner while I'm at it," said my older sister, Lin Yao.

"Alright, we'll be right back." With that, I led Fang Lei, A Bao, and Li Yang toward the village temple.

It's called a temple, but it should actually have a small altar, which is just a small brick building behind an earthen platform.

When we arrived there, some villagers were already gathered around watching, but probably because it was an annual event and they were used to it, there weren't many villagers watching the spectacle.

Although it had been several years since he had returned, many people still remembered him. After greeting them one by one, he entered the temple.

The temple was simple to the point of being rudimentary. Directly in front was a protruding platform with a huge black box on it. On either side of the temple were two huge murals with very bright colors, which made the dark color of the large box in the middle stand out even more.

The murals depict scenes from Nuoya rituals, but today they appear more vibrant and lively, as if they are about to jump off the walls.

"Oh, Lin Xiao is here." Standing next to the large box was Yin Tianhuo, the village chief, who was also one of Yin Xue's uncles.

"Uncle Yin, let's open the box," I asked.

"Hehe, yes." Yin Tianhuo nodded.

Nuo dance requires some special costumes, but these items have always been regarded by the villagers as having spiritual power and needing to be properly preserved. So, except during sacrificial ceremonies, they are usually locked in the large box in front of them, and the key to the large box is kept in the hands of each village chief. That key naturally becomes a symbol of the village chief's power.

The day before each sacrificial ceremony, the village chief would solemnly open the box in front of everyone, take out the clothes inside and offer them as an offering, to be used again the next day during the formal ceremony.

Yin Tianhuo carefully took the key off his neck and then opened the large box.

The first thing taken out was a mask on top, but... blood? I saw blood tears slowly flowing from the eyes of the mask. "Blood... blood tears...!" Village Chief Yin Tianhuo's hand holding the mask trembled violently, and his voice trembled as well.

That drop of blood, a vibrant, alluring red, with an eerie quality, streaked across the green surface of the mask…

Volume 4, Chapter 10: The Arrival of the Itinerant Physician

Volume 4, Chapter 10: The Arrival of the Itinerant Physician

"Not again...not again?" Grandma Yin exclaimed in surprise behind us. We turned around and found that she was so frightened that her face turned pale and she slowly slumped down.

"Auntie! Auntie!" Yin Tianhuo rushed forward to support her, but Old Madam Yin grabbed him and said, "Here we go again! Here we go again!"

"What? What's coming again?" Yin Tianhuo asked the question that was on everyone's mind.

"He, he's here!" Old Mrs. Yin pointed at the mask with her withered fingers, then her gaze turned to us, looking at us with a strange expression—pity or hatred? Or perhaps expectation?

"Grandma Yin, what do you want to say?" I asked.

"You all go out first!" Yin Tianhuo looked up and said to the other villagers around him. The villagers seemed a little reluctant, but the village chief seemed to have a lot of power in this village. In the end, they left quietly. In the end, only we, Yin Tianhuo, and Old Mrs. Yin were left in the ancestral hall.

"Aunt, what do you want to say now?" Yin Tianhuo seemed to sense an ominous aura as well, and his expression became somewhat solemn.

"Tianhuo...!" Grandma Yin said, her body slumped to the ground. Yin Tianhuo tried to help her up, but she waved him away. The old lady sighed and said to us, "Sit down, there are some things you young people should know."