Judge of Souls - Chapter 89

Kong Su said, “Being watched during a livestream isn’t anything special. I’ve even been watched by the entire internet while having a curse cast on me.”

Ji Ruxi exclaimed in surprise, “You really had a curse cast on you?”

Kong Su proudly stroked her hair.

For some reason, she felt a bit proud about it.

“Wow…”

Ji Ruxi and Tian Guang, these two who hadn’t seen much of the world, both let out a sigh of amazement together.

No wonder she had been so abnormal before.

“Is this the point? It’s not!” Huang Yu said, “What’s wrong with you people? You’re derailing my topic. What was I trying to say just now?”

No one remembered what she had said earlier, just that it was probably… something important.

While everyone was trying to recall the previous topic, a series of hurried footsteps came from outside.

Jiang Feng alertly tensed his body and signaled everyone to keep quiet.

The villagers aggressively pounded on the door, shouting loudly, “Open up! Who did you call human traffickers? You bunch of cheap sluts, all get out here! We kindly gave you a place to stay, and you actually repay us like this. You cheap goods, come out!”

“See,” Huang Yu said, “I told you livestreaming was wrong. If it weren’t for considering that cutting off your program might put you in danger, I would have banned you long ago.”

The villagers cursed profusely with all sorts of inappropriate words that were too vulgar to repeat.

Ji Ruxi had never seen such a scene and was stunned for a moment.

The door was being pounded with loud banging sounds, shaking constantly, and even the stairs leading to the second floor began to tremble slightly. The house wasn’t high quality to begin with, and with years of aging, it wouldn’t be surprising if this group of people tore it down.

“What do they want to do?” Ji Ruxi asked, “They wouldn’t want to kill people, would they?”

Tian Guang reached for his phone again, “Let’s livestream! I really don’t believe they’d dare kill people in broad daylight!”

Huang Yu pressed his hand back down, “Put it away! I’ll go take a look.”

Unlike Chu Xuanliang, she was herself a combat personnel.

Huang Yu opened the door and saw a group of people holding hoes and wooden sticks blocking the doorway, their eyes fierce with malice.

A woman at the front pointed at her nose and cursed loudly, “Who did you call human traffickers? Tell me! You bunch of beasts, if you don’t give us an explanation, nobody’s leaving today!”

The investor was filled with grief and indignation, his whole body erupting with great strength. He pushed aside Tian Guang and the others who were in his way, rushed to the front of Huang Yu, and cursed back, “You dare to do it but won’t admit it? You’re the beasts! How can you do such unconscionable things?! Your hearts are black, I curse you to die horrible deaths, and to be trafficked people in your next lives too!”

“You’re talking nonsense!”

The nearest old man directly swung his hoe, aiming to smash it down on his head.

Watching the hoe fall, Mr. Yu resignedly closed his eyes and didn’t dodge.

If he died here, this group of villagers would be guilty of actual murder, and none of them could escape.

Huang Yu was furious. She swung out the long staff from behind her with a “clang,” directly knocking that person back several steps.

Her strike was extremely powerful. Since the opponent was an elderly man after all, his hand hurt badly and his weapon dropped to the ground.

Huang Yu scolded, “Everyone stop! Who said we’re solving this with violence? Those with weapons, back up three meters!”

The villagers were emboldened and completely ignored her. They exchanged glances with each other and simply rushed in all at once.

Huang Yu stamped her foot, “Taking shamelessness as a free pass!”

She gripped the demon-expelling staff in the middle, pressed her fingers on one of the carved patterns, recited the talisman characters on it, then spun and swung it out.

“Command!”

A cool wind swept horizontally across the air, knocking everyone to the ground.

They had been standing densely packed, so a large group fell at once, then struggled to get back up. Looking at the few people, their gazes were even more malicious, clearly unwilling to let this end peacefully.

The Taoist magic they learned, though mostly used for killing ghosts, couldn’t cause much harm to ordinary people. But working in this field, they inevitably encountered reckless people who rushed forward to their deaths, so they also needed to protect themselves when facing humans.

Whether it was exorcising ghosts, casting spells, engaging in magic duels, or soul searching, they also learned a bit of everything. In serious cases, they could directly scatter someone’s soul completely.

Usually they didn’t want to, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t.

Huang Yu formed Taoist hand gestures, created two paper figures, lit them with flames from her fingertips, and blew them toward the villagers. She also scattered five ghost coins and seven longevity gold papers, stepped the demon-summoning steps, and chanted, “Heaven drums beat, earth drums sound, ghost talismans frighten and pursue evil people, specifically suppressing creditors’ souls and spirits, subduing the villagers of Shanyuan Village to quickly come and obey…”

She wanted to summon debt-collecting little ghosts to pester people, but the five ghosts never appeared.

“What’s the situation?” Huang Yu maintained her hand gesture and pointed forward, “Can’t summon ghosts in this territory?”

Jiang Feng said, “This place is very strange. Tian Guang did manage to summon something when playing with the Pen Fairy, but I’ve never seen any ghost spirits haunting around.”

The villagers got up and organized their formation. Discovering that Huang Yu had some real skills, they temporarily didn’t dare to advance.

“The ground is shaking,” Kong Su lowered her center of gravity to feel it. At first it was very subtle, but this trembling sensation became more and more obvious until it was impossible to ignore – even the flesh on her thighs began to shake.

“Is it an earthquake?” Kong Su said, “Quick, get out! This house is so run-down, it’ll probably collapse!”

Everyone deeply agreed and hurriedly ran out the door.

They might not be able to hear it, but Jiang Feng still had a “buzzing” tinnitus in his ears, occasionally mixed with some crying sounds, which should be coming from behind the mountain.

The villagers also sensed the trembling, but their faces changed dramatically, as if they knew what was happening. They muttered under their breaths and no longer had time to bother with them, dropping their weapons and running away one after another, hiding back in their own homes.

The previously noisy doorway immediately became quiet.

Huang Yu was still asking, “What’s happening?”

No one answered.

She turned around and found that Ji Ruxi and the others were slowly disappearing. Their hands and feet had already become transparent and virtual, leaving only their heads. The several people looked at her with terror-filled eyes but couldn’t make a single sound.

Huang Yu immediately reached out to grab them, but her hand went straight through. Soon even their last body parts disappeared, and she didn’t know where they had gone.

Huang Yu quickly turned around, wanting to call out to Jiang Feng. When she realized her vocal cords were out of control, she discovered that she too was undergoing changes. Looking down, everything below her neck was gone.

This unfamiliar sense of losing control startled her greatly. She was confused about where she was standing, but before she could panic for long, her vision had already gone completely black, and her brain was like a machine that had been shut off, completely blank.

Soon, the sensations in her limbs and five senses returned. Huang Yu blinked and found herself standing in another place.

This place had a strange color tone, thick with ghostly energy, like a ghost city.

The air was an old, dim yellow color. Though it should have been noon, a setting sun hung slantwise at the horizon. All the scenery looked as if multiple filters had been applied, appearing unreal.

In front of her was an ancient earthen house. Due to the color effects, she couldn’t make out the building’s original appearance.

Huang Yu looked at the door plaque overhead, whose paint had peeled off and whose writing was illegible, and asked, “Where is this?”

“Their ancestral hall!” Ji Ruxi said loudly, “We’ve been here before. This is the place I showed you in the photos!”

Jiang Feng remembered it too.

“The Judge Bao statue!” Tian Guang pointed ahead in horror, “It’s broken!”

The black Judge Bao statue had already exploded, with fragments scattered all over the ground. On both sides were the trays holding white clothes that Jiang Feng had seen before in the photos. Two whole rows, looking like dozens of them.

Ji Ruxi hadn’t yet emerged from the previous situation and was huddled together with her assistant, trembling, asking, “What exactly are these white clothes? Dark magic?”

“What else could they be? Cenotaphs,” Huang Yu walked over and flipped them with her staff, saying, “There are hair and talismans pressed underneath, substituting for the dead.”

Kong Su asked, “What does that mean?”

Huang Yu frowned deeply, “It’s similar to a body double technique. When certain people do wrong things and ghosts come for revenge or to collect debts, because they’re afraid of dying, they first set up a cenotaph and place it in front of the deity statue to trick the debt-collecting ghosts into thinking these people are already dead, so they’ll be safe. But actually they’re still alive.”

Kong Su asked, “So this formation was made by a Taoist priest?”

“Definitely,” Huang Yu crouched down to pick up a talisman packet, opened it to look at the patterns on it, and nodded, saying, “Very familiar too. Probably a fellow Taoist.”

“Then who do these white clothes represent?” Kong Su slapped her forehead, “Oh, no need to ask. It must be those villagers.”

For the ritual, their birth dates and times were written on the paper. Judging from the birth years and months, these were all people over fifty years old, which indeed matched the identity of those villagers. It was most likely them.

Huang Yu put down what she was holding and looked around, saying, “The biggest question is, what exactly is this place?”

Jiang Feng had seen this kind of place before and was familiar with it. Just like when the little Mountain God, due to insufficient cultivation, had brought out a fake Shaoling Mountain range after leaving his main body. This should be a virtual space related to reality.

But in the little Mountain God’s space, certain events that had happened on a particular day kept repeating. He wondered what would happen here.

Jiang Feng said, “Let’s go look at the village.”

Everyone had no objections – at least it was better than staying put.

From the ancestral hall to the village wasn’t far, just that the road was rather difficult to walk. Tian Guang and the others still had some memory of it, so following them, they quickly arrived.

The village in this space was somewhat different from the current one. Several of the newer buildings hadn’t appeared yet, so it was clear that time here was frozen several years ago.

When they arrived, the “villagers” were gathered around the main street. An old man was wailing and rolling on the ground, while the onlookers pointed and gestured, holding weapons but not stepping forward to help.

Jiang Feng could see a fierce ghost with a miserable death wrapped around the old man, having devoured most of his flesh and blood. Clearly this person was already beyond saving.

The villagers gathered together whispered among themselves:

“How did it appear again?”

“Didn’t they say it was already resolved?”

“Could it be that they also summoned that Taoist priest’s ghost?”

“That can’t be? Look, both you and I are fine.”

“How about we kill another cow and send it over.”

“What about Second Uncle? Can he still be saved?”

“I think it just can’t be suppressed. Those ghosts have broken free again. How could cattle and sheep possibly suppress the malevolent energy of those evil ghosts? Now there’s also a Taoist priest! Yesterday when I went to the ancestral hall, I saw Judge Bao’s face peeling. If this continues, we’ll all die. Who will save us this time?”

“How about we send Second Uncle over? He’s already like this anyway, and no one can save him…”

After they finished discussing, they found a cloth, wrapped up the old man on the ground, then carried him to the back mountain.

Everyone listened to their discussion with chills running down their spines. Seeing them carry the old man up the mountain like livestock made them even more horrified.

Ji Ruxi followed behind the main group and asked, “What do they want to do?”

“Living sacrifice,” Jiang Feng said, “They want to use living sacrifice to worship gods and subdue ghosts.”

Tian Guang’s voice trembled, “Does that work?”

“Yes. The human body is a great feng shui magnetic field. Our country has always had the traditional saying of using living people for sacrifice to make up for feng shui. Lu Ban did this, and it flourished for a time. The so-called ‘building bridges and roads, no corpses seen’ actually refers to a sinister practice of foundation sacrifice. In ancient times, whenever they built bridges, roads, or any major projects, they would use living people for sacrifice. Otherwise, either there would be unrest, or they couldn’t drive the foundation piles. Later this developed into using pigs, cattle, and sheep instead. During the Republic period, warlord Chen Jitang built the Zhuhai Bridge using young boys and girls for foundation sacrifice,” Jiang Feng said. “‘The Ballad of Drinking Horses at the Great Wall Cave’ writes: ‘Don’t you see beneath the Great Wall, dead men’s bones supporting each other as pillars.’ The Great Wall was built using massive numbers of living people for sacrifice. Though this practice is sinister, in backward rural villages, there are still rumors of it.”

Huang Yu had been about to explain but felt nauseated inside. Since he had already explained it, she solemnly nodded.

“You can go back and ask your elders – they should all have heard of such sayings. In recent decades, this phenomenon hasn’t completely disappeared. Where there’s unrest and consecutive deaths, they’ll buy a few mentally disabled people for living sacrifice,” Huang Yu said. “Fortunately, now the light of socialism shines on you, me, and everyone. Fighting against feudal superstition is everyone’s responsibility.”

Everyone felt chilled to the bone listening.

Ji Ruxi asked, “But… they would even kill their own people?”

“What do you mean by their own people?” Kong Su said, “They’re not human at all!”