Blood-red spider silk left a line of writing on the door panel. Strangely, when the old man turned to look, the characters dissolved into blood and slowly slid down.
"You've been searching for Sister Jiang Ling's body all this time — did you do something to betray her?" Chen Ge caught a trace of guilt and self-reproach in the old man's words.
"Come inside first." The old man hung his lantern on the doorframe. Having his long-hidden secret exposed left him flustered.
After Chen Ge entered, the old man stood in the second wooden cabin and let out a long sigh. "Actually, I know who poisoned that couple."
"You know?" Chen Ge stopped in the doorway, gripping the Skull Crusher Hammer, and did not step further inside.
"I can make an educated guess." The old man lifted the wooden bed board, revealing a coffin hidden underneath.
It was smaller than a normal coffin, pure black.
"You keep a coffin under your bed?" Chen Ge grew even more curious.
"This coffin was prepared for the eldest daughter of the Zhu family." The old man pushed open the coffin lid and took out a memorial tablet that hadn't been finished yet. Three characters were written on it — Zhu Xinrou.
"Why would you prepare a coffin for her? Does her disappearance have something to do with you?"
"To truly explain this, I'd have to go back a long way." The old man stared blankly at the tablet in his hands. "When I was young, I heard the adults in the village talk about a coffin village deep in the mountains of Jiujiang. That village never had any dealings with the outside world. The villagers all looked bizarre and strange, and they had all sorts of peculiar customs. For instance, every household kept a living coffin inside their home — nobody knew what it was for."
Chen Ge could understand the first part of what the old man said. A village deep in the mountains with no contact with the outside world would naturally practice intermarriage, which could easily lead to a high rate of deformities.
But the second part made no sense to him. What did it mean for every household to keep a living coffin? Keeping a coffin inside one's home was terribly inauspicious.
"Old sir, is that village still there now?" Chen Ge closed the door and asked quietly.
"At first I thought the village was just a legend — after all, no one had ever seen it. But who could have guessed that such strange things really did happen." The old man set down Sister Jiang Ling's tablet and reached into the coffin, rummaging through something. "The coffin village in the mountains suffered a disaster over a decade ago, and a few families managed to escape."
"Every one of those who escaped looked almost normal, without any of the strange habits mentioned in the legends. So the Bai family village at the foot of the mountain took them in."
"But no one anticipated that, in that same year, an epidemic would break out in the Bai family village as well." There was regret in the old man's voice — it seemed someone had opposed taking those people in at the time, but they hadn't listened.
"Those people brought the disease out of the mountains?"
"Who can say for certain now? Everyone capable in the village moved away — nine out of ten houses stood empty. In the end, it was those families who had escaped from the coffin village who put down roots here. Later they even changed the name of the village to what you see now — Lincun Village." Old Man Bai finally found what he had been searching for inside the coffin. He pulled out a black cloth garment.
"I made this coat for the eldest daughter of the Zhu family. Those who die outside the village must wear black when they're placed in the coffin — that way the blood doesn't show too obviously." There was another notable feature of the garment in the old man's hands — along the ribs and across the back were four additional sleeves, each only a quarter the length of a normal sleeve.
"Think this coat looks strange? The Zhu family's eldest daughter was shaped just like this." The old man's voice grew quieter and quieter, and Chen Ge could hear the pain in it. "That child's parents had escaped from the coffin village. Her mother was already pregnant with her at the time. You could say that child was the coffin village's last 'seed.'"
"A level of deformity like this can't be explained by intermarriage alone. There was something seriously wrong with that coffin village!"