"Might as well make the best of it." Chen Ge walked toward the coffin.
"Calm down!" Grandpa Bai grabbed Chen Ge's arm. "That's a coffin for the dead!"
His voice was a little too loud. Old Wei hurried to mediate. "There's something fishy about all this. We need to be careful."
"The three rooms the old lady mentioned must be these three coffins. She isn't human—coffins are home to her." Chen Ge calmly removed Grandpa Bai's hand from his arm. "Does my logic not hold up?"
"The problem is…"
Grandpa Bai and Old Wei really had no idea how to talk to Chen Ge. After a long pause, Old Wei finally spoke. "You're not scared looking at this stuff?"
"Of course I'm scared. But being scared isn't going to help, would you agree?" Chen Ge looked at Old Wei. "Don't let all this mess distract you. Come on, everyone."
The three of them walked over to the coffins together. They were roughly made, their surfaces coated in a layer of blackish-brown substance that gave off a faint stench.
"Is that the smell of a corpse?" Grandpa Bai looked at Old Wei.
"Corpse stench is much worse than this. It's probably just the wood rotting." Realizing that Chen Ge wasn't going to agree to leave, Old Wei quickly got his head in the game—he was, after all, a police officer with extensive investigative experience, and in critical moments he was far more capable than an average person. "Listen to me. We can't believe everything the old lady said. We'd better have a backup plan tonight. On the way here, I already memorized the route out. The three of us stick together tonight. If we run into danger and have to bolt, follow right behind me and don't get separated!"
"Let's first figure out whether the old lady is a person or a ghost before anything else." Chen Ge placed both hands on the coffin lid.
"What are you trying to do?"
"Open it." Chen Ge exerted his strength and began pushing the lid open bit by bit.
"You can't seriously be planning to sleep in here with three coffins all night, can you?"
"Let's see what we're dealing with first." Chen Ge pushed the coffin lid halfway open and peered inside. At the bottom of the coffin lay a burial shroud.
"Don't touch it! That's extremely bad luck. One touch and you'll disturb the soul of the deceased—you'll invite all manner of misfortune." Grandpa Bai clamped down hard on Chen Ge's hand, and Old Wei rushed over too. It took both of them to haul Chen Ge to the side.
"I just wanted to take a look, figure out the layout of this room." Chen Ge finally settled down, and Grandpa Bai and Old Wei breathed a sigh of relief—though it was short-lived, because Chen Ge's next words sent their hearts right back up into their throats. "Actually, I really want to open every coffin in this village. The biggest secret this village holds is probably hidden inside these coffins."
"If you say that outside, I'm afraid the villagers will beat you to death." Grandpa Bai walked back to the coffin, intending to close the lid. He glanced at the burial shroud inside, and his eyebrows knotted together. "Why is their burial shroud bright red?"
"Yeah, I noticed that too just now. That's exactly why I wanted to pull the thing out and take a closer look." Chen Ge walked over as well. "White paper lanterns hung on the door, white inverted fu characters pasted on it, but the burial shroud is red. In this village, red and white affairs seem to be completely reversed—somewhat like a ghost marriage."
"You know about ghost marriages?" Grandpa Bai shot Chen Ge a sideways glance.
"There's a horror scene in my haunted house that's exactly a ghost marriage—a living person marrying the dead, a union between life and death."