"I did it to save you." Chen Ge shoved the skull-crushing hammer back into his backpack. "Three ghost shadows got away. We've been exposed. We can't stay here any longer."
"We leaving?" Old Wei had wanted to go for a while now.
"Coffin Village is dead quiet at night. The sounds of our fight must have carried a long way. I'm worried other monsters might have heard the commotion and come to surround us." Chen Ge had his own plan. "Those three monsters attacked the moment they saw us. That alone tells me the old woman's reason for luring us to the haunted house wasn't innocent at all. The people in this place are nowhere near as kind as Grandpa Bai said."
Grandpa Bai didn't entirely agree with Chen Ge's assessment. "I've never been inside Coffin Village at night, so I can't say why things turned out this way. As far as I know, the real villagers of Coffin Village wouldn't do something like this. They were just like ordinary people."
"Grandpa, you haven't been here in many years. You have no idea what might have happened since then, so we'd better be cautious."
Chen Ge looked around and picked up the paper figure from the ground.
The paper figure—tormented by the boy—was covered in fingernail scratches. Its limbs were nearly torn off, and its expression was one of extreme agony.
"Zhu Fengxi?"
Three characters were written on the paper figure's back. He couldn't tell what kind of ink had been used, but they were scrawled crookedly, looking like congealed blood.
"That name rings a bell." Grandpa Bai leaned in close to Chen Ge, peering at the figure. "He was one of the people who fled Coffin Village back in the day."
"The names of the refugees are written on the paper figures." Chen Ge connected this to the odd things he had discovered in Lin Guan Village—cleavers placed behind the doors of old houses, ropes hanging from windows.
Combined with what they had just experienced in the haunted house, he vaguely understood the purpose behind those arrangements.
If a monster squeezed through the window, the rope could loop around its neck, and the cleaver behind the door was probably meant to ward off evil and provide self-defense.
The more remote a village was, the stranger its customs became. Chen Ge could only interpret things in his own way.
"The people who escaped from Coffin Village lived in constant terror. Could what they feared be the ghosts of Coffin Village itself? If a ghost captured them, did being turned into a paper figure and tormented become their final fate?"
There had always been a question Chen Ge couldn't quite answer about those refugees. Why had they fled Coffin Village in the first place?
What could have happened in this rundown little village to make its residents flee en masse?
"To get to the bottom of this, we'd probably need to find a villager and ask." Chen Ge tucked the paper figure into his pocket. "I have a plan I'd like to discuss with both of you."
"Go on."
"First, we leave the village."
"Sure." Old Wei and Grandpa Bai both nodded in agreement. They too felt the village was far too dangerous.
"Second, once we're outside, we search the houses on the village perimeter one by one and take down whatever we find." A glint of determination shone in Chen Ge's eyes. "As long as we don't make too much noise, we'll have a chance to pick them off one at a time."
Chen Ge had thought this through carefully. Every time Xu Yin devoured a ghost soul, another patch of blood appeared on his body. At this rate, there was a strong chance he would become a true Red-Clothed Ghost tonight!
The gap in power between a Red-Clothed Ghost and an ordinary ghost was enormous. Without a Red-Clothed Ghost by his side, Chen Ge never quite felt at ease.
"You're trying to wipe out an entire village?" Old Wei was a cop, and his brow furrowed at Chen Ge's words.
As for Grandpa Bai, he was already used to Chen Ge's wild ideas.
"Let's discuss our next move once we're outside the village." Grandpa Bai walked ahead, his hand clasping the jade pendant.