Chen Ge climbed out of the tunnel and looked around.
The room had no windows. Not far from the tunnel entrance lay several freshly killed poultry.
"She was using poultry blood? That can actually fool a vengeful spirit?"
He could faintly hear the crying of babies in his ears. Chen Ge followed the staircase up to the second floor.
It was clearly a woman's room. The furnishings were simple, and what distinguished it from the other houses was that there was no coffin inside — instead, there was a wooden bed.
He pulled back the thick bed curtain. Several bamboo baskets sat side by side on the wooden bed, and in each basket, a blade of grass rested over a baby's mouth.
The grass seemed to have a calming effect. Though the infants had been separated from their parents, they weren't crying too badly.
"This woman surnamed Zhu — every time she takes the children away, she's actually trying to protect them?"
Soon, Chen Ge found a notebook hidden under the pillow. He opened it and found rows of names and addresses recorded inside.
The person who wrote this likely had limited literacy. Many of the entries used symbols in place of characters.
"The woman surnamed Zhu outside looks only thirty or forty years old, but this notebook is yellowed and worn — it feels like something from many, many years ago." Chen Ge held the notebook, completely unable to decipher the writing. It looked like Chinese characters, but he couldn't read most of them. "The addresses are vague, but I can make out a few names. Could they be the children who were rescued?"
"You're right. They are all children I sent away." An old woman's voice suddenly came from behind him. Chen Ge grabbed the voice recorder and spun around.
"Shouldn't I be the one who's frightened? Or do you think this old woman with half her feet already buried in a coffin can pose any kind of threat to you?"
Perhaps due to her missing teeth, the voice sounded quite strange. Chen Ge walked further into the room, voice recorder in hand, and spotted a severely hunched old woman covered in wrinkles lying in a recess of the second floor.
She was reclining on the wooden bed in the alcove. The muscles in both her legs had atrophied, and only her head and one arm could still move with any effort.
"Who might you be?" The woman looked incredibly old, and Chen Ge instinctively addressed her with the formal "you."
The old woman looked at Chen Ge and cracked a grin. "I am someone favored by vengeful spirits."
The moment those words left her lips, Chen Ge's mind buzzed. That phrase — there was no one more familiar with it than he was!
"You remind me of someone dear. You've dealt with them before too, haven't you?" The "them" she referred to was, of course, the vengeful spirits.
"That's right. Not only have I dealt with them — I built them a home specifically to take them in."
"Then you're far better than me." The old woman made a great effort to convey her goodwill. "Sit down. I didn't hear the front door open, so you must have come in through the ancestral hall's tunnel. I imagine you're planning to sneak the babies out during the sacrificial ceremony?"
"Yes, that was the idea." Chen Ge didn't move closer to the old woman, but he set down the voice recorder in his hand.
"Same as what I'd thought. Anyone favored by vengeful spirits must possess a quality that even ghosts can recognize." The old woman's voice was calm, yet somehow pleasant to listen to.
"A quality recognized by vengeful spirits?"
"Mm."