"She's in the well, she just hasn't woken up yet." The woman surnamed Zhu didn't step back, shielding the two children in front of her.
"If you won't tell me, then I'll just have to find her myself." The black-robed figure waved at the Red Robe beside him. The monster covered in faces burrowed directly into a villager's body. In less than a second, the villager collapsed to the ground, lifeless.
"It seems it's not him." The black-robed figure tilted his head upward. "The female ghost was driven to death by the villagers. Even gravely wounded and unable to maintain her form, she would never possess a villager. So who would she take refuge in?"
If the black-robed figure was thinking at all, he was more deliberately testing the woman surnamed Zhu's reactions.
Before entering Living Coffin Village, the Ghost Story Association had already gathered quite a bit of information — though most of it was rather vague and needed verification.
Hearing the black-robed figure's voice, the woman surnamed Zhu visibly tensed.
"The female ghost despises most of the villagers, but there was one woman surnamed Zhu who was the exception." The black-robed figure called the face-covered Red Robe to his side, threading his fingers through the monster's hair and stroking it tenderly, as though treating a lover. "If I were that female ghost, I would certainly take refuge in the person I trusted most."
He patted the Red Robe's head, and his tone shifted abruptly. He pointed at the woman surnamed Zhu before him. "Kill her!"
Without any warning, this madman had been talking about something else one moment, and the next he turned hostile without hesitation.
The woman surnamed Zhu hadn't expected him to be so decisive. In that critical moment, the ornaments she had taken from the red coffin began to change.
Each ornament concealed a half-body vengeful ghost drenched in blood — this had to be the woman surnamed Zhu's last trump card.
She turned and whispered something to Jiang Ling, then poured all her effort into controlling the vengeful ghosts to hold back the Ghost Story Association's Red Robe.
Jiang Ling and Fan Yu heard the woman's words and slowly began to retreat.
The face-covered monster let out a spine-chilling laugh. This Red Robe was different from the others — it was more like a collective embodiment of resentment, most likely hailing from the world beyond the "door."
The ghosts that emerged from the ornaments were torn to shreds. Every face on the monster's body performed the same action — opening its mouth and biting into the woman surnamed Zhu.
At this moment, the black-robed figure seemed to have been waiting a very long time. His voice trembled with excitement: "To devour a top-tier Red Robe — in the past, that would have been utterly inconceivable!"
The black-robed figure finally revealed the Ghost Story Association's true purpose for coming to Living Coffin Village. Through some unknown channel, they had learned that a wounded top-tier Red Robe resided within, and every move they'd made had been orchestrated around that Red Robe ghost.
As long as they could devour that wounded top-tier Red Robe, the Ghost Story Association would possess a top-tier Red Robe of its own.
One after another, the mouths bit into the woman surnamed Zhu. After lingering for two or three seconds, the face-covered monster suddenly stopped.
"She's not on her?" The black-robed figure froze for a moment, his gaze falling on Jiang Ling and Fan Yu. "How troublesome. Since that's the case, I'll just have to kill them all."
The face-covered monster charged toward Jiang Ling, while the black-robed figure remained standing in place — he seemed to have already known the outcome and didn't care about this at all, busying himself with his own task.
Reaching into his robe, he pulled out a handful of paper figures. Every single one wore an expression of agony.
"All thirty-four people of Lin Guan Village are right here. According to their own confessions, the people who escaped from Living Coffin Village over a decade ago were all connected to the woman surnamed Zhu to some degree — including her descendants." The black-robed figure slowly rose to his feet, his eyes locked on Jiang Ling. "Among the escapees, only that little girl wasn't turned into one of my paper figures. Thinking about it that way, the person the female ghost is most likely possessing is her."
Fan Yu grabbed Jiang Ling's hand and ran toward the village, but how could two children possibly outrun the Red Robe monster behind them?
As the face-covered monster drew ever closer, Fan Yu suddenly heard a familiar voice from around the corner ahead.
"This way!"