A small, rosy hand pressed down on the cold, weathered coffin lid.
The moment Jiang Ling touched the red coffin, every monster kneeling in the center of the village stopped wailing. One by one, their deformed, horrifying faces slowly rose.
"Come help me!" Jiang Ling let out a scream. None of her usual cuteness remained on that face—her expression was terrifying.
"Bang!"
The heavy, solid coffin lid crashed to the ground. Everyone peered inside.
Lying in the bright red coffin was a woman.
Soaked black hair clung to her frail body. Her skin was pale, her features well-proportioned, and there was a sharpness between her brows that gave her an unusual air—not beautiful, exactly, but possessing a strange quality all her own.
"Stall them for a bit." Jiang Ling stepped into the red coffin, her eyes fixed on the woman inside.
The villagers at the center of the village all rose to their feet, speaking in their local dialect, their faces alight with ecstatic joy.
"What do you want me to stall them with?"
Jiang Ling lifted her hair, revealing a missing patch of bone at the back of her skull—the scalp there had caved inward.
"This is the only deformity Jiang Ling has?"
Stepping forward, Jiang Ling smeared her own blood onto the woman's hand, then lifted it and placed it against the back of her own head.
Thin threads of blood crawled out from the woman's palm, worming through the gap where bone was missing and drilling into Jiang Ling's mind.
"What is she doing? Is this her reincarnating into Jiang Ling, or is she simply attaching herself to Jiang Ling's body?"
The grotesque, deformed villagers caught sight of the woman sleeping inside the coffin, and they charged toward it like madmen.
"I hate children!" Chen Ge pulled the Skull-Crushing Hammer from his backpack and planted himself in front of the red coffin, feeling as though he would be torn apart at any moment.
Watching the assorted deformed monsters rush toward him, Chen Ge felt a flicker of panic. In a situation like this, his only options were to fight with everything he had—or to call out for
The frenzied monsters were seconds away from shredding Chen Ge and the coffin behind him when a soft laugh drifted through the blood fog: "At the brink of life and death, that female ghost didn't come out to help you. Looks like she really is sound asleep."
A crimson tide covered in human faces surged through the blood fog, slamming Chen Ge and all the deformed villagers aside.
"The Strange Talk Association's Red Robe!" Chen Ge had only been grazed, yet his entire body felt frozen stiff.
He looked down at his left hand. In the urgency of the moment, he'd only managed to shield his head with both arms, and his elbow had been struck by the Red Robe's passage.
"I've been following you this whole time, waiting for this exact moment." The face-covered monster coalesced once more, and from behind it stepped a figure in a black robe. The figure stopped beside the red coffin, but his gaze was fixed on Chen Ge. "Surprised? We meet again so soon."
On that last line, the black-robed figure altered his voice, imitating the one who had leapt from the building as a scout.
"So it's you." Chen Ge still had a trump card—