Night had completely fallen, and the two held candles as they explored everywhere. The more Bao Zhu looked, the more she regretted staying in this place.

The feeble candlelight flickered unsteadily in the night wind, and every shadow seemed to conceal lurking ghosts and spirits. Moss crept over the steps, the floorboards creaked underfoot, the walls were covered with moldy stains, and many stains of unknown origin were splattered upon them.

However, the most terrifying thing was not just these.

The footsteps of the person beside her were as light as a ghost, with his breathing barely audible. His blue robe always stood in the shadowy darkness, appearing vague and unclear. Most of the time, he was merely an indistinct silhouette that disappeared from view with a turn, as if he didn’t exist at all. If not for the fact that his feet still cast a human shadow, Bao Zhu would even suspect she was the only living person in this mansion.

Only now did Bao Zhu realize that she seemed to have never seen Wei Xun in the deep of night.

During the day, this little thief always wore an annoyingly cunning smile, and even when she scolded him, he would just laugh carelessly without seeming to find anything unusual. However, as night fell, his temperament underwent some change, as if he had become a dangerous creature carrying the aura of death, lurking in the shadows and making her unable to suppress her inner fear.

Wei Xun followed neither too far nor too close behind her, staying downwind according to years of habit. The most important thing in stealth tracking was to eliminate all sounds and traces that might expose oneself. At the expert level, even one’s breathing presence had to be concealed. This had become an instinct ingrained in his bones, and without deliberate effort, he would naturally stay in the shadows.

Suddenly a gentle night breeze passed by, blowing from the upwind direction where she stood. That rare delicate fragrance, blending the fresh and tender warm scent of a young girl, came over like an invisible, formless silk net, slowly seeping into the darkest and most obscure corners of this silent mansion.

Standing in that corner, Wei Xun was momentarily stunned.

He thought of those precious flowers and trees planted in the imperial palace’s forbidden gardens. Jade pistils, fragrant orchids, and jade flowers were all richly aromatic and so delicate that in winter they needed underground fires for warmth, and in summer they required nets to shield them from the blazing sun. Even if one liked to dig up two plants to try growing them elsewhere, no matter how carefully tended, they would always wither and die within days because the soil had been changed.

He had stolen her, roots and all, from the inner palace. Could she really survive in the barren, desolate soil outside?

While he was deep in thought, Bao Zhu couldn’t bear the illusion of being alone and made a request:

“Could you make some noise and move where I can see you?”

The first half of this sentence was still a command, but the second half was close to a plea.

Hearing the fear in her voice, Wei Xun complied and stepped forward into the moonlight. Like a pool of cold, silent lake water, his pale face was shrouded in a faint bluish aura under the dim moonlight, making one imagine whether a person with such a complexion had no warmth in their skin and internal organs.

Bao Zhu involuntarily stepped back half a pace, murmuring to herself: “I really shouldn’t have let Shisan Lang go to Xinfeng.”

Just then, a flash of white suddenly appeared in the corner of her vision. Bao Zhu quickly raised her candle and saw a bare white skull on the spirit wall in the courtyard. However, that head was certainly not the little monk she knew, but a skeleton, staring at her with a pair of pitch-black, hollow bone eye sockets.

Bao Zhu’s scream was still in her throat when a blue shadow behind her had already silently flown out, pouncing on the skeleton with unmatched swiftness, rolling away with that thing and disappearing behind the spirit wall.

Bao Zhu dropped her candle, drew her bow and nocked an arrow, aiming uncertainly at the direction where the skeleton had disappeared. But Wei Xun had already emerged from behind the spirit wall, laughing: “What mischievous ghost put this thing on the wall?” He held a skull in his hands, weighing it and showing it to Bao Zhu.

Bao Zhu was both terrified and disgusted, crying: “Throw it away quickly! How can you touch such a frightening thing!”

“Everyone has one of these. What’s scary about it? If someone didn’t have one and instead had a soft bag with facial features drawn on it sitting on their neck, that would be scary.” Wei Xun manipulated the skull in his hands, making the jawbone open and close as if laughing heartily, then casually placed it in the corridor.

Following his words with a slight imagination, Bao Zhu immediately felt a chill.

After that, they discovered three or four more skulls, and a skeleton crouched by a window. The skeleton wore clothes soaked with bloodstains, positioned as if trying to escape from danger but killed from behind while climbing through the window, remaining there ever since. The sight was miserably terrifying, perfectly matching the scene of an entire household being slaughtered when military disaster struck.

Bao Zhu sucked in a breath of cold air. Wei Xun went to examine it, saying: “Very interesting.”

Bao Zhu scolded: “Do you have no heart or conscience? What’s interesting about such a tragic death?”

Wei Xun said: “This skeleton died here, the flesh has completely rotted away, and the clothes on the body, after wind and sun exposure, should have turned to threads and fragments long ago.”

Bao Zhu shouted: “But there are so many bloodstains on the clothes. It certainly wasn’t a natural death. You must not touch it!”

So Wei Xun stopped and returned to her side.

The two continued exploring until they reached the deepest part of the mansion, where a tall storehouse stood. Nearly two zhang high and thirty paces wide, wealthy families usually stored their wealth in such storehouses. Unlike residential buildings, the windows in the walls were built extremely high. The storehouse door was locked, with the lock covered in thick dust.

Wei Xun tried pushing the door panel. The rusted hinges made a teeth-aching creaking sound, opening only two fingers’ width before being blocked by the lock. He quickly glanced inside, hooked his finger, and closed the door tightly again.

Bao Zhu asked strangely: “Aren’t you going in to look?”

Wei Xun spread his hands and shrugged: “You see, there’s such a big lock on this door. I can’t open it.”

Bao Zhu felt suspicious. Not to mention that the old door panel looked like it couldn’t withstand a kick, given his previous curiosity, how could he possibly pass up a locked room?

She asked: “You’re a thief. Don’t you know how to pick locks?”

Wei Xun was unconcerned: “There’s specialization in every trade, like mountains separating different professions. We’ve pretty much seen the whole mansion, and there’s nothing strange about it. The night is deep with heavy dew. We should rest early.”

Actually, after traveling continuously, Bao Zhu was already very tired. Having forced herself to stay up until now, she had yawned several times. Thinking that a moldy, broken storehouse really had nothing worth seeing, she turned to leave.

Having looked around all this way, the main hall with the coffin was actually the cleanest. Being a semi-open structure with only pillars supporting the eaves on the south side and no walls, it naturally had good ventilation and no moldy smell.

Bao Zhu feared ghosts, so even though a man and woman were staying in the same room, she couldn’t care about embarrassment or shyness. Wei Xun spread the straw he had found on one side as her bed.

Wealthy families would place screens to ensure privacy, but this place had been abandoned for so long that there was no usable furniture left. He simply led the donkey into the room and tied it in the center of the hall as a barrier between them. After feeding the donkey some bean cakes, he jumped into the empty coffin and lay down fully clothed.

Seeing him lie in the coffin, Bao Zhu was dumbstruck and exclaimed: “You’re really going to sleep like that?!”

Wei Xun poked his head out of the coffin and said: “My late master Chen Shigu always slept in a coffin. I’ve been used to seeing it since childhood, and being in this profession, I’ve never felt there were any taboos about burial implements. If everyone goes out together on a job and there’s such a clean coffin, we’d even have to rank by seniority to decide who gets to sleep in it.”

Only then did Bao Zhu understand that his suggestion for her to sleep in the coffin wasn’t deliberate teasing, but actually thoughtful consideration.

She quietly muttered: “Your master is really a strange person.”

Wei Xun smiled: “Indeed so. However, all people must die, and most die in their sleep. Dying in a coffin, you can be directly carried off for burial, saving the trouble of laying out the body.”

Bao Zhu thought these words, though reasonable, somehow carried a faint sense of death wish. She also thought the name Chen Shigu seemed somewhat familiar, as if she had heard it somewhere. But these bandits who used martial arts to break laws didn’t appear in court, so it should just be a coincidental name duplication.

Wei Xun lay back in the coffin, and Bao Zhu also endured her discomfort, using her bundle as a pillow and lying on the straw.

The mansion was completely silent, as if time had frozen at this moment, with only a gentle breeze softly blowing in the courtyard, brushing over stone steps and through corridors.

She feared there might be fleas and lice in the straw, and feared there might be ghostly activity in the mansion. How could she fall asleep quickly? She asked quietly: “Besides me, have you seen other people buried alive?”

After a moment of silence from the coffin, Wei Xun’s muffled voice came: “A few times. But when I opened the coffins, they were already beyond saving.”

“Did they… die miserably?”

Wei Xun thought: How could it not be miserable? The coffins were full of bloody scratch marks, with fingernails even embedded in the coffin lids. The bodies had expressions twisted with suffocation, limbs contorted. Even after complete decay, the terror of their final moment remained etched on their faces, never to be erased no matter how many years passed.

Bao Zhu’s survival was only because the tomb had been sealed recently and still had some fresh air remaining. If he had enough time and patiently waited a few months before going to rob the tomb, what he would have seen would have been her corpse. No matter what fragrant scent she had in life, it would only turn into the stench of rotting flesh.

He didn’t want to describe such horrors in detail, saying quietly: “You’re better off not knowing. Sleep quickly.”

The broken coffin returned to its proper silence.

Bao Zhu had thought the abandoned Cuiwei Temple was the worst lodging she had ever experienced in her life. However, the decline of life circumstances had no bottom line. Spending the night in a haunted mansion, having bedtime conversations with someone sleeping in a coffin – even if she told her elder and younger brothers about this in the future, they might not believe it.

She could only comfort herself that at least this was the main hall of a wealthy family, more spacious and refreshing than the nauseating communal sleeping area at the inn.

A single candle flame flickered up and down, making restful sleep impossible.

One moment Bao Zhu felt the night wind brushing through grass on the roof eaves, as if demons were crawling above; another moment she heard decaying windows creaking, as if ghosts were peering into the room; when the candle flame jumped, it was like ghost shadows dancing about. Every rustle in the wind made her imagination run wild with horror.

“Hey, are you asleep?” she asked in an extremely small voice.

The coffin was completely silent. Bao Zhu secretly got up to peek into the coffin and saw Wei Xun lying on his side curled up, motionless. Her heart settled slightly.

After the first watch, the candle burned out. The thin donkey slowly chewed bean cakes in the darkness, the only sound of living creature she could hear.

Even lodging guests couldn’t see daybreak…

Though these were the words of a villager, they kept echoing in her mind. Half-asleep and half-awake, she couldn’t help recalling various legends circulating in the palace about abandoned concubines in the cold palace using their living souls to harm people. In the darkness, all sorts of gloomy and strange scenes came flooding like a revolving lantern, impossible to distinguish between hallucination and dream.

After lying there for an unknown time, Bao Zhu suddenly heard an extremely faint voice letting out a melancholy sigh: “Alas…”

She thought her nerves were tense and she had misheard, or perhaps she had brought something from a dream into reality. She pricked up her ears and listened intently. From deep in the courtyard came another sigh. The wild grass in the courtyard swayed in the moonlight, whether from wind or some other cause.

All of Bao Zhu’s hair stood on end. She wrapped her arms around her knees, curled up in the straw pile, not daring to move.

The wild grass in the courtyard rustled, and something seemed to be lurking in the darkness.

The thing making the sighs seemed to be gradually approaching the main hall. Bao Zhu felt as if she had fallen into ice water, her heart pounding violently. Suddenly, a shrill cat cry came from the roof beam above. She was so frightened she almost cried out, burrowing deeper into the straw, the stalks scratching her face painfully.

She still had spare candles in her luggage, but she absolutely didn’t want to crawl out to get them.

After that cat cry from the beam, the commotion in the courtyard quieted for a moment.

Bao Zhu held her breath, wanting to call out and wake Wei Xun, but afraid the ghostly thing would hear her voice. Anxiety brought tears to her eyes. Just as she hesitated, the thing in the grass moved again.

“So much hatred, I have so much hatred…”

As the voice slowly moved, that thing gradually approached the main hall, seeming about to climb up the surrounding corridor to enter the hall. The thing on the beam made another threatening sharp cry, like a lynx about to pounce and tear at prey.

These two indistinct things, one above and one below, confronted each other in the darkness. Bao Zhu was so frightened her scalp tingled and her whole body trembled. But for some reason, Wei Xun slept extremely soundly with no reaction whatsoever.

The two ghostly things made noise for a while. She teetered on the edge of collapse, tears streaming down. One moment she wanted to run barefoot out of the mansion to sleep in the wilderness, the next she wanted to give Wei Xun, who had dragged her into this situation, a few hard lashes.

Finally unable to bear it any longer, terrified to the point of rage, the young girl leaped up. Her left hand grabbed the horn bow beside her, her right hand drew a feathered arrow. Drawing the bow and nocking the arrow, she first shot three rapid arrows toward the beam overhead with whooshing sounds, then shot three more toward the source of sounds in the courtyard.

“Get lost! All of you get lost!”

With a shout mixed with crying, after all six arrows were released, the entire courtyard fell into silence. No one made another sound.