Li Si looked around—Xue Ling’er was curious, Ge Chong watched coldly, Huai Cheng was unconscious, Feng Cheng was terrified, while Xuan Yuanshan beside him let out a shrill scream like a woman’s. Li Si looked back at Xuan Yuanshan in astonishment, then glanced at the pitch-black cat in the lantern that seemed to look down upon all things with contempt. He suddenly understood: “Xuan Yuanshan, don’t tell me you’re afraid of cats?”
Xuan Yuanshan’s face, which had always remained unchanged, finally contorted. He shouted loudly: “You talk less nonsense.”
Li Si had no time to inquire further. The black door on the lantern was emitting threads of black qi toward this space, and the black cat standing before the black door used its strange blue pupils to look over the several people beneath the lantern one by one. Suddenly, the black cat cried out once, its body continuously leaping and darting on the high-hung lantern. By the time the several people came to their senses, the black cat had long disappeared, and the black door on the lantern had also vanished.
At the same time, the Huai residence’s main gate appeared, opened wide, facing the bustling crowd.
Ge Chong looked at Li Si with a grave expression and asked: “Head Constable Li, what do you say about what just happened?”
“Nothing to say.” Li Si’s face was full of worry.
Without turning his head back, Ge Chong walked out of the Huai residence’s main gate. Xue Ling’er also closely followed Ge Chong and left. Huai Cheng’s illness had worsened. Feng Cheng, along with Huai Cheng’s children, escorted him to seek medical treatment outside. The Huai residence’s servants and guests had long since fled without a trace. For a moment, what had originally been an extremely lively wedding hall was left with only two people—Li Si and Xuan Yuanshan, and of course, one black coffin.
“It seems this Ancheng needs to have its name changed.” Li Si suddenly expressed this sentiment.
“Change it to what?” “Ghost City!”
Xuan Yuanshan did not sleep soundly all night. As soon as he closed his eyes, he could always hear faint footsteps echoing back and forth above his head. A small, dark head extended before his eyes. On the head was a pair of strange, ice-cold blue pupils. These pupils could kill people, just like many years ago, his own relatives and loved ones who had died beneath these blue pupils. Ice-cold breath blew on his face. Xuan Yuanshan suddenly opened his eyes. The sky was bright—it was already the next day.
A weary voice suddenly transmitted from inside the room. Xuan Yuanshan looked over alertly. Li Si was lying on the table yawning. Seeing Xuan Yuanshan awake, he said: “Good that you’re awake. There’s work to be done.”
“What work? How did you end up in my room?”
“First question—it’s a good thing. Second question—this is my room.”
Only then did Xuan Yuanshan discover he had been lying in Li Si’s bed. He wanted to ask more, but Li Si had already left the bedroom. Xuan Yuanshan could only follow out.
Li Si went straight to the county yamen’s great prison. Coming to this kind of place so early in the morning felt somewhat inauspicious when one thought about it, but Li Si did not care at all. With a “thump,” he sat down with his bottom on a pile of straw, also sitting before a person.
Li Si asked with a smile: “Morning. Want to eat some noodles?”
Li Si had someone bring three bowls of steaming hot beef noodles—noodles from Yu Laotou’s shop. One bowl for himself, one bowl for Xuan Yuanshan, and another bowl for the person opposite. The person opposite had a thin, weak build. His gaze looked at Li Si with dejection, saying aggrievedly: “Head Constable Li, I’m really, really not a madman.”
Li Si began eating noodles and said: “I know. That’s why I now want you to tell me everything you know.”
The thin, weak man was precisely Zhang Younian, who yesterday had been treated as a madman by everyone.
Zhang Younian’s face showed joy. Slowly, he recounted his experiences one by one. It turned out that this Zhang Younian happened to be the fan seller that Zhan Xin had encountered when first arriving in Ancheng. At that time, after Zhang Younian sold the fan painting to the somewhat crazed-looking Zhan Xin, with the mood of watching excitement, he hid at the corner of the alley to secretly observe Zhan Xin. When he heard Zhan Xin let out three miserable laughs toward heaven and fall down, Zhang Younian waited for a long time but did not see him get up. Curiosity made Zhang Younian approach, and only then did he discover Zhan Xin had died. Later, the yamen sent people to take away Zhan Xin’s corpse, but they forgot the fan painting that had fallen to one side. Zhang Younian was a genuine businessman—not taking advantage of a bargain would really be letting himself down. Therefore, Zhang Younian brought the fan painting back home again.
When Zhang Younian spoke to here, his gaze became uneasy. He looked at the two people listening to the story before him and said: “But only after I got home did I discover that the fan painting that dead person had bought was not mine at all. I opened the fan painting. At first, I couldn’t see anything on it. Later, a face actually emerged—the face of an exquisitely beautiful woman I had never seen before.”
Li Si’s expression was somewhat strange. He said in a deep voice: “And then?”
Zhang Younian continued. After opening the fan painting, Zhang Younian actually had not paid much attention either, thinking to himself that perhaps it was the dead person’s own fan painting that had been accidentally lost. But when time came to the latter half of the night, Zhang Younian woke from sleep and discovered that the fan painting originally placed on the table was actually placed beside his face. The fan painting had been opened. The woman in the painting, her face beautiful as flowers, was smiling right at him. Although Zhang Younian was somewhat startled, he did not feel it was anything much—perhaps he had placed it himself but did not remember. But when Zhang Younian reached out to touch the fan painting, he froze. He heard the sound of a woman crying, precisely transmitting from within the fan painting.
Zhang Younian had gotten a big fright at the time, rolled off the bed, and looked at the fan painting with fear. The crying sound in the fan painting stopped, but the voice of a woman speaking transmitted, seemingly present yet absent. She said: “You won’t have forgotten me, will you? You won’t have abandoned me, will you? I’ve waited for so long, so long…”
Zhang Younian’s mind instantly became chaotic. All sorts of messy thoughts ran out, but in the end, only one word gradually became clear—ghost! Zhang Younian tried to approach the fan painting. In his heart, he held the last thread of hope, hoping that everything was just a dream. Now that he had awakened, the matters from the dream just now should disappear. But when Zhang Younian walked to the bedside, he saw precisely that the woman in the painting had turned her face. She revealed the back of her head, and on the back of her head, another face appeared prominently—a face covered with fresh blood, a ghost face!
When Zhang Younian spoke to here, his entire body could not help but begin trembling. He licked his tongue and continued: “At that time, I really was going crazy. I left home, running aimlessly. In the end, I really could not run anymore, so I hugged a large green stone and fell asleep. But when I woke up, I discovered that I had actually run into the chaotic burial mound on the eastern outskirts of the city. I was soundly sleeping while hugging a grave marker. What made me even more terrified was that beneath that grave marker, quietly placed there, was that very ghost fan…”
Zhang Younian spoke all this in one breath, speaking until he was out of breath. As for the matters afterward, Li Si had also heard from Xue Ling’er. Li Si pondered and said: “Zhang Younian, on that fan painting, besides that face, do you still remember if there was anything else?”
Zhang Younian shook his head blankly and said: “At the time, I only noticed that human face. It seems there was nothing else. Oh, that’s right, I remember now. At the instant when the woman in the painting turned her face, I seemed to see something…”
“What was it?” Li Si pressed.
“A door—it was a door!”
Beside the green stone table in the county yamen’s back courtyard, Li Si crossed his legs, looking at the pool water flowing past not far away, smiling slightly and saying: “This is really getting more and more interesting. First, there was the swordsman Nan Jian whose courage was scared to pieces, then the Crown Prince’s favorite Zhan Xin who died from a needle piercing his eye. Next was the even more inconceivable ghost gate, followed by the coffin, Zhan Xin who died and came back to life, and just now, the ghost fan with a woman’s face painted on it… Oh, I also forgot—the cat that strolled out from the black door… Don’t you think all of this is very interesting?”
Xuan Yuanshan’s face was as heavy as water, but hearing Li Si speak to the latter half of the sentence, his complexion fluctuated slightly. He said: “I don’t find it interesting. I find my head is very big, because although we know so many things, we cannot grasp even the slightest thread of a clue that we can follow up on.”
“Who says there isn’t any? We have one ready-made piece of physical evidence.”
“Oh, what physical evidence?”
“It’s precisely that ghost fan from Zhang Younian’s mouth.”
Feng Cheng opened a black door at the eastern end of the county yamen. The black door was pushed open with a creak. Feng Cheng pointed in astonishment at the corner of the room and said: “The fan painting is gone. I clearly placed it on that table over there. How could it be gone?”
Feng Cheng’s complexion was terrible. Li Si carefully looked over the room once, turned around, and said to Xuan Yuanshan: “Now my head is also a bit big.”
“Oh?”
Li Si sighed lightly, looking at the gloomy, low curtain above Ancheng and said: “It seems truly as I said the night before last—this Ancheng will probably sooner or later become a ghost city, with demons and ghosts holding sway, stirring up wind and waves.”
Xuan Yuanshan said coldly: “Then that’s good. We can hand over the work to monks and Daoist priests and rest.”
Hearing these words, Li Si burst into loud laughter, laughing until he bent forward and backward, laughing freely and thoroughly. Since their acquaintance, this was the first time and possibly the last time Li Si had been made to laugh by Xuan Yuanshan’s words. The laughter transmitted far along the county yamen’s long corridor. A cold wind blew, and the laughter was broken into segments of trembling sounds, like ghostly weeping.