Chapter 1

Step, two steps… Li Bai's entire body tensed. She lowered her head, trying her best to control herself, to not think about those terrifying scenes, but she couldn't do it at all. The sound of the old hemp rope being pulled, constantly ringing in her ears, was like a death knell.

Li Bai swallowed hard, her throat painfully dry, as if an invisible noose was also around her neck, slowly tightening.

Cold, oppressive, suffocating… all kinds of negative emotions rushed towards her, like a giant, sticky spider web binding her tightly.

But Li Bai remained unmoved. She knew clearly that if she wanted to live tonight, she had to leave this house, step over the threshold in front of her.

Fortunately, she finally did it. The moment she stepped over the threshold, she felt like a drowning person finally breathing air. The cold aura disappeared, and she was finally free from the restraints.

Without hesitation, Li Bai immediately used the flame from the candlestick to ignite the oilcloth. In the next second, as the flames rose, the surrounding firewood was quickly ignited. The huge fire tore through the darkness, dispelling the fear in Li Bai's heart.

Listening to the crackling sound of the burning firewood, Li Bai could finally breathe deeply. The old house in front of her quickly fell into a sea of fire.

By the light of the fire, Li Bai finally saw clearly that under the roof beams, nearly ten feet above the ground, hung several bloated corpses.

The corpses were uniformly dressed in bright red wedding gowns, wearing red embroidered shoes with mandarin ducks on a white background, their whole appearance extremely festive, as if they were going to attend a very joyous ceremony.

But what truly frightened Li Bai was the heavily made-up faces of these corpses. After all, these people were all men. In the light of the flames, the men's lips were blood-red, maintaining a strange, almost smiling expression. Their eyes were wide open, unable to rest in peace.

However, this fear did not last long. Soon, the fire engulfed all the corpses.

Muffled sounds came from the fire, the sound of the hemp ropes tightening the corpses being burned and snapping, the corpses falling to the ground.

Li Bai stood by the flames for a while longer. She could have chosen to leave the moment the fire started, but she didn't. It wasn't curiosity, but worry. If she didn't see these strange, newly-wedded corpses burned to ashes with her own eyes, she was afraid she wouldn't be able to sleep. When she closed her eyes, all she would see was the scene of the corpses hanging overhead. These corpses would rotate as she moved, pairs of unseeing eyes staring down at her, which would become her haunting nightmare.

Damn villagers! Damn Blackwater Village! And… damn Night Watchers!

After leaving the courtyard, Li Bai was still unable to calm down for a long time. Yao Shunyu saw the fire burning in the courtyard, and his heart, which had been hanging, finally relaxed. Calculating the time, he knew that Li Bai must have encountered trouble.

Li Bai did not hide what happened in the courtyard. After hearing about the scenes Li Bai had experienced, even the experienced Yao Shunyu couldn't help but feel his scalp tingle. Since ancient times, hanging corpses has been a great taboo. In some unorthodox and evil practices, this is a sinister method of exchanging lives, especially when they are hanging in red wedding gowns.

Of course, these men were definitely not willing. They were hanged alive by the villagers.

The sins in this Blackwater Village were far from being burned away by this fire. What Yao Shunyu hoped for was to erase the entire village from the map with a single fire.

However, after listening to Li Bai's account, the biggest reaction came from Li Maochun. He cried and sobbed, tears flowing like they were free. He cried sincerely, complaining about what sins he had committed to be relegated to such a hellish place. He had done good deeds and accumulated virtue his whole life, and had hardly ever argued with anyone. It was said that good people were rewarded, so why was he…

Li Bai was also touched by Li Maochun's plight. She was a little regretful. Now it seemed that their initial judgment was biased. The possibility of Li Maochun being a Crimson infiltrator was very low. After all, Crimson were considered elites, one in a hundred, and this Li Maochun really didn't deserve to be one.

"Stop crying and sobbing, are you mourning?" Yao Shunyu kicked him. It was the middle of the night, and the village was so quiet. Li Maochun's crying echoed in the dim night, which was really a bit creepy.

Worried that Li Maochun might run away in a moment of panic and not carry out the task, Yao Shunyu directly escorted the limp Li Maochun to the execution ground like a prisoner, no, to the mass grave in the west of the village.

It was very desolate here. The name "mass grave" was well-deserved. There wasn't a single decent tombstone, but there were plenty of mounds of earth of varying sizes.

Because the visibility was poor at night, at first glance, the grave mounds seemed to stretch endlessly, extending into the darkness in the distance.

Yao Shunyu couldn't help but gasp. They had roughly walked around this Blackwater Village. The village was not very big, and there were not many residents, but the scale of this mass grave was far out of proportion to the normal death toll of the village. They now knew the reason for this. Presumably, buried in these nameless graves were all the poor men who had been imprisoned in this dark mountain village.

A dirt road, about two meters wide, meandered through the mass grave, full of potholes, clearly in a state of disrepair.

It seemed that this was the road that Li Maochun was going to repair tonight.

Not far from the road, there was also a huge mound of earth. The reason it was called a mound was firstly because it was too big, more than ten times larger than those desolate graves. Also, it was too regular and obviously newer, as if someone had piled it up not long ago.

Seeing this scene, Li Maochun's heart was ashen, but in the end, he had no choice but to walk towards the mass grave. Li Bai and Yao Shunyu were not far away. They clearly saw Li Maochun walk towards the mound, and then, as if he had discovered something, he dug out a basket and a tool similar to a hoe from the ground.

There was no mistake now. This mound was used to hold the soil to fill the potholes in the road. The basket and hoe were the tools used.

After all, besides the big mound, there were only desolate graves of varying sizes. If they didn't use the soil from the mound, then they might accidentally dig up the soil from a desolate grave, and who knew what trouble that would cause.

Suddenly, a hint of doubt arose in Yao Shunyu and Li Bai's minds at the same time. They had a feeling that this seemingly certain death mission seemed to be quite easy. Not only was soil provided, but tools were also provided.

And this doubt reached its peak after Li Maochun tremblingly dug a few baskets of soil, walked through the mass grave several times, and successfully filled two potholes.

"I say… could it be that we've been tricked?"

After hesitating again and again, Li Bai finally voiced her doubts. She observed that Li Maochun seemed to have relaxed a little, carrying the basket in one hand and the hoe on his shoulder, working enthusiastically.