“What was that?” Weng Chenglin didn’t dare move. He knew he was in big trouble.

Yao Shunyu appeared relatively calm. “I don’t know, but it’s definitely not one of us. Quick… quick, get the incense ash!”

Yao Shunyu’s words seemed to awaken Weng Chenglin. Elder Sun had hinted that if they encountered danger near the Corpse Interment Kiln, the incense ash could save their lives.

Weng Chenglin immediately took down the incense ash pouch hanging from his waist, but then he faced another difficulty. “Brother Yao, how do we use this incense ash? Do we just scatter it at those things?”

Weng Chenglin had no experience dealing with such evil things; he could only rely on guesswork.

“That won’t work. Pour out the incense ash, all of it. Draw a circle on the ground, surrounding us. Quick!” Yao Shunyu urged sternly.

At that moment, Weng Chenglin also panicked. He hurriedly poured out the incense ash and drew a circle on the ground with himself as the center, enclosing himself and Yao Shunyu within it.

Strangely enough, after the circle was completely closed, the footsteps disappeared immediately. Not only did the footsteps vanish, but even the sound of the wind and other miscellaneous noises nearby disappeared as well. Suddenly, silence fell.

“Huh?” Now that he had calmed down, Weng Chenglin finally realized that something was wrong.

Weng Chenglin turned slightly, using the corner of his eye to observe his surroundings. After a moment, his gaze suddenly stopped. He saw Yao Shunyu staring at him with a strange, almost smiling expression.

“Brother Yao… Yao, what are you…”

Weng Chenglin suddenly stopped. He immediately realized something very strange. The situation was so urgent just now, so why hadn’t Yao Shunyu taken out his own incense ash to draw a circle?

A few seconds later, Weng Chenglin discovered something even more terrifying. Yao Shunyu had no paper food container or grave brick in front of or behind him. All he had was himself.

“Crap…”

At this point, how could Weng Chenglin not understand? This wasn’t Yao Shunyu at all; it was a ghost!

He subconsciously reached for the pouch at his waist, but the incense ash inside was already gone.

Weng Chenglin didn’t care about anything else at this point. A powerful survival instinct drove him to leave immediately. He turned and ran, but he slammed into a wall with a “bang.” The impact made him dizzy, and his face was covered in blood.

He stared in disbelief at what was in front of him. There… there was a wall there!

It was a brick wall, the same kind of blue-gray grave brick he had been using!

The surrounding environment gradually darkened. It was hard to describe the feeling, as if the sky was gradually lowering, and everything around him was pressing in on him, until finally, he was confined in a low, narrow cave that could barely accommodate him.

Simultaneous with all of this was the approaching “Yao Shunyu.”

That familiar and reliable face was completely rotten. Decaying flesh constantly fell away, revealing ghastly white bones. A pair of blood-red eyes, still shining in the darkness, stared intently at the circle of incense ash on the ground that had trapped the two of them. “Hee hee hee, now no one can compete with me…”

“Ah! Ah… Ah!”

Accompanied by a shrill scream, the rotten head bit through Weng Chenglin’s abdomen.

Weng Chenglin, his back against the wall, slumped to the ground, his body twitching occasionally, until the light gradually faded from his eyes.

…

“Hiss—”

Yao Shunyu took in almost this entire scene from not far away, but he didn’t say anything to warn him. Weng Chenglin wasn’t Li Bai; they didn’t have a life-or-death friendship.

In fact, as soon as Yao Shunyu noticed the character "Yao" written above the cave in front of Weng Chenglin, he realized that this was a trick.

Because before he approached the cave, he had carefully circled around the mountain wall from a distance, and he confirmed that there was only this one cave with the character "Yao" written on it.

Weng Chenglin was clearly not as resolute. He had been bewitched by the ghost. In Weng Chenglin's mind, he had left his original cave and gone to the cave where "Yao Shunyu" was, but from the perspective of Yao Shunyu, the bystander, that wasn't the case at all.

The wooden-headed Weng Chenglin first stepped in place, pretending to walk, and then he went closer and spoke into the opening in the brick wall of the cave.

What happened next was even stranger. Weng Chenglin first took the bricks from the wall one by one and walked into the cave. Then, he turned around and rebuilt the wall, sealing himself into the Corpse Interment Kiln.

Yao Shunyu couldn't see what happened after that, but from the screams coming from the cave, Yao Shunyu knew that Weng Chenglin was finished.

Withdrawing his gaze, Yao Shunyu prepared to leave. His mission for tonight was complete.

Slowly backing away, as the feeling of being watched disappeared, Yao Shunyu turned and walked out.

After leaving and finding Li Bai, the scene before Yao Shunyu was quite surprising. Everyone had returned except for the dead Weng Chenglin.

Seeing Yao Shunyu return, Li Bai breathed a sigh of relief and slowly stood up.

The faces of the others were obviously not so good. Sun Yuangang looked at the mountain wall with some lingering fear. Everyone had heard the screams just now. Weng Chenglin had screamed for a full two minutes, and the despair and pain in his voice were unimaginable.

“What kind of ghosts were those? They scared me to death. I didn't dare move at all,” Wu Qiang, with his simple and honest face, shuddered with lingering fear, still not recovered.

From the subsequent conversations, Yao Shunyu also learned about the experiences of these people. Everyone's encounters were similar, and the reason why these people weren't bewitched wasn't entirely because they were cautious. Take the honest and simple Wu Qiang, for example. When he encountered strange things, he didn't think too much. He just remembered the steps Li Bai had told him, completed them step by step, and then left. He was the fastest of everyone.

Luan Lihui took out two wads of cotton from his ears and said with some relief, “At first, I heard Sister Li calling me from behind. I felt something was wrong, so I tore my clothes and pulled out two wads of cotton to plug my ears. But the sound wasn't affected at all, so I knew it must be fake. Then I heard Weng Chenglin calling me, in a very urgent way, but my ears were blocked, so why the hell was he still calling me? It was obviously fake, so I ignored him.”

“Me too, me too, but mine was even weirder. Can you believe it? I actually heard my wife’s voice inside the kiln!” Huang Jun said excitedly, “At first, I ignored it, but the voice inside became more and more sinister. She… she was actually cheating on me in there! That made me so angry!”

Everyone spoke at once, and the outline of the events gradually became clear, until a strange chant came from the bottom of the mountain.

Everyone looked in the direction of the sound and saw a light suddenly appearing in a place at the foot of the mountain. The light grew brighter and more numerous and was constantly moving.

“It seems to be in the direction of the Zhusheng Niangniang Temple,” Lü Zhangyuan, who hadn’t said much, suddenly said.