Chapter 20: The Vengeful Spirit

At the entrance to the tomb chamber, Zhang Shanshan stood, tense and focused, her ears straining for any sound from within.

“That intruder must be dead by now,” Zhang Shanshan thought to herself, noting the utter silence that had fallen for some time.

She reached out and gently turned a bagua-shaped stone disc set into the wall.

The glowing runes on the chamber walls flared, and the green orb that had fallen to the side began to shine as well.

Moments later, the closed stone door slowly slid open, and the stone room was illuminated.

Zhang Shanshan had barely poked her head inside to observe when a cold, pallid hand shot out like lightning, clamping around her throat and dragging her in.

Soon after, Zhang Shanshan found herself tied to a chair, her face as white as a sheet, her body trembling uncontrollably.

I lounged on a soft sofa, one leg crossed over the other, a cigarette dangling from my lips, watching the scene unfold with great interest.

“Aunt... Aunt, how are you still alive?” Zhang Shanshan stared at Zhang Ruye, who stood nearby, expressionless, fixing her with a chilling gaze. A wave of cold swept through her heart.

“Shanshan, I never imagined that all these years, you’ve been the one controlling me?” Zhang Ruye’s voice was soft and haunting.

“No, no... it wasn’t me! I don’t know anything, I really don’t know anything!” Zhang Shanshan whimpered, on the verge of tears.

“Is Zhang Guang dead?” Zhang Ruye’s voice suddenly brimmed with a thick aura of death.

“N-no... Grandfather went back to his hometown,” Zhang Shanshan stammered.

“And what about Zhang Xiao?” Zhang Ruye's lips curled, revealing two sharp vampire fangs that glinted coldly.

“Great-Grandfather is still alive too,” Zhang Shanshan replied shakily.

Zhang Ruye let out a low, resentful growl, then suddenly seized Zhang Shanshan by the hair, her fangs plunging toward her throat.

I flicked my cigarette away and rushed over, grabbing Zhang Ruye’s head. “You’re not a true jiangshi. You have no blood essence. If you drink blood now, will you still be able to control yourself?”

Zhang Ruye jerked her head free from my grasp, casting a cold look at me. “You’re right, but this half-human, half-corpse state of mine is the Zhang family’s doing. They’re nothing but a pack of heartless beasts. Every Zhang who aided their evil deserves to die.”

Crack.

I watched as Zhang Shanshan’s head twisted aside, her throat crushed by Zhang Ruye’s grip. She died instantly.

A chill ran down my back. Zhang Ruye’s hatred for her family ran bone-deep. What on earth could have happened?

Yet with Zhang Shanshan’s death, the clue about those nine corpses in the theater’s rooftop water tank was lost once more.

Still, perhaps by investigating Zhang Ruye’s story, I could deduce a connection between the two.

Just then, I noticed the Eye of the Underworld Dragon revealed another thread, this one now entwined with Zhang Ruye.

But I was dumbfounded. Again, it was a thread half-yin, half-yang.

Could it be because Zhang Ruye was half-living, half-dead, neither fully one nor the other?

And what about the other half-yin, half-yang thread? That one appeared after slaying the ghost fetus, yet I had no idea whose fate it was tied to.

Bathed in pale moonlight, Zhang Ruye and I sat atop a grave, the wind biting cold.

Glancing at the sea of tombstones around us, I pulled my coat tighter. To be sitting here, in this weather, at this hour, discussing life with a half-human, half-corpse woman... the sensation was indescribable.

Zhang Ruye still wore that thin silk dress, utterly unbothered by the chill.

Her figure was truly exquisite... Wait, what the hell am I thinking? This is not the woman to fantasize about—who knows if she’ll bare her fangs and drain me dry in an instant.

“Our Zhang family in Wushan has been a great clan for centuries—conservative, rigid, with strict hierarchies. I longed to break free from the suffocating atmosphere, to be free. So I threw myself into my studies.” Zhang Ruye’s voice was soft and distant.

“When I was fifteen, I ranked first in the entrance exams for Wushan No. 1 High School in Yanshui Town. But that day...”

Her tone grew colder as she recounted her tale. In the stillness of the night, my heart chilled with every word.

That day, with her mother’s permission, she’d stayed out with friends to celebrate, returning home close to midnight.

Upon entering the courtyard, she saw a man in a yellow military uniform staring at her. His gaze made her feel stripped bare; she hurried into her room.

Soon after, she drifted into a confused sleep.

She dreamed—a shameful dream. In it, she was entwined with a tall, handsome youth amid a sea of wildflowers, kissing and tumbling.

He was impossibly handsome, the white knight she’d imagined in her budding adolescence.

He undressed her, his hands caressing her body.

Nervous yet full of anticipation, she awaited the final moment, like a bride on her wedding night.

But suddenly, her mother’s furious shouting tore through the dream, jolting her awake.

In a daze, she opened her eyes just in time to see the man in the yellow uniform step through a wall and vanish.

That night, her mother held her and wept until dawn, but when questioned, refused to explain.

The next day, while bathing, she noticed a pitch-black mark on her neck.

Late that night, her parents’ angry voices woke her. She crept to their door and overheard a conversation that left her stunned.

“Zhang Guang, I don’t care about the other girls, but Ruyue is your daughter! How could you bear to give her to that old ghost?” her mother sobbed.

“You think I want to? But the Commander has chosen her. It’s her fate. If not, our entire Zhang family—hundreds of people—will die,” her father roared.

“No! If anyone tries to harm my daughter, I’ll fight to the death!” her mother declared.

“Calm down. Our family has sacrificed so much already. The Commander said Ruyue is the last one. After this, the Zhang family will rise from Wushan and become one of the country’s elite,” her father pleaded.

“Never! If you touch Ruyue, I’ll expose everything,” her mother spat through clenched teeth.

Then, Zhang Ruye heard her mother’s agonized screams. Rushing in, she found her father clutching a blood-soaked dagger, her mother lying lifeless in a pool of blood.

“Run...” her mother gasped, then died.

But Zhang Ruye could not outrun her father. She was bound and taken to a mountain valley.

The valley was once a secret underground armory built by a warlord eighty years prior. The Zhangs had supported this warlord, but after a plague swept through, the place became a land of death—no one who entered ever returned.

There she met the Commander—the warlord chief who had died in the plague decades ago, now a vicious specter.

“You will be my wife when I return to life,” the Commander told her.

Then, for five years, Zhang Ruye was forced to soak in corpse oil, drink decoctions brewed from poisonous herbs, all to erase her life force and transform her into a corpse.

When she turned twenty, the Commander pressed a green orb into her brow. After that, she lost consciousness—until the orb was dislodged by the Eye of the Underworld Dragon in my chest.

I sat in silence for a long time, struggling to process what I’d heard.

If the Commander was truly so powerful, how could I have destroyed him? Was the ghost in the yellow uniform I vanquished really the same Commander the Zhangs spoke of?

Ghosts, too, had their ranks: common spirits, then fiends, then fierce ghosts, with malicious specters at the top. If he had been a true malicious specter, I, an amateur exorcist, wouldn’t have stood a chance. What I vanquished was, at most, a middling fiend.

Moreover, the Commander claimed Zhang Ruye would be his wife after he returned to life. I found that hard to believe.

A ghost can possess a body, but it can never truly return to life.

First, a yin spirit’s possession of a living body inevitably leads to the host being consumed by yin energy, eventually dying as their life force is extinguished—so resurrection is impossible.

Second, for the ghost, possession is draining; the longer it lasts, the more it weakens.

I described the ghost I had destroyed to Zhang Ruye, but she dismissed the idea that this was the Commander—he had never been so weak.

“Seems the only way to uncover the truth is to go to Wushan,” I said.

“Take me back. I want revenge,” Zhang Ruye demanded fiercely.

“Give me two days. There are some things I need to handle first.” I glanced at Zhang Ruye, my heart uneasy. If the real Commander was a malicious specter, would I be walking into a tiger’s den in Wushan?

But I knew I wouldn’t rest easy unless I saw for myself.

Back home, I took a hot shower, then checked my phone—only to find it broken, likely damaged in the tomb chamber.

I grabbed my spare phone, inserted my SIM card, and was greeted by a cascade of notifications.

Sixteen missed calls in all: fifteen from Chi Yun, and one from an unknown number.

“So many calls—could she be in heat?” I chuckled to myself, recalling Chi Yun’s wildness in bed, and felt a stirring in my heart.

I called her back, but no one answered. Perhaps she’d already gone to bed. I hung up.

I wandered into my parents’ room, picked up a photo of the three of us, and murmured, “Goodnight, Mom. Goodnight, Dad.”

As I turned to leave, I accidentally bumped into the bookshelf, sending a pile of books tumbling down.

These were just miscellaneous books, stacked up for lack of space.

As I picked them up one by one, my hand froze when I saw a thread-bound volume—a nameless, timeworn book.

A flood of old memories surfaced. I’d read it as a child, treating it as a collection of strange tales.

Suddenly, my expression changed. I sat down on the floor and began rifling through the book.

The arrangement and condition of those nine corpses in the theater’s rooftop water tank—I’d always felt I’d seen it somewhere before. All this time, I’d thought it was from my studies in the Great Netherworld Yin-Yang Arts, but now I realized it must have been from this very book.