Chapter 662
Chapter 662
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>Translator: Ryuma
>Chapter: 662
>Chapter Title: Familiar Face
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“Lv Juren?” Yang Kid widened his eyes as he spotted the man right in front of him.
Yang Kid naturally recognized the man in front of him. After all, his whole family had stuck with him the entire way.
But hadn’t this guy gone off to the capital with Boss Lv to live the good life? Senior Brother Gao had even given them a big theater. So how was he here all by himself under Qingqiu alongside Yang Kid?
“You—you how are you here?” Yang Kid took a cautious half-step back. Right now, he had no clue whether this was the real Lv Juren or some evil creature disguised as him.
“How am I here?” Lv Juren looked dazed upon hearing the question. “I don’t know either, Yang Kid. Where is this place?”
“You’re asking me? Then who am I supposed to ask!” Suddenly recalling something, Yang Kid’s expression turned frantic. “Right, have you seen my wife? Zhao Xiumei, that woman who used to trail after me every single day.”
They had clearly come down together, yet now he was the only one here. Yang Kid grew deeply worried for Zhao Xiumei’s safety.
Faced with Yang Kid’s question, Lv Juren stood frozen in place, his expression bewildered as he racked his brains trying to think.
“Then do you know how to get out of here? Where’s the exit?” Yang Kid peered grimly into the blackness all around.
Lv Juren stood there pondering those two questions for a long while, but he still couldn’t come up with anything.
Still, to Yang Kid, it was barely a silver lining. No matter why this guy had ended up like this, the fact that he hadn’t made a move on him meant at least this thing probably wasn’t some evil spirit in disguise.
But right now, even if the other guy meant no harm, it didn’t help—they still couldn’t get out.
With the other man proving useless, Yang Kid had no choice but to figure out a way to escape this bizarre place on his own.
“Right, I remember Senior Brother Li ran into this kind of trouble before. How did they get out of it back then?”
After mulling it over for a bit, Yang Kid stuck his thumb in his mouth, sucked on it, then held it high to feel the faint breeze in the air.
He tiptoed and waved it around for a moment, then sensed a coolness coming from the south side of his hand. He started groping his way in that direction.
After a few steps, he tore a strip of cloth from his clothes, intending to leave a message for Zhao Xiumei in case she showed up. But then he remembered she couldn’t read, and he was stumped for a moment.
“I’ll find the exit first, then round up some help to come back and save Xiumei. She might not have fallen in at all and could still be outside.” Settling on this plan, Yang Kid started following the cool draft indicated by his finger.
As he set off, Yang Kid twisted his head back toward Lv Juren, who remained dazed in place behind him.
“Hey, you coming or not?”
“Coming? Where to?”
“To get out, obviously!” Yang Kid couldn’t help thinking the man now resembled Senior Brother Gao from back then—dazed and foolish. He had no idea what had happened to turn him into this.
“Get out? Sure.” Lv Juren nodded and trailed after him.
Yang Kid held his breath, hunched low, and carefully crept forward, guided by the coolness on his fingertip.
From the bumps and jostles at his feet, Yang Kid sensed that the two of them were gradually heading downward.
He had no idea if this was good or bad. All he knew was that Senior Brother Li had escaped from beneath Qingqiu this way before, so it should work for him too.
His one small comfort right now was that, pitch-black as this place was, nothing weird had come along to hurt him yet. That bolstered his confidence that his wife was still alive.
Just as Yang Kid had this thought, a distant noise jolted him alert, and he groped toward it.
The closer he got, the louder the sounds grew. But as Yang Kid listened, something felt off—they sounded like human voices. “Just what is this place? How come there are so many people underground in Qingqiu?”
After roughly the time it took to burn a stick of incense, Yang Kid finally pinpointed the source of the noise. It was a line of bizarre figures draped in all sorts of long strips of cloth.
These freaks were enormous in height—Yang Kid could only make out their lower halves, while their upper bodies vanished entirely into the darkness, impossible to discern. They shuffled their legs beneath their robes, dragging along in perfect unison toward a single direction.
Yang Kid peered intently into the gloom, which seemed to part slightly. He vaguely made out that each of these figures clutched an umbrella in hand.
Just as he failed to make sense of it, the things trailing behind the bizarre figures made him suck in a sharp breath of cold air.
They were people—people of every sort—all threaded onto long white mourning staves like meat on a skewer, dragged along the ground.
The white tassel-tipped ends of those staves were gripped firmly in the hands of the bizarre figures.
With every drag, the victims wailed in utter despair, flailing their arms helplessly and clawing at the dirt. But in the end, all they managed was to grind their fingers bloody—nothing changed.
“This—this what is this place! What the—” Yang Kid stared at the scene in the distance, completely thrown into panic, with no clue what to do.
Yet right then, Lv Juren—who’d been dazed and muddled beside him—suddenly snapped lucid, as if granted a final burst of clarity before death. Spotting Luo Jinhua strung up among the victims, he let out a furious roar.
“Juan’er! Run!!”
That shout brought the distant bizarre figures to a halt. The massive umbrellas shrouded in darkness slowly pivoted, swiveling toward Yang Kid.
As he watched Lv Juren charge yelling straight at those figures, Yang Kid felt as if he’d plunged into an ice cavern. Only one thought filled his mind: “We’re done for.”
The instant Lv Juren reached the mourning stave and stretched out to rescue Luo Jinhua, one of the bizarre figures gave its hand a flick. The surrounding darkness coalesced anew into a fresh mourning stave that speared straight through Lv Juren’s chest.
But that wasn’t the end of it. The stave, now bearing Lv Juren, twisted in midair like a living thing and hurtled directly toward Yang Kid.
Terror-stricken, Yang Kid could think of nothing else. He whipped around and bolted for his life.
The intensifying tremors of its approach deepened the despair in his heart. Just as he braced to meet the same fate as Lv Juren, a ferocious gust slammed into his face. The next instant, a heavy thud echoed from behind him. He was safe.
Fear left his body shuddering uncontrollably. When Yang Kid finally turned around, trembling, he spotted a familiar face—one standing atop that towering corpse.
“Se-Senior Brother Li?!” Yang Kid gaped in shock at the familiar man in the distance.
The figure clad in a red Daoist robe, face hidden behind a copper coin mask—who else could it be but his Senior Brother Li?
“Yang—Yang Kid? Heh, what an odd coincidence.” Li Huowang descended from the corpse as casually as if strolling down steps, eyeing the young man before him with three parts curiosity and seven parts mockery.