Chou Chui crouched at the cliff edge, quietly waiting for night to fall.
A big yellow dog lay at his feet.
One step, and he pulled back. Chou Chui didn’t provoke it; instead, he carefully sidestepped away.
The big yellow dog lifted its chin, seeming bored, then wagged its tail and ran down the mountain.
[It’s about time. Move out, and be careful.]
The communicator tucked in his ear crackled with Hall Master Luo Han’s voice.
Chou Chui nodded.
He looked down at the village.
Dinner smoke rose from every household, and the air slowly filled with the mingled scent of firewood and cooking oil.
Clothes hung out to dry in the yards. Old men sat around the courtyard entrance playing chess, while women crouched by the river washing clothes.
Everything in the Novice Village seemed so peaceful and serene.
Too bad they’d gone and provoked someone they shouldn’t have.
Chou Chui let out a soft sigh and rose to head down the mountain.
At the last possible moment, he dodged a snail struggling to crawl across his path.
Then he made his way toward the village entrance near the sea and heard an old married couple arguing in a thick local dialect.
“What do I lack compared to that Widow Zhang?! Is it just that I’m a little plump? And here I am, slaving away every morning to make you dried rations! You ungrateful white-eyed wolf! Why don’t you just go die!”
“BANG—crash, clatter—”
The window glass shattered with a dull thud, and a dark yellow rolling pin whistled right past Chou Chui’s head.
The argument inside continued, and Chou Chui wisely chose to take a detour into the village to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.
“Move aside!”
A gaunt middle-aged man staggered by with a carrying pole over his shoulder, brushing past Chou Chui, the baskets nearly slamming into him.
Chou Chui narrowly dodged, thinking to himself how utterly normal everything in this little village seemed.
He couldn’t understand why so many of his peers had gone missing in such a poor, rundown little fishing village.
He continued forward and saw a few kids tossing a cloth sack around.
The sack was quite exquisite, stamped with a small trademark. Many things in this village bore that trademark—a little fox tail.
Chou Chui avoided the kids playing with the sack, dodged a strange flying sack, and noticed the same trademark on the Blacksmith Shop’s signboard. So all those things were produced here.
That Blacksmith Shop really did have a wide range of work.
Curious, Chou Chui decided to scale the wall and check the place out.
The courtyard wall didn’t seem to have any anti-theft mechanisms installed. The owner of the yard was clearly careless.
The courtyard was completely empty, except for a scarecrow propped against the wall for damage testing.
The scarecrow also bore the Blacksmith Shop’s trademark. It swayed gently in the wind, radiating an infuriating sense of mockery.
Chou Chui was careful not to touch the scarecrow. After casually searching the yard a bit more and finding nothing, he climbed back over the wall and left the way he came.
But the moment both feet touched the ground, Chou Chui froze.
A scarecrow stood right in front of him.
The scarecrow’s face had sword marks—one horizontal, one vertical, carved into it. It was unmistakably the same scarecrow from the yard; Chou Chui remembered the blade marks.
But… how did it get here?
Chou Chui jumped up and peered over the wall, and sure enough, the scarecrow inside was gone.
This scarecrow was obviously up to something.
He really wanted to chop it down!
But he couldn’t. Knowing it was a Power-Enhancing Artifact and still attacking it would be suicide. What if the thing exploded?
Best to shake it off.
Chou Chui’s legs exploded with force, and his form vanished in a flash!
In an instant, he appeared at the village’s east entrance.
Surely now… huh?
The scarecrow had somehow already appeared, standing silently behind him.
Chou Chui turned around and saw the eerie scarecrow with the cross-shaped cuts on its face. The atmosphere around him suddenly felt strange.
Chou Chui swallowed hard, and the air around him turned even more unsettling.
A cold white figure flickered past and vanished into a small alley.
Just as he was about to call out, he suddenly saw…
Chou Chui sprinted after it, but found the alley completely empty.
“Who’s there?!”
Strange—he’d clearly just seen a shadow flash by…
Could there be a secret passage here?
“Woooo—”
Just as he was puzzled, a mournful, drawn-out cry drifted from somewhere unknown.
“I died so miserably…”
Every hair on Chou Chui’s body stood on end.
Chou Chui couldn’t understand how he could sense a gaze coming from a scarecrow. Even worse was that cold, sinister stare from behind…
Maybe it was just his guilty imagination, or something else entirely. But he genuinely felt like the scarecrow was watching him. Fear and mortified anger mixed together, giving him a strong urge to punch the scarecrow.
But he held back again… he understood that to live long, the best approach was to touch nothing and show no hostility.
Another cry came, and this time Chou Chui pinpointed the direction.
As a Cultivator, Chou Chui wasn’t afraid of ghosts.
But he was afraid of people who pretended to be ghosts.
So he decided to run the opposite way.
Yet just as he reached the mouth of the alley, a small, utterly abnormal figure blocked his path.
It was a disheveled little girl puppet, appearing there who knew when.
She stood perfectly still, but a voice came from her belly:
“Come play with me.”
Chou Chui said nothing. He leaped high over the little girl’s head… only to see a hanged corpse swaying from a crooked tree in the distance.
What kind of place is this?!
What exactly just happened in these past few moments?!
Even though he had no fear of ghosts or monsters, Chou Chui was panicking now.
Judging by these methods, perhaps all of this was the work of a hidden Grandmaster here… If he fell into that person’s hands, there was no way he’d end up well.
What was even more terrifying was that he suddenly realized he couldn’t escape.
He could see the village’s edge and run toward it, but no matter how he ran, he couldn’t reach it—as if he were running in place.
It was utterly bizarre, as if something was affecting his perception…
“This is the Ghost King’s Residence, the Gateway to Hell! Who dares to provoke the Ghost King?!”
A booming male voice suddenly echoed through the village sky, startling the entire village awake.
Hell’s Gateway?!
Chou Chui was scared half to death on the spot. The bizarre occurrences stacked together made him believe most of what the voice had said.
The terrifying punishments of Hell flashed before his eyes, making his legs go weak.
Of course, a good Killer wouldn’t break down that easily.
Whether it was someone playing tricks or a genuine Hell’s Gateway, there had to be a way out of all this.
Letting out a ghostly wail, he ran out from some civilian house and disappeared by the wall, looking like he’d just done something wrong. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a white shadow flash past, and he decided to capture a villager to get some answers.
He couldn’t catch the white figure, but he could definitely catch the villager in that house.
So he walked to the door of that residence and placed his hand on it.
However, the door opened by itself.
“Who’s making all that noise in the middle of the night?!”
“THUD—”
A dull impact followed, then the sound of a nose bridge and cheekbone cracking.
The first sound was the villager kicking the door open. The second was the sound of his nose bridge and cheekbone breaking.
Wait—why couldn’t I, a Cultivator at the seventh Cultivation Level, dodge a door panel that was just… who cast that binding spell?
Chou Chui’s first thought was—what the hell, why can’t I move?
His second thought was—damn, that’s hard.
Before losing consciousness, Chou Chui saw a familiar mark on the door’s edge.
Was this door made by that Blacksmith Shop too?
Maybe he should consider getting a new nose bridge forged there.
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