Paintings of Terror

Li Haojing.

“Maybe it’s just a coincidence? After all, there are a lot of people with the last name Li,” Wei Dong said.

Ke Xun stood up. “Let’s go ask that old man. Maybe he can tell us something.”

The two of them ran over to the old man’s courtyard.

They entered the house and went to knock on the door leading into the inner room. The old man raised his muddy, lifeless eyes and looked at them. “What’s wrong?”

“Can I ask you about who the deceased is?” Ke Xun got straight to the point.

“How do you not know that?” The old man’s tone suddenly grew vigilant. His pebble-like eyes suddenly started to move. Gradually, a strange, wicked expression seemed to emerge on his face.

Ke Xun startled. He promptly pointed to the cloth tied around his waist that had a cursed character on it: “Look, I came to help. I didn’t read a lot as a kid because I’m dumb. My memory is really bad. After helping out these last two days, I suddenly realized that I had forgotten who had died. I thought that this was too disrespectful to the deceased. That’s why I rushed over to ask you.”

The old man’s lifeless eyes were trained on Ke Xun for a long time. It wasn’t until Ke Xun started to feel alarmed that he finally said, “The deceased is Li Mazi’s Guaiguai. It’s a pity that everyone in that family has already died. It can’t be helped that we fellow villagers all have to come out and help out.”

The deformed person was named Guaiguai. Those in rural villages tended to name their children tackier names to ensure they survived.

Ke Xun asked, “How did Guaiguai die?”

The old man gave him a dark look. “It was already a miracle for him to have survived this long, given the state he had been born.”

Wei Dong recalled the conversation he had just had with Ke Xun. He asked, “What was his parents’ relationship?”

The old man: “Husband and wife.”

Wei Dong: “….”

Ke Xun had a thought. “Did anyone in this village have a grudge against Li Mazi and his family?”

The three Chinese Scholar trees and the coffin curse that Mu Yiran had talked about had come to mind.

The old man continued to stare at him, gaze dark. “We’re all fellow countrymen here. What kind of grudge could there be?”

“Who ordered Guaiguai’s coffin then?” Being stared at like that by the old man, Ke Xun began to feel goosebumps emerge on his skin.

The old man’s expression morphed strangely. “His parents had been afraid that no one would take care of Guaiguai after their deaths so they had placed the order for him while they had still been alive.”

We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.

The old man’s expression turned even more bizarre. His complexion seemed to rapidly turn grey right in front of them. Suddenly, his eyes filled with a malevolent, cruel light. His eyeballs were now popping out of their sockets. His chapped lips also pulled apart, revealing toothless, dark red gums. A terrible stench came out from his oral cavity as he said stiffly, “What Chinese Scholar trees? There aren’t any Chinese Scholar trees. Who are you? You actually dared to barge into the Li Family village. The Li Family village has forbidden outsiders from entering for thousands of years. You—die, die, die—”

As he said this, his mouth unexpectedly opened wider and wider. It looked like a bottomless black hole. All of a sudden, he pounced towards Ke Xun and Wei Dong!

“Run!” Ke Xun roared while pulling the dumbstruck Wei Dong along, in making a mad dash for the door.

The two of them charged out of the courtyard without looking back. Wei Dong had never run so fast in his life. Dragged along by Ke Xun, he felt like his legs weren’t legs anymore. He felt like six out of his ten toes didn’t even touch the ground anymore, like he was being pulled through the air.

The second he glanced at his feet, his legs gave out, unable to keep up anymore. He ended up falling flat on his face.

When he looked up, a mouthful of dirt in his mouth, he saw several pairs of legs appear in his line of view. Soon after, he saw Ke Xun sprint over to the foremost pair of legs. Based on the distance between their toes, Wei Dong guessed that Ke Xun had probably ended up braking at an extremely close distance to Mu Yiran.

“Reporting to Boss, someone wants to eat us.” Ke Xun looked like he was begging for some comfort.

‘Boss’ granted him an indifferent glance. It was clear that he intended on letting the other reap the consequences of his own actions.

“What’s wrong?” The doctor asked.

Ke Xun turned to glance behind him. When he saw that the old man hadn’t given chase, he gave them a simple explanation. He then asked the others, “Did you guys find anything?”

“We…” The doctor’s expression was complicated. “We made a really shocking discovery.”

After Mu Yiran and them had separated from Ke Xun and Wei Dong, they had first headed to the village chief’s home.

The village chief was the leader of the village. Typically speaking, his residence should be the most grandiose. With that criteria in mind, the group had been able to very quickly find their target.

However, there had been no one home. The entire house had been covered in dust, as if no one had resided within it for a very long time.

Mu Yiran had found the genealogical and village records in the small ancestral hall within the village chief’s home.

As expected, every person in this village shared the same common ancestor. The forefather of their clan was once a royal Minister of Rites during the Warring States period.

It was said that this Minister of Rites could communicate with supernatural beings and that his witchcraft and supernatural ability could only be passed down to his direct descendants, never to outsiders.

Therefore, the forefather of the Li Family created a set of rules. Firstly, all descendants would have to forever live in this land. Secondly, they were not allowed to leave. They were also not allowed to start branch families of their own by marrying outsiders. Lastly, they were not allowed to communicate with the outside world.

Just by skimming through the genealogical records, you would see that everyone had the last name Li.

No one in the entire village possessed a different last name.

“…Was their forefather crazy?!” Wei Dong wiped his lip in shock, “He basically encouraged consanguineous marriages, didn’t he?!”

“Witchcraft is a warped, sinister, abnormal existence to begin with.” Mu Yiran remained calm. “There’s no need to discuss whether their familial rules are right or wrong. All we need to know is that this village is like a lost land. It’s been shut off to the rest of the world all this time, with its communication to the outside world completely broken.”

Ke Xun continued, “Which brings up an issue.”

Mu Yiran looked at everyone. “If we connect this to what Ke Xun and Wei Dong experienced just now, we can confirm that this village has completely cut off all ties with the outside world and even prohibits outsiders from entering. Now, this brings up the question: just who painted this painting? How did this painting get spread around?”

Everyone suddenly came to a realization. Their expressions all changed.

Ke Xun raised a hand. “Boss, was there a Li Haojing in the genealogical records?”

Mu Yiran glanced at him. “No.”

Ke Xun scratched his head. “Then is it a coincidence?”

Mu Yiran’s gaze changed slightly. “Not necessarily. Many painters changed their names or decided to go by aliases after becoming successful.”

Wei Dong interrupted, “Then that makes things difficult. How would we know who decided to go by another name?”

“Since we know that the painter’s name is Li Haojing,” Mu Yiran said, “Then we more or less solved the first question. The second question is, how did this painting spread around? Or rather, how did this Li Haojing enter this village, paint this painting and then take this painting outside?”

“If Li Haojing was a villager, then it’s not strange that he was able to paint this painting.” The doctor chimed in. “However, the village prohibits its villagers from having dealings with the outside world. They are not allowed to leave the village too. As such, there’s no way to explain how the painting was spread around.”

“We have one last discovery.” Mu Yiran said to Ke Xun and Wei Dong, “We scoured all the homes in this village but we didn’t see a single living person.”

“W-what do you mean?” Wei Dong shivered.

“Every house was covered in varying levels of dust.” The doctor said, “It’s evident that no one has lived in this village for a long time. Nonetheless, we didn’t discover any corpses or coffins within any of the homes.”

Furthermore, the object we saw the most frequently within these homes,” Mu Yiran’s gaze turned profound, “Were memorial tablets.”

Ke Xun raised a brow. “So that means that the villagers of this village have already all died?”

Mu Yiran nodded slightly. “I assume so. We’ve compared the tablets to the genealogical records. The names on the tablets were also in the record.”

Ke Xun rubbed his chin in thought. “Could a plague or something have hit this village? Or maybe a natural disaster? Otherwise, how could so many people have died?”

Mu Yiran said in a flat voice, “The amount of dust in each home is different. This means that they didn’t all die at the same time.”

The doctor nodded. “It probably took out a few years—possibly even over a decade—for them to gradually die off.”

The corner of Wei Dong’s lips twitched. “Could it be because their life spans were shortened from all those consanguineous marriages?”

Mu Yiran’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Or maybe, they died from a curse?”

Everyone was alarmed upon hearing this.

Ke Xun was the first to react. “What you’re saying is that the three Chinese Scholar trees by Guaiguai’s house wasn’t meant to just curse Guaiguai’s family but…the whole Li Family village?!”

“That’s what I think.” Mu Yiran nodded.

Wei Dong was speechless. “Who would hold such a big grudge? To actually curse an entire village.”

Ke Xun suddenly asked, “Then, why did the old man say that there weren’t any Chinese Scholar trees? Although he suddenly went crazy and tried to bite us after hearing something he didn’t like, I don’t think he was trying to play dumb.”

Mu Yiran lowered his eyes in thought. Suddenly, he started walking. Everyone exchanged glances before following after him.

Once again, they arrived in front of the three old Chinese Scholar trees in Guaiguai’s courtyard. Mu Yiran gazed up at the ghost faces on the trees’ barks.

Ke Xun also came over. The faces seemed to protrude even further out compared to the morning. Entire faces and even parts of the head now stuck out. They looked like they had already escaped the trees’ bark. It was just that the back of their heads were still slightly connected to the bark. They looked like massive tumours in the trees, all gathered in clusters as they hung off the bark. They looked disgusting.

“Have you noticed,” Ke Xun jabbed Mu Yiran with his elbow, “That it looks like these faces have genders? Look at that one, doesn’t it look like it belongs to an auntie? And that one—it even has a beard. The one above it looks like a seven or eight your old child. And then there’s that one over there—there’s an infant’s face beneath the granny’s face. There are faces of guys, girls, old and young.”

“Mn.” Mu Yiran wasn’t surprised. It was obvious that he had already realized that.

“I suddenly have an idea.” Ke Xun’s gaze swept over the ghost faces as he spoke. “Do you think that these faces are….”

“The faces of the deceased villagers.” Mu Yiran finished his thought calmly.

Ke Xun pointed at a face near the roots of the tree he was looking at: “…Liu Yufei.”

Mu Yiran’s gaze followed the direction he was pointing. This face looked like it was new. It looked greyish. Unlike the other faces, it was already a dark grey.

The ghost face had a striking resemblance to Liu Yufei. There was even something that resembled a pigtail at the back of the face’s head.

The features of the face were warped terribly, preserving the pained expression Liu Yufei had made during his miserable death. However, there was also deep resentment within the pain. It looked like there was a pair of invisible eyes within those dark eye-sockets that were filled with endless resentment and malice. It felt like they were currently trained on Mu Yiran and Ke Xun.

Mu Yiran stared at those eye-sockets for a moment, completely unaffected. He then walked around the tree and ended up finding the faces of the five people who had died before Liu Yufei.

“It looks like these three trees hadn’t been planted.” Mu Yiran said, “They are a symbol in this painting that represents something else and aren’t actually real trees.”

“No wonder the old man said that there weren’t any trees,” Ke Xun said. “Speaking of the old man, why wasn’t he cursed with death? It can’t be that he’s the only survivor of this village?”

“Let’s go take a look.”

Mu Yiran said this while walking. However, Ke Xun grabbed his elbow, stopping him. “That old man’s already gone crazy. You’re going to die if you go over there now.”

Zhang Maolin, who was nearby, agreed. “That’s right! Let’s hurry and find the signature before it gets dark!”

Mu Yiran’s gaze turned towards the old man’s house. He said in a flat voice, “I have an idea as to who that old man really is.”