Chapter 21.1: Ghost Animal (18)

12-15 minutes

A blood-red moon hung in the black night sky, with circles of red halo spreading out.

It seemed like something was rising from every villa in Huaiyang village, converging in the night sky and solidifying into distorted struggling figures.

Faint, miserable and desperate cries echoed in the ears, lingering and never dissipating, no matter where you go in Huaiyang village.

Ning Su and Chen Qing arrived at the slaughterhouse in the chilly weather. Two piles of bonfires were burning inside the slaughterhouse.

The moment Ning Su appeared, the little ghost boy poked his head out from the small warehouse and ran towards him.

The little boy no longer walked crookedly or slouched, but his running was still unskilled, with his body leaning to one side.

It was hard not to feel a little happy when a little fellow rushes towards you the moment you appeared, even if the other was a ghost.

It should be noted that he was a very, very cute little ghost.

This was the first time the little boy did not hide in the warehouse to watch him, but ran towards him, perhaps because they had an agreement.

Ning Su was a little happy.

As he watched the little boy about to run over, the leaning body suddenly fell to the ground.

“...”

Ning Su looked carefully and saw that the little boy’s eyes were still in his eye sockets. He sighed either in disappointment or relief.

Then, he noticed that something was wrong.

This time the little boy did not drop his eyes or break his little hand, but instead his mouth fell off.

“...”

Because he fell diagonally, his head also became crooked.

When the child picked up his mouth and tried to put it back onto his face, it ended up near his ear.

“...”

The child stood up and immediately ran over with his crooked head, staring at Ning Su intently.

Chen Qing looked at the messy child in shock and confusion.

As she looked at him, she felt that the scene was somewhat familiar.

The way the ghostly child was looking at Ning Su was like how the black dog in the villa looked at the bride in the red wedding dress.

The spot where the child’s mouth was originally located had turned into closed skin. Ning Su extended his index finger and poked at it, and it surprisingly went inside. He felt the child starting to absorb the dark energy from his body.

His other hand went into the child’s mouth from behind his ear and he was able to absorb energy from there, too.

Ning Su’s eyes lit up like he was looking at a treasure. “This way you can eat in the front and drink water in the back. It’s amazing!”

Chen Qing: “...”

“Um, let’s start the mission now.”

Only then did Ning Su stop studying the magical child and, in a rare move, held his hand and walked to the butcher on the other side.

It was not the first time they had met, and Chen Qing felt that the three of them should be somewhat familiar with each other, which made her very awkward.

Ning Su, however, did not think so.

He crouched down next to the butcher, who was carving bones, and asked, “Big brother, last time we followed you to the funeral home and saw you change the ashes of the person in the urn with those of an animal. Why did you do that?”

Chen Qing: “...”

Could he just ask something like that outright?

The butcher slowly scraped the flesh off the bone of a calf’s leg and said, “It’s just for fun. They wanted to marry a Yin bride so badly, just like animals, so let them marry animals.”

Ning Su made a sound of hesitation and asked, “Why is it prohibited to kill people in the slaughterhouse over there?”

“Because it’s necessary to maintain the purity of animal ashes, and only animal ashes can be put in there.”

Under the lead of Ning Su, Chen Qing gained an inexplicable courage and said, “That’s only for the Yin weddings. The ghost wedding still involves human beings.”

The butcher turned his head and looked at Chen Qing with his dark, eerie green eyes. For some reason, she felt a fairytale-like feeling and was no longer as terrified.

The butcher who had scared Chen Qing by the riverbank with a turn of his head let out a soft sigh, like an old father.

“I can’t do anything about it. I’m just a wandering ghost.”

“Moreover, those brides and grooms who were cheated and forced into ghost weddings have a lot of resentment in their hearts. Here, they are the ruling class and can take revenge without restraint. I don’t need to worry, nor do I have the qualification to worry.”

Combining the butcher’s words with the experiences and positions of the male ghost with red lips, they confirmed that the people forced into ghost weddings here had a high status.

It could be seen from the fact that the “brides” could freely and mercilessly kill the “grooms”.

Chen Qing suddenly felt that the butcher wasn’t that scary.

He actually talked to them easily, like chatting with neighbors.

Chen Qing also remembered what the butcher said about him being just a wandering ghost.

Was it true, or could there be more?

Ning Su was more direct and asked the butcher, “Big brother, aren’t you the ghost master here?”

Chen Qing: “...”

The butcher said, “What ghost master? I’m just a butcher, a low-ranking little ghost.”

Ning Su asked, “Then how can you travel between the two worlds?”

“It’s just a matter of benefiting from others.”

The butcher glanced at the child inadvertently and continued to carve the meat.

Chen Qing caught his gaze and followed it.

The little ghost boy was huddled tightly next to Ning Su, holding an unknown insect with a stick and skewering it into a string before roasting it on the fire.

His movements were so skilled that it made people feel heartbroken.

Ning Su picked up the child and examined him, asking, “Little one, are you the ghost master?”

Chen Qing: “......”

The child looked at Ning Su quietly, and after a few seconds, waved the insect skewer in his hand slightly up and down.

Only then did Ning Su put him down and let him continue to roast the insects.

The insects still didn’t taste good. If only there were roasted lamb legs.

Ning Su’s gaze moved to the butcher’s hand, which was holding a piece of small leg. He stared at it for a few seconds, then suddenly blinked, “Didn’t you chop this small leg earlier this morning?”

Chen Qing immediately looked at the small leg in the butcher’s hand.

When they first came to this world this morning, the butcher was chopping people up, and Chen Qing almost threw up, so she never looked at the butcher’s hand again.

It was indeed a small leg in the butcher’s hand, and he was slicing off the meat like a knife cutting through dough.

Chen Qing couldn’t tell if it was the same one.

The butcher said, “Did you not see the groom at the wedding today?”

He was very gentle to Ning Su and even smiled at him again, “With so many ghosts in Huaiyang Village wanting to eat meat, it has to be renewable human meat that’s enough to eat.”

The two of them were stunned.

At the wedding, no matter how badly the two grooms were injured by the Black Bull and the scarred man, even if their necks were pierced and their heads pulled off, they could still recover.

Combining the fact that the person who was slaughtered by the butcher for meat was made of renewable human flesh, the two immediately understood what was going on.

Ning Su took the grilled insect skewers from the child and asked the butcher, “Can I take a look?”

The butcher waved his hand, indicating that they could look around freely.

Not far behind the butcher was a meat rack, with a lingering stench of blood around it that couldn’t be dispelled.

On it was something like a handcuff, which was originally made of iron, but had been soaked in who knew how much blood day and night, making it black.

One could imagine a person being handcuffed here and being skinned and deboned by the butcher.

Beside the rack were two large buckets of water, one containing cleaned liver and the likes, and the other...

Chen Qing didn’t dare to get any closer.

In that black steel bucket was half a bucket of water with strands of blood in it. The water, reflected by the black bucket, was as clear as black ink, and in the middle was a head facing down.

Because the face was facing down, they could only see the back of the head, covered by damp hair.

Ning Su squatted in front of the bucket, and the child also squatted with him.

Ning Su took a bite of the skewer and gave it to the child, then reached into the bucket while chewing.

The boy’s fingers were long and slender, and his skin was much whiter than normal people’s, so white that the bloody moonlight couldn’t overshadow it. Against the backdrop of the black bucket and black hair, it was even more radiant.

Under Chen Qing’s goosebumps-inducing gaze, those long fingers slightly curved downwards and touched the head.

Chen Qing didn’t understand what he was doing.

Why not turn it over and look, but touch it instead?

Could he tell who it was by touching it? If you dared touched it, you must dare to look at it too.

Touching was definitely more terrifying than looking. Chen Qing was afraid that the mouth under the head would suddenly bite Ning Su’s hand.

Just as she was thinking about it, Ning Su turned around and said to her, “It’s intact, not rotten.”

Chen Qing was stunned for a moment.

After several seconds passed, she completed Ning Su’s words in her mind.

“It’s intact, not rotten. Don’t be afraid, you can look.”

After speaking, Ning Su flipped the head over.

In a creepy village, in a slaughterhouse where people were killed, a head turned over from a black basin should be as terrifying as one could imagine.

But for some reason, Ning Su’s words inexplicably moved Chen Qing, and she didn’t feel scared at all when she looked at it.

Even though the head was really creepy.

It was not rotten, just swollen and white from soaking in the water. In the bloody moonlight, the whole face was white and somewhat grayish, as if it would rot with a gentle touch.

The eyes on the head were tightly closed, and Ning Su opened them and said to Chen Qing, “Can you recognize him?”

After overcoming the initial fear, Chen Qing carefully examined the face and said, “I recognize him!”

This was the man next to Yin Daijun in the photo, and he was likely the master of the Lily Flower Villa.

In the outer world of the Huaixiang Village, which dealt in ghost marriages, the groom here suffered day and night, and recovering from injuries was their nightmare.

Once they knew that they could recover from multiple injuries, those who harm them would become more and more unscrupulous and crazy.

However, they were not the most miserable ones. The most miserable groom might be here.

He was slaughtered and butchered countless times every day and night, and his flesh was supplied to the ghosts and monsters in the entire Huaiyang Village for consumption, with no end in sight.

Chen Qing said: “Ning Su, I have an idea.”

“When we found out that Yin Daijun was the mistress of the villa, we didn’t think of a ghost marriage, nor did we contact the bride. It was through the fact that she and the bride were both married from outside the village that we took the bride as her metaphor. Could this direction have been wrong from the beginning?”

“After all, she is the mistress of the villa. She should have been married for a while, and have a husband.”

“Could it be that her husband was killed by her in this world?”

Ning Su looked down at the head in his hand, and was about to say something when he sniffed and said, “Quick, hide!”

Chen Qing didn’t hesitate and immediately followed Ning Su into the nearby small warehouse.

The child also stumbled and followed them into the small warehouse, holding onto Ning Su’s legs and hiding behind them, imitating them by peeking out and then retracting.

After about three minutes, a fierce-faced ghost appeared at the entrance of the slaughterhouse.

It was the scarred man.

He was dressed in a wet and dripping red wedding gown, holding a bloody long knife, with a bloodthirsty and insane look in his eyes.

He stood at the door for a while, kicked the butcher, who was still carving meat, and asked, “Did anyone come?”

Obviously, he realized his status in this world in less than a day.

In the slaughterhouse of the outer world, when he saw the butcher chop off the cow’s head with an axe, he did not have this attitude.

For him, the wedding gown was originally a humiliation, but here it had become a symbol of status. For some subtle psychological reason, he did not change, even though it was soaked.

What liquid was that which soaked the red wedding gown, highlighting the intensity of the red, was self-evident.