MLV Ch 31

When Huo Ang awoke, he found himself bound with hemp rope, a stinking, dirty rag stuffed in his mouth.

Seeing that he was conscious, Shen Duo untied him and removed the gag. 

“You were just trapped in a hallucination, crying and screaming, so we had to tie you up,” he said.

Bai Nianci asked with concern, “You called out Yilale’s name many times. Did you remember something?”

Huo Ang touched his cheek; tears still clung to it, cool against his skin. Those distant memories felt like massive stones pressing down on his heart, suffocating him. He was the one who had broken his promise, leaving Yilale all alone on that mysterious and terrifying sacrificial altar. Yilale had always been timid, afraid of even moths as a child, always needing him to shoo them away. Trapped alone in the darkness of that wooden puppet, he must have been so scared. And yet, Yilale had dared to drift out of the mountain village alone, possess someone else’s body, and travel thousands of miles to return to Huo Ang’s side.

Huo Ang wiped his face and recounted the entire story, including the bizarre sacrificial ritual of Taisui Village. Then, he said in a hoarse voice, “You all should find a way to leave. I have to go find Yilale.”

“And what will you do when you find him? He’s already dead,” Bai Nianci sighed.

Shen Duo also chimed in, “Sir, if you have any sense left, you should be thinking about leaving right now.”

To be honest, Jiang Ye also felt it was time to go. The purpose of venturing deep into Taisui Village at night had been to save Yilale, but now that he was dead, there was no point in staying. As for his mother, Jiang Ye had originally thought she was likely in grave danger, but it now seemed she knew far more than they did and was surely safer than them. They really should leave.

But Huo Ang shook his head. 

“I promised Yilale I would take him away. I’ve already broken my word once; I can’t do it a second time.”

He looked down to check his ammunition. There wasn’t much left; he had to use it sparingly.

“Where do you plan to find him?” Jiang Ye asked.

Huo Ang fell silent. He didn’t know where to find Yilale either. He said, “Taisui Village is only so big. I’ll search it all over. I’m bound to find him.”

Jiang Ye handed his own backpack to him. 

“Yilale’s head is inside.”

Huo Ang cradled the heavy backpack, his eyes instantly turning red. The skull of an eight-year-old child wasn’t heavy. Yilale had always eaten little and had been bullied by him, growing up so thin that even his head had no weight to it.

“The body is still missing,” Huo Ang said.

He knew where the body was—in the place where Yilale had witnessed his own corpse, on that gloomy and eerie stilted sacrificial altar. Yilale’s soul had temporarily escaped Taisui Village, but his body had been left there forever. Only by taking Yilale’s body could he truly leave Taisui Village.

With a determined gaze, Huo Ang shouldered his gun and pushed open the dilapidated wooden door.

Jin Feize followed him out.

Jiang Ye was slightly stunned. 

“You want to help him?”

This was completely out of character for Jin Feize.

Jin Feize tilted his head and smiled. 

“Following him means I get to kill people. You should go with the others. The way out is safe.”

Before Jiang Ye could grab him, the madman had vanished into the darkness outside with Huo Ang. That bastard Jin Feize, always doing as he pleased and never listening to orders, he deserved to die in Taisui Village. But still, it was a life. Jiang Ye hesitated for a moment, then gritted his teeth and followed them out.

Inside the house, only Bai Nianci and Shen Duo were left, staring at each other.

Shen Duo sighed. 

“Kids are so hard to manage. I’m definitely not being a teacher in my next life.”

Bai Nianci deeply sympathized. To be honest, he didn’t want to stay here at all, but with no one to go with, he didn’t dare leave alone. Helpless, the two of them also followed.

The journey to their destination was tense but uneventful. The group lay prone in the tall grass across from the stilted building. Huo Ang used his scope to observe the building; the doors and windows were shut tight, and he couldn’t see anything. The outer walls were covered in creeping vines, with faint mold spots visible underneath.

“Last time I went in, there were a lot of headless Beihui,” Huo Ang said in a low voice. 

“Those things are easy to deal with. You can see them, you can touch them. A shot to the spine and it’s over. The tricky part is the mold on the walls. I think it’s conscious, able to sense movement from the outside world. I was ambushed by that mold just now, which is how I got infected.”

“I suspect that black mold is the Taisui,” Shen Duo said from the side. 

“Taisui is also known as ‘flesh lingzhi.’ Ancient texts describe it as ‘flesh fungus, shaped like meat, attached to wood and stone, a living thing. The red is like coral, the white like fat, the black like lacquer.’ It’s very similar to the mold in your village. Legend says eating Taisui grants immortality. The Taisui discovered by modern people might not be the real thing; the stuff in your village is. Your village uses a ritual to make people get infected by the mold, turning them into headless Beihui. The mold parasitizes the human body, controlling it through the spinal nerves. Even if a person is dead, they can still move. The people in your village were uneducated and thought this was immortality. Taisui Village is so deserted, perhaps all the villagers became headless corpses controlled by the mold through the ‘ascension’ ritual…”

Huo Ang cut him off. 

“Stop blabbering. Do you have a solution? Just say it.”

“The mold is a fungus, after all. Even if it possesses some kind of collective intelligence, it’s very limited. So if we cover ourselves in straw, it won’t be able to sense our temperature or scent, and it won’t notice us,” Shen Duo said. 

“We need to find a way to disguise ourselves.”

Huo Ang was exasperated. 

“Why didn’t you just say we should dress up as scarecrows?”

Everyone went to the pigsty and chicken coop to gather straw, tying it around their bodies in bundles. The straw stank to high heaven. Jin Feize’s expression was ghastly; it was the first time Jiang Ye had seen such a look on his face, and he couldn’t help but stare a little longer. Huo Ang also found an axe and tied it to his back with a rope.

They left Shen Duo and Bai Nianci in the grass as lookouts while the rest crept toward the stilted sacrificial hall. Shen Duo took out a grenade Huo Ang had left him, pulled the pin, and threw it into a nearby stilted building. The grenade exploded, and the building caught fire. The main door of the sacrificial hall suddenly swung open, and numerous headless Beihui wearing feathered cloaks rushed out, running toward the burning building.

The diversion was a success. Huo Ang, Jin Feize, and Jiang Ye climbed a crooked old tree. Huo Ang was the first to break through a window and enter, with the other two leaping in after him. Huo Ang took out his flashlight and, lying by the edge of the wooden ladder, scanned the floor below. In the dim light, many figures lay on the lower level. Shen Duo was right; Taisui Village had many things at night that weren’t there during the day.

“Dammit, not all of them ran out,” Huo Ang cursed under his breath.

“That’s not right,” Jiang Ye said, looking closely. 

“They aren’t Beihui.”

Only then did Huo Ang realize these people were all wearing military uniforms. Jiang Ye picked up a piece of rotten wood and tossed it down. The wood landed with a clatter, but the figures remained motionless, showing no reaction. Huo Ang raised his gun and cautiously walked down, kicking one of them. The person was stiff as a board, already a skeleton. Huo Ang’s kick made the entire frame fall apart, the bones all covered in black hair.

A chill ran down Jiang Ye’s spine as he examined the skeletons one by one. They were all wearing military uniforms and had bullet holes in their foreheads.

Who on earth were they? Jiang Ye’s thoughts grew heavy.

A person was lying in front of the wooden puppet. Huo Ang turned the body over and saw that it was, to his shock, the body Yilale had previously possessed. He was no longer breathing, his face ashen and his body stiff. Yilale had spent a decade with him in this body. Gazing at the peaceful face, Huo Ang couldn’t stop the tears from falling.

“Let’s make this quick,” Jiang Ye reminded him.

Huo Ang placed the body aside and swung the axe at the wooden puppet. If his guess was correct, Yilale’s remains should be sealed inside it.

Jiang Ye shone his flashlight around. The four walls were all covered with dark mold. There was far more of it than he had seen during the day, and some of it had even taken on human shapes. Some were hunched over, clearly resembling old men. Others were short, seeming to be children.

Shen Duo had said the villagers became headless corpses, but there was a fatal flaw in that theory: there were at most forty or fifty headless corpses in the village, yet there were enough stilted houses for at least several hundred people. Where did the rest of them go? Seeing these humanoid molds, Jiang Ye suddenly had a guess. Could it be that all the villagers had become this mold?

The mold wasn’t Taisui, but the villagers themselves. If that was the case, would dressing up as scarecrows still work?

Suddenly, Jin Feize shot a nail at the wall.

“What are you doing?” Jiang Ye asked.

“Haven’t you noticed? There’s more and more mold,” Jin Feize said.

Jiang Ye took a closer look and was shocked to find that while the mold had only covered half a wall before, it now covered the entire wall, and mold spots had even appeared on the ceiling.

“It’s fine,” Jiang Ye said calmly. 

“The mold spreads by contact. As long as we’re careful not to touch it, we should be okay.”

Just as he finished speaking, the mold on the wall converged, as if countless black, monstrous figures were struggling within the wall, a writhing mass of heads. Immediately after, several mold-figures extended their hands out of the wall. The dense black hairs grew out from the wall, reaching into the air toward Jiang Ye and Jin Feize.

Huo Ang, who was halfway through chopping, saw this and swore, “Fuck, what is that thing?”

Jiang Ye thought to himself, This is bad. Shen Duo’s deduction was wrong.

Meanwhile, all the feathered Beihui that had rushed into the fire seemed to receive some kind of order and suddenly turned, swarming back towards the sacrificial hall. Shen Duo’s face paled, and he threw a grenade into the distance. The sound of the second grenade was the signal for “Danger, retreat immediately.” However, Huo Ang hadn’t finished chopping the puppet. The wood was incredibly hard and the axe was too blunt, making it a laborious task. Jin Feize and Jiang Ye quickly closed the door and blocked it with tables and chairs. Jiang Ye tore off two wooden planks, wrapped one end with a strip of his clothing, and lit it with a lighter.

He handed a torch to Jin Feize and said, “Fungi are afraid of high heat. Let’s try this.”

The two used the torches to scorch the hairy black limbs growing out of the walls. It was effective; many of the limbs retracted.

But there were only two of them, and quivering, hairy black arms were coming from all directions. The number of headless Beihui outside was also growing, and the wooden door was shaking violently under their crushing and ramming. Many Beihui claws reached through the window frames, trying to grab the people inside.

“Hurry up!” Jiang Ye urged Huo Ang.

“Almost there, almost there!”

Huo Ang finally broke the puppet open, and Yilale’s skeleton fell to the ground in pieces. Huo Ang stuffed all the bones into the backpack, ready to retreat. Suddenly, the wooden ladder began to thump loudly as many headless Beihui scrambled down from above. These Beihui could even climb trees!

Their escape route cut off, Huo Ang raised his gun and fired. Jiang Ye and Jin Feize dodged in different directions. Jin Feize dropped his nail gun, twisted past a headless Beihui, and his right hand shot out, grabbing the spinous process of the vertebra at the back of its neck. With a powerful squeeze, a crack was heard as the spinal bone broke in his hand.

Jiang Ye didn’t know how to fight people, so he could only rely on his 7-second 50-meter dash speed to dodge left and right.

Catching a glimpse of Jin Feize’s clean and efficient killing technique, Huo Ang said in disbelief, “Are high school students these days so competitive? They even know how to kill with their bare hands?”

Jiang Ye thought of all the anatomy and medical books in Jin Feize’s home; the guy wasn’t studying medicine, he was studying how to kill people. Jiang Ye tried to imitate him, attempting to snap a headless corpse’s spine, but his fingers ached and he couldn’t even dislodge the bone. As a normal, ordinary high school student, he went back to running for his life.

Seeing that the main door was about to be breached, Jiang Ye yelled to the outside, “Throw a grenade at the doorway! Blast a path for us!”

They heard Shen Duo’s reply: “It’s too dangerous!”

Huo Ang paid him no mind and roared, “I’ll count to three! Three—two—”

Jiang Ye and Jin Feize scrambled for cover and quickly hit the ground.

“One!”

A grenade was thrown through the doorway. With a deafening boom and a flash of fire, the headless Beihui outside were blown to bits. The Beihui inside were also hit by flying shrapnel, and many were immobilized. Dust rained down on Jiang Ye’s head. The stilted building was too small, and the doorway wasn’t actually that far from where they were. The blast left Jiang Ye’s ears ringing. Many headless Beihui, blown in half, were now crawling on the ground. Jiang Ye felt concussed, unable to get up from the floor.

“Little Jiang!” Huo Ang yelled from the doorway.

Jiang Ye forced himself up and stumbled towards the entrance. Halfway there, the floor beneath his feet suddenly gave way. A large hole appeared beneath him—perhaps it had always been there, already unstable, and was now finally collapsed by the grenade blast. He fell towards the dark pit, but at the critical moment, a hand grabbed his wrist. He looked up and met Jin Feize’s pair of beautiful, dark eyes.

Jin Feize wore a faint, teasing smile. 

“What would you do without me?”

Jiang Ye: “…”

If it weren’t for Jin Feize recklessly following Huo Ang, why would he even be here?

Jiang Ye said coldly, “Without you, I’d be safe and sound and live to a ripe old age.”

“Then why did you follow me?” Jin Feize’s eyes held a starlit smile. 

“Could it be that you can’t let me go? Little Ye, your mouth says you hate me, but your body is very honest.”

Jiang Ye stopped talking. With a person like Jin Feize, the more you engaged, the more smug he became.

Jin Feize lifted him up with one hand. However, before he could climb out, the entire section of the floor collapsed, and he and Jin Feize fell down together.