Chapter 4: Zombies, the Old Lady with a Cat’s Face, and White-Wrapped Corpses

Cloud asked the question that had been troubling him. “Officer, if I remember correctly, the Public Security Administration Punishments Law says that when a statement is taken, at least two police officers must be present. Why are you the only one here?”

He had learned that much in a school legal-awareness class.

To ensure the proper conduct of law enforcement and the authenticity of the record, one officer was supposed to ask the questions while another served as recorder or supervisor.

At Cloud’s words, the officer’s expression changed at once, and he glared at him. “What are you implying?”

Cloud ignored him, glanced at the other man’s fingernails, and raised a second question. “And may I ask why your nails are so long?”

They were long, with a dull sheen, unlike anything living.

Tonight’s events were far too strange, and his mind had instinctively leaped toward the supernatural.

He remembered stories told by the elders in his family: there were two kinds of people whose eyes had been clouded by ghosts or spirits.

One fell into his own hallucination, like a dream, and in that case it was almost impossible to tell one had been struck.

The other was trapped in an illusion created by some art or trick, and in that case one could still find flaws.

After all, ghosts and monsters, like human beings, had limited understanding.

They could not imagine things they did not comprehend.

For example, the appearance and dress of basic-level police officers were strictly regulated.

There was no way they would keep nails that long.

And when they went out on duty, there had to be two of them.

This disguised fellow must not have known such things, which was why he had completely overlooked the detail.

That was a limitation of perception, not a flaw in the spell.

...

“Nails?”

As soon as those words left his mouth, the bespectacled man glanced reflexively at his own hand. A flicker of suspicion crossed his face, as though he still had not realized where the problem lay.

Cloud caught the subtle change in expression and knew he had guessed right.

At the same time, he silently cursed that things were getting worse.

The situation had grown ever stranger.

He did not understand why someone would impersonate a police officer and come to his door.

The “officer” in front of him seemed ready to argue, but then realized he could not explain why only one person had come to take the statement.

He no longer seemed interested in keeping up the act.

With a mocking air, he sized Cloud up, unhurried, and then suddenly wore the grin of a cat before a mouse. In a low, eerie voice, he said, “You’ve got sharp eyes. That’s all it took for you to notice?”

He really had underestimated him.

He had assumed only that “thing” mattered. He had not expected a college student he thought he could easily fool to notice the flaw in the illusion.

...

Hearing that cold laugh, Cloud’s expression remained unchanged, but inwardly he had nowhere to put his misery.

Before, he had not been certain. Tonight’s bizarre happenings had seemed to allow two possibilities: one, this world had ghosts; two, someone was playing at being a ghost.

After more than ten years of materialist education, he had leaned toward the latter.

So even after spotting something wrong with the officer, he had asked first rather than panicking.

He wanted to confirm his guess.

Now, at last, he could give up hope.

It was the first.

This world really did have ghosts.

And when he looked again at the dark shape that had suddenly appeared at the stairwell corner, his eyelids twitched violently.

It was unmistakable.

That shadow was not even on the same layer as the illusion.

He could see it at a glance.

...

His mind still could not digest the image that had overturned his worldview, so Cloud drew a deep breath.

The disguised officer was here for him.

He had not broken in by force. Instead, he had lured Cloud into opening the door, clearly because he had some scruple.

And now that Cloud had opened it, he still had not forced his way in.

Cloud no longer rushed to shut the door.

Since they had come all the way to his doorstep, hiding would not help.

Even now, he still did not know what had happened tonight, and he wanted to probe their purpose.

Glancing toward the dark figure at the stair corner, he simply added, “There’s one more thing. The corpse scent on you is actually pretty strong.”

Ordinary people might not notice it.

But Cloud, who had grown up in a coffin shop, knew it well.

It was the smell of a body that had been preserved remarkably well, halfway between decay and not yet decayed.

...

Within an illusion, smell was the hardest flaw to imitate.

At those words, the bespectacled man across from him finally stopped pretending.

With a smile that was not a smile, he said, “Interesting. You’re not a transcendent, and yet you can smell corpse aura...”

As he spoke, the scene around them shifted like a slide projected from a reel. The corridor suddenly turned pitch-black.

There were no more officers going up and down the hall.

Before Cloud’s eyes, there was now only one person.

A fellow dressed in the official robes of a former dynasty.

It really was a glamour that hid the true sight.

Cloud looked at the man’s real appearance and his pupils narrowed slightly in surprise.

The top bead on the official hat was lapis lazuli, and the insignia on the chest bore cloud geese, the robe of a fourth-rank civil official.

The thick, rotten old smell clinging to the garment made it look less like a cheap imitation and more like an antique freshly unearthed from a tomb.

But that was not the point.

What mattered was the man’s dark-blue face, his long bloodsucking fangs, and the black, smoky aura radiating from his body.

“A zombie?”

Cloud’s expression shifted faintly.

A stunned exclamation rose in his heart.

He could not understand why a perfectly normal person would suddenly become a zombie.

But almost immediately, he accepted it.

Since he had confirmed that this world had ghosts, then the thing from earlier had truly been a corpse demon.

And now that he was seeing a zombie, beyond novelty, it did not seem all that frightening.

Of course, more importantly...

Compared with the fellow in the official robe, the one behind him was even more terrifying.

Cloud’s gaze slid past the man’s shoulder.

At the foot of the stairs, in the gloom, that figure had already stood there silently for quite a while.

A fitted motorcycle leather jacket outlined a sleek, graceful figure. With long hair falling over her shoulders, she looked like a girl in the bloom of youth.

But that deathly pale skin made it obvious at a glance that she was not living.

Half her face was blurred in shadow.

Others might not have been able to see clearly.

But Cloud recognized her instantly.

Because she was his dead former girlfriend, Shang Xiaoyu.

...

His earlier suspicion that someone had taken Shang Xiaoyu’s phone to play a prank was utterly shattered now.

He had never imagined it would be the original owner herself who came.

Cloud’s eyelids twitched uncontrollably.

Because only that morning, he had personally watched her be buried.

She had risen from the grave?

Shang Xiaoyu’s appearance across from him suggested she had come in person precisely because she feared he had been tricked into opening the iron gate.

...

The zombie in the former-dynasty official robe seemed surprised that Cloud showed no great terror.

But then he noticed the direction of Cloud’s gaze.

Could it be...

He silently cursed that something was wrong.

He had no time to make a move.

The moment he turned his head, the corner of his eye caught a ghastly white face appearing less than a foot behind him.

Ghostlike, soundless.

At such close range, Cloud could see it clearly and could not help swallowing.

It was a face he knew all too well.

She had come!

She had really come back!

The dense corpse aura surging off her was even stronger than that of the official-robed zombie before him, by several times over.

It really was Shang Xiaoyu.

Especially when Cloud’s gaze fell on the obvious stitched scar at her neck, his certainty deepened.

This was the body he had seen before.

Shang Xiaoyu had died in a motorcycle accident, her neck severed by wire.

She had been stitched up for burial, and only then laid to rest.

How had her corpse appeared here?

Cloud could not make sense of it no matter how hard he thought.

...

Reality gave him no time to keep thinking.

A tearing sound rang out.

Without giving the official-robed zombie any chance to dodge, a pale, delicate hand wrapped in frost grabbed clean through the dark blue robe and burst out through his chest.

In a zombie body, there was no spurt of blood, only rotten flesh turning outward.

The stench of decayed organs instantly filled the entire corridor.

“What kind of speed is that?”

Cloud took an instinctive half-step back, his mind struggling to accept something beyond his understanding.

A corpse transformation was one thing.

But was this still the kind of zombie that only hopped around clumsily on television?

Even if a corpse had risen, how had Shang Xiaoyu become this powerful?

Cloud felt that the problem was not with him.

The world itself was wrong.

Before he could recover from his shock, another change occurred.

When the prey entered the trap, the hunter made his appearance.

“Ke ke...”

From the stairwell behind them came a cold, mocking chuckle. “So you couldn’t resist and made a move, huh?!”

As the words fell, two burning yellow talismans flew through the air.

Boom! Boom!

The two fire talismans burst in the darkness, flashing with eerie green light.

The scattered phosphorescent fire rained across Shang Xiaoyu like luminous powder.

In the instant of that flicker, a ghostly figure vaulted down from the ceiling.

Hunched and frail, yet as nimble as a black cat climbing roofs and walls.

Cloud had only seen the figure flash by when that shadow was already before him.

Looking closely, it was an elderly woman wearing a black headband with red flowers, her face twisted in a ghastly smile.

But this stooped old crone did not have a human face. It was a cat face, complete with whiskers and a pair of slender black fangs at the corners of the mouth.

Another ghostly creature!

Cloud recognized it at once: in folk tales, this was the wicked thing that formed when a corpse suddenly rose after being startled by a cat — the Cat-Faced Old Lady.

A kind of corpse-spirit.

Perhaps he had seen too many strange things tonight, for even shock had begun to go numb.

...

The Cat-Faced Old Lady was extraordinarily agile. She leapt down from the ceiling in a single bound.

With a crisp slap, a dark-gold talisman was pasted onto Shang Xiaoyu’s forehead.

The talisman fixed the corpse, and Shang Xiaoyu’s body stiffened at once, going motionless.

Only after finishing this did the Cat-Faced Old Lady finally let out a breath.

At the same time, she looked sternly at the corpse before her and muttered, “What terrifying copper skin and iron bones... This white corpse’s body is already close to the level of a flying zombie. When did such a master appear in Jianghua City?”

In folklore, “zongzi” referred to a zombie, while “white zongzi” specifically meant a female zombie.

Shang Xiaoyu was pinned in place.

The zombie in the official robes, with a hole punched through his chest, stumbled back two steps before laboriously pulling the pale hand out of his body.

A fist-sized cavity gaped in his chest, rotten flesh exposed.

After all, it was still a zombie body, so it would not die, but it had been badly wounded.

“Damn, she really was strong. If not for your speed, old lady, we might have lost this one...” the official-robed zombie said, looking at the hole in his chest with a dark face. Then he complained again, “Damn it, with the body torn up like this, who knows how much blood food it’ll take to recover?”

“Alive is what matters,” the Cat-Faced Old Lady said soothingly.

Then she looked at the dark-gold talisman, clearly pained, and said, “This was originally the backup Nether-Gold Corpse-Quelling Talisman, meant to stop your corpse transformation from running out of control. Now that we’ve used it, that’s several hundred thousand gone just like that.”

The official-robed zombie also said sourly, “Exactly. We even lost Old Dog’s life on this mission. If we can’t make more than that back, then it’s a complete loss.”

As soon as he finished speaking, the two of them turned their cold eyes, in perfect unison, toward Cloud, who was still staring in confusion.

The accomplice had been dealt with.

Now it was time for the real target.

Cloud met those two vicious gazes in an instant, utterly bewildered.

“???”

Don’t look at me!

Cloud had no idea what had happened tonight at all.

Cat-Faced Old Lady, zombie, white corpse... what in the world was going on?

You can fight if you want, but why are you looking at me?