Chapter 33: Ghost Mountain Villa 33
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The current appearance of the old steward, in stark contrast to the elite steward who welcomed the production team when they first entered the mansion, was quite disturbing. He was dressed in layers of coarse fabric, which were soaked with dried and oxidized dark red bloodstains. Wrinkles in his clothes revealed a buildup of flesh fragments.
From the moment Yan Shixun first saw the old steward in the kitchen, he had an intuitive feeling that something was off about that face. It seemed like human skin awkwardly stretched over an ill-fitting structure, and this feeling of dissonance had intensified.
However, after witnessing the events of a century ago in the memory world and then seeing this face again, Yan Shixun couldn’t help but furrow his brow.
—A century ago, Xi Shuang, who had become a vengeful spirit, had skinned every bandit alive, resulting in the mansion and the mountain being filled with these blood-red monsters. So why did the bandit Leader Zhou Shi who had also been skinned, still wear human skin?
The old steward, Zhou Shi stood at the open door, his stiff, decaying face tinged with a blackish-blue hue that no living person could possess. He leaned against the doorframe without entering, with his eyes, which resembled dull, inorganic glass beads, he fixed a malevolent, hateful gaze on Yan Shixun.
In those eyes, there was bitterness, hatred, and a sense of accomplishment that he had finally achieved something. The amalgamation of these emotions created a twisted and chilling look.
“I should have reminded our guests not to wander around the mansion without permission, for fear they might stumble upon certain neglected places and break their necks.”
The old steward chuckled, his laughter devoid of warmth. “It seems that daring guests like you didn’t take my warning to heart. What a pity. In the event of an accident, your companions will be quite devastated, won’t they?”
“There’s no need for you to worry about me.”
Yan Shixun sneered, echoing the old steward’s tone as he retorted without restraint. “Actually, I should be more concerned about you. Won’t your companions be envious and want to tear you apart? You’re the only one who looks so out of place, wearing a sour expression as if you picked it up from somewhere. They must be quite displeased.”
His words could be considered as him no longer having any reservations, openly hinting that he already knew the old steward’s true identity.
Previously, while inside the mansion, Yan Shixun had warned everyone not to mention anything related to spirits or deities. This was to prevent provoking the supernatural entities within the mansion when they were completely unaware of their surroundings. It was also to safeguard the members of the production team who had no means of self-defense and were out of his sight.
However, at this moment, Yan Shixun had almost unraveled all the secrets of the mansion and Ghost Mountain. Furthermore, he and the old steward were currently in an isolated space, detached from the rest of the production team, so there was no need to consider their safety.
With everything falling into place, Yan Shixun had no reason to hold back any longer.
No, it would be more accurate to say that he wanted to provoke the old steward, the former ruthless leader of the bandits who had killed without remorse. He wanted to make him lose his composure and thoughtfulness so that he might reveal more information.
As expected, the old steward, who had intended to intimidate Yan Shixun psychologically, was taken aback when Yan Shixun responded boldly and directly. He hesitated for a second.
Then, the old steward’s face, marred by dark spots and wrinkles, trembled violently, showing signs of anger. “You little brat…”
“Better than someone with no face,” Yan Shixun replied casually, as he flipped the nearly empty crystal hourglass on the vanity table back to its full state, allowing it to start counting down again.
Afterward, he leaned slightly forward, with one hand in his pocket, and stood up from the dressing table.
“Is the face you’re wearing now really yours? Or does it belong to some unfortunate passerby?”
“Without your human skin and face, you must feel like you’ve been stripped of your identity.”
Without mincing words, Yan Shixun directly exposed the old steward’s true identity and name. “Zhou Shi, you have lost the chance to be reborn as a human. Even the underworld’s officials will no longer spare you. The hope of enduring the torment of the eighteen levels of hell day and night is a luxury for you.”
“You have been abandoned, left alone and forgotten in this secluded Ghost Mountain. There is nowhere you can go.”
On Yan Shixun’s handsome face, his sharp and disdainful eyebrows and eyes revealed his contempt and mockery towards the old steward, Zhou Shi. It was as if he was saying——
You, deserve, this.
This expression, coming from Yan Shixun’s rebellious face, had an especially strong impact. It could even breathe life into the dead.
Especially someone who had triggered all the alarm bells like the old steward.
In response, Zhou Shi’s anger flared, and his face twisted into a furious expression. His already unyielding face tightened further.
The old steward’s original target was the person who had been staying on the fourth floor for a hundred year.
He had been lurking in the shadows, observing everyone from the production team like the most patient hunter, waiting for an opportunity when someone would be isolated.
However, what he didn’t expect was that the most peculiar and formidable young man seemed to possess innate spiritual sensitivity. This allowed him to keenly sense something unusual, disrupting the old steward’s plans repeatedly.
However, after Yan Shixun shattered the barrier leading to the fourth floor, the old steward realized that this was a rare opportunity in a century—to enter the fourth floor, devour the vengeful spirit, Xi Shuang, and gain the strength needed to leave Ghost Mountain.
Even though the root cause of all his suffering over the past century was right in front of him, he decided to temporarily set Xi Shuang aside. As long as he could consume her, he would finally achieve the freedom he had yearned for over a century.
Old steward Zhou Shi’s attention was now entirely focused on the young man before him, who made him so furious that even his soul trembled. He emitted broken, unintelligible sounds from his throat, resembling the intimidating noises made by animals before they attack.
“Ha… ha… damn brat, dare to look down on me! Then I’ll make you taste the bitterness of death, experience the despair of being trapped in one place for a hundred years!”
“I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you—!!!”
Yan Shixun, however, remained casually standing in front of the dressing table, composed and unruffled. He seemed like a sharp blade, positioned between the vengeful spirit and the malevolent ghost within the bloody mirror’s surface. Across the room, he locked eyes with the old steward, who stood outside the door in the corridor.
He sneered at the old steward, who was staring at him intently, as if mocking the old man’s timidity.
—You talked big about killing me, didn’t you? Come on then, kill me now!
Or perhaps you’re just a piece of meat trapped in an oak barrel, too weak to escape even from here, let alone kill me? Bandit? Ghost? Hmph, nothing more than a coward who blusters with words.
The old steward saw through Yan Shixun’s expression. His murky eyes swiftly turned solid black without a speck of white left. “Crack”, “crack”—continuous soft cracking sounds came from above as the skin on his entire body rapidly split open, revealing the original blood-red flesh underneath.
That blood-red writhed quickly beneath the splitting skin as if maggots squirming under the ground, competing to look out through the cracks. The twitching chunks of flesh with pulsing veins and muscle bundles seemed to have grown eyes, all aimed at Yan Shixun and staring at him with malicious, venomous gazes.
Finally, like an orange peel splitting open from the middle, the steward’s antique, gore-covered clothes and human skin abruptly burst apart in all directions. What had always been concealed beneath was revealed.
The instant Yan Shixun saw what it was, undisguised disgust appeared on his handsome face.
—Unlike the blood-red humanoid monsters Yan Shixun had seen in Ghost Mountain’s garden and split screens, beneath the steward’s human skin were chunks of minced flesh and blood. Scattered white bones could even be glimpsed within.
Yet each chunk of flesh seemed to have a will of its own, an individual entity only barely held together by some unknown force and restrictions to clumsily form a human shape propping up the human skin.
Now, the flesh-formed monster let out a shrill, guttural hiss from its throat. It leapt up from the door and charged at Yan Shixun, who still stood unfazed in the same spot, with blood-red claws.
“Since you scorn death…then taste it yourself!”
Without the human face, Zhou Shi’s bare skull beneath the rotten, blackened muscles and blood vessels gaped its jaw wide open. Worms and rotten teeth could be seen in its mouth.
It let out a malicious cackle, watching as the youth before it seemed frightened stiff by its imminent approach. Zhou Shi was already viciously imagining his despairing, tearful expression.
Yet Yan Shixun, who had been casually standing with one hand pocketed, merely lifted his thick lashes at the instant Zhou Shi closed in. Those overly bright, unbridled eyes looked at the charging monster with a mocking, amused expression, as if scorning its foolish recklessness.
Zhou Shi seemed to sense something wrong instinctively, but it was already too late to stop its momentum.
The raging gale of its bone claws nearly shattered the mirror behind Yan Shixun and blew back his stray bangs. That face which was always unconstrained reveal his sharp excitement without reservation.
The very moment Zhou Shi got within arm’s reach, Yan Shixun abruptly raised his previously hidden hand and swiftly grabbed hold of Zhou Shi’s crown with enough force to lift a thousand pounds. It nearly peeled off the evil spirit’s scalp.
Not letting Zhou Shi react, Yan Shixun’s eyes chilled. His pale lips pulled back an even more terrifying grin than the monster’s. Dazzling golden light erupted from his palm, enveloping Zhou Shi who couldn’t break free. It could only shriek and struggle violently.
Yan Shixun’s palm exerted force in a flash. At the instant of Zhou Shi’s pain and instability, when its flesh-connected body teetered on the verge of coming apart, he ruthlessly smashed Zhou Shi’s seized head down against the floor.
“Bang—!”
The entire room’s marble flooring cracked inch by inch from this merciless impact.
Zhou Shi’s makeshift blood-red corpus was already showing signs of crumbling. Its skull that somehow endured Yan Shixun’s golden palm and the heavy blow was severely damaged. Rotten flesh and bones were strewn amidst the web of cracks. A completely black eyeball even popped from its socket and rolled aside, glaring resentfully upwards at Yan Shixun with its bloody gaze.
Yet Yan Shixun only scoffed, not considering this vengeful spirit worth a single look: “Kill me? Wash away your sins first, put on the guise of man again before saying that. No ghosts have been able to kill me yet. Oh right, I forgot—”
He deliberately paused before staring straight at Zhou Shi’s fallen black eyeball, enunciating word for word: “You’ve already been stripped of a human identity.”
Zhou Shi’s entire flesh quivered violently, clearly enraged.
But Yan Shixun didn’t give it time to react.
As soon as he finished speaking, his slender palm clamped Zhou Shi’s skull along the bone seams. In this posture he slowly stood up straight, lifting the crumbling Zhou Shi along.
Then Yan Shixun immediately smashed Zhou Shi towards the ground again fiercely. Each impact more brutal than the last, pounding the head in his palm on the fracturing floor—
“Bang!”
“Bang!”
“Bang!”…
With increasingly teeth-achingly loud crashes, Zhou Shi’s head completely disintegrated into chunks of minced meat under Yan Shixun’s palm. Only the blood-stained bare bones remained of the skull. Its flesh-connected body also finally lost all cohesion, scattering into pieces across the floor.
Only now did Yan Shixun let go and slowly straightened his tall frame, looking down condescendingly at the mess of flesh, bones, and blood.
In his blood-stained slender hand was clearly layers of golden talismans forming an array. Continuously radiating light and majestic righteousness, utterly incompatible with evil spirits.
—It turned out, to guard against failure persuading the female ghost leading to the vengeful spirit’s frenzy, Yan Shixun had long prepared a spirit-binding array on his palm. He didn’t expect it to come in use on Zhou Shi though.
Of course, the original array prepared for the female ghost Xi Shuang wasn’t this violently overbearing, bordering on obliterating the soul. After Zhou Shi’s appearance, Yan Shixun had silently recited scriptures with that hand in his pocket, adding layer upon layer of power to the array.
Vengeful spirits often dwelled in the skull, so Yan Shixun directly seizing Zhou Shi’s head also allowed the power to get closest to its soul, heavily injuring it and robbing most of its strength to resist from the very start.
This resulted in Zhou Shi being basically powerless under Yan Shixun’s fierce and rapid strikes
—Yan Shixun had predicted possible dangers based on his limited information from the very beginning and made advance preparations.
“Kill me?”
Yan Shixun sneered contemptuously: “All under heaven have the duty to punish evil spirits who commit murder. Only man’s removal of demons is permitted by the Heavens, what right have you to question this?”
On the floor, Zhou Shi’s minced flesh seemed like ants fleeing a capsized boat, madly separating from its bones.
Even having seen many wicked beings before, Yan Shixun still felt somewhat disgusted by this nauseating scene. He raised a hand to rub the goosebumps on his arm.
Evil spirits today really had no manners! They can’t win so they disgusted people, ugh.
But just as Yan Shixun was about to pinch a mudra to stop these escaping chunks of flesh, he suddenly sensed a gaze watching him from behind.
Strangely though, in this place overflowing with rotten corpses and evil spirits, he didn’t feel the slightest malice from this gaze.
On the contrary, it felt more like complicated but welll-meaning emotions.
Yan Shixun whipped around to see the female ghost Xi Shuang standing inside the blood-colored mirror.
Her slender body trembled as her pretty phoenix eyes stared wide at Yan Shixun. She hadn’t hidden back into the mirror’s space and shut herself away again. Instead she had watched the entire thing from start to finish.
“You’re not…in league with Zhou Shi.”
Xi Shuang asked Yan Shixun in a voice suppressed to keep from sobbing: “You came…to save me?”
As if confirming something, or speaking to herself, she firmly repeated: “Someone came…to save me.”
Because of her hatred, the vengeful spirit had her eyes clouded, making it impossible for her to see the true intentions of the living. Instead, she relied on the emotions and actions of the living to discern their purpose.
Once, Xi Shuang had embraced the goodness inherent in humanity when facing each person who entered Ghost Mountain.
However, every one of them, upon seeing her or sensing her presence, would either scream and flee or attack her. Their actions seemed no different from those of the bandits she had encountered back then.
Thus, filled with hatred and clouded by vengeance, Xi Shuang came to the conclusion that these people were all associates of the bandits, coming to harm her. She began to hate them as well and ceased attempting to inquire about their true intentions, allowing them to roam the mountain in chaos but never letting them leave.
——No, I can’t allow another bandit to escape from here and harm others.
Only the determination at the moment of death remained crystal clear in Xi Shuang’s memory.
She knew that those who stood with the bandits, those blood-red figures, were also bandits. Those who stood with her, as pure and white as the rose bushes under the pale moonlight that night, were the people she knew from the mansion. She couldn’t harm them.
For a hundred years, Xi Shuang had always made this distinction between those who entered Ghost Mountain and the mansion.
Until a man named Yan Shixun broke free from the cage she had constructed for herself, intruding into the closed-off realm of her soul tainted by hatred, and revealed the entire truth about the nanny to her.
And when the bandits attacked again, he shielded her with a protective stance.
This time, she didn’t get injured, and her blood didn’t splatter all over the dressing mirror, leaving her in despair and hatred, killed within her own room.
Yan Shixun was here to protect her.
Yan Shixun was the person trusted by her nanny. He rescued her from the bandits…
Initially alert and cautious, Yan Shixun witnessed the gradual transformation in Xi Shuang’s expression and demeanor. She no longer presented herself to him as the terrifying aspect of a vengeful ghost.
In that moment, Xi Shuang resembled a young girl wandering alone in the endless darkness. She had journeyed with a heart full of hatred, and her innate goodness and gentleness had been worn away, leaving only the hatred and obsession of a vengeful ghost, sustaining her as she continued forward, dragging her enemies along to decay in this darkness.
However, someone who she was waiting for without giving up, finally suddenly appeared.
On that moonless night a hundred years ago, Xi Shuang had prayed countless times in her heart for the arrival of someone to save her. And now, that person had come.
So, all the despair and hatred softened.
Under the vengeful ghost facade, the long-forgotten softness and goodness that had once been part of her as a human silently wept.
Through the looking glass, Xi Shuang’s gaze towards Yan Shixun was no longer hostile; instead, it resembled the gaze one would give to a trusted companion.
Seeing all of Xi Shuang’s emotional changes through the mirror, Yan Shixun suddenly realized something.
—His speculation was correct.
Xi Shuang was not only the foundation of the Ghost Mountain’s formation but also the only way to leave the Ghost Mountain.
His actions of attacking the bandit leader Zhou Shi and protecting Xi Shuang within this mansion, which was filled with various powers and rules, were perceived by Xi Shuang as acts of a companion.
Therefore, if one couldn’t see through the fundamental nature of the mansion and the Ghost Mountain, couldn’t recognize Xi Shuang’s true nature behind her terrifying ghostly appearance, couldn’t gain the trust of the nanny, and meet Xi Shuang without her recognition, they would be considered part of the bandits and forever trapped in the Ghost Mountain.
A wrong step would lead to no chance for redemption.
If he hadn’t promptly discovered the standoff between Xi Shuang and the blood-red creature carrying an axe and noticed the unusual situation. If he had given up on driving away the seemingly ferocious vengeful ghost Xi Shuang, once he took hostile actions against her, he would have faced failure, and the entire production team would have been trapped in the Ghost Mountain together.
Indeed, the Ghost Mountain was perilous.
Even Yan Shixun, after unraveling the entire situation, couldn’t help but silently say, “Thank goodness,” in his heart.
Just as Yan Shixun was conversing with Xi Shuang, a piece of flesh on the ground suddenly took the opportunity to fly towards him from behind, attempting to ambush him.
Xi Shuang let out a sharp scream, and her black, flowing hair shot out from the mirror at lightning speed, tightly binding the piece of flesh and devouring it within the braided hair, absorbing it as nourishment.
Yan Shixun didn’t move a muscle, and the crisis was averted.
However, the fact that he had been attacked by Zhou Shi still infuriated Xi Shuang.
Yan Shixun could clearly sense that the dressing table next to him was shaking violently, with the cabinet legs hitting the ground, producing a “bang, bang” sound. In the blood-red mirror, Zhou Shi’s audacity to enter the fourth floor and her daring attempt to attack Yan Shixun had completely enraged her.
Blood began to flow down from the dressing table mirror. What’s more, all the mirrors in the room that could reflect human figures gradually turned blood-red, and the blood pooled on the ground, forming a substantial puddle.
Xi Shuang crawled out from the dressing table mirror. Her ghostly visage now more sinister than ever.
The vengeful spirit, which had briefly calmed down when Yan Shixun mentioned the nanny earlier, once again remembered her resentment.
The blood-red color covered her rose-patterned qipao, and her beautiful face twisted into a grotesque grimace. Her eyes glared with anger, her elongated nails became as sharp as daggers. A chilling ghostly aura emanated from her, causing the corridor’s wall lamps to burst one by one, making “pop, pop” sounds that made anyone who heard them’s heart skip a beat.
The corridor echoed with a rustling sound, like countless skeletal remains crawling rapidly along the ground.
Soon, Yan Shixun realized what those sounds were.
—They were the same skeletal female corpses that crawled out of the wall paintings when he was in the corridor earlier!
These female corpses, shrouded in black hair with indiscernible expressions, were piled up in layers at the door. Their pale bone claws reached out with resentment towards the scattered blood-red flesh.
Two different forces clashed violently, each unwilling to let go of the other in their struggle.
“Xi Shuang.”
“
Just as Xi Shuang walked past Yan Shixun, her long, trailing black hair brushing against the ground, he grabbed her wrist.
Under the deliberate restraint of power and Yang energy, Xi Shuang, in contact with Yan Shixun, remained unburned and unharmed.
Despite being a vengeful ghost, Yan Shixun had no intention of exorcising or subduing her.
Instead, he seemed like a friend entrusted by an elder, persuading a stubborn acquaintance, “After you’ve avenged yourself, leave. The Ghost Mountain is neither the mortal realm nor the underworld. Ultimately, it is not a place for souls to linger. Given enough time, you might even forget your own name and become a full-fledged vengeful ghost.”
“Moreover, your nanny hopes that you can be reincarnated.”
Yan Shixun deliberately softened his magnetic voice, imbuing it with a reassuring and steady tone.
Xi Shuang was momentarily stunned, frozen in place.
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