Chapter 232: Escape
"Everyone in this village has been possessed by ghosts," Long Zihan said as she stood by the window, lifting the curtain a little to secretly peek at the villagers in the street below.
"It looks like we’re surrounded."
Li Mu sat on the couch with a displeased look. "If this were a normal trip, and we just came and went, they probably wouldn’t have done anything to us."
"And after Xiao Jing noticed something strange, if you two hadn’t gone to check out the clinic, those ghosts might not have acted, right?"
"Long Zihan went. I was just packing my bags and somehow got possessed," Yu Fan said, pointing at Long Zihan.
Xiao Jing was still standing with the ghost called Da Zhuang, guarding the two other ghosts. Her expression was very serious.
Those two ghosts sat quietly on the floor, looking very obedient.
"I only went to look because we were trying to find your parents!" Long Zihan said, pulling the curtain again to peek outside, then froze.
"This time, they’re not even using ghosts," she said, looking nervous. "Seems like they’re going to fight us directly."
"Did you call the police?" Li Mu asked.
Yu Fan nodded. "Yeah, I called them right away…"
But just as he finished speaking, the two quiet ghosts suddenly jumped up and dashed through the wall to escape.
Everyone was surprised, but not too shocked.
The most troublesome thing about ghosts is that unless their core is destroyed, they don’t really die.
For example, Xiao Jing’s main body is a mirror in Li Mu’s house. No matter how badly she gets hurt outside, even if she turns into dust, she can still come back to life from that mirror.
So controlling ghosts is nearly impossible.
Those two ghosts probably knew they couldn’t win a fight and were just pretending to behave so they could gather information.
"I have a very strong ghost inside me," Li Mu said as she heard footsteps in the hallway outside.
Clearly, the villagers were ready to drop the act and start fighting.
Yu Fan quickly joined her in moving all the furniture, sofas, tables, even the fridge, behind the door to block it.
The ghost named Da Zhuang also returned to his physical body and came over to help. Up to now, he still had not said a single word.
"You have a strong ghost? Then why isn’t he showing himself before?"
"I don’t know either…"
Once they had blocked the door, everyone felt a bit relieved. Until loud banging started on the front door.
Their faces turned pale, and they began panicking, running around the room like ants on a hot pan.
"There are still people guarding downstairs."
"Jumping from the third floor would definitely break our legs!"
"There’s a platform for the air conditioner here!" Xiao Jing suddenly found a way out and shouted, "We can jump to the balcony downstairs from here, do it a few times and we’ll reach the ground!"
Yu Fan took a look and immediately backed away. "What do you think we are? Soldiers?!"
Just then, a soft rope ladder suddenly dropped from above, hanging in the air outside the window.
Then, a ghost fell from the sky, passing through the wall and crashing into the living room.
Da Zhuang was about to attack when Li Mu and Yu Fan both cried out in surprise:
"Liu Shenglong?!"
It was the ghost they had run into back at school. When they first met him, he didn’t even realize he was already dead.
Later, because he was obsessed with finding his mother who had gone missing years ago, and his obsession controlled his actions, Li Mu had let him go to face his fate alone.
She hadn’t expected that he would survive, turning from a weak ghost (that usually disappears in a week) into a powerful ghost like Xiao Jing, and even show up here?
"No time to explain. Just climb down the ladder!"
Liu Shenglong turned his head and looked at the villagers who were about to break through the door, then quickly called to the others, “Climb down the rope ladder!”
“But what about the people downstairs...?” someone asked.
Without answering, Liu Shenglong jumped straight out of the window. Right after that, thick fog began to spread below.
“This is kind of like the raincoat ghost’s power...” Li Mu muttered.
Long Zihan had already carefully started climbing down the rope ladder.
Worried that the ladder might not hold too much weight, Li Mu and Yu Fan turned back to pile more furniture behind the door to stop the villagers from getting in.
“This is way too scary,” Li Mu said with a hopeless look on her face. “We just came for a trip.”
“I had a bad feeling about this trip the moment we ran into Long Zihan,” Yu Fan said with a dark expression.
“Also, why is the ghost inside me still doing nothing at all?”
In a panic, Li Mu kept glancing down at her stomach, hoping that the powerful ghost hiding inside, one so scary that other ghosts were afraid of it, would finally come out, destroy the enemies, and protect her.
But that ghost's presence only made the other ghosts stay hidden inside the villagers’ bodies. It didn’t actually do anything else.
“Sister! Sister Zihan just made it down!”
“You go next!” Yu Fan quickly picked up Xiao Jing and placed her onto the rope ladder outside the window.
“You guys go first—”
“Hurry up!”
He didn’t have time to argue. He turned and shouted to Li Mu, “You go with Xiao Jing. The two of you should be fine together!”
“Okay.”
After all the chaos, they finally made it to the ground safely.
The fog was so thick they could barely see anything in front of them, but luckily, Liu Shenglong wasn’t affected by the fog. He led the way as everyone ran as fast as they could toward the highway outside the village.
“We should be safe now, right?” Long Zihan bent over, breathing hard, as Da Zhuang helped support her body.
That ghost, who also had a physical body, turned to her with a blank face and said, “Yeah.”
They had never seen this ghost before…
But then Li Mu suddenly remembered Long Zihan’s huge suitcase. She guessed the body had probably been chopped up and stuffed in there.
Then she turned to Liu Shenglong, waiting for an explanation.
“After I left your house, I just followed my instincts and my obsession,” Liu Shenglong said. “That eventually led me to this village.”
He waved his hand to clear some of the fog, so passing cars wouldn’t be affected.
Yu Fan and Xiao Jing were listening carefully while also trying to wave down a car for help.
“The villagers here are all possessed by strong ghosts,” Liu Shenglong continued. “They were very friendly to me and invited me to join the village. They said that if a ghost takes over a human body, it feels like being alive again…”
“I was kind of tempted,” he said, scratching his head. “But I’m just a shut-in, and this place doesn’t even have internet.”
“Then I found out they’ve been keeping a lot of people locked up, like livestock.”
“If the body they’re using gets sick, they just switch to another one. If someone accidentally dies, they bury the body in the graveyard behind the village. The people being kept are all held in the basement under the clinic. Besides giving them meals, the villagers try not to contact humans at all.”
“The important part is... I saw my mom there…”
He suddenly stopped talking and ran toward the nearby fields.
At that moment, a few motorcycles pulled up beside Li Mu and the others.
“Long Zihan, Li Mu, Yu Fan…” the police officers on the bikes frowned as they checked each of their names. “Are you all okay?”
“We’re fine!” Xiao Jing answered cheerfully as usual. “Uncle, your bike looks so cool!”
“You’re safe now. A police car is on its way.”