Originally, was the first person we saw in the village a dead person?

Thinking back to the strange look in the old man's eyes when he looked at them, Yu Xing understood in his heart.

It was reasonable and expected.

For someone else, there might be feelings of "regret" and "fear" after the fact, but for Yu Xing, it was just valuable information.

Very interesting.

The information he obtained from the Xu brothers combined with his own deductions had given him a thorough understanding of Guanjia Village. Now, he continued to ask:

"Why did Zhou Facai bury him? Was it after he died or..." Yu Xing omitted the last two words, knowing that the old lady could understand his question.

Continuously pressing for answers could be seen as urgent and make the person being questioned wary.

Swallowing the last few words would make the other person subconsciously feel consulted and acknowledged, and more likely to tell the truth.

The old lady's bony fingers gripped the cane and finally shifted her gaze from the sky to Yu Xing: "In our village, the village chief is special. He protects us and lives with us... We genuinely love and respect the village chief, but the village chief's family is also under a curse."

"What curse?"

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"The village chief's child is sent away as soon as they are born and only returns after thirty-five years. On the day they return, this child becomes the new village chief and buries the previous village chief under the village's locust tree." The old lady seemed a bit sad. "Facai is a good child, but I am an old person. In my memory, the old village chief is still more familiar..."

Yu Xing responded with an "oh" and rhythmically tapped his leg with two fingers.

"What if the new village chief can't bear to bury the old one?"

"Can't bear it? No, most of them are very willing to do so." The old lady thought of something, but her stiff and aging facial muscles couldn't express her emotions at the moment. Yu Xing vaguely felt that she was being sarcastic. "If there are any who are unwilling, the villagers will help bury them."

Ah, so in a village, there can only be one bloodline of the village chief's family at a time.

Yu Xing suddenly became excited and asked, "Besides me, has anyone else asked you this question?"

"Yes... It seems like a young man came to ask last night."

With this information, a smile formed at the corner of Yu Xing's mouth. He already knew where the missing Carlos had gone.

...

At dawn.

The small town just across the mountain from Guanjia Village was still bustling, with many merchants buying wild game and medicinal herbs.

Carlos yawned and took a refreshing hot bath in the hotel in the town, washing away some of the fatigue from driving all night.

After changing his clothes, he walked out of the bathroom with wet, ash-blue hair draped with a towel. Just as he was about to wipe it, he heard a "wuwuwu" sound coming from the bed.

He walked over slowly, and the color of Carlos' blue eyes became even deeper as he looked down emotionlessly at the young man whose limbs were bound and mouth was gagged.

He didn't speak until the young man realized something and stopped struggling, looking at him with a terrified expression.

Only then did Carlos smile satisfactorily. "Zhou Qinghai... Are you hungry?"

The young man didn't dare to provoke this ruthless psychopath. He had only resisted in surprise before and almost had his legs broken.

"It's okay to be hungry. We'll go eat later." Carlos removed the cloth from the young man's mouth and said before the young man could speak, "Will you eat obediently? I'm tired now and don't want to deal with more moths flying at me... I'm sure you don't want to involve other innocent people either, right?"

His tone was gentle, as if he were a friend of the young man's. The young man trembled all over but nodded in despair.

"Good, I really like straightforward people." Carlos finally glanced at him and focused on drying his hair. "After we finish eating, I'll take you to a good place where you'll meet... hehe, the person you've been looking for. Thank me."

In his role memory, he had stayed in this small hotel the night before entering the mountains.

The guest next door was a young man named Zhou Qinghai, who was outgoing and had no guard against others. They only had breakfast together, and Zhou Qinghai told him that he was an orphan and had been searching for his parents.

Originally, he paid extra attention to such a clear event in his role memory. After hearing the old lady's words last night, he understood.

Zhou Qinghai, the son of Village Chief Zhou Facai... was in town.

All he needed to do was bring Zhou Qinghai back, and the village chief would disappear.

Of course, at the same time, Zhou Qinghai would become the new village chief, bound by Guanjia Village.

But what did that have to do with him? He just needed to complete his deduction.

A pleased smile flashed in his azure eyes.

...

With the desired clues in hand, Yu Xing bid farewell to the old lady and planned to go back and consolidate the information with Xiao Xuechen and Wei Fan.They did not choose to gather at the village chief's house, but instead arranged to meet on the hill near the ancestral hall, which was more secluded and would not be discovered by the villagers in advance.

Straightening his messy and fluffy short hair, Yu Xing walked briskly into the small hill to the east of the village.

In theory, the air in the mountains should be good, but the trees on this hill were withered, and the branches at the top were like claws. The eeriness of the night turned into desolation during the day, and it felt as if even the breaths they took were filled with death.

He arrived at the designated location, and the other two were already waiting there.

"San!" Xiao Xuechen was originally talking to Wei Fan, but when she saw him, she smiled and waved at him.

"Good afternoon." Yu Xing nodded and sat down with the other two in a relatively clean area.

"Let's start consolidating the information. What have you guys discovered?" He picked up a tree branch and played with it absentmindedly, poking at the grass on the ground.

"Then I'll go first." Wei Fan had already heard about Yu Xing's ability from Xiao Xuechen, so he put away all his disdain for this young painter. "I asked a disabled villager in the village and found out that there are some villagers who never leave their homes. They are hidden resources and have a much better attitude towards outsiders than others."

"Hmm." Yu Xing nodded, signaling him to continue.

"After someone in the village dies, they will hold a so-called funeral on the eighth day, and everyone will go to the ancestral hall to witness it." Wei Fan tried to summarize the information he had gathered. "But the disabled villager told me that almost everyone in the village has been the protagonist of the funeral."

"Which means they have all died once!" Xiao Xuechen didn't seem afraid, but rather excited. Her clear and cold voice sounded a bit hoarse after a day of investigation. "This matches what I found out. The villagers in Guanjia Village are all dead. They are no different from ordinary people during the day, but their thoughts are cruel and twisted compared to humans. In the evening, they light candles to maintain their human form. If there are no candles, they will turn into malicious monsters."

She pushed her curly hair back and continued, "The only exception is the village chief. Based on my guess, the village chief is the only living person in Guanjia Village. He should play the role of a mediator and communicate with outsiders."

"Not a mediator, but a guardian." Yu Xing replied coldly.

These two were able to gather such important information, indicating that they were quite capable.

"Oh? What do you mean?" Xiao Xuechen was very interested in the term he used.

"It means..." Yu Xing paused, pinching the tree branch in his hand, and then explained his analysis.

The information he exchanged from the Xu brothers, the Feng Shui masters, was that Guanjia Village was located in a deep valley, surrounded by mountains, forming a closed-off area with no way in or out.

The layout of the houses formed a grid pattern. Borrowing a phrase from "The Peach Blossom Spring," it was indeed a place where "the paths intersected," and the houses were neatly arranged.

After calculations, it was found that there was no vitality here, but rather a pervasive sense of death, completely different from the outside world.

"Which means..." Xiao Xuechen widened her beautiful eyes, her tone hesitant.

"Yes, we should have been disturbed by some kind of illusion or something else." Yu Xing rolled up his long sleeves, a hint of a smile appearing at the corner of his eyes. "This place is not where the living should be, but... an underground tomb."

"You can think of the entrance to the village as the entrance to the tomb, and the flat road as the tomb passage. The houses we slept in are the tomb chambers where coffins are placed, so-"

"The coffins are our beds."

The reason why it was called Guancun Village was naturally not because there was only one black coffin in the ancestral hall.

It could be said that every household had numerous coffins, but they had been transformed by illusions, making it impossible for outsiders to recognize them.

"We slept in coffins last night!?" Wei Fan was shocked.

This news was too bizarre, and he had doubted whether Yu Xing had guessed wrong. But when he connected it with the rules of not being able to leave the room or let others into the room at night, it seemed to make sense.

Tomb chambers had their own rules. If the time when the monsters in the village awakened was at night, then lying in the coffins, they were also members of the "corpses." In one tomb chamber, there were two coffins that could not be disturbed.

If they didn't guard it well and let other corpses break into their tomb chamber, the rules would be disrupted, giving other corpses an opportunity.

On the contrary, if they guarded it, then the rules of the tomb chamber would be in place, and other corpses would not be able to forcefully enter.

And the lack of food and various supplies in the village could also be explained... perhaps they were just some peculiar products of the tomb.

Thinking of this, Wei Fan's face turned pale as he recalled the food he had eaten.

Xiao Xuechen also looked at Yu Xing with a complicated expression. She remembered that a few deductionists didn't want to have dinner that night, but San happily said it was delicious and asked everyone to eat together.Would it be too late for her to throw up now?

Does she even have a chance?

Yu Xing pretended not to notice the resentment in the two people's expressions. He didn't care about what he was eating, even if he was told that the soup contained rotten insect corpses, as long as it was edible, he would still eat it.

Covering his mouth with his hand and coughing twice, he turned his head.

"Missie, don't look at me like that, I'll get shy."

Xiao Xuechen: "…"

Wei Fan: What about me? Don't I deserve it?

Fortunately, Yu Xing didn't continue with his double standards and went on to discuss the analysis, giving Wei Fan some comfort.

"The village chief is different from the other corpses; he is alive. I think he should be playing a role similar to a tomb keeper."

At that moment, he repeated the old lady's words.

Since he was alive, the woman had already lit the candles at dusk, but the village chief didn't need to.

The corpses' transition between day and night was affected by the rules, while the village chief... merely relied on his acting skills. He was different from the corpses whose thoughts were irreversibly twisted. He knew everything but still chose to help the corpses harm outsiders.

So sometimes, living people might be more terrifying than ghosts.

Fortunately, the village chief was not without weaknesses. The Deductionists who wanted to kill the village chief would most likely be stopped by the corpses, and might even trigger the death condition. However, there could only be one tomb keeper in the tomb at a time. If there were more, the corpses would bury the original one alive.

Yu Xing knew that he didn't need to worry about the village chief. That magician... should be back soon.

"Well, I have a question about this." A glint flashed in Xiao Xuechen's eyes as she looked at Yu Xing.

Yu Xing: "Hmm?"

"If all the villagers are corpses, then what was Zhou Yongsheng before?" Guanjia Village was Zhou Yongsheng's hometown.

"Didn't you notice that there are no children in this village?" Yu Xing looked at her leisurely, hoping that Missie could think for herself.

Guanjia Village had not only no children but also no one under the age of twenty.

Wei Fan had also said that from time to time, a new villager would "die" and a funeral would be held.

So, although this place was a tomb, the corpses in the tomb... changed frequently.

"Could it be that these corpses still have the ability to reproduce, and after giving birth to children, they send them away, and when they are old enough, they bring them back to kill them and become new villagers!?" A bunch of clues fought in Xiao Xuechen's mind, and after several rounds, she finally sorted out a logical line.

"Not bad." Yu Xing praised, then continued, "The villagers are no different from living people during the day. Since they are no different, whatever living people can do, they can do as well."

He guessed that whenever a child was born, the village chief would send the child out of the mountain to grow up in the outside world.

During this time, the children outside might not even know the true situation of their home until they were old enough to be deceived back to Guanjia Village and then killed by the village chief or other corpses.

For example, Zhou Yongsheng.

Due to the special rules or curse here, the children born to the corpses were undoubtedly living people.

This kind of thing that broke the boundary between life and death was against the laws of nature and, of course, not allowed by the world. So the villagers could only be trapped in this small area and could never leave.

The old lady used to be a living person too. After being killed by the villagers, she was trapped in the village, forever longing for the life outside.

"The funeral time is at six o'clock in the evening when night is about to fall. This time is the fixed funeral time for Guanjia Village. Usually, villagers don't go out and only gather on the days of funerals. This is the moment when yang turns to yin, symbolizing that a living person is buried through the ceremony and officially becomes one of them." Yu Xing said indifferently.

The funeral was the key to the continuation of the curse in this village.

Dusk was neither day nor night, and candles were not needed. It was the moment when the boundary between life and death was most blurred for Guanjia Village.

Today's funeral protagonist was Zhou Yongsheng.

This young man's normal life had been completely destroyed.

So, Yu Xing, Carlos, and the Xu brothers were all called by Zhou Yongsheng. Zhou Yongsheng didn't want to harm them together, but wanted them to destroy the funeral ceremony and break the endless vicious curse.