The Sickly Beauty Haunted by a Gloomy Male Ghost - Chapter 5

Bai Weixue had a nightmare.

He dreamed of those dangerous, dark eyes.

Dense, pitch black, and bottomless, the pupils were laced with a streak of scarlet, like a venomous snake flicking its tongue.

Bai Weixue lowered his gaze, refusing to meet them.

The narrow eyes squinted, and something clattered, rolling until it hit Bai Weixue’s foot.

It looked like a black glass marble.

After a second of hesitation, Bai Weixue bent down to pick it up. The moment he saw what was in his palm, his usually calm expression cracked,

This was no glass marble, it was a pitch-black eyeball!

The black pupil quivered as it stared at him, its gaze full of malice like dripping slime, as if saying: I see you again.

The eye was webbed with blood vessels. As he held it, his own eyes began to mirror the crimson streaks.

Bai Weixue squeezed his palm shut with all his might, crushing it.

He had beautiful hands, with well-defined bones, long fingers, and joints tinged with a faint pink.

But now, that soft pink was coated in a nauseating, sticky film. Dark red gore filled the gaps between his fingers. He tremblingly opened his hand, only to see the mangled, bloody eye still staring straight at him with a mocking glint, as if saying:

“I will be watching you.”

Just as Bai Weixue was about to gouge and tear the eyes apart, a rhythmic “thud, thud, thud” of knocking sounded by his ear. He bolted awake from the nightmare, staring warily toward the door.

“Weixue, it’s time to get up and eat.”

Hearing that gentle, familiar voice, Bai Weixue let out a sigh of relief. It was just a dream. He looked weary, his voice raspy. “I’m coming.”

By rights, Wen Yu was the employer, so Bai Weixue should have been the one waking up early to cook, but he seemed to have no such self-awareness. After washing up, he sat down at the table to eat.

Today he wore a black turtleneck, which made his face look even more like pale porcelain. As he pushed the sticky rice into his mouth with his chopsticks, his expression froze. He was reminded of the cold, slimy sensation in his palm from the dream, and his appetite vanished instantly.

He set down his chopsticks. To avoid a misunderstanding, he added, “It tastes good.”

Wen Yu’s eyes lit up. “Really? I used to cook for Xiaoyu all the time. she’s a very picky eater, so I had a lot of practice.”

The next moment, he lowered his head gloomily. “Xiaoyu…”

Bai Weixue wiped his mouth and stood up calmly. “Thinking about it won’t help. Let’s go outside and take a look.”

***

The village was sparsely populated, making it feel exceptionally silent and desolate.

Bai Weixue stepped outside and saw someone working in the field behind the house. The field belonged to a neighbor, and the man farming was his neighbor. However, since houses in Yinsi Village were scattered, even neighbors lived far apart and rarely crossed paths.

The man saw him too. He didn’t offer a greeting, but gave him a quick glance before lowering his head to continue his work.

Bai Weixue didn’t mind. He retracted his gaze and kept walking.

As he walked, just as the village chief had said, he didn’t see a single woman, only a few men. When these men saw him, they treated him like a harbinger of plague, bowing their heads and rushing past, terrified of making eye contact. Bai Weixue could tell they were wary of him.

All because of Him.

If what the villager Jiang Hui said yesterday was a lie and the curse didn’t exist, then things were very strange. In a village with so few people, the desire to procreate should logically be very strong, so why were there no women? Without women, there would be no children, so why did he hear the voices of children?

Conversely, if the curse was real, why were the villagers playing these supernatural games?

He stopped and turned onto the dirt path leading to the village chief’s house, with Wen Yu following close behind like a little tail.

They were just around the corner from the chief’s house when Bai Weixue stepped forward, his face half-visible. At that moment, he caught sight of the village chief stepping out of his home, looking anxious and hurried.

Bai Weixue stopped short, a thoughtful expression crossing his face.

The chief was old. For someone that age, a fall could be fatal, so they usually walked as slowly as possible. But the chief was different now, he seemed to be in a great hurry, walking faster than a young man.

Wen Yu nearly walked into Bai Weixue’s back. He poked his head out from the side, looking in the direction the chief had gone. “Where is he going?”

“Come on,” Bai Weixue said. “Follow him.”

They kept a moderate distance behind the chief, watching him enter another villager’s house.

Before Wen Yu could say anything, Bai Weixue slapped an invisibility charm on both of them. An invisibility charm lasted for thirty minutes and only hid their physical forms, it couldn’t mask sounds or movements. He had only brought two with him on this trip.

They followed the chief into the courtyard. As soon as they stepped inside, they were hit by the heavy, metallic scent of blood.

Bai Weixue looked at Wen Yu and put a finger to his lips, signaling him to remain silent.

Wen Yu blinked and gave an “OK” sign.

The smell of blood was coming from the inner room, growing stronger the closer they got. Bai Weixue didn’t know the layout of the inner room and wasn’t sure what he would see, he was even more afraid of encountering a ghost. To avoid being discovered, he stood in the adjacent room and peered through a crack in the door.

Wen Yu followed suit, his eyes wide as he looked inside.

There was a bed in the inner room. Something was on it, but the village chief had his back to them, blocking their view. The smell of blood was overpowering, snaking through the crack in the door and into their nostrils until it made their heads ache. Bai Weixue wondered if someone was slaughtering a pig and draining its blood inside.

The chief’s hair was white, his back hunched like a dried shrimp. He leaned over, his withered body moving up and down as if he were pressing down on something.

After a few repetitions, the chief seemed tired and wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.

In that moment, Bai Weixue saw something, and his eyes instantly grew sharp.

That raised hand was as shriveled as old tree bark. When Bai Weixue first met the chief, the man had reached out toward him, the veins on the back of his hand were hollow and covered in age spots.

But now, none of that was visible, because the hand was completely covered in blood.

Bright red blood dripped down his thin, withered wrist, staining the chief’s face and splattering onto the floor.

It was thick and garish.

Bai Weixue was momentarily dazed by the color of the blood. When his gaze fell back onto the chief, his eyes suddenly widened, as if he had witnessed something incredibly shocking. His pale pupils constricted sharply.

The chief had moved to the side, and the view that was previously blocked was now fully exposed.

Bai Weixue had considered many possibilities, from slaughtering a pig to murder, but he never expected this scene,

Lying on the narrow wooden bed was a villager, his face deathly pale and covered in blood.

The villager had dark skin and thick body hair. He possessed male physical characteristics and was, without a doubt, a man.

He was tied to the bed, his limbs firmly secured with ropes. Fresh blood poured incessantly from his abdomen, the scent sharp and nauseating.

But what was truly blood-curdling was not the pool of blood, but his high, protruding stomach.

His abdomen seemed to contain something alive, pulsing and bulging, making one feel as if the skin would burst at any moment. A normal person’s belly, no matter how bloated, would be flesh-colored, at most showing a layer of fat.

But his was different.

The skin was stretched until it was a bruised purple, and one could even see the dark veins snaking along the inner wall. The belly button had long since been flattened into a shallow depression. Centered on the navel, the surrounding skin was stretched to the point of cracking, covered in a spiderweb of reddish-purple lines.

Above those lines sat a dark mass.

Calling it a “spot” wasn’t quite accurate, it was more like a massive black mole.

The fist-sized mole sat in the center of the purple spiderweb, looking repulsive and bizarre. More unsettlingly, an unnatural point protruded from the center of the mole.

It was as if something inside was pressing against it with an elbow.

The village chief placed his hands on the purple abdomen, pressing down repeatedly. The villager’s expression was one of extreme agony, but his mouth was gagged with cloth, so he couldn’t make a sound. Only a faint, muffled wail could be heard.

Under the continuous pressure, the villager’s stomach became as thin as paper. Bulges appeared and disappeared. That towering abdomen was like a mountain of flesh, crawling with deep purple fissures.

“Rip”

A sound like tearing fabric rang through the air.

Flesh and skin were forced open.

The black mole split into a gap, like a massive, gaping mouth. Blood gushed out, and along with it came a black hand.

Tiny, like that of a newborn infant.

Bai Weixue stared at the scene. Whether out of terror or something else, his face turned transparently pale.

Deep in his pupils, the reflection of a soaking wet infant’s head appeared.

Before long, the infant poked its limbs out and crawled out of the villager’s stomach.

An excited, fanatical light appeared in the chief’s eyes as he spoke for the first time since entering the room. “It’s born! It’s born!”

Born?

Bai Weixue blinked slowly.

He stared at the infant in the chief’s arms, his expression complex.

What exactly was born? Was it even human?

The infant was entirely black, surrounded by a swirling black mist. Its head made up two-thirds of its body. Its skin was covered in reddish-purple cracks. As if sensing something, it turned its face toward Bai Weixue.

The moment he saw the infant’s face, Bai Weixue stopped breathing.

Where eyes should have been, two solid black ovals were embedded, looking eerie and sinister.

It had no nostrils. Its mouth looked as if a sharp blade had slashed across its face, a horizontal crack stretching all the way to its ears. It stared toward Bai Weixue and suddenly split its mouth open, letting out a cry like a baby. Its heavy, massive head tilted back, and the sound was so high-pitched it pierced the eardrums.

It was a ghost infant!

Cold sweat slid down Bai Weixue’s cheek, and his stomach churned with acid. He looked away from the ghost infant toward the chief, only to find the man stroking the creature’s head with his bark-like palm, his old, raspy voice cooing gently, “Don’t cry, don’t cry, be a good baby.”

Bai Weixue’s face turned green from the shock of the scene.

Blood continued to pour from the villager’s stomach. Since the ghost infant had crawled out, that massive mountain of flesh had deflated like a punctured balloon, the dry skin clinging to the internal organs and revealing the sharp outlines of his ribs.

A large hole remained where the mole had been, but then a hair-raising sight occurred. The edges of the tear began to writhe toward each other, interlocking like a zipper and healing on their own!

Seeing the village chief about to carry the ghost infant out, Bai Weixue quickly tapped Wen Yu’s shoulder to snap him out of his daze, mouthing the words:

“Let’s go!”

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