Chapter 130: Dinner

Chapter 130: Dinner

Chen Xiaomeng’s gait slowed down. She remained in the range of the light. She also noticed something was wrong and wondered if this was a ghost’s trap.

The giant building rose before them. Everything appeared as black silhouettes. It felt like they could move at any moment. As they approached the building, suddenly, Zhou Rong heard a strange sound.

It sounded like fabric rubbing against branches or stones. He turned to the source. A few seconds later, his eyes widened. Under the corner of the wall, there was a shrunken, wrinkly face!

Jiang Cheng and Chen Xiaomeng discovered it as well. Bei Qian was no longer as proud as before. His eyes were bloodshot, and he closed his hands over his mouth. He hid in the corner, his body shivering. Thankfully, other than some dirt, they couldn’t detect any wounds on his body. In other words, the blood came from someone else.

Bei Qian’s gaze was transfixed at one spot. Jiang Cheng moved the oil lamp to where Bei Qian was looking at. It was the window. There was a small tree in front of the window. The tree was split in the middle. A branch protruded out, forming a natural spike. At that moment, a body was hanged from the tree. The branch pierced in from the mouth and exited through the lower body. The stomach was slashed open. Organs fell out with blood.

It was Jiang Zhongyi...

His dangling hand gripped a roughly-hewn, wooden cross that had been dyed red. Zhou Rong was stunned. This scenario was heavily coloured by religion. If he were not in the nightmare realm, he would have thought he had returned to the Dark Ages. Due to the angle, they couldn’t see Jiang Zhongyi’s eyes.

Zhou Rong slowly raised his head. He noticed that the second-floor window had been shattered. Some wooden splinters extended outwards. It looked like Jiang Zhongyi jumped out from the second-floor window. Then, he was unlucky enough to impale himself on the tree branch. However, this was in the realm of nightmares, and Jiang Zhongyi was not dumb.

If he merely carelessly fell from the second floor, the falling power wouldn’t be enough to have an entire person skewered. This felt more like Jiang Zhongyi was shoved out the window by a giant force.

After that, Bei Qian, who slowly recovered, explained the situation.

“The bigger families of Little Ravine Village,” Chen Xiaomeng tossed a wood into the flame. “Like the Qian Family who had a village head.” The rest didn’t need more than that to understand the meaning. Before Jiang Zhongyi’s tragedy, some of them had already suspected the origin of this courtyard. Bei Qian merely brought it to the surface.

“If this really were the Qian Family’s courtyard, it would explain why Zhao Xiangmei would kill people here.” Lee Lu said, “She might have confused us as the Qian Family members.”

Then, this brought up another issue. The current village head didn’t tell them this was the former Qian Family home. He also didn’t warn them of the risk of staying here. This made the village head a suspect too.

After all, based on the words of An Ping Inn’s boss, the experts hired by Little Ravine Village had all mysteriously disappeared. Those experts had once stayed in this courtyard. Similar to the travellers.

After a quick discussion, they came up with three points of interest.

First: Who was this courtyard’s previous owner?

Second: Zhao Xiangmei’s real identity.

Third: Why would the ghost hang the corpses around An Ping Town after killing them?

They had asked the village head about the second and third questions, but they didn’t get any valuable information. However, the village head had to be able to answer the first inquiry. They decided to question him the next morning.

Actually, there was a fourth issue that no one wanted to bring up... There had to be a clue hidden inside that large building that shared their courtyard.