Chapter 3: The Warning Spreads

I repeated Dad's exact words to Su Wei and asked her to pass them on to the Xu family.

The Xu family moved quickly. They immediately sent people up the mountain to look for the master.

As for us, we stayed indoors like turtles retreating into their shells.

After moving into the new neighborhood, we tried to avoid the neighbors whenever we went out.

We wore masks, too, so no one would recognize us.

We had kept our identities so well hidden that no one had realized we were the family netizens had mocked as “cowards.”

Of course, that had all been my parents' idea.

They said it was Grandma's instruction.

We had thought that with our well-meant advice, Liu Shuoshuo and the Xu family might avoid disaster.

But we had been far too optimistic.

Someone in the Xu family died.

The first was Xu Yang's father.

The story quickly hit the trending lists. Netizens speculated wildly about whether the old man had been murdered or had taken his own life.

The night it happened was his seventieth birthday.

The Xu family had made a great occasion of it, throwing a lavish birthday banquet.

But after cutting the cake, the host went upstairs to rest—and died unexpectedly.

He died on the toilet in his own home.

The police investigation found that he had drowned.

But the death was bizarre. Marks around the toilet showed that the old man had fought desperately while alive.

There were also scratches on his face.

All the evidence pointed toward an answer no one dared believe.

Either the old man had staged the whole thing himself, or a hand had reached out from inside the toilet, clutched his face, and drowned him.

His birthday had become his death day. The whole Xu family was in a panic.

Dad stared at the news, deep in thought. “That doesn't make sense. According to your grandmother, even if that master couldn't stop the calamity, he should at least have been able to delay it.”

“Yet someone has already died, and so soon?”

We looked at one another in confusion. Mom sighed. “Maybe it's fate.”

Dad furrowed his brow. “Or… perhaps they never found the master? Xiaotang, call and ask. And remember—don't reveal where we are.”

I nodded and called Su Wei.

Her voice sounded tired. “Hello, Xiaotang. What is it?”

I got straight to the point. “Su Wei, did you tell the Xu family about the master I mentioned?”

“Huh? Well…”

Dad crossed his arms and gave me a sidelong glance, suspecting that she either hadn't passed the message along or had gotten it wrong.

Su Wei stammered. “Um… Xiaotang, where are you now?”

The question made everyone in the family tense. They all leaned in to listen to my call.

I held back my anger. “Don't worry about where I am. Answer my first question.”

Su Wei's voice trembled. “I did tell them about the master, but… but Liu Shuoshuo said the master had been scared to death…”

“What?!”

The master was dead!

My parents were horrified. I had never seen anyone look so frightened.

I frowned. “Explain.”

8

According to Su Wei…

Liu Shuoshuo told Xu Yang about the master right away. The next day, Xu Yang sent people to Mount Xiyi to find him.

That very night, they brought the master home to perform a ritual.

He was thin and haggard, dressed in a classic yellow Taoist robe, his long hair loosely pinned with a hairpin.

He didn't seem surprised that the Xu family had sought him out. He told his disciple to remember to feed the cat on time, casually packed his things, and then came down the mountain.

First, he inspected the Xu home for good and bad fortune. He told them it bore the signs of a great calamity.

The Xu family panicked. That very night, they all left the villa and let the master stay behind to perform his ritual.

He covered the villa in talismans and prepared strange liquids to paint symbols on the floor. He transformed the entire house until it looked less like a home and more like a giant coffin.

The guards the Xu family had stationed outside the villa heard no sound at all during the night.

They assumed the master had taken care of everything. At dawn, they rushed eagerly into the villa.

Everything was still arranged just as it had been, but the master had disappeared.

They split up to search the huge house.

At last, Xu Yang found the master cowering in terror inside the rice bin in the kitchen.

On closer inspection, all the rice in the bin had turned black, as if scorched.

The master's face was blue-black. His pupils rolled wildly out of control, and he muttered, “It's my fault… It's my fault. Don't come near me again. Please, don't… It was my fault…”

Xu Yang was startled. He was about to ask what had happened when the master suddenly screamed and gouged at his own eyes!

After hearing Su Wei's story, I fell silent for a long time.

Su Wei asked cautiously, “Xiaotang, do you know any other way to resolve this?”

Dad signaled for me to hang up.

I told her I didn't know and ended the call.

My parents slapped their thighs in alarm.

“We're doomed!”

“Go! We can't stay here. The whole family has to get out of the province!”

We left in a panic. We didn't even take the supplies we'd stocked at home. We hurriedly bought plane tickets and left the province.

By the time Liu Shuoshuo found my address, all she could do was curse.

To stay alive, the moment we got off the plane we drove through the night to the countryside and rented a room at a farmhouse inn.

Dad smoked and sighed. “Good thing we left quickly.”

Later, through messages from other mutual friends, I learned that Liu Shuoshuo had indeed come looking for us. She just hadn't been fast enough to catch up with our escape.

Liu Shuoshuo and Xu Yang seemed to have realized something. They changed hundreds of phone numbers and kept calling me frantically.

I set my phone to automatically reject calls from unknown numbers.

Not long after, another disaster struck the Xu family.

This time, Xu Yang's younger brother died.

His death was bizarre, too.

He had been hanged.

There was a clear strangulation mark around his neck, but the police searched the rented room from top to bottom and found no murder weapon.

Liu Shuoshuo was completely terrified. The successive sudden deaths left her unable to enjoy her luxurious life.

The Xu family scattered. Some moved house, some boarded flights overseas, and others asked the police for protection.

Everyone did whatever they could to get away from the Xu family.

Xu Yang and Liu Shuoshuo invited a whole crowd of Taoist priests to stand guard in their home day and night.

Dad glanced at the news and said, “It won't help. Hundreds of people from Sanjia Village gathered together that year, and it didn't help them, either.”

The story of Sanjia Village was indeed so strange it was hard to believe.

Grandma had divined that the village faced a calamity that would wipe it out. She went to ask whether its people had ever done something cruel together.

But they not only denied it—they cursed Grandma for slandering them.

9

That night, a child in Sanjia Village went missing.

The entire village searched through the night. At last, they found the child in a patch of thorn bamboo.

Thorn bamboo was common. Its branches grew thick with spikes, sharper and larger than those on ordinary bamboo. It was like a hedgehog in the world of bamboo.

Bamboo grew in dense clumps. The roots and stalks of several plants—or even hundreds—twined and knotted together.

The child's cries came from the middle of a remote clump of thorn bamboo.

To rescue the child, they had no choice but to cut down every stalk.

The child was so frightened that his mind seemed muddled. No matter what anyone asked, he wouldn't answer.

He only kept mumbling, “I was wrong… I was wrong… Sister, don't…”

Not long afterward, the people of Sanjia Village went to Grandma. The whole village humbled itself and begged for her help.

Grandma shook her head. She said she couldn't save them.

Soon after, the disaster struck Sanjia Village.

Everyone in the village hanged themselves inside their own homes.

Like Xu Yang's younger brother, no one could find a weapon.

The entire village was wiped out in a single night.

Only afterward did Grandma discover that the people of Sanjia Village had once joined together to harm a mentally ill woman.

She had been a wanderer passing through. The village chief's eldest son—a local tyrant—had taken an interest in her and wanted to force her to marry him.

The woman's mental state came and went, but when she was lucid, she firmly rejected his proposal.

She tried to run away, but couldn't. The whole village helped the tyrant keep watch over her.

He locked her in a remote cowshed, planning to keep her there for two days until she gave in.

A week later, he brought her a bowl of noodle soup to persuade her.

Instead, he found a decomposing corpse hanging from a beam above the cowshed, the stench already unbearable.

Her neck had been stretched long, too.

Perhaps her mind had become unstable again. For reasons no one knew, she had hanged herself in the cowshed that very night.

A thought suddenly came to me.

“The people of Sanjia Village hanged themselves, and Xu Yang's brother was hanged, too. Could the same person be behind both calamities?”

My parents hated it when I speculated about these things. They spoke sternly.

“Stop guessing, and stop talking about it. If Grandma's pendant hadn't warded off the calamity for you, you might be in trouble now, too.”

A chill crept down my spine.

If Grandma hadn't left me the pendant and her final warning, if Liu Shuoshuo hadn't stolen my boyfriend, I should have been the one in danger now.

In a way, Liu Shuoshuo had become my substitute in death.

The thought left me covered in goosebumps.

Of the Xu family members who fled, the one who had gone farthest died first.

Xu Yang's uncle died mysteriously in his apartment overseas.

He had hanged himself, too.

I began to realize that the Xu family were dying one by one, from farthest away to nearest.

It was as if an invisible figure were warning them:

Don't leave the Xu family villa.

Although Liu Shuoshuo no longer saw the woman in white, she was terrified every day.

She and Xu Yang began livestreaming around the clock, hoping netizens would cheer them on and keep their spirits up.

During one stream, Liu Shuoshuo saw a comment.

[Is this payback for stealing someone else's boyfriend?]

Liu Shuoshuo jumped. “Really? Should I go apologize to her now? But my best friend blocked my number. What am I supposed to do? Boo-hoo!”

Xu Yang had also become a wreck. The handsome, carefree man grew thinner by the day.

He cried and shouted into the livestream, “Jiatang! I wronged you. The affair was all my fault. Now my family is suffering retribution. Can you save me?”

I learned about it from other netizens' comments.

I shook my head. This probably had nothing to do with the affair.

Perhaps, like the people of Sanjia Village, they had brought it upon themselves.

10

Liu Shuoshuo and Xu Yang lived in constant fear.

Then Xu Yang had a dream.

In the dream, a strange girl led him along, saying she would take him somewhere beautiful.

The girl was very pretty. She gently took his hand.

Xu Yang followed her without thinking.

She smiled. “We're going somewhere beautiful.”

“Come on. Lift the stone pressing down on you.”

Xu Yang realized there really was a stone on top of him, so he obediently lifted it.

“Put your hand here. We'll pass through this waterfall together.”

Xu Yang did as she said and passed through the massive waterfall.

“Let's climb the mountain together.”

Xu Yang nodded. He took her hand, and they slowly admired the mountain scenery.

“There's a stream here. Let's cross it.”

The girl let go of his hand, crossed the stream first, and waved to him from the opposite bank.

Xu Yang nodded. “Then wait for me.”

Just as he was about to take his first step, Liu Shuoshuo's scream woke him.

“Hubby! Don't go over there! It's dangerous!”

Xu Yang's gaze grew hazy. But he saw that the girl on the far bank had transformed into another face. She bared her teeth and glared at him.

“Are you waking up already?!”