SES Chapter 84 Part 2

Madai noticed too. “What is that?”

Luo Ren quickly recounted what had happened in the cave.

Yan Red Sand nearly jumped up in shock. “You saw her too? Was it… a ghost?”

She hurriedly told her own story.

Luo Ren chuckled. “What ghost? When I threw her off, she definitely had weight.”

Madai reached to check his hand, but Luo Ren pulled it back quickly. “Don’t touch it—it could be poisonous.”

Madai bit her lip, then suddenly remembered something. She fished in her pocket and pulled out the piece of rouge-colored amber she’d torn off the savage earlier.

Luo Ren took it and compared it against his fingers. “Same color. Only, this piece is solid. But when I grabbed her throat, that amber was soft—warm, even…”

Yan Red Sand suddenly screamed, “Look! Luo Ren—look!”

No need for her to say it. Everyone saw.

The sticky layer on Luo Ren’s fingers was trembling, pulling toward the amber pendant in his hand.

Like metal filings to a magnet. Like tiny raindrops on glass sliding into a larger one.

In a blink, the stuff on his hand was gone.

Madai’s scalp tingled. She smacked the pendant out of Luo Ren’s hand. “Don’t hold it!”

She’d carried that thing on her for so long—yet it was alive.

Luo Ren glanced at it on the ground. “Is there still water in the pack? Hand me a bottle.”

Madai hurriedly dug one out. Luo Ren carefully picked up the pendant by its black string and dropped it into the bottle.

Plunk. It sank to the bottom. With the refraction of water, from outside it looked like a giant, blood-red eye.

Water containment…

Madai and Red Sand exchanged a look.

Sure enough, Luo Ren continued: “Remember how the first and second murder slips both used outside forces to build scenes? The first had fishing-line puppets, the second was a huge mural made of sea-beast bones.”

Red Sand nodded. “You’re saying this third one must have been used to make something too—we just haven’t found it yet.”

Luo Ren said, “Or maybe we already have… and just didn’t realize it.”

Mukai frowned. “Found it?”

Had they seen any drawings along the way?

Luo Ren picked up a branch, smoothed the dirt in front of him with his hand, and sketched a few lines.

Messy, tangled—like a pile of knotted ropes.

“At first I didn’t think much of it,” Luo Ren said, “but in the cave, when I was fighting that person, the scarlet amber around her throat suddenly began to glow. This character appeared.”

Mukai was doubtful. That was supposed to be a character?

“The first and second death slips both involved archaic oracle bone script. So whenever I had time, I looked into some Oracle characters. A few left a deep impression on me. This one looks chaotic, but it can actually be broken into three parts.”

Next to the rough shape, he drew the upper portion. It looked like a twisted cord.

“This part is a rope. It means to hang or bind.”

Then he drew the bottom portion: “This is a person tied up with ropes.”

“Put together, it’s a person bound by rope, strung up in the air. It means ‘to hang.’”

Yan Hongsha shuddered, blurting out, “My grandfather was hanged.”

Luo Ren sighed lightly and turned to Mukai. “And? What else gets hanged?”

“What else?” Mukai was at a loss. “The… rain-bringer doll?”

“That’s right. The rain-bringer.”

In Lianshu’s shop, the rain-bringer dolls were little clay figures with bases, meant as curios. But in folk ritual, the dolls used for praying to the heavens had to be suspended.

A hanging rain-bringer—this was a staged scene in itself.

Each time the doll was hung up, an attack soon followed. The first time, Old Yan was seized by the savage, only to be intercepted by Mukai and the arriving Luo Ren. The second time, during the hornet attack, Old Yan finally couldn’t escape his fate.

This was a little different from the first two slips. Instead of the scene manifesting after the killing, here the signs appeared beforehand.

Mukai thought it over. “So the third death slip isn’t with the savage—it’s with the woman you encountered?”

Luo Ren nodded.

“Putting together what Red Sand and I both saw: that woman’s throat was cut open, flesh peeled back. She’s the very person Old Yan killed years ago.”

“But for some reason, before she could completely die, the death slip shielded her throat. Since the slip itself is formless, it had to borrow some physical medium to seal the wound. That amber—it was probably from the treasure well, or something she already wore.”

Yan Hongsha interjected, “It must’ve been hers. The gems from the well are all raw stones. Even if they were dug out, they’d need to be handed over to craftsmen to be cut and polished.”

Luo Ren recalled the woman he had seen in the cave.

“Her skin was pale, deathly pale. Partly from blood loss, partly from never seeing the sun. She lived underground. I suspect that back when she fell into the well, she remained there for a long time too.”

He gave Mukai a faint smile. “She moved fast, almost like your wall-crawling gecko technique. She must’ve spent years in that vertical shaft, going up and down.”

Mukai frowned. “But didn’t we guess earlier that the savage saw what happened, and after… after Red Sand’s grandfather left, she dug the woman out?”

Luo Ren shook his head. “Based on age, the savage would’ve been very young at that time. With her natural feral instincts, if she had seen it, she definitely would’ve leapt out to attack. If she didn’t, that means she wasn’t there.”

“And for someone whose throat and windpipe had just been severed, it would take time to figure out another way to make sounds, to transmit information. That doesn’t happen overnight.”

That woman must have remained in the well for a very long time, pacing in despair, barely clinging to life thanks to the death slip. Not dead, but warped by the cold, the blood loss, the hunger, the poisonous aura of the treasure well—becoming neither human nor ghost.

She kept struggling to produce a voice until one day, the female savage passed by and suddenly heard a sound rising faintly from underground…