The two exchanged a glance and silently came to a decision.
Just as they reached the village Party branch secretary’s doorstep, the team leader suddenly stopped. “Um, Village Chief Feng, these two are the experts. Xiao Zhou and I staying here won’t be of much use. Once you’ve looked over the documents, we’ll head back—there’s still some provincial business to handle.”
The more he thought about it along the way, the more frightened he became, though he couldn’t quite figure out why. After mulling it over, he decided to leave professional matters to the professionals.
“Ah? Oh, okay, sure—can’t delay provincial work,” Village Chief Feng said hurriedly, taking the documents.
Ye Yang and Shen Ming gave them a glance but didn’t call them out. This was fine. If there was real danger, they’d only have to worry about protecting these two anyway.
Once the handover was done, Xiao Zhou visibly relaxed. The team leader rubbed his hands together and reiterated to Ye Yang and Shen Ming, “If you need us to pick you up or deliver any supplies, feel free to contact me anytime, no need to be polite.”
With that, the two hurried off, pulling up navigation to find their car.
Ye Yang found it amusing. These two hadn’t even seen anything yet and were already this cowardly, yet still sharp—maybe they had potential for cultivation too.
Outside, it was pitch black. The few streetlamps were far apart and dim. The low nighttime temperature brought a fog that made everything even harder to see. The team leader and Xiao Zhou walked faster and faster, eventually nearly breaking into a run.
Only after getting into the car and driving several kilometers did Xiao Zhou finally speak: “Section Chief, why is this place so terrifying?”
The team leader fanned his collar and touched the back of his neck, finding it damp and cold. He realized he’d been so frightened that he’d broken out in a cold sweat—his back muscles were completely stiff.
“Right? Nothing obviously wrong, but somehow just scary.”
Xiao Zhou nodded repeatedly. “Exactly! You felt it too, Section Chief? I thought I was imagining it!”
Then he started worrying about Ye Yang and Shen Ming, who had stayed behind. “Hey, leaving those two young people there—will they be in danger? That place is really strange.”
“Especially that expert with the surname Ye. He’s quite good-looking, looks like a college student, so young. If something happens…”
Before he could finish, the team leader waved him off. “What are you thinking? Don’t judge by appearances. In my experience, he could easily take on ten of you without breaking a sweat. Besides, they both have abilities ordinary people don’t.”
Xiao Zhou recalled Ye Yang’s slender build and thought the team leader was exaggerating. “Really? I’ve trained in martial arts, you know.”
The team leader snorted. “What do you know? This mysterious department—it’s your first time dealing with it, so it makes sense you don’t get it. Let me tell you something quietly: don’t be fooled by his youthful looks. He might very well be older than the two of us combined!”
As Xiao Zhou pressed him with curiosity, the team leader began sharing what he knew about the YCG. By then, they were already far from Yuluo Village, driving through the more lively streets of Suli County. The inexplicable, tense fear they’d felt earlier had finally vanished completely.
·
After the team leader and Xiao Zhou left, Ye Yang and Shen Ming sat down at Village Chief Feng’s dining table and listened as he briefly introduced the village’s situation.
“Well, Yuluo Village—you’ll see it tomorrow—is built along a seaside cliff. It has only a tiny bay and shoreline. Compared to other villages in Suli County, there’s no fishing to speak of, and the land isn’t good for farming. It’s always been desperately poor.”
Village Chief Feng hadn’t seen anyone from outside in a long time. Now that he had the chance, he poured his heart out to Ye Yang and Shen Ming.
“There are only old folks left in the village. They’re impossibly stubborn and hard to communicate with. I’ve been here this long and still haven’t convinced them to let us build a road to the village entrance.”
Ye Yang was curious. “Road building is a poverty alleviation project, right? No cost or labor needed from the village. Why won’t the villagers agree?”
“Sigh!” Village Chief Feng let out a long sigh. “People call me village chief, but I’m not really. The real village chief is one of the villagers themselves. They don’t accept me as Party branch secretary at all. They have their own ideas. The road construction crew actually made it to the village entrance, but the villagers shouted and threatened until they chased them away.”
“Look at where I’m living. When friends and family ask, I tell them it’s to coordinate with county work—I need a place with decent transportation, so I live a bit farther from the village. But honestly? I just can’t live in the village.”
He gave a bitter smile. “To be honest with you, I’m from a neighboring city. I took the civil service exam for years. Finally found a post no one wanted, so I came here to be a village official. What a trap. No wonder no one applied. Now I can’t leave either—no one wants to take over my work. I’ve been stuck here for five years.”
It had been too dark outside to see clearly, but now indoors, Ye Yang noticed that Village Chief Feng was very young—looked like a college student. He hadn’t expected him to have already been here five years.
“But hey, you two experts—I see you haven’t brought much. Don’t you need equipment for your research?”
Aside from a travel bag Shen Ming had brought, they had no luggage at all.
Shen Ming: “We brought some portable containers. We’ll take samples and analyze them back at the lab. The equipment is too bulky to carry around.”
Ye Yang quickly nodded. “Right, exactly. So our main goal is to survey the geography and hydrological environment here. That means we’ll need to walk around the village.”
Village Chief Feng didn’t understand any of this either. It all sounded very profound to him, so naturally he didn’t suspect a thing. He warmly made them some noodles, prepared bedding and pillows, and arranged to go to the village together the next day.
Once Feng’s breathing had steadied and he had fallen into a deep sleep, Ye Yang and Shen Ming quietly slipped back to the entrance of Yuluo Village.
They wanted to conduct a preliminary investigation under the cover of night.
So far, Village Chief Feng seemed fine, but he had been here for five years. With so many people dying in the village, was he truly unaware?
Ye Yang and Shen Ming weren’t ready to trust him just yet.
The mission intelligence showed that deaths had surged recently in this area, and had it not been for a chance discovery by a YCG member, the outside world would have remained completely in the dark. The villagers held no funerals, nor did they take the bodies to the crematory—they buried them secretly on their own.
The police had come several times, reasoning with them and threatening them with the law, but the family members stuck to their stories. Some claimed the victims had fallen off the cliff, others said they drowned. Though the accounts varied, the police had no evidence. And since these were all elderly folks in their seventies and eighties, there wasn’t much they could do—nor could they perform autopsies.
An advance team had secretly examined one body. The lungs were filled with water, consistent with drowning. All limbs and organs were intact with no major wounds. There were only some fine scratch marks on the skin, as if from struggling while being held. No other injuries—not what you’d expect from falling off a cliff.
It wasn’t necessarily caused by a non-human entity, but there was definitely something wrong.
Ordinary people couldn’t solve it, which was why the case had been transferred from the YCG to the public security bureau and then back again.
Like the advance team, Ye Yang and Shen Ming concealed their forms and auras and surveyed the entire village. They found quite a few residents—not just the elderly, but also many middle-aged men. Most were male. There were indeed no young people, and no children or infants at all.
Apart from a palpable lack of vitality and a pervasive, indescribable foul odor, they noticed nothing else unusual. The villagers were all resting normally, and there were no corpses in sight.
Ye Yang was puzzled. “The intelligence said there should be at least two people who died within the past week. But there are no fresh graves in the cemetery, the ancestral hall is empty, and no bodies have been transported out of the village. Where are they hiding the corpses?”
Under Shen Ming’s spiritual perception, the entire village was shrouded in a decaying atmosphere. Regardless of age, every villager carried a deathly air of approaching the end. But even he couldn’t conjure up corpses that had no traces of life or lingering spirits.
Scanning the village, he said, “No rush. Tomorrow we’ll check the cliff.”
·
Daytime in Yuluo Village was still sunless. The whole place was blanketed in fog, visibility under ten meters.
Village Chief Feng led the two through the village.
They encountered few people along the way. Even in broad daylight, the village was eerily quiet.
Occasionally, a villager would either glance at Feng and completely ignore them or glare at them menacingly, yelling in the local dialect to drive them away.
Only one middle-aged man—wearing glasses, graying at the temples, with a sharp glint in his eyes—asked Feng who Ye Yang and Shen Ming were. Feng called him Old Xu. His accent was slightly lighter.
When he heard they were marine biology experts, Old Xu’s expression darkened. He questioned Feng at length in the local dialect, then hurried off.
“What’s that about?” Feng was equally baffled. He turned back to Ye Yang and Shen Ming with an awkward smile. “Old Xu is usually the friendliest toward me. I don’t know what got into him today.”
Under Feng’s guidance, they reached the cliff area.
“No need to go up there, right?” Feng said. “You’re here to collect water samples. Shouldn’t we go to the shallow beach instead?”
Ye Yang pretended to be interested. “I’ve never seen a seaside cliff. Let’s go up and take a look. It won’t take much time.”
Feng looked reluctant. Shen Ming added, “Since we’re here, I’d like to see it too.”
With no choice, Feng led them up.
A long stretch of Yuluo Village’s boundary was cliffside, with farmland extending all the way to the edge. Ye Yang walked along the ridge toward the slope.
“Careful!”
Shen Ming abruptly pulled Ye Yang into his arms. Ye Yang had just stepped into empty air—before he could react, he was enveloped in a fresh, oceanic scent. Shen Ming’s smell dispelled the foul odor that had been clinging to his nostrils, clearing his mind.
Ye Yang poked his head out from Shen Ming’s embrace. Once steady, he saw that the edge of the field almost exactly coincided with the cliff’s edge. Approaching from below, you couldn’t see the drop—it was dangerously easy to fall.
Village Chief Feng panted as he rushed up. “Are you okay? Are you okay? Oh my, you scared me to death! Why are you two so fast? I didn’t even have time to warn you. This area is extremely dangerous. I told you not to come up.”
Ye Yang stood at the cliff’s edge, gazing down at the sea below. “How can you not have any guardrails in such a dangerous place?” he couldn’t help asking.
If Teacher Shen hadn’t reacted so quickly, he—a dignified fourth-rank Yao—would have nearly taken a fall. He even began to wonder: could it be that those who died really just accidentally fell off?
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