The Village Chief's Secret

Do no wrong, and you won't fear a ghost knocking at your door.

This was a truth Wu Wang had always lived by.

For example, after he had once snuck downstairs in the middle of the night to shave his neighbor's cat bald, he would find himself unconsciously quickening his pace up the stairs every time he heard the cat's resentful meows.

He was terrified his neighbor would find out.

It wasn't that he was afraid of being held accountable. He was mostly afraid his neighbor would retaliate by shaving his own ‘Dick Cat' bald. If his Second Sister found out about that, she would scold him all night long.

By the same token, Yin Fate Village had to find a Yin Fate Saintess every year but never mentioned a word about where the previous one went.

Wu Wang was sure this was a guilty secret.

The fate of those Saintesses was most likely not a good one.

Yet, none of the families in the village seemed to care, still holding the Yin Fate Grand Ritual as usual. This proved they knew they were profiting from bloodshed, and they feasted with relish.

So, what kind of magic did this Yin Fate Great God possess?

How could it fool an entire village to this extent?

He would start with the village chief.

"Village Chief! Please, think of something! That thing is causing a panic in the village, and people don't even dare to trust their own spouses anymore!"

Uncle Li knelt before the Ancestral Hall, kowtowing and pleading. Behind him stood a dense crowd of villagers, all exchanging glances with a hint of suspicion in their eyes.

After all, what had happened before was too bizarre.

Now, everyone they saw looked like a fake.

Even the village chief's grandson was in the crowd, demanding justice. His face was so bruised and swollen, his head so covered in lumps, it was hard not to laugh.

A moment later, the door to the Ancestral Hall opened.

An old man with white hair and a face full of wrinkles emerged. He was so stooped over he looked a head shorter than a normal person, and he walked out slowly, leaning on a dark-red, snake-headed cane.

Strangely, despite the warm temperature, he was wrapped in a thick, padded cotton jacket, wore a windproof hat, and had on a pair of well-insulated gloves. He was dressed for the dead of winter.

None of the surrounding villagers found this odd in the slightest. They simply looked at him with eyes full of hope.

"Mm... I understand the situation now. So that's what was going on with that worthless grandson of mine earlier."

The Old Village Chief's voice was extremely hoarse, like a broken gong.

"You can all go back to your business. I will ask the Yin Fate Great God to handle this."

With that, he stomped his snake-headed cane on the ground.

Thump, thump, thump...

In the next second, the previously noisy villagers fell silent. They exchanged glances, thanked the Old Village Chief one by one, and then left the Ancestral Hall to get back to their work.

Not a single person raised an objection.

Wu Wang, disguised as a child and hidden in the crowd, was astonished. The villagers' trust in the Old Village Chief had reached the level of blind obedience. Even when faced with something they found terrifying, if the Old Village Chief said he could handle it, he could handle it. No one doubted him.

But it didn't matter.

They weren't his target anyway.

Wu Wang had figured it out from the start.

The villagers come to you when they have problems, but who do you go to when you have a problem? Let me see what this Yin Fate Great God is all about! Wu Wang thought to himself.

His figure gradually broke away from the crowd.

Just as the Ancestral Hall's main door swung shut, Wu Wang's small figure swooped inside in a flash. He saw the Old Village Chief's hunched figure leaning on his cane as he walked deeper inside, and he followed cautiously.

He was still in the form of a child; his body was light, small, and hard to detect.

The Ancestral Hall of Yin Fate Village was very large. Upon entering, he found a structure similar to a traditional courtyard home. In the open space before the main hall stood a gigantic censer, from which large amounts of burning incense sent white smoke curling upwards.

Following the Old Village Chief along the mahogany corridor, Wu Wang saw that the rooms on both sides housed spirit tablets of various sizes. The names of the deceased were engraved upon them.

What was strange was that there were only names, with no other information like birth dates or family relations.

And they were all uniformly surnamed Zhang.

This was something Wu Wang had found out earlier from some naive children while he was sneaking around the village. Yin Fate Village was led by the Zhang clan, which accounted for more than half of the entire village's population.

Arriving outside the door of the innermost main hall, Wu Wang saw what was enshrined within.

Bloody human skins!

They were hung in a position directly facing the entrance. There were about ten of them, all peeled off with extreme perfection, showing no signs of any seams. It was as if the bodies underneath the skins had simply evaporated into thin air.

Their empty eye sockets stared out the door. Though they contained no eyeballs, Wu Wang still felt an inexplicable sense of being watched.

Crack, crack...

Suddenly, a bizarre sound came from within the main hall.

To be precise, it came from the Old Village Chief.

He was kneeling before the group of human skins, twisting and writhing. His hunched back, in particular, was bulging to a ridiculously exaggerated arc, like something was about to hatch and tear through its shell.

The sickening cracking sound of his skeleton distorting made Wu Wang's eyebrows twitch.

Is this a fucking alien giving birth? Wu Wang grumbled internally. Shouldn't it burst out of his stomach? Why is he molting instead?

Rrrrip!

The skin was finally stretched to its limit and tore open.

Then, a horrifying scene unfolded.

A creature as thin as a skeleton crawled out from the Old Village Chief's ruptured body. Although it was humanoid, its skin was stretched so tightly over its bones that it looked devoid of flesh and blood. Wu Wang found it hard to classify it as a living person.

It more closely resembled a skeleton.

Wait a minute...

Wasn't there a side quest to get rid of the ghost in the Ancestral Hall?

Holy crap! The Old Village Chief himself is the ghost!

Wu Wang's heart skipped a beat. If this thing was really a ghost, it was obviously impossible to just jump out and kill it with brute force.

At least, he couldn't do it.

Of all the ghosts he had encountered so far, he couldn't even defeat the tentacled student ghosts in Gao Shan High School head-on, never mind a creature that was likely a boss.

If there really was a player who could kill their way through an instance with brute force, Wu Wang would be willing to call him the Big Muscle Tyrant.

"Jiejiejie… The one in hiding… why don't you come out and meet this old one?"

The skeleton let out a strange, raspy cackle, as if it had a glob of thousand-year-old phlegm stuck in its throat. Its entire head rotated one hundred and eighty degrees to look behind it, towards the area outside the door.

A small figure walked out timidly.

"Grand… Grandpa Village Chief, you scared me…"

Looking at the child's tender face and his aggrieved, frightened expression, with tears welling up in his eyes, the skeleton's voice softened slightly.

"So it's Zhang Mazi's little brat… This is no place for a child. Hurry on home now."

Hearing this, the child turned to leave.

But unexpectedly, the moment his gaze shifted, the skeletal ghost was already right behind him. It extended its long, slender finger bones to poke viciously at the crown of his head.

A greedy look appeared on the skeleton's face.

"Such tender and smooth Blood Food…"

Swoosh!

In that instant, the child ducked and dodged to the side. Using the momentum, he propped himself up with one hand on the ground and swung his legs high, kicking towards a certain vital spot on the skeleton's lower body.

Hit 'em in the balls first, and you'll double your odds of winning!

After kicking, Wu Wang used the force to flip over and land steadily on his feet.

Then he discovered a sad truth.

"Damn it, you don't have any!"

The skeleton's lower body was completely empty. He hadn't felt himself kick anything fragile at all. This bag of bones had no balls.