Chapter 98: A Terrifying Night in the Northeast

Yan Bo got out of the vehicle by himself, leaving Hao Dalong alone inside, utterly bewildered.

The scene had become oppressively bleak. Around them, only the patch of ground occupied by the truck still held any light, as though they were trapped in a deserted forbidden place where no living soul ever set foot.

Hao Dalong truly did not dare get out. After all, this was the first time he had ever been through anything like this. The fact that he had not already been screaming his head off was impressive enough.

Uncanny sounds were rising all around the body of the truck, a low, hard-to-identify droning, soft and high at times, then lower again, gradually growing chaotic.

He could still vaguely hear Yan Bo speaking with someone, but the words were impossible to make out.

Then, somehow, the tone of the exchange seemed to turn wrong. Hao Dalong was just about to crack the side window open and stick his head out to see what was happening behind him when the glass slid up...

And a bone-piercing, far colder wind than before slammed straight into his face. Merely feeling that drop in temperature was enough to fill him with dread.

At that moment, a pair of figures, one in red and one in white, came almost skipping toward the vehicle from its left and right sides. Just as before, one wore a red-trimmed long gown, the other had a white cloth wrapped around its head. Their steps were light and wavering, drifting along at a maddeningly slow pace, yet in the blink of an eye they were already ahead of the truck.

"Woo woo..." "Woo woo woo..."

Their thin, eerie cries grew clearer and sharper. Hao Dalong hurriedly shut the window tight, then turned the ignition again, ready to flee at any moment.

On the windshield before him, several round paper coins drifted down. The two figures moved as though dancing, their loose garments swaying in the wind, their gestures broad and sweeping, yet strangely drawn out as if in slow motion.

Another wave of paper money rained down from above, and this time there were far more of them, fluttering like great flurries of snow, nearly covering the entire windshield...

Hao Dalong switched on the wipers, trying to clear away the inauspicious yellow sheets.

Soon the wipers began shuddering back and forth, pushing the paper aside little by little. Then the figure in red had somehow already pressed itself against the glass.

A half-fox mask covered the upper part of its face. The lower jaw left visible beneath it looked like the face of a gaunt young woman. It clung there, staring at Hao Dalong through the windshield, and in the dark eye-holes of that mask, faint green light seemed to flicker...

Hao Dalong was so frightened that he lurched hard backward. Then, through the rearview mirror, he saw it: the white-clad, mourning-dressed fox-masked figure had seated itself neatly in the back. The little truck had not even had a rear seat to begin with, so where exactly it was sitting was impossible to tell; in any case, its outline remained blurred and indistinct.

"Woooooo!"

The one plastered to the windshield suddenly let out a long, shrill howl. At such close range it was even more piercing. The lower half of the face not hidden by the mask had actually looked rather delicate at first, a small cherry mouth, but now it opened wide. Not into a gaping maw, not broad, but long... terribly long. The upper and lower jaws stretched apart in a grotesquely unbalanced way, revealing a gap nearly a foot in length.

The wailing grew sharper and sharper. Hao Dalong’s whole body jolted as though electrified. His neck stiffened and jerked upward; his eyes could no longer focus on anything; his mouth hung open as well; his arms were locked straight. Aside from the involuntary trembling of his body, he could no longer fight back at all.

From behind him, the other one... reached out with two pale, slender, jade-like hands, white almost to match the mourning garments, but with fingernails nearly an inch long, black as ink and gleaming coldly...

Slowly... they extended from behind him, inch by inch, until they converged toward his head, as though they meant to cover his eyes. One finger after another began to bend. The sharp, pitch-black nails pointed straight at his eyeballs.

"Woo woo woo woo... woo woo woo..."

The distant, ghostly crying at his ear, the rank musky stench drawn into his nose, the red-robed monster on the windshield, the pale claws reaching from behind and hovering before his face...

For Hao Dalong, all of it was right there, so close he could almost touch it, yet there was nowhere to hide, because his body no longer belonged to him.

But just as his eyes were only a few millimeters from those glinting black nails, the wailing suddenly turned even more shrill. The thing on the windshield was yanked downward as though something had seized its legs. Its claws could not grip the smooth glass and only left a few faint scratch marks behind.

At the same time, the masked figure in mourning clothes on the back seat seemed frozen in ice. Its hands snapped back from in front of Hao Dalong’s face like lightning.

The truck shuddered faintly, and they could still hear some kind of animal screaming after being attacked...

When Hao Dalong finally managed to force open his heavy eyelids, he saw Yan Bo pinching a blackened lump between his fingers, lighting it, and holding the smoking thing beneath his nose so the foul, acrid smoke could sear into him.

The smell was even more choking than chili peppers. Hao Dalong’s eyes were driven to tears by it. After sitting up, he bent over the steering wheel and retched for a long while before he could catch his breath.

When he finally felt a little better and turned to look at Yan Bo... he froze again.

Before getting out, Yan Bo had been perfectly fine. Why did he come back looking beaten to hell?

The skin on his forehead seemed to have been split open by something, leaving a little blood that had already coagulated.

One lens of his glasses had been shattered, and his down jacket was in tatters in several places, full of claw marks...

There were bloodstains on his knitted scarf and on his cuffs, some red, some black...

Seeing that Hao Dalong was all right, and that he himself had not actually been hurt too badly, Yan Bo still looked rather miserable. Though they were only surface wounds, he was indeed in a sorry state.

He lit a cigarette, but after only one drag he broke into a violent coughing fit. Hao Dalong did not know what had happened in that brief stretch of time, nor what had come after, but the world outside the truck had already returned to normal. They were back on the county road, though the vehicle had been shifted a long way off course and now sat at a slight angle.

Hao Dalong quickly groped around beside him, found a can of energy drink, popped it open, and handed it to the unsteady Yan Bo. Yan Bo took it, drained nearly half the can in one go, and only then seemed a little better.

"Ah... damn... ah..." After sighing several times in a row, Yan Bo gave a bitter smile and said, "Good grief, those things in the northeast are just too fierce. They’re on a completely different level from ordinary wandering spirits and evil hauntings. I nearly lost my life there..." After swallowing a few more mouthfuls of the drink, he looked at the stunned Hao Dalong. "Heh, you fool... should I say you’re lucky, or unlucky?"

"If you say you’re lucky, then you managed to blunder right into one of those rare and festive spirit weddings... and of all times, you had to crash the celebration."

"But if you say you’re unlucky, then I was the one who got swept up by your ride along the way... heh, tell me, isn’t that hilarious? Heh heh heh... ugh, cough cough cough..."

That was how Hao Dalong and Yan Bo first met. As for why they later ended up traveling together, it was because Yan Bo felt there was a bond of fate between them. After that incident, the two became acquainted.

At the time, Yan Bo had long been roaming from south to north, doing business in the mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, while Hao Dalong was in the uncertain years of his youth. So he decided to follow Yan Bo and go wherever he went.

For several years, he was like Yan Bo’s shadow, following him from place to place, helping him run his affairs and handling whatever tasks were needed.

And because Yan Bo had once saved his life, Hao Dalong, though he often joked around with him in private, still regarded him as something between a teacher, a father, and a benefactor...

Not to mention that later he met Yan Bo’s apprentice in cursecraft, Xuanxuan. The two of them even dated for a time, though they have since broken up... By now, everyone had long since been living together like one family.

With a relationship like that, it was only natural that Hao Dalong would work so willingly by Yan Bo’s side. By now, he was no longer the reckless young discharged soldier he had once been. He had seen more strange and sinister things than he ever would have imagined, and could be counted as half an expert.

He even told Qi Yan that he had once gone head-to-head with that very group in a bloody fight.

Hao Dalong lifted his shirt and exposed his back. Across his broad spine, from the nape of his neck down to his waist, there was a long scar... Though it had healed long ago, Qi Yan still could not help clicking his tongue repeatedly at the sight of it. Such a long scar... what kind of pain must it have come from? Had someone slashed him with a blade?

Hao Dalong stubbed out the ninth cigarette he had smoked while telling the story, then pointed backward at the scar with two fingers and said with a grin that was all skin and no warmth, "See this scar? Courtesy of that little bastard Watanabe! He was only in his teens back then... I never in my wildest dreams thought things would turn out this way. I was fine and steady while I was still in the army, but after I got out, I ended up living a life where death was always one step away."