Yin Shou Shu

Chapter 409 Paper Cutting Becomes Ghosts
The old, worn-out paper book feels rough and stiff to the touch, more like the skin of a patient covered in acne, scabs, and scars than a book.

Ran Qing stared at the vivid, writhing ghost characters in the book, her brows furrowed and her gaze gloomy.

A sinister light seemed to flicker in that gloomy, single eye.

The first page of the ghost story, told in Ran Qing's own voice, coldly recounts his death.

Ran Qing in the Yin Shou Shu is already dead.

He died beside the coffin of the Ghost King.

"...I shouldn't have gone to find Li Hongye. Perhaps the Corpse-Driving Taoist was right. I should have fled Moonlit City."

If I can escape Moonlit City, at least a few fewer people will die.

Now I die beside the Ghost King's coffin, having failed to stop Li Hongye, and I myself am dead, my death utterly meaningless.

……

"..." Looking at the self-pitying, gloomy, and resentful words in the Book of Longevity, Ran Qing remained expressionless, but inwardly she sneered.

This book of Yin Shou is indeed the work of evil spirits.

This self-pity and resentment, like that of a wronged woman, is completely unlike Ran Qing's temperament and personality.

He never acts impulsively, and he never regrets his actions.

Going to find Li Hongye was a well-considered choice. Even if he were to die tragically beside the Ghost King's coffin, Ran Qing would not complain about fate.

The first page of the Yin Shou Book, with its densely packed, writhing ghostly script, is filled with the resentment and regret of a woman confined to her boudoir.

Although it also mentions how Ran Qing died next to the Ghost King's coffin, and how Li Hongye instructed the evil spirits to cruelly kill him.

But Ran Qing completely distrusted the "prophecies" mentioned in the book.

After reading the first page, he took a deep breath, paused for a moment, and rubbed his throbbing temples with his fingers.

Even with the blessing of the evil lord of the underworld, reading the ghostly text in the Book of Longevity still left Ran Qing exhausted.

After reading just the first page, Ran Qing felt as if she had stayed up all night studying, her head was throbbing.

After taking a deep breath, he closed the Book of Yin and Yang and carefully put it back into his canvas bag.

Then he took out incense sticks and candles, and used red cinnabar to draw the same strange character on the palms of his hands, between his eyebrows, and on the soles of his feet.

Then, he took out scissors and paper from his canvas bag and simply cut out four pale, thin paper figures.

These four paper figures only have the basic outline of human limbs and torsos, without facial features or eyes drawn on them.

Ran Qing carefully placed the four paper cutouts in the four corners around her and slowly shook the bell.

Jingle bell—jingle bell—

The crisp sound of bells echoed in the main room. A dark wind swept through the yin altar, and strange faces vaguely appeared among the densely packed candles burning inside.

The evil lords whispered and chuckled strangely.

Ran Qing remained unmoved by the unusual movements around her, continuing to slowly shake the bell while her lips moved, slowly uttering incantations.

"...Debts from the past life should be repaid in the past life, and grudges in this life should be settled in this life."

"The bell rings, sealing the soul away; the paper figure drinks blood and hangs from the roof beam!"

Jingle bell—jingle bell—

The crisp ringing gradually became more urgent, and amidst Ran Qing's muttered eerie incantations, the four thin paper cutouts placed close to the ground slowly stood up in the gloomy, cold wind.

They spread their arms and danced around Ran Qing.

The voices of the evil lords faded into the air.

Instead, there was an unsettling, sinister, and eerie laugh.

Those four thin, short paper figures were clearly only the size of a palm.

But as they danced around Ran Qing, in the dim, flickering candlelight inside the room, the four paper-cut shadows behind her gradually grew taller and larger.

They danced and floated around Ran Qing, their sinister and eerie laughter revealing undisguised greed and malice.

—A secret technique of the Yin-Yang lineage: paper cutting to create ghosts.

Using simple paper cutting as a medium to summon unknown evil spirits.

Although it was Ran Qing who performed the ritual, even he didn't know what kind of evil spirits had been summoned.

He could only hear those eerie and sinister laughs in his ears and sense the other party's ill intentions.

Ran Qing gave a cold snort.

He suddenly turned the bell in his hand upside down and slammed it heavily onto the ground.

hum!
The bell, which slammed upside down on the ground, emitted a strange, dull, and piercing sound.

Upon hearing this sound, the four eerie black figures connected by paper figures all clutched their heads in pain, as if screaming in agony.

Ran Qing could not hear their screams.

A few seconds later, when Ran Qing picked up the bell again and slowly shook it, the four dark figures that had been jumping around him became visibly much more obedient.

Although the gazes they sensed were still venomous and greedy, they obediently followed the rhythm of the bells and swayed with them.

Ran Qing shook the bell expressionlessly, her arm trembling faster and faster, and the bell in her hand rattled more and more rapidly.

Finally, the bell detached from his hand and floated in the darkness before him, trembling eerily in the air.

The four dark figures moved faster and faster in sync with the bell's pulsation.

In a daze, Ran Qing felt as if she were surrounded by a multitude of ghostly figures.

The rapidly spinning ghostly figures danced around Ran Qing, like shamans dancing around torches to pray for blessings during the Torch Festival.

Ran Qing released the bell and lay down directly.

The four ghostly figures moved rapidly, and wisps of black energy kept oozing from Ran Qing's brow, palms, and soles, being greedily sucked away by these writhing, sinister figures.

In a daze, Ran Qing closed her eyes and fell asleep.

He slept very soundly.

The death energy entering his body caused him far more damage than he had imagined.

Now that the death energy has been extracted, Ran Qing's energy seems to have been drained as well, and she needs a long sleep to recover.

In her hazy sleep, Ran Qing seemed to return to the classroom, where she saw her familiar classmates and heard the teacher lecturing on the podium.

Sunlight seemed to stream in through the window, bathing the classroom in warm, comforting light.

Ran Qing was stunned as she felt the familiar and safe environment. The classroom, filled with the sound of turning pages and drifting dust, was so familiar, yet it seemed incredibly distant.

It's only been a month since I left, but it feels like a century has passed.

If I manage to survive this time, I should be able to go back to the way things were, continue my studies, and prepare for the college entrance exam, right?
Compared to those sinister and terrifying evil spirits, the topics in books are much more appealing.

Ran Qing even began to miss the feeling of doing practice exams and solving math problems...

Ran Qing slept for two hours.

Two hours later, Ran Qing woke up from her sleep and saw a cold wind blowing through the stuffy, hot main room.

The four simply cut paper figures had silently collapsed to the ground, no longer moving.

The dim candlelight shone on the paper figures, which were visibly torn to shreds, only to be forcibly pieced back together, making them nothing more than a pile of scraps of paper.

Ran Qing's eyes turned slightly cold upon seeing this scene.

"...Have you eaten?"

He scanned his surroundings with hostility and uttered a cold question.

The séance is over, and the four mediums who were summoned should have left safely.

However, the paper figures that carried them were torn to pieces, which shows the fate of the mediums.

This is the ancestral altar of spirit mediums, where evil spirits cannot approach. Only... can tear apart these mediums.

"Hehehe..." "Delicious!"

"You have to eat! You have to eat!"

In the darkness, a shameless and brutal laugh could be faintly heard.

Those evil lords seemed to enjoy the pleasure of provoking Ran Qing.

Generally speaking, the evil spirits who walk the path of the dead are terrifying beings who are high above, mysterious, and sinister.

For example, Aunt Liu's Ghost Eye Goat God only appears when needed. Most of the time, when Aunt Liu borrows the power of the Ghost Eye Goat God, the Goat God doesn't even need to show itself.

The relationship between the spirit medium and the evil master can be considered a kind of harmonious contractual partnership.

But behind Ran Qing's Nuo opera mask, the evil lords are violent, vicious, chaotic, and disorderly, seemingly wanting to take away Ran Qing's physical body at any moment.

Moreover, they made no attempt to conceal their malice towards Ran Qing.

The saying goes, "Even when beating a dog, you have to consider its owner."

Ran Qing didn't care about the four spirit mediums, but the spirit mediums he had invited had helped him absorb some of the death energy in his body. As a result, without Ran Qing's permission, these evil lords took it upon themselves to eat the spirit mediums.

Hearing the provocative and ear-piercing sounds from the evil lords, Ran Qing snorted coldly, but did not fly into a rage.

He simply glanced around coldly and said, "...Fine, keep being arrogant. You'll get what's coming to you in a couple of days."

After saying that, he ignored the group of crazy and manic evil lords.

Ran Qing took out the Book of Longevity, took a deep breath, opened the book again, and began reading the second page.

The death energy within him has not been completely eliminated. At this rate, it will probably take two more times to completely remove the death energy.

Each time the death energy is removed, an interval of more than six hours is required.

Ran Qing naturally wouldn't waste this rest time.

He silently opened the book of divination and continued reading.

On the old paper book, wriggling ghostly script, like centipedes, crawled toward Ran Qing's brow.

Reading the second page brought an even stronger sense of pain.

But compared to the pain of reading, the content of this second page, just the first line, already made Ran Qing's pupils shrink.

My mom told me to get close to Ran Qing, who is Ran Jianfei's son.

I don't really want to go.

That boy, whose always sunny and cheerful smile concealed a heartbreaking sadness.

His mother died early, his biological father abandoned him, and only his elderly grandmother remained at home.

But his grandmother is in poor health and may not live for many more years.

This innocent boy has nothing to do with the feud between our two families, and he knows nothing about what happened ten years ago.

He's already suffered enough; I don't want to get close to him, I don't want to hurt him.

At this moment, I feel a little regretful.

If I had known, I wouldn't have told my mom about him.

Mom won't let him get away with this...

……

The amount of information conveyed by the yellowed, ghostly script crawling on the old parchment book made Ran Qing's pupils contract.

The previous page's Yin Shou Shu was clearly a death diary written from his first-person perspective.

But on this second page, the person writing the account has changed to Li Hongye?
Why Li Hongye?

This is his own deathbed memorial book! Not Li Hongye's!

Why is Li Hongye's death diary included in his book of posthumous birthdays?

He stared intently at the old parchment book in his hands, flipping through the second page over and over.

After confirming that this was indeed Li Hongye's death diary, Ran Qing abruptly closed the Yin Shou Book in her hand and took a deep breath.

"...What exactly is going on?"

Ran Qing muttered to herself in the dimly lit main room.

The Book of Longevity in the Underworld is too secretive and mysterious, and people who practice the art of exorcism throughout history have kept it a closely guarded secret.

Even if each generation of spirit mediums could understand the ghostly script in the Book of Life and Death before they died, they would never tell the contents of their Book of Life and Death to others.

Even the closest disciples and relatives.

Each generation of people who walk the path of the dead tacitly takes the contents of the ghostly text in the Book of Death as a secret into their coffins.

As a result, Ran Qing lacked understanding of the ghostly texts in the Yin Shou Books written by Yin Shiren throughout history.

They were even more unsure whether the contents of the Yin Life Book and Ghost Script in their hands were problematic.

He lacked a point of reference.

But now, staring at the Yin Shou Book in his hand, he saw a diary written entirely in Li Hongye's voice, a ghostly text.

Ran Qing's face was gloomy as he muttered, "What exactly is real?"

If the death diary in this book of death is real, then what was Li Hongye really thinking at the time?
But when she thought of the first page, with its completely fabricated content that seemed so contrary to Ran Qing's personality, Ran Qing quickly calmed down.

Perhaps the second page is also just a bunch of nonsense made up by evil spirits.

"...It seems I'm still not calm enough."

Ran Qing pounded her head hard, reflecting on her actions.

Upon suddenly seeing the death diary written in Li Hongye's voice, his emotions suddenly spiraled out of control, clearly affecting his rational judgment.

Now that Ran Qing has regained her composure and rationality, she keenly sensed the suspicious points involved.

Since the first page of the death diary is fabricated, the authenticity of the second page of the death diary is obviously not high either.

With this in mind, Ran Qing calmed down, opened the Book of Death and continued reading the third page.

The eerie, centipede-like characters kept crawling towards Ran Qing's brow.

Ran Qing felt a stinging pain in her head.

The third page of the Yin Shou Book once again presents a narrative narrated in the first person by Ran Qing.

"...I know a way to escape Moonlit City."

If I had listened to the corpse-driving Taoist priest and fled far away while I was alive, and hadn't bothered with Li Hongye's affairs, everything would have been different.

I will not die, Mo Li will not die, Zong Shu will not die, and Xiao Mianhua will not die.

We all have a chance to survive, escape Zangke, and start a new life.

I should have thought more about them back then...

It was my stubbornness that killed them; I killed my own friends.

……

The ghostly handwriting on the Yin Shou Book coldly recounted Ran Qing's self-reflection.

But Ran Qing, upon seeing this self-narration, sneered.

"...Are you starting to use moral blackmail and emotional appeals?"

The self-narration in this book of longevity actually began to use Mo Lizongshu and others to persuade him.

It seems the evil spirit behind the Yin Shou Shu doesn't want Ran Qing to go to Li Hongye?
why?
Will Ran Qing's death affect the evil spirits behind the Yin Shou Shu?

Or is it trying to trick Ran Qing into listening to it and using its so-called "method" to escape from Yue Zhao?

Before her death, it seems that Aunt Liu listened to the ghost stories in the Book of Longevity and killed her closest relatives to turn herself into a ghost in order to prolong her life...

(End of this chapter)