I fabricated myths to guide the revival of spiritual energy.

Night falls earlier in Huai'an County than in the mountains, and the night is even more desolate.

In the dilapidated courtyard, a dim oil lamp that had just been lit suddenly turned a ghastly green flame without warning, and then abruptly lowered it, as if it had been tightly covered by an unseen hand.

Just then, a very soft, delicate sob came from the room next door that had been empty for three months.

"Waaah...waaah..."

In the empty night, the sound was like a cold steel wire, cutting straight into the bone through the eardrum.

Zhou Aman froze, instinctively turning his head, the words "Aunt Wang" about to escape his throat. But as soon as he opened his mouth, a hand carrying a faint medicinal scent reached out from the darkness and tightly covered his mouth.

Lin Xiaolu's eyes were absolutely clear in the dim light, and she shook her head very lightly at Zhou Aman.

Standing in the corner of the courtyard, Han Zhao immediately made a tactical hand gesture representing "silence".

The array master Lu Yan slid three ordinary copper coins from his sleeve and silently placed them behind the door, on the window frame, and at the bottom of the water vat. This was not a high-level defensive array, but rather a "sound chaos formation" with extremely low spiritual pressure, set up using feng shui techniques. It could not completely isolate outside sounds, but it could weaken the certain rule-based influence within the sounds, preventing any alarm from being alerted.

"The crying wasn't coming from the next room."

Xie Wujiu maintained his disguise as an old servant. With his eyes slightly closed, he used the unique Yin energy perception of his paper doll avatar to whisper to everyone, "That's just a 'shell.' Something is using the echo from that empty room to test us."

As if to confirm Xie Wujiu's judgment, the crying from next door began to change strangely.

The sobbing of the unfamiliar woman gradually distorted and lengthened, eventually turning into the violent and heart-wrenching cough that Zhou's mother had heard during the day!

Then, the coughing changed again, turning into the desperate curses they had heard at the street corner that evening when the drunkard was dragged away by the yamen runners; later, the voice even vaguely imitated the tone of Luo Qi, who was disguised as a waiter, when he casually called Fang Bai "Old Bai" on the street that afternoon.

Everyone felt a chill run down their spines.

This thing is not an omniscient god; it cannot directly see through the team's Earth background, nor can it simulate the voices of their Earth relatives. It can only be like a monster scavenging in the dark, grabbing the "sound traces" left by living people in this city recently, then crushing and piecing them together, trying to induce emotional fluctuations in the people in the house.

"There was ashes from paper money in the water tank."

Lu Yan looked down at the broken water vat in the yard. The once clear well water was now covered with a layer of fine ash that had somehow drifted down from somewhere.

Lin Xiaolu quickly checked the bunches of local herbs drying on the windowsill. The edges of the leaves were visibly turning black and withering. She immediately turned and went back into the inner room, placing her fingers on the wrist of the unconscious Zhou mother, her expression changing slightly.

"Zhou's mother's life is slipping away." Lin Xiaolu quickly gestured to Han Zhao, "The crying outside is drawing life out of the sick and weak."

Just as Lin Xiaolu was about to use acupuncture to seal her meridians...

"Tap, tap, tap."

Suddenly, three knocks sounded at the gate.

The sound was extremely clear, as if a hand was pressed against their thin wooden door, the knuckles rhythmically tapping the wooden planks.

Immediately afterwards, a woman's extremely soft and mournful voice came from outside the door:

"Open the door... I'm looking for Zhou's Ah Man."

The room was deathly silent, with only Zhou Aman's heavy, trembling breathing.

Seeing no response, the voice outside paused for a moment, then changed its tone, taking on a cold tinge:

"Open the door... I'm looking for a doctor from out of town."

It captured their daytime disguises!

Han Zhao's eyes were like a frozen lake, without a ripple. He tapped the wall lightly with his knuckles: ignore it, everyone on high alert.

However, something strange happened.

Zhou's mother, who had been lying unconscious on the hospital bed, still had her eyes closed, but her right hand seemed to be raised stiffly as if out of control, pointing towards the courtyard gate, and she straightened up to open the door!

With lightning speed, Lin Xiaolu pierced Zhou's mother's neck with a silver needle imbued with a trace of Yi Wood spiritual energy, striking her with pinpoint accuracy. Zhou's mother's body went limp, and she collapsed back onto the kang (heated brick bed).

But the next second, an even more terrifying scene appeared before everyone's eyes.

The courtyard gate was clearly closed, and the monster outside hadn't broken in. However, on the dry blue brick floor of the inner room, a wet, bare footprint suddenly appeared!

The footprints didn't come from outside the door, but started from the edge of Zhou's mother's bed, step by step, carrying a nauseatingly foul-smelling water stain, slowly extending towards the courtyard gate.

It's inside!

Or rather, some kind of sinister rule has bypassed physical defenses and directly materialized within the house.

"Mother Zhou has long been corrupted by the Yin energy of this place, and its scent has long been present in her lungs." Xie Wujiu stared at the trail of wet footprints leading outwards, his voice hoarse. "She has become half a marker of the rules of this night's weeping. This thing wants to use her to 'open' the door from inside the house."

If this mark isn't removed, Zhou's mother will surely die tonight, and this courtyard will become a new hunting ground for the Night Crying Case.

"Suppress it." Han Zhao did not let Xu Chenzhou draw his sword. Physical attacks were meaningless at this stage against this kind of rule-based evil spirit.

Lin Xiaolu immediately grabbed a handful of local, potent mugwort, mixed in a trace amount of Yi wood spiritual energy, and lit it. She used the yang wood energy to scorch Zhou's mother's mouth, nose, and heart, forcibly protecting her last bit of life force and severing her resonance with the yin energy outside.

At the same time, Xie Wujiu glided to the front of the main room like a ghost.

He pulled an inconspicuous underworld seal from his sleeve. It was the most basic soul-binding seal that came with his paper doll.

Just as the wet footprints were about to cross the threshold, Xie Wujiu grasped the small seal and pressed it precisely onto the last half of the footprint.

"laugh--"

A plume of thick, piercing smoke rose. The two fingers of Xie Wujiu's paper avatar were instantly corroded and charred by the yin water from the footprint. But he withstood the backlash, firmly pinning the rule node that was attempting to extend outwards within the threshold.

Fu Xiufangbai immediately stepped forward, mixed a common folk house-protecting talisman with a little cinnabar, and stuck it on the door latch with a snap, completely sealing off the energy flow between the inside and outside of the courtyard.

The number of footprints stopped increasing.

Lu Yan held a compass-like magical artifact, squatted beside the set of footprints, and meticulously calculated the residual energy of the yin water.

A moment later, he looked up at Han Zhao: "Captain, these footprints seem to lead towards the courtyard gate, but the direction of the yin energy flowing beneath them does not point to the mortuary in the south of the city, but rather... the west of the city. The Demon Suppression Office that we passed by today."

This is an extremely crucial clue. The case of the night crying in Huai'an County was not just an ordinary case of a corpse being unearthed from a mass grave; its origin lies within the yamen (government office) that represents the official suppressive power.

"Luo Qi, take samples," Han Zhao ordered. "No one is allowed to go out tonight to track them down."

Luo Qi quickly took out a specially made small porcelain bottle, scraped off a little bit of green brick powder containing dampness with a silver knife, and sealed it tightly.

Seeing that the gate to the courtyard remained closed and the internal connections were severed, the eerie presence outside seemed to have lost patience.

"Waaah..."

The crying gradually drifted away from their courtyard gate and returned to the empty house next door.

Soon, in the quiet night, the sound of the wooden door of the empty house next door being pushed open with a "creak" could be heard.

With their extremely keen hearing, the team members clearly heard a heavy, dragging sound coming from the supposedly empty room, as if some wet object was being pulled.

"Aunt Wang... Widow Wang was the first person to say she heard her deceased husband knocking on the door before she died." Zhou Aman huddled in the corner, trembling like a leaf. "That room has been empty for a long time."

"It doesn't need living people." Lin Xiaolu wiped the cold sweat from her forehead, a flash of understanding in her eyes. "The rules of the Night Cry Case not only mark the living people corrupted by Yin energy, but also constantly reuse the residences of the dead. It turns these empty houses into its 'shell' for wandering around the city."

"A sinister network that is constantly spreading outwards through the dead and empty houses." Xie Wujiu looked at his charred paper doll fingers and gave his final assessment based on the soul aspect.

……

At this moment, Huai'an County was already shrouded in an invisible shadow of terror.

In a house in the east of the city, a four- or five-year-old child woke up groggily in the middle of the night and heard his father returning home from outside the courtyard. He was about to get out of bed to unlatch the door latch when his mother grabbed him from behind and covered his mouth tightly. The mother's eyes were filled with terrified tears, and outside the thin wooden door, came a series of wet footsteps.

At a street corner in the city, a yamen runner, wrapped tightly in a tattered cotton-padded coat, was hiding in a dilapidated temple on night watch. When he heard someone outside calling his name in the voice of the county magistrate, he was so frightened that he couldn't even draw his sword. He could only bite his tongue tightly until he tasted blood, but he dared not make a sound.

Meanwhile, in the mortuary in the south of the city, filled with unidentified corpses...

Beside a worn-out, thin-skinned coffin, a corner of the straw mat covering the corpse had slipped slightly. A hand, pale and wet from being soaked in water, silently drooped down, its fingertips dripping foul-smelling black water.

The entire county trembled under these suffocating rules.

……

The long night finally came to an end after endless torment.

When the faint sound of the clapper at midnight came from the direction of the county government office, the crying that had been lingering in the empty house next door and outside the courtyard gate gradually disappeared like the receding tide.

As the first rays of dawn shone into the courtyard, Xu Chenzhou pushed open the door a crack.

There were no water stains on the bluestone slabs outside the courtyard gate, only a thick layer of ash, as if left after countless paper money had been burned.

Inside the room, Lin Xiaolu was using a mixture of mugwort ash and powder scraped from a locust tree to temporarily repair the two damaged paper doll fingers of Xie Wujiu.

"Cough...cough cough..."

Zhou's mother, who had been in a coma, briefly regained consciousness just before dawn.

Her cloudy eyes stared unfocused at the ceiling, and her throat emitted a wheezing sound like a broken bellows. Lin Xiaolu was about to step forward to comfort her when Zhou's mother suddenly grabbed Lin Xiaolu's sleeve, unconsciously uttering a chilling sentence:

"Three years ago... what the Demon Suppression Division sealed off... wasn't a door... but a name..."

After saying this, Zhou's mother rolled her eyes and fell into a deep coma again.

The air in the room seemed to drop to freezing point in an instant.

Before dawn, Han Zhao gathered everyone in the main hall for a very brief tactical meeting.

"Last night's probe yielded three key clues."

Han Zhao's voice was low and rapid. "First, the Night Crying Rule uses sound imitation and knocking to induce a response from the living, thus locking onto its target. Second, people long affected by Yin Sha and empty houses where murders have occurred become nodes for its movement within the city. Third, and most importantly..."

Han Zhao glanced at Lu Yan and Lin Xiaolu.

"The wet footprints pointed to the west of the city, and Zhou's mother mentioned that the Demon Suppression Division sealed not the door, but the name," Lu Yan interjected. "This means that behind the Night Cry case, there is very likely a terrifying existence that even the Demon Suppression Division of the Great Yu Dynasty dares not call out by name and can only forcibly seal it in the yamen."

"During the day, when the yang energy is strongest, its rules are weakest." Han Zhao assigned today's task, "Today, we're going to explore the Demon-Suppressing Office in the west of the city."

Lin Xiaolu slung her medicine box over her shoulder and turned to look in the direction of the west of the city.

The morning fog there was thicker than anywhere else in the county, as if even sunlight couldn't penetrate it.

As dawn broke, the sound of the night watchman's gong gradually filled the streets, followed by the sporadic sounds of doors opening and the suppressed cries of vendors. Huai'an County was alive again, as if nothing had happened the night before.