Chapter 7

Parsed with an automated reader. The content accuracy is not guranteed.

Original Title: 挖坟挖出鬼

Genres: Drama, Horror, Mystery, Supernatural, Yaoi

This translation is based on multiple MTLs and my own limited knowledge of Chinese characters. If I have made any egregious mistakes, please let me know.

Chapter Index

Chapter 7 - Police Station

His early morning class was basically just background noise. After trying to listen to the professor, all the sentences blurred together until there was only a buzzing sound.

Lin Yan propped himself up with his elbow on the table, his head nodding off again and again.

“These Ming Dynasty shirts were made of jade-coloured cloth and silk. They had wide-sleeves and circular collars, with black ribbons and seams hanging down.

Even prisoners wore this style of clothing.”

The city was immersed in sleep at midnight, and there was no activity insight. Lin Yan drove his car from the residential area to the main road, and the night breeze came in, blowing the hair on his forehead.

A person appeared silently in the middle of the road.

Lin Yan gasped. Too close to swerve out of the way, he subconsciously slammed on the brakes, “Squeak--”

The huge inertia made him rush forward. He prayed that he didn’t get into an accident. When he looked up again, he saw the front of the car stopped less than two metres away from the person, but the person stood perfectly still as though he hadn’t seen the car. There is no intention of moving out of the way at all. Did this guy want to die? Lin Yan’s hand grabbed his chest. He flashed the car lights twice to signal to the person to move aside. After seeing the person clearly, Lin Yan’s mind turned to static.

The man’s feet were reversed, with heels facing forward and toes facing backward.

He slowly raised his head towards Lin Yan. His head was a skull covered with chunks of flesh with bone peeking through. His lips were more than half-rotten, two rows of slanted white teeth exposed. There was a stiff, crooked grin that pulled at the corners of his mouth, and dark laughter sounded in Lin Yan’s ears…

Lin Yan’s body trembled and he was thrown back awake.

“Skirts were slightly lighter in colour in the early Ming Dynasty; white skirts were promoted during the Chongzhen period. There were one or two inches of embroidery around the hem of the skirts…

"At the end of the Ming Dynasty, it developed into eight or ten inches. Pleated skirts were very popular, with fine and large folds…”

It was the middle of the day, these were human voices.

… Was that a nightmare?

Lin Yan recovered from his mini heart attack and tried to slow his breathing, but his heart couldn’t stop beating.

Hesitantly, a cold hand touched his hair lightly. It stopped on the back of his neck as if it were soothing, but it disappeared in an instant. Lin Yan froze. The anger and constant anxiety of being violated at any time would make anyone paranoid. His anger came to a breaking point; ghost encounters at night, dreaming of ghosts during the day, would it ever stop? With a wave of his hand, he threw the textbook to the side, slapped the table, stood up, and shouted, “Fucking try it again! Come at me, I’m not afraid!”

The book fluttered across the table and chairs in the front row, and the papers in the book scattered like snow. Lin Yan stood in a daze, and it took a moment for him to snap out of it. Looking around, his confusion melted into overwhelming embarrassment. He saw the hundreds of students in the classroom turned back and stared at him. The teacher that taught his Ming Dynasty costume research class stood on the podium at the front of the room and looked at Lin Yan with disgust.

“Sit down. If you have any questions, you can talk to me after class. This teacher is old and can’t keep up with your young people’s games.”

The rustling whisper in the class turned into a roar of laughter. Lin Yan blushed and shuffled all the way to the front to retrieve the textbook. He bowed to his teacher and returned back to his seat.

He was terrified that the ghost would try something else for most of the night. It had gotten harder to keep his eyes open just as dawn broke. It was hard staying awake during his morning class but he didn’t expect his half-asleep daze to cause him this kind of embarrassment.

His face was still burning.

Just as he was thinking about it, his phone screen suddenly turned on, and a text message popped up. Yin Zhou sent: “Was everything alright last night?”

Lin Yan settled down and quickly sent a reply: “I’m still alive. I should be fine before July 15th.” Fingers snapped and moved across the keyboard: “I found something new on a supernatural forum. Meet me at the entrance of the cafeteria at noon so we can talk.”

On the first day of the month of Wushen, the fifteenth day of the seventh month, was the day of the Ghost Festival, and the gate of ghosts is wide open.

Lin Yan shrugged his shoulders and lay on the table, scribbling on the notebook while thinking. Unconsciously, he had covered a whole piece of paper with the rebirth curse. He hadn’t done anything, so why is this ghost doing all of this? Lin Yan poked the paper bitterly with his pen, making small holes.

At the end of his two classes, when it was time for lunch, Lin Yan rushed to the cafeteria after packing up his things haphazardly. He went out and, when he turned to the left, he roughly bumped into another person. His nose slammed into their forehead and he almost cried out loud.

He should have checked his horoscope before going outside today.

Lin Yan held his nose and hissed and sucked in cold air. The other man stood silently. When Lin Yan opened his eyes and looked at the person he hit, he was surprised to see that he had run into a Daoist priest.

He was short and thin, his skin pale and he appeared weak. He was wearing some weird Tibetan blue homemade clothes. His shoulders were hunched under the weight of his backpack. This person seemed so dull that people couldn’t help but yawn just glancing at him.

“Sorry, I was rushing to the cafeteria and didn’t see you,” Lin Yan apologized embarrassedly. The man didn’t seem to be listening to him at all. His gaze was focused on something over Lin Yan’s shoulder. He stared at it and suddenly grinned.

“Such powerful Yin energy. You need to be careful.”

After speaking, he let out a soft “ah” as if he had just woken up from sleepwalking, and lightly floated past Lin Yan.

“Is that guy rambling delusions again?” The boy following Lin Yan poked his arm and said in disbelief.

Lin Yan shook his head and rushed down the stairs with his bag.

It was raining lightly, and the whole campus was wet. The students who were going to eat held umbrellas over their heads, looking like large colourful mushrooms from a distance. Lin Yan stepped onto a small paved road to avoid stepping in a puddle. Looking around, he saw Yin Zhou, who was looking around like a stupid bird at the entrance of the cafeteria. He looked terrible. He was holding a large red umbrella, four characters seemingly hanging on his forehead that was advertising his current mood: Stay away from me.

People who passed by couldn’t help but glance over at him.

Lin Yan strode over the accumulating water under the steps in two quick strides, and patted Yin Zhou on the shoulder: “Why do you look as bad as I do?”

Yin Zhou was a little out of it, and took a long time to look at Lin Yan: “Second Immortal Gu is dead.”

“My mother just called and asked us to the police station.”

Lin Yan’s face dropped.

When the police offer on duty led Lin Yan and Yin Zhou into the morgue and removed the white cloth that covered Second Immortal Gu’s face, Lin Yan took two steps backwards in shock. Yin Zhou couldn’t stop gagging. The face was extremely distorted. Her eyes were cracked open, the eyeballs almost bursting out of the eye sockets. Her mouth was wide open like a black hole, and her face looked like it was covered with nail scratches. It seemed that she had witnessed something extremely terrifying before she died. The most disgusting thing was that the skin all the way from her face to her neck was covered with deep holes. She had been eaten at by insects and ants. It is only by the contours of her face that they could barely recognize her as the grandmother who pretended to be a ghost in front of them yesterday.

Lin Yan covered his mouth and tried his best to suppress the urge to vomit. He waved his hand vigorously to let the police know to put down the white sheet.

“This is the person?”

Lin Yan nodded and took a few steps back unconsciously.

“She died last night. The bug bites are still under investigation.” The policeman said casually, and glanced at Lin Yan’s expressions disdainfully: “Are you two okay? We are all used to seeing dead people. It’s better to think about where they’re going.”

Lin Yan and Yin Zhou, as the last two customers of Second Immortal Gu, were asked to stay at the police station to assist in the investigation. The interrogators took them to record their statements and fill out some forms. The police officer shuttled back and forth between the two interrogation rooms with the folders. As he walked, he muttered: “College students still believe this. I’ve heard so many crazy things over the years.”

At 3 pm, the autopsy report from the hospital was sent to the police station. Second Immortal Gu died of a heart attack, which was a normal death. The blood contains a lot of catecholamines, the myocardial cells are damaged, mixed with erythema; it was a common way to die for patients with cardiovascular diseases. There were many insects in the countryside, and they gnawed away at the corpse overnight.

Lin Yan and Yin Zhou were taken out of the interrogation room, and each concluded the case by leaving their fingerprints for the file. The policeman on duty sent the two out. Seeing that the superior was not there, they shook their heads and muttered to Lin Yan: “The report said that they were strongly affected. To put it bluntly, they were scared to death. When I was a child, I heard the villagers say that these sorts of people never died a peaceful death, and dealing with ghosts and gods would damage their morality and sucks away at their life to the point that it kills them.”

When they left the police station, the pattering rain was still falling, and there were few people on the street. Lin Yan’s face turned blue and he couldn’t stop shaking from head to toe. When he passed by the convenience store, he bought a pack of cigarettes and sat side by side with Yin Zhou on the road. The body of Second Immortal Gu lingered in front of his eyes. Lin Yan wiped the rain off his face, his lips shaking as he asked, “Do you think… that thing did it?”

Yin Zhou was silent. “He came again last night, he seemed very angry.” Lin Yan buried his face in his hands. “We shouldn’t have gone to see her yesterday.”

“You saw how she looked just now. That thing isn’t human.”

As he raised his head and looked around, his voice suddenly rose: “just because no one can see it, it thinks it can just kill anyone it wants to? That’s a human being; a living, breathing person. No matter what I do, you always fucking leave regardless of what I say. You’re coming after me and yet you take revenge on others?!”

Insane, perverted, totally unreasonable. Lin Yan said mutely, “Ghosts were human once too. Did you even have a conscience when you were alive?! Why don’t you come out? Brother, I’m waiting to die, it would be very kind of you to come here now. Why wait for July 15th? Let’s end this!”

On all the roads of all the towns and villages, the faces behind every window have remained unknown to the general population. No one knew that in a village in the northwest corner of the city, a grandmother had been robbed of her life. She died inexplicably. To many, it was as unnoticeable as stepping on an ant. A ghost did it! Who would believe that? Lin Yan recalled his experience last night. He thought that that gentle kiss would at least show that the monster still had some trace of his conscience from when he was a human being. It even sympathized with his paranoia, but now? Second Immortal Gu couldn’t see his existence at all, what did she do wrong? Lin Yan shouted desperately in his heart, what did I do wrong!

“The next one could be me, my parents, or you…” Lin Yan squeezed the cigarette out, a vicious expression in his eyes: “I wanted to make peace with it, but now I changed my mind.”

“He can come and try to take my life. I’ll kill him first; a life for a life!”