Chapter 454: Carrying the Coffin

"Should we leave early?" Wang Shi's experiences over the past few years had made him extremely cautious. Since the three of us had been exposed—even if only to a child who had fallen behind—we had to be prepared for the worst while in such danger.

"Let's wait a bit longer. Without a local guide, we'll only get lost in the wilderness if we leave." Having learned how the village had come to be, I was in no rush to leave.

Seeing that neither Feng Minglong nor I had any intention of leaving, Wang Shi spoke up again. "Leaving the village is only a temporary measure. We can stay on the outskirts to guard against any surprises. Once the sun comes up, we'll naturally be able to get our bearings and escape the mountains."

"Your plan is sound enough, but you're making a critical mistake," I said helplessly. "How do you know the sun even rises here? What if this place is trapped in eternal night?"

Wang Shi clearly hadn't considered that possibility. All of his reasoning rested on the major premise that we were still in the Yang Realm.

"So we just hide out here waiting to die, leaving our lives in other people's hands?" Wang Shi retorted, unwilling to accept that.

"You can't put it like that. Even if we wanted to leave, there's no guarantee we could make it out of the village safely. The god-welcoming procession just now was probably made up of the living villagers, but aside from the living, the dead make up more than half the village. Just think about the coffins inside those houses—you don't even have to look far, just look at the old woman here in this stone building. With so many corpses watching over the place, could we really escape safely?" I had a lot of concerns, and I laid them all out at once. "The god-welcoming is terribly important to this village. If we act rashly and disrupt the grand god-welcoming ceremony, we'll likely end up far worse off. So my point stands: wait and see how things play out, and meet force with appropriate tactics."

While Wang Shi and I were talking, something else changed in the village. The god-welcoming procession abruptly halted just as it was about to leave the village. The clanging of gongs and beating of drums gradually died down, leaving only the shrill wail of the suona horn lingering over the entire village.

Right after that, something none of us had expected happened. Lu Shan, dressed differently from the rest, was driven out of the procession, and four or five burly women grabbed her by the arms and marched her back toward us.

"What's going on?"

They quickly reached the door of the stone building and began shouting inside in the local dialect.

"Can either of you understand what they're saying?" Feng Minglong looked at Wang Shi and me. "Going by their tone, I doubt we're welcome."

Frowning, I used my Judging Eye and saw the child who had fallen behind hiding behind the women, mixed in with the group. Clearly, he was the one who had ratted us out.

"I don't know what they're saying, but only a few village women came over—none of the men showed up. That's a bit strange. Things haven't reached the worst possible point yet." My guess was soon confirmed when two of the women held the Double-Faced Woman down and pushed her into the room. She was the only person in the god-welcoming procession not wearing a mask.

"There aren't many men in the village. The clan elder wants you to follow the god-welcoming procession to the temple and carry the coffin." Lu Shan's words were evasive, as though she were deliberately holding something back.

"Carry a coffin? Aren't you performing the god-welcoming? What does a coffin have to do with it?" No matter how much I questioned her, Lu Shan refused to say another word. The village women, however, occasionally barked a few lines in an utterly unintelligible dialect, and judging by their tone alone, it didn't sound like anything good.

After a standoff lasting several minutes, the three of us outsiders chose to give in. Standing under someone else's roof, we had no choice but to bow our heads.

The village women draped brightly colored outer robes over our shoulders, then led us to catch up with the god-welcoming procession.

Once we merged into the ranks, the musicians at the front started beating their gongs and drums again. Paired with the red-and-white Soul Sedan Chair bobbing up and down, the shrill racket made the whole scene exceptionally eerie.

"What kind of mess is this? Forcing us to carry a coffin—nothing but bad luck." Walking alongside Lu Shan, the three of us outsiders looked completely out of place among the crowd dancing silently around us.

The long god-welcoming procession soon left the village behind, climbing a rugged mountain trail halfway up the slope before finally stopping in front of a Buddhist temple.

Low, dilapidated, gloomy, and damp, the temple had peeling walls mottled with moss and a roof laid with antique dark tiles. It had likely stood here even longer than the village at the foot of the mountain.

'It's overgrown with weeds, and the temple is so rundown that no one is tending to it. Yet judging by how seriously the locals take the god-welcoming, this ruined temple seems to hold a very high place in their hearts. That's strange—if they revere the temple, why leave it to rot without ever maintaining it?' The villagers' attitude toward the temple puzzled me; I couldn't figure out what they were really thinking.

Before long, an old man said a few words to Lu Shan. She nodded to show she understood, then led the three of us outsiders to the temple entrance. "The clan elder wants you to go inside and carry the coffin out. Be careful, and don't disturb the deity."

"Just the three of us?" I froze on the spot. The god-welcoming procession crowded outside the temple in a ring, dressed in bright clothes and wearing Paper Doll Masks as they stared silently at the three of us outsiders. "Fine, we'll go."

The temple wasn't large, yet its threshold was unusually high. Because the mountain slope was steep, seven stone steps had been built outside the entrance.

'None of the houses in the entire village have thresholds built into them, yet this rundown temple has one?' I began to understand why the temple was so dilapidated and untended—this place probably wasn't somewhere ordinary villagers could enter.

Climbing the steps and entering the temple, we found a small courtyard inside spanning a dozen or so square meters, paved with dark bricks and overgrown with weeds on both sides.

Continuing inward across the small courtyard, we entered the main hall. It looked even more dilapidated than the outside: missing tiles left gaping holes across the roof, and the walls were splitting apart, scarred everywhere with startling cracks.

Deep inside the main hall stood a Buddha statue crafted with two faces. In front of the statue stood an offering table bearing a wooden tablet inscribed with three ancient characters—Good and Evil Buddha.

'So this is the Two-Faced Buddha's true name? He's called the Good and Evil Buddha?' I raised my phone and recorded everything. After dealing with him for so long, I had only now learned his true name. 'Good and evil in opposition—what does this name signify? Or is it just something the villagers made up themselves?'

"Mr. Lu, taking pictures with your phone inside a temple is deeply disrespectful. You'll bring disaster upon yourself."

"Number Twelve, hurry over and help us. I feel uneasy all over in this rundown temple, like someone has been staring at me this whole time."

Behind the Buddha statue, Wang Shi and Feng Minglong had found the coffin Lu Shan had mentioned. Wide at the front and narrow at the back, it was trapezoidal in shape and looked like a log split in half.

"How do we lift this? I've heard there are strict rules about carrying a coffin."

The coffin sat at an angle behind the Buddha statue, coated in a thick layer of dust. There was no telling how long it had been sitting here.

"You two take the head of the coffin, and I'll take the foot by myself." Since I practiced the Profound Truth Mental Method and Crushing Fist, my physical conditioning was far better than an ordinary person's, so I took one end of the coffin alone.

"We just lift it like that?" Staring at the wooden coffin on the ground, neither Feng Minglong nor Wang Shi wanted to lay a hand on it. To them, a coffin was bad luck, and storing one inside a deserted temple was bizarre to begin with.

"The temple walls are low—why don't we just climb over the wall and make a run for it? We're already outside the village limits. It's a rare chance!"

Wang Shi floated the idea to me, and I was half-tempted myself. Just as I was about to discuss whether the plan could work, the Underworld Live Show Phone in my palm let out a soft chime.

"Ding!" A text message landed in the phone's inbox right at that moment.

"Hold on." I opened the inbox to check the message. Inside was only a single short line—"Optional Quest 3: Steal the Good and Evil Sarira. Completion reward: 10 points and one Live Broadcast Immunity!"

'The Good and Evil Sarira?' The reward for this optional quest was remarkably generous, nearly rivaling the eighth livestream quest to kill Lu Xing. I stared at the phone screen in silence for a long time. 'Of all times, it gets issued right after we step into the temple. Could the Good and Evil Sarira be hidden right here inside? Did Lu Xing go to such lengths to board the train just so he could come here and take the sarira?'

The Two-Faced Buddha's tablet was inscribed with the name Good and Evil Buddha, which meant this Good and Evil Sarira had to be connected to the Two-Faced Buddha as well.

"Mr. Lu, say something—are we leaving or staying?" Feng Minglong and Wang Shi both looked at me anxiously, afraid that stalling any longer would make the villagers outside suspicious.

"No rush. I need to find something in here first."