Chapter 4 White Tiger Heavenly General Arrives

  Just as the villagers were in a daze, Liu Guangyi hummed a tune and walked back, seeing many people standing in front of his house door. He thought that his home had been burglarized and rushed back in a hurry, opening his mouth to scold the villagers with all sorts of unpleasant words.

  Waiting for him to scold until he's tired, the bald-headed monk walked out and didn't say much. He opened his mouth and asked where his father was buried. If it were someone else, they would definitely be anxious! Without saying anything, he opens his mouth and asks about someone's dead father!

  Liu Guangyi was only puzzled in his heart, wondering how this bald-headed monk knew about his father's death. He couldn't help but feel a sense of respect for him. Without hiding anything, he told the monk that he had buried his father in the orchard on the back mountain. The monk nodded and asked, "How long has it been since he passed away?" Liu Guangyi was different from others; when others' fathers died, they would at least hold a funeral, but he had gone to gamble on the same night his father died. He didn't show any disgust or discomfort, casually saying that his father had choked to death during lunch a month ago and had stopped breathing suddenly! His expression seemed particularly calm. The villagers were shocked and started chattering among themselves, all talking about how Liu Guangyi was unfilial. Liu Guangyi didn't think it was a big deal and invited the monk to visit his father's grave, saying he wanted to be a filial son and offer incense to his father. It only took ten minutes to get to the half-mountain waist from the village. The mountain was full of lush longan trees. Under Liu Guangyi's lead, the monk and the villagers arrived at Liu Guangyi's father's grave in a grand procession. Due to Liu Guangyi's family being poor, they couldn't even afford a tombstone, so they just found a flat stone and wrote Liu Guangyi's father's name on it.

  The bald-headed monk's face suddenly turned white as a ghost, and the villagers didn't understand what was going on. The monk slowly put down his hands and said, "This place is indeed the White Tiger Heaven Rush land." Everyone didn't understand these professional terms, so they asked the monk one by one.

  The monk waved his hand and sighed, saying, "This is a place with extremely good feng shui, if someone is buried here, their descendants will definitely have a general. So this White Tiger Heaven Rush is a treasure land that can make future generations prosperous." Before he finished speaking, Liu Guangyi suddenly burst out laughing and said, "I didn't expect to accidentally stumble upon the ancestral tomb!"

  The bald-headed monk glared at Liu Guangyi and said, "Do you know what the price is?" Price? Liu Guangyi shook his head, not knowing. The monk continued, "It will cost all living things in your village their lives, including people. The few people who died earlier were just the beginning!"

  The villagers' faces turned pale with fear, but only Liu Guangyi was still smug. The monk turned to leave, and the villagers instinctively grabbed him, asking for a solution. The monk sighed and said, "If it were just digging a hole without burying anyone, it would be easy to handle. But now that things have come to this, there's no way... Ah, everyone can only leave the village, maybe that way you can live a few more days!"

  After finishing speaking, he quickly escaped from the village like a madman. Since then, the villagers seemed to have vanished into thin air overnight, leaving not a single person behind. Some people who often visited Pingpo Village said they had all left, but their furniture was still arranged as before. Others speculated that the entire village had died out, so you could often see their ghosts returning home.

  The story of the disappearance of Pingpo Village's villagers has been passed down in many versions, so few people dare to enter the village, leaving it desolate for over 20 years. At first, when Liu said he was a villager from Pingpo Village, I had some curiosity, but sometimes curiosity isn't a good thing, so I never asked.

  I and Hei Zi packed up our things and set off towards Pingpo Village on an old electric scooter that had been used for ten years. Hei Zi was bored, so he added two 24-volt batteries, which made the speed quite fast, only slightly slower than a motorcycle. We rode out of Anlong County, where people were coming and going in droves, but once we left the county, there were significantly fewer people around.

  Hei Zi drove, and I sat in the back, facing the cold wind of November, quietly watching the scenery by the road. To be honest, many people in Anlong knew the name Pingpo Village, children and adults alike, but no one dared to go there, fearing that a possible curse might fall upon themselves. The car drove north for about 10 kilometers, and the urban highway of Anlong County was replaced by a rural path overgrown with wild grass, possibly because very few people set foot there, and the road surface grew a lot of wild grass. Trees gradually became more numerous, and the speed of the small sheep-like vehicle slowed down from 75 km/h to 25 km/h. Hei Zi hummed along to popular music from 2013, slowly driving forward, his voice not being particularly heavenly, but in this small Anlong, such a sweet singing voice was indeed rare, or maybe it was just my limited vision, because I never watched those variety shows about singing and dancing, thinking they were all exaggerated performances by rich people.

  After fourteen or fifteen minutes, Hei Zi and I arrived at Pingpo Village. The village was full of small hills and mounds, with withered grasses that made it look desolate. In the flat areas, rows of houses were neatly arranged, but perhaps due to lack of maintenance for a long time, many dry branches and leaves had fallen on the thatched roofs of the rural buildings from the early 1990s. Wild grasses grew profusely on the straw-covered rooftops. It wasn't as eerie and frightening as the rumors outside, it was just that the trees were too lush, blocking most of the sunlight and temperature, making this place particularly gloomy. If I had to describe it in one sentence, this village was like a settlement deep in a dark and dense forest.

  I got off the car with Hei Zi and walked straight towards a stone monument with three big red characters that read "Ping Po Village". The characters were written in a rare calligraphic style, with flowing strokes and elegant yet bold lines. They seemed to have been there for hundreds of years. After enduring the wear and tear of centuries, the characters still looked remarkably clear, which was truly remarkable. Hei Zi didn't understand the text on the monument and looked at me with a puzzled expression, asking if we had taken a wrong turn while driving. I read out the text on the monument to him, and he responded with a silly grin, looking like someone who hadn't studied much. As we continued walking towards the village, Hei Zi shivered and gazed around at the scenery with an unusual look in his eyes, saying: "Brother, do you think these hill-like things could be graves? I feel like there's a cold wind blowing down my neck." I glanced around and Hei Zi's words reminded me that what we were looking at did indeed resemble unmarked graves.

  Hei Zi, this guy always has to be strong and never admit defeat, but when it comes to these cow demon snake god things, he's completely spineless and has no resistance. In order not to crush his morale, I said calmly: "You can think of it as a mountain slope, besides, what ghostly thing would come out in broad daylight? If something really does come out, you can use the sunlight here to shine it right in the face."

  I rarely joke around, and Hei Zi doesn't often hear me say such things. As soon as I said this, he was stunned for a moment, then reacted after a second or two, laughing so hard his mouth couldn't close. Laughing while speaking, he said: "Really can't see that you have the talent to be a jokester, don't you feel tired with your serious face all day? Sometimes I think being a fool is also happy."

  I ignored Hei Zi's teasing and walked slowly into the village along the sunlight of the setting sun. I took out my small Nokia phone to check the time, it was past three in the afternoon, just when the winter sun was shining brightly. There was no need to worry about anything.

  I gazed at the rows of houses in front of me, bewildered, and couldn't tell which one was Old Liu's house. Almost every house, except for their different shapes, could be described with a single word: desolate!

  It can't be that we have to find one by one, there are at least 70 or 80 houses here, I thought to myself. Hei Zi usually gets along well with Lao Liu and often drinks and chats with him, let alone Lao Liu is also someone Hei Zi has invited to help with the funeral, so he should be quite familiar with Lao Liu. Turning to ask Hei Zi: "Do you know which one is Lao Liu's house? Finding one by one is tiring, and it's getting late too!"