The moment that terrifying voice rang out, all three of them felt as if their very souls had been frozen!
They slowly turned their heads—only to see that the old man who was clearly already dead was once again standing in front of them!
Only this time, he wasn’t holding a broom… but a pair of sharp scissors!
Step by step, the old man approached, the smile on his face growing more and more twisted and eerie.
His wrinkles seemed on the verge of swallowing his entire face, and the icy aura emanating from him became increasingly suffocating.
All three of them understood clearly now—this old man was very likely no longer human!
Realizing the danger, their first instinct was to escape—but to their horror, they found they couldn’t move their legs no matter how hard they tried!
Their legs felt as if they’d been filled with lead—unbearably heavy!
“So… this is the power of a ghost…”
Ning Qiushui felt a chilling cold settle in his heart.
They were far too weak. In the face of a ghost, they had almost no ability to resist!
As the old man with the scissors drew closer and closer, Bai Xiaoxiao calmly spoke up from behind:
“Elder, we didn’t touch anything in the ancestral hall on purpose… but the things here… Guangchuan doesn’t like them. It was he who led us here.”
The moment the name “Guangchuan” was mentioned, the old man’s menacing expression froze.
In the next instant, those lifeless, fish-like eyes filled with overwhelming fear!
He turned his gaze toward Bai Xiaoxiao, locking eyes with her.
“What… did you just say…”
Bai Xiaoxiao’s palms were sweating, but her expression remained calm as she continued:
“If you don’t believe us, we can show you something.”
As soon as she said this, Ning Qiushui, sensing the shift in the ghost’s aura, quickly pulled out Guangchuan’s memorial tablet.
The moment the old man saw it, it was like he had laid eyes on something unimaginably terrifying. With a panicked scream, he dropped the scissors and fled into the depths of the forest without looking back!
The moment he left, the three of them finally regained control of their bodies.
Their backs were soaked in cold sweat, and they gasped for breath. Liu Chengfeng looked at Bai Xiaoxiao with a mix of awe and admiration:
“Damn, Sister Bai, you really have some tricks up your sleeve!”
“You got rid of that old ghost with just a few words!”
Bai Xiaoxiao exhaled and said:
“I just took a shot in the dark. If it didn’t work, I had other options…”
“…But now it seems, the story told in that annotation probably doesn’t line up with what really happened back then. Otherwise, that ghost wouldn’t have been so afraid of the memorial tablet in Qiushui’s hand!”
“If even a ghost fears it… that just shows how intense the resentment was from the tablet’s owner after death!”
Ning Qiushui looked down at the tablet in his hand and felt a chill run down his back, but still put it away and said:
“Let’s leave this place first. Who knows when that old ghost might come back. And it doesn’t look like there are any other useful clues here anyway…”
With all the back and forth, it was already midday. They returned to the rest area the village had set up for tourists and went to the canteen to get food.
Just after they got their meals, a tall, slim woman in jeans walked over and said to them:
“Excuse me, do you three have a moment?”
Ning Qiushui and Liu Chengfeng didn’t respond.
Bai Xiaoxiao gave a graceful smile—
“Yeah, we do. Is there something you need?”
The slim woman in jeans extended her hand toward her.
“I’m Tang Jiao. Would you like to come join a meeting?”
“Most of the other participants in the Blood Gate are here too.”
Bai Xiaoxiao hesitated for a moment, then nodded.
“Sure.”
She followed Tang Jiao upstairs to a larger room on the second floor. Inside, four other Blood Gate participants were seated.
Ning Qiushui scanned the room, frowning slightly:
“Why are we missing three people again?”
As soon as he asked, the expressions of two people in the room turned grim.
Judging from their faces, those three were probably not coming back.
“What exactly happened? Would you mind telling us?”
Perhaps Bai Xiaoxiao’s beauty had an effect, because when she gently asked the question, one of them slowly began to speak:
“…It’s nothing much, really. The three of them teamed up and went through the forest, heading for the mountain temple in the back, hoping to find a way out.”
“We tried to stop them, but they insisted. They promised that whether or not they found any clues in the temple, they’d be back within an hour.”
“The mountain’s not that tall, and there’s a well-built staircase, very easy to climb—takes less than ten minutes. But we waited at the bottom for almost three hours, and they still didn’t come back. Just as we were wondering if we should go up and look for them…”
At this point, the fear in the speaker’s eyes was nearly overflowing, as if recalling something truly horrific. He suddenly covered his mouth and began dry heaving!
His companion next to him looked more composed, but his face was deathly pale as well.
Seeing their state, no one pressed them. The group waited in silence.
Eventually, the man who had been gagging managed to suppress the spasms in his stomach. In a raspy voice, he finally said:
“Just as we were deciding whether to go up the mountain or leave… something suddenly rolled down from the top, nearly hitting us…”
“When it finally stopped in the clearing, we saw what it was…”
“It was… their corpses!”
Everyone in the room stopped breathing for a moment.
Dead silence.
The man’s eyes looked hollow as he muttered to himself:
“They looked exactly like that body outside the guesthouse this morning… exactly the same…”
“Their heads had been torn off… torn off while they were alive… It was a ghost… It must’ve been a ghost!”
“There’s a ghost… in that mountain temple!”
Seeing him become a bit hysterical, his companion slapped him hard across the face and quickly handed him a bottle of cold water. After a few gulps, the man’s emotions stabilized again. He stared silently at the table in front of him, saying nothing.
After a long pause, Tang Jiao finally sighed.
“Everyone’s seen the situation for themselves.”
“This Blood Gate… who knows what’s going on with it. It’s supposed to be the second gate, but the difficulty is off the charts…”
“To be honest, I’m a veteran who’s cleared five Blood Gates. This time I took a job to guide newcomers, but even I think the difficulty of this one isn’t any lower than the fifth gate I did back then!”
“If we don’t work together and stick together, we could all get wiped out!”
The moment she said “wiped out,” everyone—except Ning, Bai, and Liu—visibly paled.
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