Chapter 33: The Old Village Chief (8)

Li Yuan did not leave the village. Yes, he really did not leave the village. He convinced his wife and father that they could not leave the village.

That morning, there was a thick fog, and the mountain road that was familiar to him on weekdays became a maze. The Li family of three could not get out of the village no matter how they tried. From morning to 4 o’clock in the afternoon, they were still wandering around in the same place.

At 4 o’clock, when Li Yuan found himself still in the same place with a pale face, he was discouraged. He threw his luggage away and sat on a big rock, saying in a despondent voice, “Let’s go back.”

His wife didn’t say anything, and neither did his father. The fog that had been hanging around since morning was a sign of something. This was against the laws of nature, and even a fool would know that there was something wrong!

“Not going anymore?” Li Yuan’s father also sat down, as if to confirm, and asked as if to give himself a positive answer.

Li Yuan looked up at the pale mist and said, “No, I can’t go any further. I’ll go back and fight. It doesn’t matter if I live or die, I have to save something.” That was a determination made after being forced into a desperate situation.

Li Yuan’s father said, “I’m getting old. It doesn’t matter if I live or die. I have to protect you two.”

After this sentence, the three of them burst into tears on the mountain. This heart-wrenching feeling was simply too much to bear…

The road back down the mountain to the village was surprisingly smooth. The thick fog that had been surrounding them gradually dispersed. When he reached the village, Li Yuan couldn’t help but look back and see where the fog was on the mountain.

But this only increased his despair. He understood that the old village chief did not want him to leave, but to die!

When I heard the story, I was very confused. I asked my master, “It is the ability of ghosts to make people lost. Is the old village chief a ghost?”

“No, the old village chief is an extremely special being. I’m afraid that there are few similar examples in China from ancient times to the present.”

Unlike the stories we hear on the train, no matter how terrifying they are, we know that we won’t be sucked into the story. Li Yuan’s story is not an exception. The horror in the village continues.

On the way back to the village, Li Yuan met several other people, who were also from the same village as Li Yuan and were a family. Li Yuan remembered that they were also the ones who accompanied the old village chief on his inspection of the fishing grounds that day.

Seeing that they were also carrying luggage and acting like a family, Li Yuan couldn’t help but ask, “Can’t you leave the village?”

The man looked at Li Yuan and was obviously startled, but then suddenly thought of something and said in a somewhat decadent tone, “Yes, you too?”

“Yes, I dreamed of him. He said 15 days. What about you?” Li Yuan was already in a state of mind where he was willing to risk it all. Now that it had come to this, what couldn’t he say?

The man’s face changed immediately. He stopped and stared at Li Yuan, slowly saying, “He’s under the water grass.”

Li Yuan sighed to the heavens, as if he were talking to himself, and then to the man, “Our dreams must be the same. He will definitely be back in 15 days. We need to inform the villagers.”

So that night, more than 80 able-bodied men in the village gathered in the village ancestral hall. When they talked about it, they found that there were five people in the village who had dreamed of the old village chief.

But after all, it was a dream. The reason they couldn’t leave the village was because of the fog. It would be difficult to convince people with this, or to put it another way, people might believe it, but what can you do in the face of such a thing?

This is a kind of helplessness that awaits death, because the enemy is invisible and intangible, and there is nothing you can do about the tactics used. It is something that you can’t fight even if you want to desperately, just like air.

Li Yuan lived a life of days in a dream. Every day, he would dream that the old village chief would come to tell him the time, and every time, he would feel as if he had been scared half to death.

He resisted sleep, he dared not sleep, but every day after two o’clock in the morning, no matter what he was doing, even if he gathered a few people who were dreaming to play cards together, they would fall asleep, and the same was true for those people.

On the tenth day before the end, half of the village suddenly dreamed of the old village chief.

At this time, something even more terrifying happened.

In the countryside, some chickens and ducks are raised in free-range farming. In the evening, the chickens and ducks will return home by themselves. On this day, when it got dark, most of the chickens and ducks in the village did not return home.

The next day, people found a large number of dead chickens and ducks in a remote mountain valley, all of which had been bled and some of which had been bitten.

He’s back, that’s what people thought.

This kind of concept is terrifying. When faced with life and death, there are always people who want to struggle. On the day after the villagers discovered the dead chickens and ducks, they began to run in large numbers. They didn’t know where they were running to, but they wanted to run out of the village, at least to the neighboring village to seek refuge.

Faced with this situation, Li Yuan did not make any move. He just looked at the crowd and said, “You can’t run away.”

Yes, they couldn’t escape. At least a dozen families left the village that day, but by the afternoon, all of them had returned, and they were all pale.

On that day, the chickens and ducks continued to die. Those who had not let their chickens and ducks out found them dead in their homes the next day.

There is nothing more terrifying than dying in one’s own home. That means that the terrible thing has come to one’s own home. Rather than that, people would rather let the chickens and ducks run free and die, because dead chickens and ducks are better than dead people.

It was the eighth day of the countdown, and everyone in the village, including the children, had a dream about the old village chief.

This time, in the village ancestral hall, dozens of men were crying at the same time. Is it true that all of them will die, just as the old sacrificial priest said? Will they all die?

Li Yuan calmly watched all this. Every day, he devoted himself to two things: sharpening his kitchen knife and writing letters. He didn’t know much about reading, but he wrote this letter with the help of a dictionary, which the old village chief had given him.

On the seventh day of the countdown, a man came to the village. This man came to the village almost once a month. This man was the postman. He came to the village once a month to deliver the mail and to see if anyone in the village needed to send a letter out.

Under normal circumstances, the village usually receives more letters than it sends, and it takes out a lot of things.

But today, the postman found that almost every household asked him to deliver mail, and the destinations were very ridiculous, mostly relatives in nearby villages. The postman wanted to say that he could clearly do this himself, but he strangely found that the people in the village were very insistent and wanted him to deliver it.

There was no way around it, so the postman agreed, but when he left in the afternoon, he found dozens of people from the village following him, all of them with luggage and the like, and they were all going out of the mountains with him. The postman also noticed a problem: these people all had a very strange expression on their faces.

That expression… The postman thought about it for a long time, and then he realized that it was a very fervent, fervent hope! The postman’s vocabulary was not very rich, and it was difficult for him to think of such a sentence. It was indeed because the villagers’ expressions were so strange.

But? The situation again made the postman feel strange. He went into the mountains and found that the people were actually circling on the mountainside and not moving!

No matter how he shouted, the people didn’t seem to hear him. He wanted to go down to see what was going on, but was stopped by a pair of trembling hands. It was a teenager from the village, followed by two other people, an elderly woman and a middle-aged man. The postman was very surprised because he saw that all three of them were shaking.

“Don’t… don’t go… don’t get yourself caught up in it,” the boy said to the postman.

“What’s so bad about it?” the postman asked, confused. He himself didn’t know what he was feeling, but he had a strange feeling when he entered the village today. As soon as he entered the village, he felt a very oppressive feeling, and… and there was also a word that the postman didn’t want to say, the whole village was lifeless!

“Go, don’t ask!” The boy was still just persuading, but the middle-aged man actually pulled the postman up and ran down the mountain.

Finally, they ran down the mountain and arrived at the entrance to the neighboring village. The postman found them, and they were all in tears. The middle-aged man let out a painful cry and knelt down in the direction of the village.

When he saw him kneeling, the young man and the old woman also knelt down at the same time. The three of them bowed their heads heavily in the direction of the village.

When he got home that evening, the postman still couldn’t understand what had happened. All he heard from the three men was: “I didn’t go to the river that day.”