The next morning, the mourners opened the door to find the courtyard a scene of carnage: blood flowed like a river, and three of the four bodies were in pieces. The fourth was huddled in a corner, already raving. They rushed him to the hospital, where doctors sedated him. He didn't regain full consciousness for two days, and even then, his mind was never the same; he only repeated the story, often screaming in the night about the black cat coming.

Wang Jue took a deep breath, gripping the armrests of his chair tightly. I was long past being shocked by such things; listening to a ghost story while sitting here felt far less painful than having a spirit stab a dagger into my hand.

"What's the connection between what happened last night and Hua Jinlan, and the corpse that climbed out of the coffin?" I asked.

"You'll know when the time comes. You two didn't rest well last night either. Stay here for a while, I'll show you to the guest room."

The guest room at the village chief's house was simple: a large bed with bedding. Wang Jue and I lay down, but despite our exhaustion, neither of us felt sleepy. I turned on my phone—still no signal. It was strange; this place had water and electricity, indistinguishable from any ordinary village, yet mobile service was entirely absent. I worried about my older sister, wondered if Old He had managed to contact Li Xiaoshu, and fretted that Li Xiaohao might go to the hospital to cause trouble again—a jumble of concerns spun wildly in my head.

Wang Jue patted me. "Are you afraid of going into the mountains tonight?"

"Being afraid is useless; we have to face what needs facing eventually. Besides, there will be people from the village going together. More people mean it will be fine," I reassured him, though I certainly wouldn't have invited him to come along if I'd known what transpired last night.

As I was lost in thought, A-Li pushed the door open, holding a plate with a few pieces of cake and candy. She looked at us with a bright smile, her large, flickering eyes as captivating as ever. "Are you hungry? It's not mealtime yet, so I found some snacks for you."

Wang Jue sat up, grabbed a piece of cake, and immediately stuffed it into his mouth. Only then did I realize I had only eaten a single steamed bun all day; my stomach was indeed rumbling. Traveling inevitably means roughing it, and though A-Li was young, she was remarkably thoughtful; she would undoubtedly make a very virtuous wife when she grew up.

"A-Li, are the black cats around here particularly fierce?" Wang Jue asked, chewing while keeping his mind sharp, trying to pry information about the black cats out of her.

Hearing about the black cats energized A-Li; she opened the floodgates and began to speak with vivid animation: "You must not touch the black cats! Especially the ones that are completely black, without a single stray hair. If one jumps onto a dead body, that corpse will turn into a jiangshi (zombie) and climb out of its coffin, wielding a sickle to chop everything it meets in half. If someone performs a ritual on the jiangshi using a 'Two-Realm Pass,' the jiangshi will transform into a wraith identical to a human—those things can speak, they can think, and they blend in with ordinary people in a crowd. But they don't eat grain; they sustain themselves by sucking the vital essence of humans. Moreover, they collect more 'Two-Realm Passes' to create more wraiths. If someone is targeted by them, they are made to look like an accidental death, and when the coffin is set up in the mourning hall, the black cat appears. A few years ago, a jiangshi appeared in the village, and the village chief led a group into the mountains to catch it. It's said that the jiangshi was just about to turn into a wraith when the village chief swung his sickle and cut off its head. Everyone piled up firewood and burned the body to ash. After that, no black cats appeared for a very long time." A-Li spoke animatedly, spitting slightly, only stopping when she was breathless.

Children naturally love these strange and uncanny tales. Still, I believed she was telling more than just a legend, because the village chief had mentioned the jiangshi earlier.

Black cat jumps on the corpse, the corpse becomes a wraith—I sucked in a sharp breath! Tonight's mission must be catching the jiangshi, that much was certain.