"The outsiders are here! They're the ones who brought the woman possessed by the female ghost into the village!"

While still immersed in mourning the deceased, someone nearby suddenly pointed at us and shouted at the police.

A wave of indignation quickly swept through the villagers. The crowd began to murmur, voices rising in shouts directed at us:

"Yes, it was them! They brought the female ghost and slaughtered our village!" "Arrest them and torture the truth out of them!" "A life for a life must be paid in blood." "They can't be let go so easily. The police must bring justice for the wronged souls." ...

Soon, a squad of police officers approached us, showed their credentials, and requested our cooperation with the investigation.

I exchanged a meaningful glance with Old He and Xiao Shu, then obediently followed the officers into the police car.

The interior of the police vehicle had been converted into a makeshift office. Since Miao Village lacked any official government outpost, and the Village Head—the only link to the government—had also perished in the massacre, the villagers, only just returned from taking refuge in the caves, had no suitable temporary space. Thus, the police car had to serve. Nevertheless, this circumstance did not diminish the seriousness with which they conducted their business. The officers separated the three of us and began questioning us one by one.

Since I was still wearing the blood-spattered clothes from the previous night, I naturally became the primary focus of their inquiry. Four or five officers asked me the same questions repeatedly: Who was I, where had I been last night, what happened in the ancestral hall, and who killed the people inside.

Although I cooperated fully and recounted the events exactly as they transpired—without a single lie, unlike my reticence with the villagers—they remained deeply disappointed. The reason was simple: they were all atheists. They did not believe in supernatural occurrences, much less in a single person being possessed by a female ghost to slaughter fifty-one strong, able-bodied men overnight. In their minds, this massacre must have been a political incident, perhaps linked to a cult or even anti-government forces from abroad. The perpetrators must have been a group, not a single individual; otherwise, it was too unbelievable, too illogical, too unconvincing.

Half a day later, I was released. Xiao Shu and Old He were already waiting for me outside the car. After sharing notes, we discovered we all shared the same decision: tell the police the unvarnished truth and let them judge whether to believe it or not. Of course, their testimonies omitted the part about the slaughter in the ancestral hall; at that time, they were hidden away in the caves. Only I had witnessed that bloody moment and only I knew precisely what had transpired that night. Yet, the police ultimately seemed to choose disbelief in our accounts. Afterward, whether on the internet, in newspapers, on television, or over the radio, there was no news report about this massacre, as if nothing had ever happened.

It was later rumored that the police treated the incident as a top-secret case following an exhaustive investigation, with everyone involved sworn to silence. The elderly, women, and children of the village who had lost their main providers received varying amounts of financial subsidies, with the government assuming responsibility for supporting these families now lacking their primary laborers. The truth of the massacre, however, was eternally sealed within that classified file.

In truth, sometimes the truth is not far from us; it is merely our own perspective, status, or existing knowledge that prevents us from believing it, or perhaps, we simply choose not to believe.