Chapter 156 — Night Investigation

The sound was much like the chirping of insects at any ordinary time, and neither Zhou Yixuan nor Wild Wolf Daoist paid it any mind. But Xiaowan suddenly gave a jolt, whipped around, and looked back. She turned so sharply that the two men beside her were startled, thinking something unforeseen had come upon them from behind, and they too spun about to look—only to find the way behind them empty, and nothing there at all.

Zhou Yixuan said in surprise, "Xiaowan, what is it?"

Xiaowan's face shifted uncertainly, her expression strange. After a moment's hesitation she said, "Grandfather, I—I think I heard Little Grey calling."

Zhou Yixuan's brows drew together. "Little Grey? What Little Grey—" His voice suddenly caught, then he said in a low voice, "You mean that monkey of Ming Li's?"

Xiaowan nodded, but a look of bewilderment came over her face. Slowly she said, "But there is no sound now. Could I have been mistaken?"

Zhou Yixuan and Wild Wolf both looked off toward the far end of the alley, but there was only pitch-darkness—where was any sign of Ming Li or Little Grey? Zhou Yixuan glared at Xiaowan. She flushed and turned away, but for some reason her expression seemed a little abstracted, as though her thoughts were elsewhere.

Wild Wolf Daoist, watching from the side, let a strange and inexplicable look flit across his dog-face, and slowly lowered his head.

Zhou Yixuan said, "Enough. No more wild fancies. Let us go in."

Xiaowan and Wild Wolf Daoist both nodded in assent. Then the three of them crept on tiptoe to the ruined doorway. In the gloom the little courtyard within lay before them—overgrown, dilapidated, pitch-black everywhere, with nothing to be seen; and yet behind every shadow it seemed a pair of cold eyes were watching them.

A cold wind blew past. It was truly ghost-haunted, and the fine hairs rose on the back of one's neck.

Zhou Yixuan swallowed hard and slipped quietly inside. As the three of them trod upon the grass and brush of the courtyard, for all their extreme care, their footsteps still gave out the faintest sound—yet in that silence, to their own ears, it seemed louder by a thousandfold than in ordinary times.

As the three drew nearer and nearer to that house of the dead, their hearts could not help but quicken. Xiaowan even felt that her own heartbeat was so loud she feared others might hear it.

And it was at that very moment that within the pitch-dark house of the dead there suddenly rose a sound—faint enough, yet to their ears then like a clap of thunder—and a flame sprang to life within the room; and the color of that flame was, remarkably, a weird and ghostly dark green...