Time seemed to freeze in that moment.

Only Lu Yao's heavy breathing remained in the air, along with his heart frantically pounding in his chest.


The face beneath the Ghost Soldier's helmet was identical to his own.

The same eyes and brows, the same nose bridge, even the inconspicuous mole at the corner of the mouth was in the exact same position.

The only difference was that face had no trace of life, only deathly pallor and emptiness.


Those eyes, pitch black, like two bottomless vortices, threatening to suck in his soul.

"No..."


A broken syllable squeezed out from Lu Yao's throat.

He moved backward, retreating on all fours, the mud and gravel painfully digging into his skin.

But that Ghost Soldier, that monster wearing his face, just stood there silently, its empty eye sockets still locked onto him.

"Run now!"

The Taoist priest's hoarse roar pulled him back to a thread of consciousness from the boundless terror.

He struggled to get up, staggering toward the Taoist priest.

"Master, that thing... that thing it..."

"Don't look at it! Don't think about it either!"

The Taoist priest grabbed his arm with surprising strength, almost crushing his bone: "The yin energy here has solidified into substance. My spiritual tools can't suppress it, and my talismans are nothing but waste paper!"

Blood was still trickling from the corner of the priest's mouth, but his face flushed with an unnatural redness from anxiety.

"The source! There must be a source! They're trapped here by someone's evil magic!"

The source?

Lu Yao's mind was in chaos, countless images flashing through.

The villagers' fanatical faces, the large pit they had dug, and... that yellowed family genealogy book.

The genealogy book!

A thought struck him like lightning through the chaos.

He remembered now. On the last page of the genealogy book, besides that eerie bloody handprint, there was an extremely crude map drawn in cinnabar.

The endpoint of the map was right behind the ancestral hall, under that century-old locust tree.

There was also a line of almost illegible small text beside it.

"When the bell rings, the soul returns."

"The ancestral hall! Behind the ancestral hall!"

Lu Yao, as if grasping at the last straw of salvation, howled while pointing toward the direction of the village.

A flash of determination crossed the Taoist priest's eyes.

He flung the last three yellow talismans from his sleeve. The paper talismans combusted without fire, transforming into three feeble glows of light, barely holding back several approaching Ghost Soldiers.

"Run!"

The two tumbled and sprinted desperately toward the ancestral hall.

The sound of armor grinding followed them like a shadow. That putrid smell of rust seemed to have seeped into their bones.

The ancestral hall was already in ruins. Moonlight shone through the holes in the roof, falling upon the dust-covered memorial tablets.

Lu Yao, guided by memory, circled to the back of the ancestral hall.

The old locust tree was there, its branches gnarled, resembling a silent giant in the night.

"It's right here!"

Lu Yao pointed at the ground beneath the tree.

Without wasting words, the two of them used their hands and broken wooden boards to frantically dig at the soil beneath the tree.

Their fingernails were torn and bleeding, mixing blood with soil, but they were completely oblivious to it.

The mist around them grew increasingly thick, with the Ghost Soldiers surrounding the small shrine so tightly that not even water could seep through.

The "clang" of footsteps was just a few meters away.

"Found it!"

The Daoist priest exclaimed.

His hand had touched a cold, hard object.

It was a box.

A bronze box about the size of a palm, covered with green rust, ancient and heavy.

With trembling hands, Lu Yao opened the box. Inside, a bronze bell lay silently.

The bell had a strange design, covered with intricate patterns. In the faint moonlight, several blurry characters could vaguely be seen.

"Fourteenth year of Wanli... suppress..."

Lu Yao took out the bell. It felt ice-cold to the touch, and a chill shot from his palm straight to the top of his head.

He shook it instinctively.

There was no sound.

He turned the bell over in confusion, looking inside.

There was no metal clapper inside the bell.

Instead, there was a piece of... bone tied with a thin red string.

It was a finger bone, polished smooth and rounded, displaying an eerie ivory white.

This was it.

Lu Yao's mind buzzed.

He remembered those words from the family genealogy.

"When the bell rings, the soul returns."

Perhaps this was the only way.

He hesitated no longer, gripped the bell tightly, and shook it with all his might.

"Ding-a-ling—"

A crisp yet eerie bell sound suddenly rang out in the dead of night.

The sound wasn't loud, but it carried a strange penetrating power that instantly drowned out all other sounds.

The Ghost Soldiers around him simultaneously froze in their tracks.

It's working!

Lu Yao's heart leaped with joy, and he shook the bell even more vigorously.

"Ding-a-ling... ding-a-ling-ling..."

However, the scene he had anticipated—the Ghost Soldiers dissipating—did not appear.

At his feet, from the earth around him, suddenly pale hands stretched out!

Those hands pushed aside the soil, followed by helmeted heads and bodies in tattered armor...

More Ghost Soldiers crawled out from beneath the ground!

They silently rose to their feet, joined the existing ranks, formed neat formations, and countless hollow eye sockets all turned toward Lu Yao, who held the bell.

How could this be happening?

Lu Yao's blood instantly ran cold.

He looked at the bell in his hand with terror, almost throwing it away.

Just then, he felt something rough on the inner wall of the bell.

He scratched hard with his fingernail and actually extracted a tiny roll of silk sealed with wax from a compartment in the inner wall.

He hurriedly unfolded the silk.

There were no Chinese characters on it, but rather a kind of completely unintelligible, twisted symbols that resembled tadpoles.

The moment his fingertips touched those symbols.

The entire world began to spin.