This Damned Thirst for Survival

Once the ritual was over, Jiang Luo took off his mask. The mask made him feel uncomfortable, his face was smiling, but it had a deadly look to it, stereotypical, stiff and eerie.

He tucked the mask into his pocket and listened quietly to the whispered conversations of the participants.

“Did you find anything today?”

“Nothing, do you?”

“Neither have I. But, I have noticed that there are very few old people in this village.”

“Even the village chief looks to be in his fifties, not too old.”

There are many old people in their 50s and 60s who are still working in the fields, and as a result, many of them are fit and healthy and live into their 70s and 80s, and in the countryside, where there is little recreation, the most common sight is an old man sitting in the sun on his doorstep.

In Shen Tucun, however, there are not many elderly people in sight.

Jiang Luo withdrew his sideways listening after eavesdropping on the conversation.

Lu Youyi suddenly said, ” Jiang Luo, isn’t that the little girl we met earlier?”

He tugged Jiang Luo and gestured for him to look to his left.

Jiang Luo turns his head to see a little girl dressed in red running silently away from her parents, hidden from view around the corner and heading back.

He said at once, “Come on, let’s go and have a look.”

Jiang Luo and Lu Youyi move discreetly away from the crowd, following after the little girl.

Gradually, they traced the trail from the village to the edge of the beaten track, and after passing through a large area of dense forest, it suddenly opened up before them.

At the end of the dense forest is a large wilderness cemetery with graves next to graves.

The graves are pointed like small hills, each with a tombstone carved in front of it. At a glance, almost all the graves are identical, except for the weeds on them, which vary more or less.

Jiang Luo darted a quick look around the tip of the grave and soon saw a red figure, “There it is.”

The little girl is digging the grave.

Her hands were no more than palm-sized and she held neither a shovel nor a spade. Her two white hands dug the grave with their bare hands and were soon bloodied by the harsh blades of grass and the hard stones.

Even when someone came, she only looked up at Jiang Luo and Lu Youyi and then lowered her head to continue digging the grave.

Jiang Luo squatted down without changing his face and said softly, “Little sister, what are you doing?”

Lu Youyi crouches shivering next to Jiang Luo.

The little girl did not respond and Jiang Luo asked again before the little girl said sluggishly, “I am digging a grave,”

Jiang Luo patiently asks, “Why did you dig the grave?”

The little girl said, “I’m looking for my mummy and daddy.”

“Are your mum and dad under the grave?” Jiang Luo asked without haste, “So your mum and dad that we saw during the day are not your real mum and dad?”

The little girl did not say anything, but shook her head silently, not knowing whether she was denying Jiang Luo’s question or expressing the fact that her parents were not real parents.

She dug the grave two more times and suddenly looked up at the sky and murmured, “It’s getting dark, I’m going home.”

After saying this, she left the grave bag and Jiang Luo, who had been dug out of a small hole, and darted into the dense forest.

Jiang Luo was caught off guard and only reacted when the little girl was gone, Lu Youyi gulped, “Then let’s go too?”

Jiang Luo looked down at the grave bag, his half-lidded eyelashes twitched and the corner of his mouth suddenly lifted, ” Lu Youyi , have you ever dug a grave?”

Lu Youyi : “……”

Ten minutes later, the two men started digging up the grave with two long pieces of wood they had found.

The moon was in the sky, and the white moonlight hit the clearing more brightly than if it had been lit.

Lu Youyi was sweating profusely as he dug, and after concentrating on digging the grave, he felt no more fear, and the long logs danced with such vigour that the grave bag was soon half flattened.

The coffin in this grave was buried so shallowly that it didn’t take long for the skin to emerge from the grave.

As the two men worked together to clear the soil, Jiang Luo used the tip of the wood to lift the lid of the coffin, and Lu Youyi’s voice shook, “Lu, are we really going to open it?”

Jiang Luo paused in his movements and looked at the grave bag, “Then let’s bury it again?”

Lu Youyi shut up when he thought about how hard he had just dug the grave.

Jiang Luo, with a single push, jerked the coffin open. Lu Youyi looked in and drew a cold breath.

Inside the coffin lay the bodies of a man and a woman, who looked exactly like the parents of the little girl they had seen during the day.

The body was somewhat decomposed, but neatly dressed, and must have died recently.

Lu Youyi : “This this this ……”

If the two bodies in the coffin were the parents of the little girl, who was the couple they had seen during the day?

After looking at the body, the mystery was not solved a little, but became more confusing. Jiang Luo and Lu Youyi put the lid on the coffin and restored the grave bag to its original state.

Jiang Luo buried the last shovelful of earth and ran to the tombstone to read the inscriptions on it.

Lu Youyi wiped the beads of sweat from his face when Yu Guang caught a glimpse of a bright light behind Jiang Luo’s back, and with a jump he shouted, “Jiang Luo get down!”

Jiang Luo heard a cracking wind and he reacted quickly by rolling to the ground and making his way to another grave.

As soon as he settled down he looked up and saw a large, cold, shimmering blade plunging straight into the ground where he had just been, the sharp edge of the blade missing most of the way, and if Jiang Luo hadn’t run so fast he would have been cut in half by it.

Jiang Luo looks in the direction from which the large knife is cast.

A man with a strange image emerges from the dense forest.

He was dressed in an extremely strange garment, like a layer of worn fabric wrapped around his body, or a robe of ancient shape. He gradually stepped out of the darkness into the moonlight, his tall figure trampling over fallen leaves and dead branches as he walked over to the greatsword and drew it up.

“With a scuffle, the man gripped his knife and looked at Jiang Luo and Lu Youyi.

He looks like an ancient warrior general, his eyes cold and full of bloodshed. Jiang Luo rises from the ground, his back slightly bent and his whole body tense, ready to attack and flee at any moment.

The man gave him a great sense of oppression, a man who looked like a man and not a ghost, with a fury that was like a substance, a malevolent fury that could only be formed by someone who had killed thousands of people.

“Who are you?” Jiang Luo asked tentatively.

Without a word, the man walks towards Jiang Luo with his knife instead. Jiang Luo spins his yin and yang ring, but to an outsider he looks motionless, as if he is stunned.

Lu Youyi lunged forward and wrapped his arms around the man’s thighs as he gritted his teeth and shouted to Jiang Luo, “Run!”

“Run, Jiang Luo !” Lu Youyi turned white with anxiety, “Run!”

Jiang Luo was stunned.

The man frowns slightly in annoyance, stops walking towards Jiang Luo, looks sideways at Lu Youyi and raises the hand holding his large sword.

The light of the knife flashed across Lu Youyi’s body. Lu Youyi’s eyes were closed tightly, obviously terrified, but he held on to the man’s leg. Just as the sword was about to fall on his spine, a Jin Guang rose up and the golden shadow lunged the man aside, a tiger roared and one of the golden tiger’s paws slapped heavily on the man’s head, its bloody mouth opened wide and hissed towards his face, “Roar!”

Lu Youyi’s eyes froze open and Jiang Luo walked up to him with a ragged breath and crouched down, ” Lu Youyi, are you an idiot?”

Lu Youyi : “Huh?”

Jiang Luo’s lips were pursed, suppressed downwards, his face restrained and tense, vaguely mixed with a deliberate indifference. It was as if the scene in which Lu Youyi had sacrificed his life to stop the danger had not touched him in the slightest, but had repulsed him.

“Why are you lunging,” the tone was even a little annoyed, “do I need you to do that?”

But Lu Youyi didn’t see anything wrong with him at all, and he replied stupidly, “I see you’re getting weak in the legs, if I were slower you’d be dead.”

Jiang Luo’s inexplicable anger stalled as he took a deep breath and pulled the fool up, looking coldly at the man pinned beneath the tiger.

Just now, in the heat of the moment, his head was filled with anger and tension, and he was almost on fire with the thought: How dare you fucking touch my people?

In such a mood, he summoned Yin Hu, which he had never summoned before. Jiang Luo’s eyes grew colder as he looked at the man, and the harder Yin Hu stepped on his paws, the angrier his roar became.

The man seemed to have strength left in him, his grip on the knife moved, and Yin Hu, as if provoked, slammed a heavy claw into the man’s head again without mercy.

Blood dripped from the man’s forehead and the man finally closed his eyes. Jiang Luo walks slowly over with Lu Youyi in tow, his sharp gaze sweeping the man’s entire body and kicking the large knife in his hand aside with his foot.

Lu Youyi looked at the mighty tiger without blinking, and never stopped exclaiming, “Crap, crap, crap, crap!”

“So damn handsome!”

He also tried to reach out to touch the tiger, but saw the man in its paws jerk his eyes open and the wound on his forehead had returned as good as new.

Lu Youyi sat down on his butt in shock, “Jiang Jiang Luo, he’s opened his eyes again!”

Jiang Luo immediately looked sideways, only to see the man looking straight at them with his eyes open, but not making any movement except to look at them.

The tiger roared and the man looked expressionlessly at the tiger and then at Lu Youyi and Jiang Luo , “Who are you.”

He paused, “And who am I.”

Jiang Luo : “……”

Lu Youyi : “……”

The man’s expression showed a little confusion that dissolved the coldness on his face, “Why is this tiger stepping on me.”

“You’re pretending again?” Lu Youyi said with contempt, “You deadbeat, think you can fool us like that?”

“Is Deadbeat my name?” The man said, “And what’s your name?”

Jiang Luo : …… has a trigram when things are not decided.

The trigram proved that the man was not lying. Jiang Luo cautiously wrapped the golden talismanic culture around the man as a si snake before letting him rise.

When the man got up, Jiang Luo knew why he had lost his memory.

As the tiger pounced on the man, it pounced him right into a sharp stone. The stone plunged into the back of the man’s head and, not knowing what the man was from, in a short time the wound on the back of his head had healed, the wound wrapping tightly around the stone, leaving only a small point of stone left on the outside of his scalp.

Jiang Luo squinted at the wound and even smiled a little.

He and Lu Youyi looked at each other and Lu Youyi coughed his throat, “Have you really forgotten who you are?”

There was some blank confusion on the man’s expressionless face, “Didn’t you say that my name was Dead Ghost?”

Lu Youyi choked and then let out a bad laugh, “No, Dead Ghost is just your nickname, you have a big name.”

The man asked, “What is my first name?”

“Call it Jiao Jiao,” Lu Youyi said with a straight face, “because you’re so fond of being pampered.”

The man pondered for a moment, “Then you may as well call me Dead Ghost.”

Having established that the man’s amnesia was genuine, Jiang Luo did not want to do anything to a man who knew nothing as if he were a newborn, and he said indifferently, “Lu Youyi, let’s go.”

Lu Youyi immediately leaves the dead ghost behind and follows Jiang Luo. The two of them walk out of the cemetery, but the man who just tried to kill them picks up a large knife and follows them silently.

Jiang Luo released Yin Hu and pulled up his lips coldly, “If you follow us again, I will not be polite.”

“Why?” The dead ghost looked at them confused, “Aren’t we friends?”

Who would be friends with someone who wants to kill them?

Jiang Luo, without further ado, released Yin Hu against the men and left the tomb with Lu Youyi at a fast pace.

The man left in place struggled to resist the tiger’s attack and slowly moved towards them in pursuit.

……

Half an hour later, Jiang Luo and Lu Youyi returned to their accommodation. They spoke to their companions about the bodies of the little girl’s parents, which was too strange for the crowd to sort out.

“It looks like we’ll have to wait for the selection at the shrine tomorrow,” Wen Renlian frowned, “I don’t know what this selection means, do you think it looks like a selection of people to be sacrificed?”

“But if it was the person who chose the sacrifice, the village chief would not have said something like ‘Don’t be in a hurry,’ ‘Don’t get into a dispute,\'” Ge Zhu said, resting his chin. “Unless this sacrifice, in their eyes, represents a good moral.”

Liao Si was about to say something when he suddenly looked out of the window, surprise flashing in his eyes, and then said with a smile, “There seems to be a living dead man outside the door.”

No sooner had he spoken than a shadow was reflected in the gap in front of the door of the room.

Lu Youyi instantly turned his head to Jiang Luo: “It’s not a dead ghost, is it?”

Jiang Luo raises his eyebrows and gets out of bed to open the door, and there is a man standing outside with a sword like an ancient man.

The man’s body was covered in numerous wounds, which had already healed, and only his even dirtier clothes and blood testified to his wretchedness. When the man saw Jiang Luo, his eyebrows were relieved, but his face was still paralysed as he said, “Friends, I have come to find you.”

Lu Youyi walked up behind Jiang Luo and Lu Youyi said, “Why are you still there?”

Liao Si looked at the men from behind the crowd, a twinkle in his eye and he raised his voice, ” Jiang Luo , do you know this living dead man?”

At the sound of the man’s voice, he glanced in the direction of Liao Si, who made a silent gesture: Why are you here?

But as soon as the word was spoken, the man turned his eyes away without a waver, fixing his gaze on Jiang Luo and Lu Youyi as if he didn’t know Liao Si at all.

Liao Si’s forehead twitched, how did Teng Bi become like this?

“He’s the living dead?” Jiang Luo turned to Liao Si and asked, “What’s a living dead man?”

Liao Si returned to his senses and explained, “The living dead are people who can act like living people even though their bodies are dead. Unlike their counterparts, they still have living memories and emotions, as if they were alive, but dead.”

Ye Xun added: “The living dead are extremely rare, and some people are so fierce that no one dares to take their souls away even after death.

The man in front of him is undoubtedly the one Ye Xun is talking about.

Jiang Luo wondered with interest why a rare living dead person would appear at Shen Tucun?

And why did they come to kill him and Lu Youyi?

The crowd looked at the man curiously, and seeing that some of the other participants had noticed the commotion, Jiang Luo let the man in.

The man sits at the table and places the large knife on the tabletop. His knife still has the soil from his attack on Jiang Luo, and in the light Jiang Luo can clearly make out the knife, which is sharp but simple in appearance. A loop of black fabric was wrapped around the handle of the knife, otherwise there was no decoration.

Under Jiang Luo’s gaze, some black fierce aura gushed out around the blade. Amidst the tumbling of the foul qi, there were countless ghostly faces grimly trying to escape and being imprisoned within the blade’s surface.

“You want my knife?” The dead ghost snapped, “But I can’t give it to you because it’s the only weapon I have.”

Jiang Luo withdrew his eyes and said with a lazy sideways glance, “How did you find your way here?”

“Following your scent,” said the dead ghost, his sword brow furrowed, “the scent refuted and sent me on a long detour. Are ye trying to lose me, my friend?”

Lu Youyi whispered in Ye Xun’s ear, “He speaks so strangely and literally.”

Ye Xun nodded, “By the looks of him, he must have been alive for hundreds of years.”

Zhuo Zhongqiu asked curiously at this point, “What’s your name?”

The dead ghost said, “My name is Dead Ghost.”

The crowd was silent, “…… is such a great name.”

It was getting late and it was time to rest. The people put these matters aside for the time being and went back to bed to rest.

While others are busy and no one cares, Liao Si stands beside the man as if by accident, looking out the window, ” Teng Bi, what are you up to?”

The dead man looked at him strangely, ” Teng Bi who is it.”

Liao Si frowned, “Did you really forget or did you fake it?”

The dead ghost didn’t want to pay attention to this quaint man, he closed his eyes and turned a blind eye.

Liao Si’s smile faltered, and when he saw that someone from Bai Hua University was coming over, he had to press on.

Day 2.

Early in the morning, Jiang Luo left the house to look for the little girl he met yesterday.

It didn’t take long for him to notice the changes in the village.

There are many more girls coming and going in the village. These girls are rosy-cheeked, their black pearl eyes bright and affectionate. Their shiny hair is braided behind their backs, their bodies are slender, their clothes are neat and flattering from head to toe, as if they were not peasant girls.

Jiang Luo approached a good-looking girl and smelled a sweet fragrance on her as soon as he got close, “Do you know why there are so many pretty girls today, sister?”

Jiang Luo was so good-looking that she didn’t look like a mortal, and when she smiled on purpose, she made people blush. We all want to be the god’s bride, so of course we have to dress up properly.”

“The shrine selection is for the gods to choose a bride?”

The girl’s eyes gradually took on an obsessive look, “The shrine is only opened when a bride is chosen for the god, and we have long since pledged ourselves to him. As soon as the gods have chosen me, they will come on an auspicious day to welcome me away.”

Jiang Luo said a thoughtful farewell to the girl and, after a quick look around the village without finding the little girl in red, went back to the house to join his companions.

The companions likewise noticed something about the girls in the village, and Wen Renlian asked, holding his chin up, “Do you know about the Falling Flower Cave Girls?”

“Together with the corpse chaser and the bewitcher, the three evils of western Hunan,” Wen Renlian said softly, “are unmarried women who imagine that they are married to a god, that their beloved is a god, and that they will not be moved by mere mortals. They maintain their beauty and serenity every day in anticipation of the day when they will actually marry the gods.”

Zhuo Zhongqiu said, “Are you saying that there is a god here?”

Wen Renlian shook his head, “Whether there really is a ‘god’ or someone is pretending to be a god, we can’t guess. If we want to figure out the secret here, the best way is to blend in with the girls and go to the shrine once more at six o’clock this afternoon.”

At these words, Jiang Luo, who had been inattentive, suddenly had a bad feeling and he took a step back without a trace.

“To blend in with the girls, you have to be a girl, of course,” Wen Renlian said with a smile, “and while I can, I’m not enough. Isn’t that right, Jiang Luo?”

The crowd looked back at Jiang Luo in unison.

Jiang Luo : “…… I don’t wear women’s clothing.”

Fight to the death not to wear.