Chapter 264 - Back to the Center (2/2)
Hardly witty with words, Chongxi never once mentioned to the introverted Xiao Yu about our quest. In fact, they rarely talked about our adventures. On the other hand, Yuanyuan and Lin Feng were another completely different combination; they talked so much about our adventures that I daresay that Lin Feng must have told her another heavily-exaggerated account of my first travel through Time before and that must be why she looked so envious now.
Big Sister was at least mollified that we were fine and well. She propped a leg over a knee, saying, “All right then. Let’s talk about that magistrate constable who came looking for Father. What is going on actually? He refused to tell us anything.” Knowing that the “magistrate constable” was in fact Zheng Shuang, I shrugged. “After I apprehended the Cao Xuedong’s ghost at his house, I handed him to his girlfriend, Huang Li. But it appears that she failed to revive him. Somehow, she came up with the idea of reporting the incident to the authorities so that they would come to arrest me.” Big Sister furrowed a brow and pressed on, “And then?”
“What else?” Lin Feng quipped, saying, “We came back in time. Would you believe it? We came back right inside the Wu Zhong Police Station. Zheng Shuang was so shocked when he saw us that he choked when he was eating and noodles sprouted right out of his nostrils!” And Lin Feng burst into fits of guffaws.
Big Sister stared strangely at Lin Feng with a disapproving look on her face. Chongxi, still wiping beads of tears off Xiao Yu’s eyelashes, added, “We sent Xiao Qi and her sisters to the police district headquarters so that one of them could enter Cao Xuedong’s dead body and pretend to be him. That should clear us all.”
“Hahahaha!” Big Sister laughed and said, “You must have been learning how to cheat during your time outside! Come on, is it even logical that a person who’s been dead for seven days wake up again! Imagine how many people could be scared witless by this!” I giggled, shrugging my shoulders. “Well, that’s the least of our concern for now. At first, I only wanted Xiao Qi to pretend to be Cao Xuedong, move his body somewhere else and leave it there. But I discovered that the officer in charge of this inquiry, the one who came from the district headquarters, was also one of Huang Li’s kin. I was having hallucinations again when I shook his hand. So I decided to play a stronger hand. He could be maintaining contact with Huang Li. God knows what else they’re plotting now.”
“So where are Xiao Qi and her sisters now?” I answered with a smile, “Home, naturally. They are to go home immediately right after their errand.” That elicited an exasperated smile from Big Sister.
As we were talking, Chongxi remembered something suddenly. He turned to Yuanyuan, saying, “Speaking of errands, bring us to your old house later. We have an errand to do there.” “What errand?” Yuanyuan looked at him suspiciously. A perplexed Lin Feng then understood and he quipped, saying, “To take something back.”
Yuanyuan shrugged her shoulder with ambivalence then she too remembered something. “You reminded me of something as well, now that we’re talking about my old place.” Everyone looked at her. “The settlements at my old place are being demolished. The building team was moving West, demolishing all of the abandoned buildings there until they were forced to halt. There have been rumors… Rumors that they have encountered something bizarre!”
If she was expecting a strong and enthusiastic reception from us, she would be disappointed. None of us stirred and the few years of training in the past had seen to that. We had been seeing demons and monsters as frequently as we saw humans that there was little that could surprise us anymore.
A disenchanted Yuanyuan continued, “The building team is now just outside an old residence. They’ve tried everything but nothing they did could do anything to remove any brick or mortar from the ancient building. There have been people saying that the house was so old that it has developed a consciousness of its own. The vehicles and motors that the building team is using fail whenever they want to do anything. In the end, the foreman of the building team sent a man to climb the roof. The man was ordered to start by removing the tiles from the top but guess what happened to him!”
She paused to let the moment sink in, hoping that she could try pique our interest again only to meet the blank stares coming from us. Looking positively forlorn now, she divulged, saying, “An unseen force pushed him off the roof and the man rolled down like a ball and fell to the ground with a good many tiles coming down and crashed on him. He’s in the hospital now, badly injured. I heard that the foreman has sent for a Taoist priest a few days ago. They say he’d be performing a ritual soon!”