CHAPTER 328: CHAPTER 8: RATTLE DRUM

This eerie situation lasted for a full half-minute before the two little girls picked up the drum and kite from the ground and turned away.

Soon, they disappeared at the end of the street.

"Boss?" Sun Hang turned his head towards the crack in the door and asked tentatively.

There was no response.

"Boss? Are you still there?" Sun Hang asked again.

Still no response.

Even a blind person could see that the two little girls were peculiar—compared to those "worthless" townsfolk, the two were clearly very special beings.

However, what puzzled Sun Hang was that he had clearly "offended" them just now, yet they targeted the "shop owner" who hadn’t shown them any malice...

What is this? Does the world of the strange also bully the weak and fear the strong?

But I am not exactly "strong," right?

All Meme Abilities were lost, and those mysterious "trump cards" were nowhere to be found. Except for recovering from the time in the hospital, Sun Hang was at his weakest, with almost negligible fighting capabilities apart from the hunting pistol hidden in the underarm holster.

This place was clearly a world where the weak are prey to the strong, as could be seen from the "shop owner" casually killing those townsfolk in the street. But if that’s the case, why, when facing someone with barely any combat ability like himself, did the "shop owner" engage in fair and honest transactions rather than choosing to kill and loot?

Could it be that in this bizarre town, outsiders held superior privileges?

Strange entity? Foreign-worshipping?

These two utterly unrelated terms collided in Sun Hang’s mind.

"A little bit absurd..."

Sun Hang shook his head and reached out to push the slightly ajar carved wooden door.

As the door creaked open acidulously, the light from the street outside shone in, and the darkness in the room retreated in haste—as if fearing it. The darkness shrank into deeper corners before the light could reach, leaving just a blur of shadows.

Those black things weren’t shadows but had substance—Sun Hang had seen them once before when they dragged the middle-aged woman inside. But for some reason, those things could leave the room and be exposed to the streetlights before, yet now they had shrunk.

"Boss?"

Sun Hang asked "courteously," then pushed the wooden doors open as far as they could go.

A small stool made of bamboo strips lay overturned a meter away from the threshold. Beside the stool lay a water pipe also made of bamboo.

As for the "person" who had just been sitting here smoking, he had disappeared without a trace.

Sun Hang stepped over the threshold and entered the room.

For a moment, he felt a chill approaching from both sides behind him—darkness from the room spread towards the inner side of the outer walls where the light couldn’t reach.

But it could only reach as far as the door. Any further, and it would have to touch the light streaming in from outside.

Sun Hang felt that if he took two more steps forward, this door would close behind him again.

He crouched down, picked up the water pipe from the ground, and drew out his short knife. With a few chops, he split the stool and wedged those pieces between the door and threshold.

Unless the force to close the door could snap these bamboo pieces... As long as he heard the sound of the bamboo under stress, Sun Hang would break through the door without hesitation—the two wooden doors were thin and fragile enough that even without Meme Ability’s enhancement, an ordinary person could easily smash through them.

Sun Hang continued forward. With each step he took, the shadows in the corners retreated a step.

"Boss, where did you run off to? I still want to buy some things from you," Sun Hang said as he walked.

Still, no one responded.

These old buildings all had two-story structures. Sun Hang took out his phone, turned on the flashlight, and shone it towards the room’s corners—sure enough, there were wooden stairs leading to the second floor on both the left and right sides.

In the center of the room, against the wall, was a shrine. On the shrine sat a Buddha statue, but the statue was incomplete—from the left shoulder to the right rib, the upper part had vanished.

It seemed as if it had been sliced by a Kasaya Slash from Dongying Swordsmanship—the Kasaya Slash was so named because the direction and angle of the slash corresponded perfectly with the line of a cassock.

Sun Hang didn’t know much about Buddhism, so he couldn’t tell which Buddha or Bodhisattva this headless statue represented. There wasn’t any sign or banner indicating the statue’s identity beside it, either.

Besides the statue, there was a bronze censer on the shrine, with three extinguished incense sticks inserted inside. In front of the censer were three porcelain dishes, all with chipped edges.

Two of the porcelain plates were empty, while the middle one held the "bait block" that the "shop owner" had just bought from Sun Hang.

"Buying food not to eat, but to offer, to worship?" Sun Hang suddenly understood why "food" was so precious in Maoyun Town.

If this thing was endowed with some "religious significance," then everything made sense.

"But... why offer to a headless Buddha statue?" Sun Hang tilted his head, scrutinizing the statue on the table, "Is it a kind of evil god? Or a powerful strange entity?"