Chapter 96: The Wedding Procession

By the appointed time on the third day, everyone had gathered at the train station. They were not carrying much, since this was hardly a pleasure trip.

The train that had been expected shortly after one in the afternoon was delayed by another hour, and it was nearly three before they finally squeezed into the carriage.

After buying some fast food, Yan Bo ate it while the hot broth dripped and leaked everywhere, and said to the group, "Let me tell you something. Today's journey's a bit rough. Once we get to Changsha, grab a quick bite, then head straight to the coach station and take the long-distance bus to Beisheng Town. If it's too late, we'll spend the night there. If we still have time, we'll keep going. Our final destination is Jinyan Village..."

As soon as Qi Yan heard that, he thought, Good heavens... where on earth are we going? Some godforsaken backwater in the middle of nowhere? We're taking eighteen wrong turns to get there...

At first they had only said it was in Hunan Province, without making it clear that the place would be this remote.

Once the train pulled out, it headed west all the way. Of course the few of them sat together. They had barely left the city, and there was nothing much to see out the window.

Xuanxuan even found something to kill time with. "I just saw a post. Take out your phones and use any app that lets you type. Enter the letters z and s, and see what the first word that appears is... apparently it can reveal your personality."

Except for Ding Lingzi, who did not move, Yan Bo and Qi Yan, bored out of their minds, tried it on their phones as well.

Xuanxuan got "truth" as her result, which seemed normal enough.

"My first word is 'truth.' That means I'm... reserved, and kind of dark-hearted... tsk, doesn't seem very accurate."

Yan Bo squinted at the screen. "My first word is... 'posture.'"

Xuanxuan compared it with the explanation and said, "If it's 'posture,' that means you're decisive and sharp."

Qi Yan leaned back with almost no energy, on the verge of dozing off. He yawned. "Mine is... 'self-destructing.'"

"Uh? Self-destructing? Let me see... if that's your result, then your personality's a bit eccentric, and also rather gloomy. It's the kind with two extremes."

At last it was Hao Dalong's turn. The big fellow blurted out the word that came up from the initial letters without a second thought: "Zheng Shuang!"

...

Everyone turned to stare at him at once. Qi Yan was jolted half awake.

Hao Dalong scratched his nostril and asked blankly, "What are you all looking at me like that for?"

Xuanxuan put her phone away, completely at a loss for words. The others were even less able to say anything; each of them simply drifted back into their own drowsiness.

Qi Yan found it a little funny too. This broad-shouldered, solid-built elder brother was really rather adorable. In truth, not just him, but the others too, aside from the blind girl, were all rather amusing. It barely felt like a journey to investigate anything supernatural at all.

Still, no matter whether it was Zheng Shuang or not, the feeling of cramming onto a train was not exactly pleasant. You could neither sleep nor play on your phone; all you could do was listen to Yan Bo start chatting away again, talking about all manner of things from every corner of the world.

Four hours later, the train arrived.

The temperature in Changsha still felt like midsummer, and the air was rather stifling.

It was Qi Yan's first time here, but in a big city he still did not feel anything particularly striking about it; it was nothing more than a difference in layout.

Then they took a taxi to the south coach station to catch a long-distance bus. According to the place Yan Bo had mentioned, it still seemed far away...

But Xuanxuan still rushed off first to buy two cartons of Furong King cigarettes. She had the strongest craving for cigarettes. Yan Bo and Hao Dalong smoked too, and Qi Yan was a complete cigarette fiend as well. As for poor little Ding Lingzi, she could not see, to begin with, and whenever they reached a place where smoking was allowed, she was instantly surrounded by the four of them like a cluster of chimneys.

While waiting at the coach station, they also found a small place nearby to eat something.

Once they were on the long-distance bus, things became much quieter, and they could rest for a bit.

When Qi Yan half-opened his eyes again, it was already dark. The bus was no longer on the highway and had entered a county town.

Seeing that night had fallen, it would be inconvenient to go to the countryside now, so they simply found a hotel to stay in.

Qi Yan and Hao Dalong shared a room, and with that opportunity they began talking. Only then did Qi Yan remember that back in the exhibition city, it had been this elder brother who had carried him to the hospital.

"Brother Hao, I heard you used to be in the army? How did you suddenly end up with Yan Bo and the others?"

Speaking of this, Hao Dalong felt a little sentimental too. The two of them lit cigarettes, and he spoke at length. "Ah... it's a long story. I was discharged when I was about your age. My hometown's in the Northeast. Back then I ran into some trouble. If it hadn't been for Old Yan, I'd probably be dead by now."

Now that Qi Yan could be counted as one of their own, Hao Dalong was also willing to tell him more about how they had known each other before.

On the road, on the bus, he had been terribly sleepy, but once they reached the hotel he could not sleep at all, so they simply started chatting.

"Don't be fooled by how unreliable Old Yan looks most of the time. When it really matters, that old man is absolutely ruthless!"

Hao Dalong took off his shoes and leaned against the headboard.

It was probably around 2009. Hao Dalong had returned to his hometown in the North after finishing his military service in the south.

Among the people in the group, his background was the most ordinary. Both his parents were still alive, and although his childhood had been somewhat poor, it had at least been free of illness and disaster.

But his hometown was in a village in the Northeast, and Hao Dalong thought that since he had just been discharged and was full of youth and vigor, and the army had even arranged a job for him in the county, there was no reason to go back and live with his parents.

He had worked in the county town for only a few months before deciding that a dead-end salary of two or three thousand yuan a month meant absolutely nothing. He quit in a hurry, thinking of heading to a big city like Harbin to struggle for a few years, and then he moved again and again after that.

But Hao Dalong had gone into the army right after high school. Although he had spent several years in the army and was already in his twenties, his worldly experience was still not enough, and he had no real work experience either. After searching here and there, he finally managed to find a job as a freight truck driver. It was not anything remarkable, but the salary for a freight driver in a big city was still quite decent.

Now that he was in his early thirties, he was naturally much steadier. Back then, though, he was only in his twenties and still had a hard time holding himself in check sometimes.

Even though he knew he had to drive a long distance that night, he still drank quite a bit with a few friends at dinner that afternoon.

He was not drunk exactly, but his head was already a little foggy, and yet on a winter night he actually got behind the wheel of a small truck like that, preparing to take the county road to a station exit dozens of kilometers away.

Fortunately, there were no checkpoints for drunk driving on that road at that hour. But looking back now, if he had really been stopped by some traffic police officer then, his life might have turned out completely differently from what it is now.

County roads were nothing like highways. There were not even many streetlights, and the surroundings were mostly pitch-black. When he drove up to a T-junction, a group of people suddenly appeared on the road ahead. Not one or two people, but a whole group...

Thankfully, he had not been going too fast. Once he spotted them, he hurriedly braked, or else he would have flattened several of them. Those people were crossing the road from one side to the other just like that, on the narrow lane.

Because of the emergency stop, Hao Dalong's body lurched violently forward and back, and half the alcohol in him was scared sober at once. His high beams had been on the whole time, so once the truck came to a complete stop, he could clearly see what was happening a few meters ahead.

The way those "people" were dressed was extremely strange. Most of them wore loose red garments. Drums and gongs hummed, and suonas blared. There were about a dozen in all. At the front were two short figures carrying a tall signboard. One person, ribbons flying, skipped forward. Bells hung from the waist of another, ringing all over their body: ding-ling-ling... ding-ling-ling-ling-ling... sharp and clear.

In the very center, a large bridal sedan chair was being carried with a bobbing motion by eight "people."

Taken together, the details made it obvious that this was a wedding procession, but certainly not in any modern style.

And there was something even stranger. If it was a festive wedding procession, should not everyone have been dressed in red robes? Why were there a few people wearing mourning hemp and filial white mixed in among them?

At the front of the procession were one person in red and one in white serving as guides, red on the left and white on the right. Toward the back, there were also a few in white, holding tall mourning banners and scattering paper money...

None of these "people" looked male or female, because every one of them wore a mask. The masks had pointed ears and pointed snouts, something like... foxes? They covered only the upper half of the face.

What was most eerie of all was the way they walked. They seemed to be bouncing along with lively little hops, yet in fact they were moving very slowly, almost as if walking through water, bobbing up and down.

The sound of the suonas was piercing and uncanny, chilling the back of one's neck.

Above the most eye-catching sedan chair, there also seemed to be a huge luminous pearl set in place.

Under the truck's headlights, everything was plain as day.

They moved across the road in a pace that was neither fast nor slow, giving no sign of being affected in the slightest by Hao Dalong's truck rushing toward them.

It took a full two minutes or more before the entire procession gradually finished crossing the road and reached the other side. Then... only the festive music could still be heard, growing fainter and fainter until it slowly vanished into the night.

Throughout the entire scene, Hao Dalong remained frozen in the driver's seat, staring blankly at everything before him... It was not until a long time after even the sounds had disappeared that he finally came back to himself. In the freezing winter night, the clothes beneath his jacket were soaked through with sweat from fright. There was simply no other way to describe it than utterly inexplicable... Had he drunk too much? What on earth had he just seen?!

By then, the other half of his drunkenness had completely worn off as well.