32: Chapter 32 Ancient City, Gathering of Ghosts!

He was just about to continue searching for the basement entrance so he could finish early and call it a day.

Suddenly.

A black door materialized without warning right in front of Lin Ye.

"Another one?"

The dark iron door frame was covered in reliefs of human faces, and the door handle was wrapped in damp, long hair.

The door swung open silently, revealing bright sunlight and lush green grass inside.

An elderly woman with white hair sat on a rattan chair, beckoning to him kindly as she muttered, "Xiaoye, come here. Grandma made your favorite jujube cake..."

Lin Ye didn't stop his stride, casually swinging the zhulong staff.

The golden staff shadow slammed into the door frame, intertwining fire and lightning. The dark iron shattered, and thousands of human faces screamed in unison.

The sunny grass field behind the door, along with the old woman's kind smile, was torn into flying fragments amidst the screech.

He stepped over the pool of sticky black water on the ground without even lifting an eyelid.

"Gulp..."

Wang Zheng and the others seemed somewhat accustomed to Lin Ye's unreasonable, brute-force style.

Walking three steps further, the floor split open, and another door poked out from the crack.

It was a wooden door with faded spring couplets. Warm orange light leaked through the gap, and the fragrance of food enveloped a woman's gentle voice, "Honey, the dishes are getting cold..."

Obviously.

Lin Ye wasn't married yet, so it was impossible for him to have a wife.

With a strike of his staff, the wooden door and its frame were driven into the floor, smashing out a charred depression.

The light flickered and went out.

Next came the third one.

It was a carved wooden door with lion-head knockers. A hoarse voice behind the door said, "Kid, you'll have to pay for breaking it."

Without even pausing, Lin Ye sent the door and the voice away together with a single strike of his staff. The bronze lion head opened its mouth and spat out two puffs of black smoke, which were swept away cleanly by the wind from his sleeve.

The fourth door.

The fifth door.

The sixth door.

One came, and he smashed one.

A pair came, and he smashed a pair.

The zhulong staff swung in his hand with a fixed rhythm...

Raise hand, build power, smash down, retract staff, continue walking.

The others behind him went from shocked to numb, from numb to accustomed, and eventually simply started counting for him.

"The twelfth door," Wang Zheng said.

"The thirteenth door," Zhou Peng continued.

"Fourteen..." Lu Wanqing's voice suddenly changed pitch, "No, something's wrong."

The blue light pattern on her forehead flickered rapidly as her mental detection operated at full capacity, "Every time Lin Ye smashes a door, the grievance power fluctuation of that ghost thing upstairs vibrates violently. But this time's vibration amplitude... is more than ten times greater than before. She is..."

Before she could finish, she abruptly bent over and covered her head, as if struck by some invisible force.

Nosebleed trickled through her fingers onto the floor.

"Wanqing!" Su Tang rushed over to support her.

Lu Wanqing raised her head, all the color drained from her face, "She... she is enraged. That core female ghost is enraged."

Before her voice trailed off, a muffled sound came from the end of the corridor.

No.

Rather, all the walls, ceilings, and floors were heavily struck from the inside by something at the exact same moment!

Then the sound rang out again, heavier and deeper, like a giant heartbeat thumping underground.

The wall plaster peeled off in rustles amidst the vibration, revealing the slowly writhing dark red flesh walls beneath.

For a moment, a pungent stench soared into the sky.

Everyone felt as if they had been forced to swallow a mouthful of rotting blood.

Shen Qinghan's ghost-slaying blade had its special attack patterns flashing wildly, shining dazzlingly bright.

This represented just how powerful the nearby ghost's strength had become!

Everyone present felt a bone-chilling chill.

In the darkness, a woman's voice faintly drifted over.

The voice seeped out from the walls, from under the floor, from the ceiling, and from every single crack.

She was chuckling softly.

The laughter was sometimes near, sometimes far, sometimes high, sometimes low. At times it felt like someone breathing right beside your ear, and at other times it seemed to drift over faintly from far, far away across layers of doors.

Halfway through the laughter, it suddenly turned into a sharp sob, followed by an infant's crying, and then reverted back to that hair-raising soft chuckle.

"Big Sister hates to see you leave. Keep Big Sister company and play a little longer, okay?"

The dim green wall lamps in the corridor went out simultaneously.

Immediately after, ghost doors emerged one after another on the walls on both sides of the corridor.

Unlike all the previous illusion doors, this time they were crude and ferocious!

They looked like things squeezed directly out of chunks of flesh.

Over a dozen doors appeared haphazardly on both sides of the corridor, blocking all ways forward.

Then, the doors opened!

Grey mist, so thick it was almost liquid, surged out from within the doors.

It carried countless fragmented murmurs, cries, sharp laughs, teeth-grinding sounds, and string after string of meaningless whispers.

Suddenly, the floor beneath everyone's feet vanished.

A sense of weightlessness instantly washed over them.

Tumbling in the air for a few seconds, the group heavily slammed onto a patch of hard flagstones.

Wang Zheng was the first to crawl up. Clutching his bruised knees, he raised his head, and then his entire body froze.

The surroundings were no longer the inside of the villa.

They were in an ancient city!

A bluestone paved main street extended straight ahead, flanked by crooked, crowded wooden buildings. Faded lanterns hung under the eaves; though devoid of fire, they emitted an eerie green glow.

At the end of the long street stood a three-story wooden pavilion with flying eaves and painted beams.

A plaque hung above the lintel, with most of its paint peeling off, barely allowing three characters to be recognized.

Zuixian Pavilion!

The entire city was completely deserted and terrifyingly quiet.

"What kind of ghost place is this?"

Jiang Xiaohong's face looked awful.

Then, the ancient city came alive...

All the closed doors and windows on both sides of the street lit up with ghastly green light simultaneously in an instant!

The sound of opera singing seemed to drift over, accompanied by various other eerie noises.

Someone was dragging a heavy object and walking slowly across the flagstone ground, fingernails were scratching repeatedly against the door panels, and something was chewing—crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.

Someone was crying; the weeping drifted down from the second floor, torn into intermittent fragments by the wind.

Someone was laughing; the laughter was sharp and petty, like a dull knife scraping against bone.

"Careful!"

Shen Qinghan shouted.

All the doors on both sides of the street opened simultaneously!

A ghost creature walked out of every single door.

An opera actor wearing bright red theatrical costumes had their face painted with thick stage makeup, the corners of their mouth split all the way to their cheekbones, carrying a bone fan in hand whose surface was densely embedded with human teeth.

A hunchbacked old man wrapped all over in yellowing talismans was hunched over. The corners of the talismans were covered in dried blood, and with every step he took, a talisman detached from his body, falling to the ground to burn into a ball of green fire.

A tall man carrying a black coffin on his shoulder walked out from the alley. The coffin lid had a crack open, from which sticky black water seeped out, hissing and smoking as it dripped onto the ground.

"So many... It's over, we're done for!"

Fear surged like a tide, making it difficult for Wang Zheng to breathe.

The man who had previously shouted about making a big splash in the Ghost Domain was almost scared to the point of pissing himself right now...

There were even more...

Drenched children crawling out of the wellhead, a long-haired woman hanging upside down from the eaves, a skin-and-bones old man squeezing out from the wall, a middle-aged man with only an upper body and no lower body crawling out from the gaps between the flagstones...

Over twenty of them, and all of them were Resentful Spirit-tier ghosts!

The lowest was at the early Resentful Spirit stage, most were in the middle stage, and the last six were all at the peak of the late Resentful Spirit stage!

Just a hair's breadth away from a malevolent ghost!