There is a trick

Chapter 125: Blind Village, Widow Village, and Lost Son Village (4K)

In the early morning, when the sky began to light up, a mule-drawn carriage was seen swaying out of the morning mist.

The sickly donkey mule hung its head, and the bell on its neck rang a few times.

The sound of the bells could be heard from far away in the mist, startling a few crows that were perched on the top of a dead tree behind a dilapidated temple. They cried loudly, flapped their wings, and flew away into the mist.

Several figures were accompanying the mule-drawn cart, and they also seemed to be in a hurry.

Among them was a tall young man who walked out of the crowd and went towards the dead tree where the crows had previously roosted.

As he approached the dead tree, he saw a body wrapped in rags under the tree.

The flesh on the corpse had been eaten almost entirely by passing wild animals and scavenging birds, leaving only some blackened flesh buds tightly attached to the bones. Waves of foul odor wafted from the corpse.

"Another sudden death..."

Zhou Chang sighed, turned and walked towards the mule cart.

If he had seen remains on the road before, he would have buried the bones on the spot or burned them on a pile of firewood to prevent the spread of plague and evil spirits. However, as he walked along the way, he had seen too many people who had died unjustly and too many abandoned and deserted villages.

If he had collected and buried them all, then there would be nothing else to do now but to bury the bodies along the way.

There were too many dead people, and even with his power, he couldn't bury them all.

"The village ahead is probably a deserted village too."

Zhou Chang returned to the team and said to Yang Rui, who was fiddling with the compass given by Yang Xifeng, "There are dead bodies on the road, but no one is collecting them.

If it was a village with people, there wouldn’t be corpses lying on the road, left for birds and beasts to eat.”

"Since it is a deserted village, it must have been haunted by ghosts and gods, which led to the village being abandoned." Yang Rui looked at the needle on the compass and said to Zhou Chang without raising his head, "To be on the safe side, let's go back and not take this road."

Ghosts and gods feed on the thoughts of all living things.

Among all living things, human beings have the most important desire for food.

Therefore, the more humans live in a place, the more it is favored by ghosts and gods. When the tide of worship surges, ghosts and gods will come in droves.

In today's world, many villages and towns have been suddenly abandoned, and countless people, carrying their elderly and children, have fled in panic. Most of them are because the grand festivals in the villages and towns have attracted ghosts and gods.

Along the way, Zhou Chang also saw many similar abandoned villages and towns.

The people in these villages either fled to unknown places or simply died quietly in their homes.

Although the villages and towns have been abandoned, ghosts and gods may still exist in them.

All things have the desire to feast, but it is not just the living that are affected.

Those 'dead' towns and villages themselves are also silently nurturing thoughts. When the time is right, weird creatures and demons will be born from them.

So when Zhou Chang heard what Yang Rui said, he nodded simply: "Okay."

He turned to look at Bai Xiu'e, Bai's father, Shi Danzi and the others, and smiled: "Let's take a detour and stop to rest when we find a slightly safer place."

Several people nodded.

The group had been walking like this all night and had not rested for a long time.

Zhou Chang reached out to grab the reins of the donkey, and pulled the donkey to slowly turn around on the road.

Yang Rui followed behind him, fiddling with the compass for a while, and suddenly said, "Could it be that there is something wrong with the compass? How come all along the way, I have walked on the road full of dead people, with corpses everywhere?
Could it be that the corpse driver made a mistake?

They gave you the compass they used to find the body as a compass for finding your way?"

"Brother Yang shouldn't be so careless." Zhou Chang hesitated for a moment, and finally shook his head, "Didn't we often walk into populated areas during the past few days using the compass?
It’s just that in the past few days, I suddenly passed by several uninhabited villages one after another.

Perhaps a large area nearby had suffered a disaster, so many villages were abandoned, and it had nothing to do with the compass. "

Yang Ruiben just muttered a few words casually.

After hearing Zhou Chang's explanation, my doubts were dispelled.

At this time, Zhou Changcai turned around while pulling the sick mule, and suddenly heard a dull sound behind him: "Bang! Bang! Bang!"

Hearing the sound that sounded like a wooden stick hitting the soil, Zhou Chang turned around and looked back. At the end of the road, in the gradually fading morning mist, there was a thin figure holding a bamboo pole, constantly hitting the soil on the road.

Behind that figure, the outlines of houses and courtyards were faintly visible in the mist.

"Boom bang bang..."

The figure holding the bamboo pole opened his eyes, but his pupils were gray and there was no light in them.

——This is a blind man.

The blind man walked out of the "deserted village" at the end of the road and walked towards Zhou Chang along the road. When he passed by the corpse that had been pecked by birds and beasts, his nostrils flared and his steps obviously quickened a lot.

“Hi, hi, hi…”

The sick mule shook its head and cried a few times.

The young blind man stopped immediately when he heard the sick mule's cry.

He clenched the bamboo pole tightly, his empty eyes turned towards where Zhou Chang and his group were, his face full of anxiety: "Who is it? Who is over there?"

Zhou Chang and Yang Rui exchanged glances.

Yang Rui immediately raised his voice and asked: "Who are you?

How did you get out of that deserted village?
——Are you a human or a ghost? !”

"What, what deserted village?"

The blind young man became even more nervous, and he turned around and said repeatedly: "This is the territory of Da'an Village, where my home is - there are still many families in the village, how come it has become a deserted village?
Don't scare me, you outsider!
I can call everyone from our village over if I shout at the top of my lungs!"

"Come over if you want. Do you think I'm afraid of them?" Yang Rui sneered and gave Zhou Chang a wink.

Zhou Chang immediately followed up and said, "Brother, we are just passing by here and are traveling merchants on our way to sell goods elsewhere. We have no ill will towards you, but we just saw a dead body on the road with no one to collect it, and there is a village in front of the body.

So I subconsciously regarded your village as a deserted village with no one living in it.

I didn't expect that there are still so many people in your village?"

The blind man felt even more frightened after hearing what Yang Rui said, and he stepped back unconsciously. When he heard what Zhou Chang said, his expression eased a little, and he said, "Are you just starting out as peddlers selling goods everywhere?
If you are an old person who has been in this business for a long time, you should know our Da'an Village.

This is not an uninhabited deserted village. There are still hundreds of households in the village..."

Zhou Chang frowned when he heard that.

A market town like Qingyi Town has only about a thousand households.

Nowadays, the population is declining rapidly. A town with more than a thousand households is already considered a wealthy town.

And this young man actually claimed that the "Da'an Village" behind him had hundreds of households?

How could a village with hundreds of households be so desolate and empty? Or was the blind man deliberately exaggerating to boost his own morale?
Zhou Chang looked at the houses and buildings in the village again and said with a smile: "Brother, are you joking? Your village doesn't look like it has hundreds of households.

Don't worry, brothers. We are indeed traveling merchants who have just entered the business and are not very familiar with the local customs. But we are definitely not the bandits who rob and kill people for their goods, nor are we the sorcerers with evil intentions and crooked minds.

Otherwise, how can we sit idly by and watch you secretly retreat and go to the village to inform the news?

You can go back to the village without any worries, we will never stop you."

Zhou Chang spoke frankly.

He led the crowd, neither following the blind man into the other village nor turning around and walking away. Instead, he stood in the middle of the road, watching the blind man retreat into the light mist, approaching the entrance of "Da'an Village".

The blind young man stood at the entrance of the village, turning his head to look at the village from time to time. For some reason, he did not run away, nor did he loudly call out to his hundreds of neighbors in the same village.

The blind man hesitated for a moment, tapped the wooden pole again, and walked out of the fog.

"Are you really traveling merchants? Do you have any goods to sell?" the blind man asked Zhou Chang tentatively.

"We just returned from the Secret Tibetan Region and exchanged furs, Tibetan medicine and other goods in Qingyi Town. Now we don't have much to sell when we get off the car." Zhou Chang said with a smile, "But we still need to collect some goods along the way and sell them elsewhere.

If you have pressed tea bricks, tea cakes, medicinal herbs, mushrooms, leather goods, etc., you can bring them to us and we will definitely give you a fair price.

Even if you don't have these goods, if you have kitchen knives that have seen blood in killing, or armor and weapons stripped from the dead, you can sell them to us. We can sell them to the corpse-carrying craftsmen of the Northern School, who use them to suppress evil spirits."

"Corpse driver?

Do you know a corpse driver named 'Yang Nanfeng'?
He is also a corpse driver from the Northern School." The blind young man raised his eyebrows and suddenly asked.

"But I don't know him." Zhou Chang shook his head.

He looked at the blind man, whose expression did not change, but whose wooden pole in his hand suddenly tightened, and then he laughed and said, "But I know a corpse driver named Yang Xifeng.

Brother Yang said goodbye to me not long ago. I wonder if the Yang Nanfeng you mentioned is related to my Brother Yang?
The names are too similar.”

The blind man laughed when he heard this, and his hand holding the bamboo pole relaxed. He said, "I remembered it wrongly. The corpse driver should be called Yang Xifeng, not Yang Nanfeng.

Come with me.

Our village doesn’t produce a lot of tea, and even fewer people go out to collect herbs or hunt, so we can only see if they have the kitchen knives, armor, and weapons you mentioned at home.”

Zhou Chang also smiled and nodded: "Okay."

He had guessed earlier that the blind man was testing him with words.

If he didn't know Yang Xifeng, and pretended to know the corpse driver named Yang Nanfeng in front of the blind man, the blind man's face would change immediately, and it would be unknown what would happen next.

The blind young man led Zhou Chang and his companions into the village.

Just as Zhou Chang guessed, there were only a dozen or so houses in this village that remained intact. The rest had either collapsed to the point of leaving only ruins, or were swaying in the breeze, looking like they could collapse at any time.

"I'll call them out, and see if they have the goods you want." The blind man was talking to Zhou Chang, and he knocked the ground with the bamboo pole in his hand more and more vigorously, shouting, "There are traveling merchants coming to our village!
Do you have anything to sell? They mainly buy tea cakes, tea bricks, leather goods and medicinal materials...

If you don't have these, you can also bring them kitchen knives used in killing people, or armor and weapons stripped from dead soldiers, and exchange them for money!"

"A traveling merchant has come to the village..."

The blind man shouted again and again.

Zhou Chang heard "bang bang bang" sounds coming from the courtyards along the road, similar to the sound of wooden poles hitting the ground.

The sound was so loud that it sounded very strange to Zhou Chang's ears.

He was a little alert and looked at Yang Rui standing beside him.

Uncle Yang also squinted his eyes, as if thinking about something.

Not long after, a villager pushed open the gate and stood at the entrance holding a wooden pole.

Zhou Chang looked at the man at the door. The man had his eyes wide open, but they were empty without any light.

It turns out that he is also a blind person like the blind young man!
Could it be that - Zhou Chang looked at the wooden pole held by the blind man at the gate and listened to the sound of the wooden poles hitting the ground. He suddenly guessed something - Could it be that most of the people in this village are blind? !

"Squeak-"

"Bang!"

"Bang bang bang!"

The doors of the houses on both sides of the road gradually opened, and men, women, old and young, walked out of the doors, all holding wooden poles in their hands with empty eyes.

They followed the sound of the horse bells and turned towards Zhou Chang and his group.

Just as Zhou Chang guessed, as far as Zhou Chang could see, everyone in this village was blind!

"Will you put away the kitchen knife that was used to kill the rabbit?"

At this time, a blind man standing at the door held a wooden pole in one hand and waved a kitchen knife in the other.

As the blind man spoke, the others followed suit and asked:

"I still have some medicinal herbs left. I don't know what they are for. Would you like to take them?"

"I don't have armor on the dead, but I have some dead people's clothes here - my old wife's, my son's, my daughter-in-law's, and my grandson's. See if there is anything you need. Buy it and give me some money..."

"Do you have any medicine for chest pain? I have a good knife here, which was left by my dead husband. This knife killed several people. If you can cure my chest pain, I will give you this knife in exchange..."

……

When Zhou Chang was pulling the sick mule through Da'an Village, where all the people were blind, there were more cargoes on the mule cart.

They were all kitchen knives, medicinal herbs, furs and the like that he had collected from Da'an Village.

He originally just used the identity of a peddler to make it easier for himself to travel around, but now that he had this identity, he had to do what a peddler should do, so he collected some goods according to his needs.

Things like medicinal herbs and furs can be sold along the way.

As for things like kitchen knives and armor of the dead, he specifically collected them to see if there were any materials suitable for refining the master's sword.

The blind young man took Zhou Chang all the way to the other end of Da'an Village.

Before leaving, he said to Zhou Chang: "Everyone in our village is blind, so outsiders also call Da'an Village the 'Blind Village'.

The villagers are not able to move around easily and have no source of livelihood. They rely on exchanging daily necessities with peddlers like you to survive. However, most peddlers are cunning. I have never seen a merchant like you who only takes money to buy things that people don’t need...

thank you! "

"You will go along the road and come to a three-way intersection.

Remember to continue walking along the road to the east. The road to the east leads to the "Lost Son Village". The villagers in the Lost Son Village don't care about what's happening outside and are kind to outsiders like you. The other two roads lead to the Widow Village and the Black Wasteland Mountain. These two places are quite evil, so don't go there..."

(End of this chapter)