Forgotten Photo Studio

Chapter 51 "Double Happiness"

Xu Yan stepped out of the ancestral hall.

The bluestone pavement underfoot felt strangely soft and slippery; when I lifted my foot, there was a sticky resistance.

The dark red sunlight bathed everything in a color that resembled old, scabbed blood.

A Zhe's legs went weak, and he almost turned around and ran away, but the branding from the shrine fire burned him intensely, like nails driven into his bone marrow, pinning him to the spot.

"Brother Yan...this place feels like it's swallowing people up..."

Ah Zhe's voice trembled, pressed down by the stagnant air.

Xu Yan did not turn around; all his attention was focused on resisting the strange "comfort" coming from his right arm.

The fragment of "Abyss" thrived here, tearing wildly at the brand on his palm.

The path that Chen Dingkun pointed to had become a dark passageway squeezed out by the distorted space.

In the thick, churning shadows on both sides, countless pained faces appeared and disappeared, howling silently.

After walking for an unknown amount of time, a discordant sound pierced the deathly silence and drifted faintly in.

It's music.

The tune played by the old-fashioned suona was sharp and desolate, turning joy into a mournful funeral.

The sound of gongs and drums was dull and lifeless, like striking an empty coffin lid.

Beneath this eerie joy was a low, suppressed sob, not like a funeral wail, but more like a desperate hiss squeezed from the depths of the throat by something that had blocked the mouth.

Joy and sorrow were twisted and intertwined.

"Did you hear that?" Xu Yan asked in a low voice.

Ah Zhe nodded vigorously, his face deathly pale: "This...this is for people to hear?!"

The further you go, the clearer the sound becomes.

The stench in the air was masked by another smell: the cloying sweetness of cheap perfume mixed with strong sandalwood, making one's temples throb and feel nauseous.

Sparse, pale white paper money began to appear at my feet.

These paper money were not still, but trembled and rotated slightly on the ground.

They formed a perfect line, as if someone had specially paved the way for the departed souls.

Xu Yan squatted down and picked up a coin with his fingers.

It felt cold and heavy to the touch, unlike paper at all.

The edges were painted with crooked, writhing runes in a dark red, almost undried blood plasma.

A faint... throbbing and appetite emanated from the fragment inside his right arm.

He flung his hand away in disgust.

Two points of light appeared ahead of the passage.

Two lanterns, emitting a faint green glow, swayed and hung on either side of a dilapidated courtyard gate.

The lantern was made of a kind of tanned thin leather, and the green light it emitted made the huge, red "囍" character on the lintel look like a ghost face.

The gate was wide open, revealing a dilapidated old-style courtyard.

There were at least twenty or thirty "people" standing in the courtyard.

Their figures were blurry, dressed in drab old-fashioned clothes, with their heads bowed and motionless, like paper dolls arranged in a fold.

However, the chilling, deathly aura emanating from them was so thick that it almost condensed into black water, dripping onto the ground.

Ah Zhe's lips trembled, and his voice shook: "Brother Yan...are they...waiting to watch the show? But whose eyes...are so empty?"

A simple platform was set up in the center of the courtyard.

Several ghostly figures resembling musicians played instruments, producing sounds that tormented the nerves.

Their movements were stiff, their expressions were numb, and their eye sockets were hollow black.

All the attention of those who "exist" was focused on the innermost part of the courtyard. There stood two empty armchairs, yet they exuded a chilling majesty, as if some unseen entity sat upon them.

In front of the grand master's chair, a huge and intricate array was drawn on the ground.

The dark red lines were not cinnabar, but rather tiny, trembling, viscous beads of blood that had not yet congealed, emitting a fresh, fishy smell.

Whenever the suona sounds, those blood droplets tremble simultaneously, as if they are breathing.

At the core of the formation, a pair of distorted yin-yang runes were emitting an ominous red light, rising and falling in rhythm with the suona music.

At the edge of the formation, there were two bowls of rice piled high and shimmering with black smoke, each with a pair of ebony chopsticks stuck straight up on top—blood offerings for the departed souls.

And at the very center of that pulsating array, where the red light was at its strongest.

A young man dressed in modern clothes sat slumped, thin blood vessels constantly seeping from the corners of his eyes, sliding down his face, but not a single drop fell to the ground, as if they were all swallowed up by the formation.

He was dressed in a loose, worn-out, stained, old-fashioned red wedding suit, with a rotten red flower on his chest that was almost falling off.

She looked like an empty shell forcibly stuffed into a dress and placed in the center of the room.

Only the occasional, extremely subtle tremor reveals a sliver of remaining life.

Xu Yan's gaze was fixed on the groom's face.

Although the other person's face was stiff and distorted, completely consumed by fear, the contours of their features...

Xu Yan felt as if his heart had been pierced by an ice pick!

He knows this man.

It was that deliveryman who always ran errands near the photo studio, who had argued with him over delivering the wrong package, and who had once brushed past him late at night, exhausted—a young man with the same surname as him.

In another corner of the courtyard, two blurry figures were arguing in hushed tones.

A voice with a hoarse tone repeatedly emphasized, "The money for carrying the sedan chair must be paid in full; that's the rule!"

Another reason was that the organizers of this "wedding" gritted their teeth and tried to lower the price: "Four hundred is too much! Three hundred and eighty is already quite a lot!"

The tone of their bargaining even had a touch of streetwise charm.

Ah Zhe listened in a daze, almost thinking he was hallucinating, and couldn't help but mutter to himself, "Such a wealthy family, do they really care about twenty yuan?"

Xu Yan's face darkened, and his voice was colder than the air: "Three hundred and eighty, this is not a bargain, but the toll for the groom to go to the Ghost Realm."

A sudden chill ran down A Zhe's spine, as if he had been sliced ​​by an ice blade.

The groom's face, reflected in the eerie red light, seemed to have become a mirror.

Xu Yan suddenly saw another version of himself in it, with the same surname "Xu", also thrown into the ghost formation, becoming a joke.

"How could it be...it's him..."

Xu Yan heard his own voice dry and cracked. Almost instinctively, he opened his mouth, wanting to shout, "This has nothing to do with me!"

But the words stuck in his throat, turning into a suppressed gasp.

All hesitation and excuses were instantly crushed by this chilling fear.

Just then, the suona music suddenly stopped, as if the pipe had been broken, letting out a broken wail before falling silent.

The suppressed sobs also stopped simultaneously, as if the vocal cords had been severed by a knife.

An absolute silence suddenly crashed down, the vacuum-like stillness tearing at the eardrums, producing a sharp ringing sound.

In the courtyard, all the ghostly guests with their heads bowed, at this moment, all the ghostly necks clicked and turned at the same time, their movements so synchronized as to be utterly lifeless.

At the same moment, all the ghostly figures' mouths opened wide, revealing dark, empty oral cavity, forming a uniform "smile" that no living person could possibly make.

The black incense sticks at the edge of the magic circle suddenly turned as black as ink, their smoke swirling and condensing.

A wedding dress's hem was faintly visible in the black smoke, its trailing hem seemingly stained with blood, dripping onto the ground like crimson "flowers."

A chilling gaze pierced through the smoke and landed on Xu Yan.

A ghost marriage is about to take place.

(End of this chapter)