Chapter 38#
Those Who Listen to Stories (Part 5)#
The reason for Huang Yiyue’s imprisonment was not explicitly stated in the newspapers, but it was likely related to the two madams of the Qin family who died in Cheng’en Hospital back then. The matter of kidnapping Ye Sheng could only be said to be an attempt. Huang Yiyue’s imprisonment was probably because she was pushed out by the Xie family to be a scapegoat.
Qin Wenrui was a confirmed murderer, but the crime of the Xie family who assisted in the surgery was difficult to identify.
The Xie family’s Cheng’en Hospital had already closed down, and the evidence had disappeared completely.
Ye Sheng didn’t pay much attention to this news. He opened Xingyun Live, wanting to search for that [I am a little cloud bean] to ask some questions about Lover’s Lake, but [I am a little cloud bean] was the default ID for new users on the Xingyun Live platform. A search yielded tens of thousands of people, so finding him was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Perhaps he could walk through that Lover’s Lake himself.
The next day when Ye Sheng went to work at the haunted house, he was unsurprisingly greeted with a barrage of questions from Xia Wenshi and Huang Qiqi. Both of them were full of energy. After experiencing all kinds of shocking deductions in the group chat last night, their gossip hearts were now fermenting with unprecedented vigor.
Huang Qiqi: “Junior, who was in the car yesterday? A man or a woman? What’s your relationship!”
Xia Wenshi: “Tsk, you’re hiding your light under a bushel. Little Ye, you’re riding in a ten-million-dollar luxury car and coming to me for a daily wage of one hundred yuan.”
Ye Sheng pursed his lips and said quickly: “The person in the car is my friend. I met him on the train from Yinshan to Huaicheng. We happened to be schoolmates, so we started chatting. Yesterday, I asked him for help with a private matter.”
Xia Wenshi caught the keyword: “Schoolmate?!”
Ye Sheng thought that Ning Weichen was a few months younger than him and nodded: “Yes, a freshman in the same year as me.”
“…” Xia Wenshi and Huang Qiqi looked at each other and finally said “Damn” together.
Xia Wenshi was bubbling with sourness.
Why does someone drive a ten-million-dollar Bentley at eighteen, while someone else is still running a struggling haunted house after graduating for many years?
Huang Qiqi was shocked. Schoolmate???
It’s over. She felt that her junior’s limelight was about to be stolen.
So he’s not a domineering CEO or a rich second generation, but a top-tier rich second generation?!
Huang Qiqi instantly became vigilant and asked in a low voice: “Junior, what does your friend look like?”
Ye Sheng was stunned. He didn’t understand why Huang Qiqi suddenly asked this, but what did Ning Weichen look like…
Ye Sheng said casually and honestly: “He’s okay, quite good-looking.” His “okay” was already the highest praise he could give to someone’s appearance.
Huang Qiqi: “Then compared to you?”
Ye Sheng: “…” How was he supposed to say this? Ye Sheng had no concept of people’s facial features and appearance, nor did he think it was something that could be compared. The differences in a person’s eyes, nose, and height were only for distinguishing oneself from others.
Ye Sheng said: “He will come to pick me up this afternoon. You should be able to see him.”
Huang Qiqi: ???
Xia Wenshi was bubbling with sourness, clutching the feather duster in his hand and asking the heavens in silence: “Damn it, so young and so rich, and good-looking too. Nuwa, are you asleep? I’m so frustrated I can’t sleep.”
Immediately, he was stunned by Ye Sheng’s “He will come to pick me up this afternoon” and slammed the feather duster on the table.
Xia Wenshi raised his voice and repeated: “Little Ye, he’s coming to pick you up this afternoon?”
“Mm.” Even though Ye Sheng had experienced the shock of a proxy marriage in the Qin family, his concept of certain things was still slow. He didn’t think it was an intimate and ambiguous thing for a man to pick up another man from work.
Ye Sheng didn’t want to talk about these private matters with them and led the topic to work.
“Senior, aren’t you going to make a ghost bride scene? Have you bought the props?”
The words in Xia Wenshi’s mouth were held back. He said: “I’ve bought them. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Speaking of work, Xia Wenshi immediately returned to his passionate appearance of a dream-chasing youth: “Little Ye, I have a bold idea. Isn’t the Qixi Festival coming up? How about we make it a multiplayer couple’s game before Qixi? I bought a ghost bride’s dress, a sedan chair, and a double coffin for a couple. At that time, the key to solving the puzzle can be for the girl to wear the wedding dress and lie in the coffin, and the boy will carry her into the sedan chair. Do you think it’s creative?”
Ye Sheng didn’t think it was creative at all, but as a worker listening to the boss’s enthusiastic ideas, he could only perfunctorily say: “Mm.”
Xia Wenshi chuckled: “I’ve almost figured out the plot of the instance. We need a tomb keeper NPC. So, we need to recruit another person.”
Ye Sheng continued to be perfunctory: “Mm.”
Xia Wenshi was deeply gratified, considering Ye Sheng a confidant, and continued to chatter about his jump scare design for this scene.
Ye Sheng went to help set up the scene. While dividing a large bucket of blood plasma into bags, he suddenly asked Xia Wenshi.
“Senior, is the water ghost of Lover’s Lake real?”
Xia Wenshi said without thinking: “It’s definitely fake.”
“Couples at Huaian University have basically all walked across the Verification Bridge. If it were really that effective, the corpses would have filled Lover’s Lake long ago.”
Xia Wenshi said.
“I think the existence of the Verification Bridge is problematic. What is the standard of ’true’, and how do you ‘verify’ it? Men are all sensory animals. If a good-looking girl confesses to you on a quiet bridge, who would think that the love they say is fake? Oaths of eternal love are all sincere when they are spoken.”
“When I told Qiqi about this, Qiqi didn’t believe it. Qiqi believes that love can be verified, and that love for a person will flow from the bottom of one’s eyes. Isn’t that nonsense? The female ghost of Lover’s Lake is so powerful, she shouldn’t be a ghost, she should be Cupid!”
Ye Sheng was noncommittal about his analysis and asked directly: “Have you ever known anyone who walked through Lover’s Lake and was entangled by the female ghost?”
Xia Wenshi was stunned, then nodded: “Yes, when I first entered university, I joined a supernatural research society. They specialized in studying all kinds of strange things. A senior sister took her boyfriend to try it. After coming back, the senior sister started having frequent nightmares, talking nonsense, saying that a female ghost in a white dress would watch her from outside the window every time she slept. But she happened to have a cold at that time, so we thought she was sick and having wild thoughts, so we didn’t pay much attention. Later… later the senior sister dropped out of school.”
Xia Wenshi was both sad and angry when he talked about this matter, and at the same time, it was particularly ironic: “But the senior sister dropped out of school because she was driven to depression by a scumbag. If the Verification Bridge of Lover’s Lake is real, then the one who should be haunted by the ghost is her boyfriend, not her!”
Ye Sheng was stunned. Thinking of the hair with a strong smell of blood that he had fished out of the lake, he asked Xia Wenshi: “Then after she dropped out of school, do you have any news of her?”
Xia Wenshi shook his head and said: “No, her home is very far away. After she dropped out of school, no one had her contact information. I don’t know how she is doing recently. Oh no, I think I have her sister’s WeChat.” Xia Wenshi suddenly thought of something: “There was an event during the freshman year. Her phone ran out of battery, but she needed her family to help send a document, so she borrowed my phone.”
Ye Sheng said: “Can you still find it?”
Xia Wenshi: “I’ll look for it.”
At this time, a quarrel suddenly came from outside, accompanied by Huang Qiqi’s low curse. Xia Wenshi’s eyes widened: “Damn, it can’t be Qiqi’s resentful ex-boyfriend again.”
Ye Sheng said: “I’ll go out and see. You continue to look.”
Xia Wenshi didn’t understand why Ye Sheng was suddenly so interested in Lover’s Lake, but mentioning the past, he also wanted to know the current situation of that senior sister. He opened his WeChat, which had a bunch of people added without any notes, and looked for them one by one.
When Ye Sheng went out, only Li Guangyun was there. Unlike yesterday’s arrogant appearance of bringing a mistress to find trouble, Li Guangyun had dark circles under his eyes, a pale face, a stubbly beard, and a look of being out of his mind.
Huang Qiqi was obviously very angry with him: “Are you fucking crazy! Li Guangyun, I’ve already broken up with you, why should I walk the Verification Bridge with you again?”
Li Guangyun’s mental state was a bit abnormal now. His eyes were red, and he said with a trembling voice: “No, don’t break up. Qiqi, I love you. Let’s walk that bridge again. I must love you. Everything I said is true, every word is true.”
Huang Qiqi had a “Huh?” expression. Although she had read countless articles and liked to watch the “chasing wife to the crematorium” trope, in real life, a scumbag turning back is just letting you be disgusted by last night’s garbage again.
Huang Qiqi was disgusted enough: “What kind of madness are you having?”
She didn’t think she was the female lead of a novel, and Li Guangyun’s stupid appearance didn’t look like a “prodigal son returning”.
The only conclusion was that he was having a fit.
Li Guangyun’s expression suddenly became ferocious, and it seemed that he wanted to repeat his old trick of grabbing Huang Qiqi.
But at this time, Ye Sheng walked out of the haunted house. Li Guangyun recalled the pain of being grabbed by Ye Sheng yesterday and immediately gave up his evil intentions. Then, in front of the two of them, he couldn’t help but cry.
He was really crying.
His expression was terrified, and large drops of tears fell, full of fear.
Li Guangyun said with a trembling voice: “Huang Qiqi, I’m being targeted by the female ghost of Lover’s Lake.”
Huang Qiqi was still angry. At first glance, seeing Li Guangyun’s cowardly appearance and hearing him say this, she was stunned.
“What did you say?”
Li Guangyun sat down on a chair, obviously mentally tense and scared to death. He said.
“The female ghost of Lover’s Lake is real. That day when I was on the bridge with you, I saw that female ghost. She was wearing a white dress, her face was strange, and the color of her eyeballs was completely opposite to that of a normal person. Her dress was covered in blood because her two feet had been cut off. I wanted to pull you away quickly because I saw her.”
“Later, when the live broadcast incident came out, I thought it was your prank, so I didn’t think much about it. But last night, at three o’clock in the morning, my sister suddenly stood stiffly in front of my bed.”
When Li Guangyun talked about this, he shivered violently, as if he could feel the bone-chilling cold even in broad daylight.
“I wanted to drink water in the middle of the night and saw a blurry black shadow standing by the bed. I screamed in fright and turned on the light. I saw it was my three-year-old sister. She was staring at me like she was sleepwalking. I called her name, but she didn’t respond, shook her head, and went back.”
“As a result, she told me at breakfast this morning, ‘Brother, someone was looking for you yesterday.’ I asked her who it was. She said, ‘A woman in a white dress knocked on her window last night and told her, ‘Your brother owes me something.’ My mother immediately scolded her, saying that we live on the sixteenth floor, how could there be someone outside the window, you must be dreaming. My sister said aggrievedly, ‘It’s not a dream, I can even draw what that woman looks like.’”
“I felt something was wrong at that time. I asked her, ‘Did you go to my room last night?’ My sister was a little confused and said she forgot. Then she showed me her drawing. In the drawing, standing outside the window and smiling was the female ghost of Lover’s Lake, with her eyeballs completely reversed in black and white.”
“I was so scared that I couldn’t even hold my words steady. I asked her, ‘Did that person say what I owe her?’ My sister suddenly showed the same sleepwalking state as last night, looked at me blankly, then lowered her head, and said in a particularly strange tone, staring at my legs, ‘She said, you owe her a pair of feet.’”
After Li Guangyun finished speaking, he could no longer hold back and burst into tears.
He grabbed Huang Qiqi, who also had goosebumps all over her body, and shouted: “Qiqi, I was wrong! I was really wrong! I love you, every word I said on the Verification Bridge is true, let’s go again!”
Huang Qiqi finally broke free from the terrifying atmosphere and understood Li Guangyun’s logic.
“…You want to walk the Verification Bridge with me again to prove to the female ghost that you are not a heartless person?”
Li Guangyun nodded with tears in his eyes: “Yes.”
Huang Qiqi: “…” Huang Qiqi couldn’t bear it anymore: “Are you a fucking idiot?”
Li Guangyun cried his heart out again: “Qiqi, I was wrong, I was really wrong, give me another chance! Give me a chance to love you! Don’t worry, this time I will be absolutely sincere and not fake!”
Huang Qiqi said: “You are really a genius to come up with this kind of solution. If I were you, I would go and hire a Taoist priest now.”
Li Guangyun said with a terrified expression: “It’s too late. That female ghost was just scouting last night. She will take my legs soon.”
Huang Qiqi: “Isn’t it convenient for her to do it if you go to Lover’s Lake tonight?”
Li Guangyun’s lips trembled: “No, I’ve called a lot of people. With more yang energy, I’ll feel more at ease.”
Huang Qiqi: “…”
At this time, Ye Sheng spoke: “Did your sister say when the female ghost knocked on the window?”
Li Guangyun was now at a loss and answered blankly: “Around twelve o’clock at midnight. She is still young and usually goes to bed at eight o’clock at night. At that time, she should have been woken up from a dream and then came to my room.”
Ye Sheng said again: “Don’t you have a window in your room?”
Li Guangyun shook his head: “No. My bedroom is in the innermost part.”
At this time, Xia Wenshi suddenly ran out with his phone in his hand, his eyes red and his face pale.
He said: “Little Ye, I contacted the senior sister’s sister. That senior sister died three years ago!”
“In the early morning, she smashed the window with a hammer and jumped out.”