Chapter 18: Escaping the Zhang Mansion

After exiting Madam Zhang’s memories, Li Si returned to the Small Bamboo Courtyard. Rummaging through the wardrobe, he actually managed to find suitable clothes.

These clothes had been there for some time, probably spare clothing left behind by someone who had come to exorcise ghosts and died here.

Fortunately, there were clothes to change into, otherwise with his weak body, he could easily catch a cold.

In this world, catching a cold, given the level of medical care, could potentially be fatal.

After changing clothes, Li Si didn’t plan to stay long in the Zhang mansion. He had initially thought there was only one recently deceased ghost, but it turned out there was an even more vicious one.

Moreover, Landlord Zhang was a two-faced person. He had previously said his wife had taken her own life, but it turned out he had killed her himself.

No wonder his former wife had turned into a vengeful ghost haunting the Zhang mansion. He deserved it. Why hadn’t the ghost managed to kill him?

“Go up there,” Li Si commanded the Beheaded Ghost, pointing at the roof. The Beheaded Ghost looked at him and shook its head.

Li Si was speechless. This Beheaded Ghost could pass through walls but couldn’t climb onto roofs. He stepped back a few paces, looked at the wall several meters high, and immediately knew he couldn’t climb over it either.

“Then I’ll just use the main gate,” Li Si thought, and walked straight out of the Small Bamboo Courtyard towards the main gate.

Walking along the path, although Li Si had the protective charm and the Beheaded Ghost for protection, he still felt uneasy. After all, the Beheaded Ghost was only a low-level ghost creature.

And the protective charm could only protect against low-level and mid-level ghost creatures’ harm, it couldn’t resist attacks from high-level ghost creatures.

Moreover, the protective charm’s reaction was somewhat slow, and the Beheaded Ghost wasn’t very intelligent.

If it weren’t for this, he wouldn’t have fallen into the well earlier. It was fortunate that the ghost creature had only pushed him once, rather than stabbing him with a knife.

He wasn’t strong in this world. He thought it would be better to catch ghosts in places where people had just died, developing his strength stealthily, rather than confronting ghost creatures head-on.

After all, he only had one life. This wasn’t a game; if he died, he would truly be dead. And his soul might even be eaten by ghost creatures, never to be reincarnated.

Whoosh~

A gust of wind came, accompanied by a “rustle rustle” sound that reached Li Si’s ears. His taut nerves were triggered, and he turned his head towards the sound, only to see it was the sound of wind blowing against a window.

Because the window of this room hadn’t been closed properly, it was swaying back and forth in the wind, hitting against the door frame.

Li Si exhaled, but then felt something was off. He seemed to have seen something just now. He walked closer to the window and looked inside, seeing more than a dozen people laid out on a large communal bed. Li Si recognized these people; they were the servants of the Zhang mansion.

“So they went to sleep this early, no wonder there’s no one in the Zhang mansion,” Li Si thought to himself. But then he felt something wasn’t quite right. Looking more closely, he saw that there were both men and women on the communal bed. Moreover, these people were all wearing clothes and weren’t covered with blankets, which was clearly abnormal.

At the same time, he didn’t believe the Zhang mansion couldn’t afford separate quarters for men and women.

At this point, Li Si wasn’t in a hurry anymore. If these people were bizarre entities, he would first collect some soul points before leaving.

He opened the door and walked in, looking at these people. It felt very strange; these people looked like they were alive.

He took out the Eight Trigrams mirror and shone it on these people. Looking in the mirror, he found their appearances hadn’t changed, clearly telling him these people were normal.

Li Si walked up to one person and felt for their breath. He found they were breathing normally. He checked another person’s breath and found they were breathing too. This clearly indicated these people were alive.

But soon, Li Si’s face turned slightly pale, and small beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He extended both hands to simultaneously check the breath of these two people. It was then that he discovered the bizarre aspect.

The heaviness and frequency of these two people’s breathing were exactly the same.

Li Si touched one of them, and with a thought, a message appeared in his mind as he had expected.

“You have encountered a low-level half ghost creature—Human Corpse. This ghost creature is tied to other ghost creatures and is too low-level to form a contract.”

Is this really a ghost creature? Li Si couldn’t help but doubt. If these people were ghost creatures, why couldn’t the Eight Trigrams mirror show their death appearances?

Li Si suddenly remembered a story from his previous life. It was about a person who had died but didn’t know it, until someone told him, “You’re already dead.” Only then did he wake up and realize he was dead, after which his body decayed into a dried corpse as if he had been dead for a long time.

These Human Corpses might be in a similar situation. This also explained why he couldn’t form a contract with them. Because these people were half-dead, they still counted as half-human.

So it wasn’t strange that the Eight Trigrams mirror couldn’t show their death appearances, because these people weren’t truly dead yet.

Li Si exhaled and walked out of the room. He had to leave the Zhang mansion quickly. He felt the mansion was becoming increasingly bizarre.

He felt as if the entire mansion was wrapped in a spider’s web, getting tighter and tighter, suffocating him.

He didn’t plan to kill these people because, in some sense, they could still be considered truly alive. He couldn’t bring himself to kill a living person. Perhaps he would kill in the future, but definitely not now.

Li Si quickly walked towards the main gate of the Zhang mansion. The path was eerily quiet, without a single person in sight. At this time, the night made the Zhang mansion appear somewhat bizarrely gloomy.

He soon reached the main gate of the Zhang mansion. He had noticed earlier that the door was barred with a wooden beam, unlike modern society where there would be a lock inside.

Li Si quickly walked to the door and struggled to lift the wooden beam.

As for why he had to lift it himself, it was because he feared the Beheaded Ghost wouldn’t know its own strength and might wake up the bizarre entities in the mansion. At the same time, he was also afraid that while the Beheaded Ghost was handling the wooden beam, some bizarre entity might suddenly attack him, and the Beheaded Ghost might not react in time.

“Worthy nephew Li, where are you going?” Suddenly, a voice came from behind him, startling Li Si. He almost dropped the wooden beam he was holding.

Li Si stiffly put the wooden beam on the ground. Turning around, he saw Landlord Zhang standing at the bottom of the steps with two strong servants, smiling at him.

His heart raced. He discreetly took out the Eight Trigrams mirror and shone it towards Landlord Zhang, glancing at the mirror with his peripheral vision. He immediately relaxed. This Landlord Zhang wasn’t a ghost, at most he might be a Human Corpse.

However, he knew in his heart that this Landlord Zhang might be more terrifying than a ghost. After all, some ghosts at most were as muddled as Human Corpses. But this Landlord Zhang liked to eat human flesh.

Thinking of Landlord Zhang heartily enjoying his meal at the dining table, Li Si felt a chill. Surely this guy wasn’t planning to kill him and turn him into a dish?

Thinking of this, a flash of murderous intent crossed Li Si’s mind.