Chapter Sixteen: The Spirit Within the Wood

“What’s wrong, Huang? These trees aren’t naked beauties—why are you staring so intently?”
Fu Yang deliberately cracked a joke, hoping to dispel the oppressive, eerie atmosphere that pervaded the place.
Huang shook his head, his expression pained as if constipated. “Can you stop making dirty jokes when I’m nervous? These trees—they’re all locust trees! Who’s the madman who planted so many locusts in a place reeking of such heavy yin energy? If there aren’t any ghosts here, that’s the real miracle!”
Locust trees? What’s the issue?
Fu Yang and Old Zhao exchanged bewildered glances.
“It’s a big problem! You know how the word ‘locust’ is written? It’s made up of ‘wood’ and ‘ghost.’ It’s the ghost among plants—the tree with the most yin energy. Even planting two or three in a neighborhood is asking for trouble, easy to attract ghosts. But here, around Linxin Lake…”
He didn’t finish, but Fu Yang and Old Zhao had already caught on. The dense, layered trees encircled the entire lake—every single one of them!
“There must be hundreds here! Damn!”
Huang corrected, “Not grass, I mean trees. Locust trees.”
Fu Yang was speechless.
No matter what, both men felt a chill shoot up their spines, making them shudder. They asked Huang what they should do.
“We don’t know enough yet. I need to check out the lakeshore. The danger here exceeds anything I expected. Fu Yang, I’m not kidding. You and your roommate should head back.”
“That’s not right. I started this mess; it’s on me. How could I leave you here alone? Old Zhao can go, but I have to stay and keep you company!”
After some back-and-forth, they finally persuaded Old Zhao to leave.
Now, only Huang and Fu Yang remained by Linxin Lake.
Huang looked resigned but moved, and punched Fu Yang lightly. “You’re not afraid of ghosts, are you?”
“Heh… What’s there to be scared of? Remember when we were kids? You watched Master Lin’s vampire movies and dragged me out to the graveyard at midnight, determined to subdue zombies. We were so little back then and never scared! Now we’re well past that age.”

“Respect!”
Huang gave him a thumbs up, then parted the thick wild grass ahead. The two carefully made their way toward the lake.
Linxin Lake was actually a man-made lake, but its age and seamless integration with the environment made it look entirely natural. The lakeshore was soft and sandy, pleasant enough underfoot.
Fu Yang felt uneasy, coughed lightly, and remarked how quiet it was—no birdsong, nothing. He even missed the noisy sounds of the city.
“Not just birds. Look at the lake—there aren’t even any fish. This place is a land of yin. If fate aligns, it could turn into a corpse-breeding ground in a decade or so. Tsk tsk, a corpse-breeding site in the city center—now that’s a world-class oddity!”
Land of yin? Corpse-breeding ground?
Fu Yang found Huang’s words increasingly difficult to understand. They hadn’t seen each other in years, and their experiences had diverged so much. Still, childhood bonds remained.
“Let me see just how deep this damned lake is!”
He opened the heavy cloth bag, revealing red thread, talisman papers, cinnabar, ink, brushes, Guanyin soil, and a short peachwood sword.
What shocked Fu Yang most was the presence of a tightly bound rooster inside the bag!
Was Huang planning an impromptu barbecue here? But Huang offered no explanation. He pulled out a yellow talisman paper, dipped the brush in ink, and swiftly drew a complex, twisted character. The edges glimmered faintly.
As soon as the character appeared, Fu Yang felt a strange urge—he felt he could copy it himself…
Huang shouted, “By urgent decree, the Three Pure Ones grant me power! Go!”
The talisman soared through the air, hovered briefly above the lake, then plunged rapidly into the water.
“All right, let’s see how deep Linxin Lake really is,” Huang said, winking at Fu Yang.
Half a minute passed, but the talisman did not reappear… Huang’s expression darkened.
A full minute later, still nothing… Huang grew uneasy, muttering that it couldn’t be.
Finally, after two whole minutes, the talisman emerged from the lake with a rush of water, spontaneously combusting in midair into two flames, forming the characters “Five” and “Ten.”

Fu Yang hadn’t had time to ask what that meant before Huang’s eyes widened and he cursed, “Damn it! Over fifty meters deep! Are they trying to dig through the earth?”
Linxin Lake is fifty meters deep?!
The number startled Fu Yang. The lake in Jiangcheng University’s forest campus wasn’t famous, rarely mentioned within the school, but this discovery was shocking.
“Well, this is getting more interesting. Yang, your university isn’t exactly a peaceful place. There must be deeper secrets here…”
Fu Yang scratched his head. “So now what? At fifty meters, even if we could swim, we wouldn’t dare go down. You’d need professionals in diving gear to reach the bottom.”
“Who said anything about going to the bottom? We don’t know what’s real or not—diving in blindly is suicide! Tonight I’ll set up an invisibility talisman array and keep watch here, so that water corpse doesn’t crawl out to kill again, and I can learn more about this haunted place.”
Fu Yang glanced around at the dense locust grove, so thick that even daylight barely penetrated. He shivered involuntarily.
“Really going to spend the night here? Isn’t that practically begging the ghosts to come for us?”
“No choice. In the history of Daoist arts, once a water corpse appears, it kills one person every night. Night before last, Du Du died; last night, another poor female student. Tonight, that water corpse will surely strike again. Since we don’t know its target, we have to wait at its doorstep…”
Fu Yang understood. Huang intended to prevent more deaths by intercepting the water corpse from Linxin Lake tonight.
Though scared, Fu Yang thought about how his friend had nothing to do with this mess, and resolved to risk his life alongside him.
The two wandered the lakeside. Huang observed and memorized every detail of the terrain; Fu Yang, with nothing to do, could only keep him company. They reminisced about childhood in the afternoon, laughter easing their nerves…
By six o’clock, the forest grew ever darker. The conversation ceased. Huang rolled up his sleeves with a flourish. “All right, time to show what I’ve got!”