Smoke and Fire [GL] - Chapter 10

After speaking, the two women led the way back to the Shen residence. This time, the towering gate wasn’t closed, but the scenery inside was blurry, like an unrendered section in a video game.

Luo Yao looked up at the increasingly violent yellow sandstorm and said, “Let’s go.”

“Hey, why are these two calling us ‘experts’ or ‘Elders’?” Yi An immediately stuck close behind her, starting her cosplay as a sticky plaster.

“Some attachments, to allow us to complete the commission, will assign us reasonable roles,” Luo Yao patiently explained. “You can simply understand it as role-playing.”

As they spoke, they walked shoulder to shoulder through the dimly lit doorway. What appeared before them was a solemn and luxurious courtyard.

Faceless servants moved constantly throughout. A side room was brightly lit. Servants carried water basins in, and what they poured out was bright red bl00d.

“Are we… crashing a delivery room scene?” Tan Tan looked at Luo Yao with a hint of confusion—since her birth, she had stayed in the Celestial Realm and had never witnessed a human giving birth.

“No,” Luo Yao corrected her with lowered eyes. “It’s a dystocia (difficult labor) scene.”

Without waiting for Tan Tan’s look of astonishment, she reached out and stopped a featureless house servant carrying a water basin, asking, “Who is inside?”

“It’s the Third Madam,” the servant replied.

“What’s happening?”

“Difficult labor, heavy bleeding…”

The servant was halfway through speaking when she was suddenly interrupted by another voice: “Was the infant just born and washed away in the wooden bucket earlier hers?”

The questioner was not Luo Yao, but Si Yin. When this person wasn’t joking, she became unapproachable. Her eyes were cold as she spoke, giving off a strong sense of pressure.

Unexpectedly, upon hearing this, the servant immediately lowered her head, carrying the water basin and walking away without looking back, as if she had heard an unspeakable taboo.

“Uh, that.”

The bar girl saw her reaction and suddenly spoke hesitantly, “That child, I think, must have been a girl.”

Everyone’s scrutinizing gaze immediately focused on her—the reason being: the infant was covered in bl00d and dumped directly into the river. Even several real Gods here couldn’t see clearly, so how did she?

“No, don’t look at me like that! Isn’t the hint obvious enough? Ancient times, Shen residence, wealthy family, ‘Third Madam’,” the girl counted on her fingers. “They want a son, but she gave birth to a daughter. Don’t all TV dramas play out like that?”

Yi An “Aiyed” and reached a consensus with her: “Sharp observation, sister! I agree with this. It also explains why that person just ran away.”

Si Yin only snorted through her nose but said nothing, indicating that she actually agreed with the viewpoint.

Just then, the two servants who carried the wooden bucket earlier suddenly appeared behind them. Unsure if they had heard their conversation, they just said faintly:

“Elders, how much longer do you intend to delay?”

Hearing this, Luo Yao looked up, meeting the spot on their faces where eyes should have been, and smiled sweetly: “Since we are here to banish evil, we naturally must observe your residence’s feng shui comprehensively. By not allowing us to ask more, what are you afraid of?”

Her tone was actually very gentle, not sounding like an interrogation, but for some reason, it made people dare not be perfunctory.

The two servants fell silent simultaneously, standing with bowed heads.

Luo Yao briefly scanned the courtyard. Without being polite to them, she led the other four people to walk through the courtyard from beginning to end.

First, the obvious: there was not a single child in this courtyard, which was clearly abnormal for an influential family.

Secondly…

As they passed several long-abandoned courtyards, Luo Yao suddenly turned to the two servants and asked, “The one giving birth just now was the Third Madam. What about the First and Second Madams?”

The two servants looked down at their noses, focusing on their hearts, neither speaking.

Luo Yao didn’t press the question, simply stopping and detouring to the Ancestral Hall. Strangely, Yi An felt a chilling draft as soon as she entered. Although it looked brightly lit from the outside, the inside was very dim.

Yi An had only seen this kind of ancestral hall in TV dramas and found it fascinating. She reached out her finger, intending to poke one of the spirit tablets, and then… then Pia, Si Yin slapped her back out the door.

“Dangerous scene. Go back to courting death on your own. Bye-bye.” She waved her hand at the door without looking back and went inside with Luo Yao and Tan Tan.

“What the hell!”

“What the heck, big sister…”

Yi An and the bar girl swore simultaneously, then slowly exchanged glances: Awkwarding.

“Haha, she’s just like that. Don’t take it too seriously.” Yi An gave an awkward laugh, but she was raging inwardly: What the hell, I’m actually defending that jerk Si Yin. I must be crazy?!

The bar girl slowly sat down on the steps of the Ancestral Hall and asked her, “But she’s quite formidable, isn’t she?”

Yi An was stunned for a moment: “How can you tell?”

“She’s beautiful, and confident,” the girl looked at her with her heavily made-up eyes. “Not like people like me, like street rats, where even a cleaning lady gives you a bonus of spit. Hahaha.”

This time, Yi An was silent for a long time. When she spoke again, she didn’t even notice that her tone had softened considerably.

“Actually, I’m an orphan,” she sat down too, suddenly taking a keen interest in the gaps in the steps. “You might think I’m crazy, but I’ve never had a New Year’s Eve dinner. Only after going to university did they accompany me… Hah, why am I talking about this.”

The girl stared at her thoughtfully for a moment, then suddenly rested her chin on her hand and said, “Are you familiar with the person in white clothes?”

Yi An was taken aback, subconsciously wanting to say yes, but she immediately recalled the abruptly vanished ghosts of Yunshan Village, the hateful Lin Shuang, and the so-called “Foremost High God of the Celestial Realm.”

She slowly said, “I guess so.”

“Oh,” the girl continued, “Does she have anything special about her? I mean, compared to that one just now.” (Referring to Si Yin)

Compared to Si Yin, Luo Yao is clearly several levels higher, Yi An thought.

But just before the words could leave her mouth, her long-neglected wariness—always faint due to her naturally carefree nature—suddenly flickered slightly.

When she looked up again, she showed a perfectly nuanced expression of confusion: “Anything special… not really? What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” the girl smiled slightly. “I don’t mean anything.”

…

Inside the Ancestral Hall, red candles flickered, and the shadows were distorted.

Luo Yao quickly scanned all the spirit tablets, pausing slightly when she saw two of them.

Her true form was the divine bird Azure Luan. General Yin (dark/evil) energy couldn’t exist around her, but these two lacquered red spirit tablets were heavily shrouded in ghost shadows, clearly on the verge of being unrestrained.

“This is…”

Si Yin couldn’t see as much. She walked forward with daring audacity and slowly read out, “Ancestress Madam Chen of the Shen Family’s Tablet… Wait, is this the First Madam’s spirit tablet?!”

“Mhm, and since concubines are not entered into the Ancestral Hall, the Second Madam is likely deceased as well,” Luo Yao slowly stroked the feather on her right ear. The flickering candlelight made her expression unreadable.

Hearing this, Si Yin made a disgusted noise: “No wonder those two women wouldn’t say anything. Holy cow, don’t tell me this Master Shen himself is wife-jinxing, and he wants us to solve it for him.”

“I don’t know yet. Let’s go.”

As Luo Yao pulled her out of the Ancestral Hall, Yi An happened to stand up upon hearing them. She looked at them with eyes full of expectation: “So fast? Is it because there were no ghosts inside at all?”

Luo Yao maintained a pitying silence.

Si Yin was less kind and ruthlessly shattered the poor girl’s last shred of fantasy: “You’re overthinking it. The quickness is because we couldn’t afford to provoke them.”

Yi An: “…” Sobs.

The group scoured the residence thoroughly, feeling justified, and then followed the two servants into the main hall.

Because of someone’s words earlier, Yi An was too scared to walk last now. She was actually the first one to enter when she lifted the door curtain, so one can imagine how terrified she was when she saw something lunge at her the moment she stepped inside.

“Aahhhhahahaha what the sh… what are you doing?!”

Luo Yao heard the awkward inflection and turned her head, stifling a laugh.

—Learning from the bloody lesson last time, student Yi An had thoroughly internalized the profound meaning of “Do not ask the dead their names, do not summon lonely souls.” The phrase “What the hell are you” only managed to produce a slight roll of the tongue before she forcefully suppressed the rest of it herself.

The student is teachable, Luo Yao commented internally.

Although she forgot to tell Yi An that this phrase didn’t apply in an Attachment Illusion.

But soon she didn’t need to say anything, because the person who had bumped into her quickly backed away three meters, holding his slightly askew head-dress, and repeatedly apologized: “Oh dear, I was too excited, Elder. I’ve startled you, please forgive me! Please forgive me!”

Yi An slowly posed a question mark: “You, you are…”

Hearing this, the man who called himself “this humble one” slowly straightened up, adjusted his sleeves, bowed, and smiled: “Pardon me, Elders. This humble one is Shen Junxuan, the seventeenth generation Head of the Shen family.”

Yi An could no longer hear what he was saying.

She stared blankly at the man’s face, the messy jumble in her brain condensing into one genuine thought: Holy. Crap.

The young man before her wore wide sleeves and a long robe, cloaked in a moon-white outer garment. His smile was simply breathtaking. She was absorbed in this thought until a voice came from behind: “Yi An.”

“Ah, ah, yes?” Yi An turned around awkwardly, like a little fox whose tail had been pinched.

Luo Yao’s voice showed a hint of suspicion: “Why are you blocking the doorway?”

Yi An realized she had been blocking the entrance for over ten seconds. Her face flushed, and she quickly moved aside.

After Luo Yao and the others entered, Shen Junxuan greeted them one by one. They sat down in the refined seating area of the main hall. Faceless servants filed in, serving them tea.

Shen Junxuan was the first to raise his teacup: “The tea in this humble house is incomparable to that of a cultivator’s abode. Please forgive my poor hospitality, Elders.”

“Master Shen looks quite young,” Luo Yao said, seemingly casually.

“My late father passed away early. It couldn’t be helped,” Shen Junxuan sighed with a bitter smile. “In fact, the reason I invited you all here is related to my late father’s death.”

“How so?”

“This stems from the rules of my Shen clan. Before the Shen family prospered, my ancestor specially invited an outside expert to survey the feng shui. This expert said, ‘The Yin energy around the Shen ancestral house is too heavy and will inevitably harm the clan’s fortune.’ So my ancestor set a rule: No female descendants are to be kept—since then, the Shen family has flourished and endured.”

Everyone’s gaze grew more astonished as they listened. Si Yin directly interrupted him, saying, “What do you mean by ‘no female descendants are to be kept’? Over so many generations, it’s impossible that not a single girl was born, right?”

Shen Junxuan’s gaze slightly darkened: “That is what I was about to say. The Elder is correct; it’s not that no female infants were born over the generations, but that the girls who were born were all strangled in their cribs.”

The four exchanged glances. Without exception, they all thought of the wooden bucket from the beginning.

“Strangled—as in, drowned?” Luo Yao asked softly.

“…” Shen Junxuan looked pained and slightly lowered his eyes. “The first few female infants were indeed strangled. Soon, because of their tragic deaths, they turned into vengeful ghosts seeking retribution, causing several tragedies. Later, the ancestor found the feng shui expert again. The expert said that these female infants would naturally have intense attachments if they died by human hands, so a different method had to be adopted—a death indirectly caused by human hands.”

“Treating the symptoms, not the root cause,” Luo Yao said flatly. “This approach can only delay things for a few generations. Once the resentment accumulates to a certain level, the result will be the same.”

“The Elder is truly intelligent. By the time of my great-grandfather’s generation, a series of suspicious deaths occurred in the Shen residence. First, the women who married into the family died one by one in unexpected accidents. Then the targets became the children; the male infants who were kept also died prematurely one after another…” His voice was very low as he spoke here, as if he truly didn’t want to remember: “Eventually, it became my great-grandfather himself.”

“Starting from my father’s generation, women who married into the Shen residence did not live past twenty, and children did not survive to full term. My own father also passed away before the age of forty.”

“What about you?”

Shen Junxuan looked at Luo Yao and explained, “I was frail since childhood. My father originally didn’t want me to inherit the family business, so I was raised in my mother’s ancestral home from a young age. Fortunately, I survived.”

Luo Yao was thoughtful: “Then why did you invite us here?”

Hearing this, Shen Junxuan was silent for a moment. Instead of answering her directly, he stood up and pushed open the screen behind the group.