146: Chapter 146 The Abnormal Town

Jiang Feng stood before the boundary marker, his finger tracing the runes on the stone's surface.

The carvings were deep, their edges worn smooth by weathering, yet they felt rough and abrasive to the touch.

He glanced back.

The dense fog behind him was closing in.

Within three seconds, the path he had come from was completely sealed off.

There was no way back.

Jiang Feng wrinkled his nose and looked ahead.

About ten paces behind the boundary marker, a thing was crouching in the low-hanging fog.

Saying it was "crouching" wasn't entirely accurate.

The figure was hunched over.

Its vertebrae poked out one by one from its back, pushing against the thin gray clothing to form a ridge-like line.

The entire body was bent like a bow, its head almost touching its knees.

It was slowly turning around.

Its face was unnaturally smooth; there were no wrinkles where there should have been, and no pores where there should have been.

It had all its facial features, but the proportions were wrong.

The eyes were too small, the mouth too wide, and the bridge of the nose too flat.

The whole face looked like a lump of unformed clay.

"Hehe."

"Something alive."

It spoke.

"Something alive... It's been a long time since something alive came here."

Jiang Feng stood where he was, his hands in his pockets.

The hunched figure shuffled forward two steps.

It walked in a strange way, its entire body gliding along the white fog on the ground.

"Kid."

Its mouth stretched another inch wider.

"Wuyin Town does not accept the living."

"Do you know what happens to those who trespass into the land of the dead?"

"The thick fog will scrape away your flesh and blood."

"And use it to plaster the walls."

It whispered the last two words right against Jiang Feng's ear.

In less than a second, the thing had moved to within half a meter of Jiang Feng.

That clay-like face was tilted upward, and its palm hovered over Jiang Feng's chest.

If it were anyone else, in this situation, their bladder control would have reached its limit long ago.

But Jiang Feng merely picked his ear.

"Are you done?"

The hunched figure's wide mouth closed by half an inch.

Jiang Feng pulled his finger out of his ear and stretched his neck, his bones cracking twice.

His mind was clear and refreshed.

Empathy Shielding was working silently in the background.

The signals of fear radiating from this skin-suit were all blocked by the system outside the emotional processing center.

Only the information itself was transmitted.

The information said: There is a grotesque thing in front of you threatening you.

The emotional response: Oh.

Jiang Feng didn't retreat; instead, he stepped forward twice.

The hunched figure's palm was still hovering in mid-air, but after being bumped by Jiang Feng's chest, it awkwardly retracted it.

Jiang Feng walked past it, went to the side of the boundary marker, and reached out to pat the moss on its surface.

"Listen."

He turned around, pointed at the boundary marker, and looked thoroughly impatient.

"Which neighborhood committee are you from?"

The hunched figure's small eyes blinked.

"This broken marker is standing in the middle of the road, and there's no traffic sign or public notice board. You're crouching here blocking the way—do you have a business license or a permit for occupying the road?"

The fog was still swirling.

Jiang Feng didn't give it time to react.

He fished a business card out of his pocket.

The gold-stamped characters "Starlight Private Security and Information Consulting Company" were particularly striking in the gray, murky fog.

Jiang Feng held the business card between two fingers and shoved it directly into the hunched figure's withered fingers.

"Hold onto this."

"My company is Xingchen Security, directly under the Location headquarters. I'm here to conduct a field survey for an outsourced security project in your town."

He stepped back, spread his hands, and looked full of complaints.

"What kind of dump is this place? There's not even a signal, the road in is all mud, and the fog density is way over the limit. I almost got lost outside."

The hunched figure lowered its head to look at the business card in its hand.

Its fingers pinched the corner of the card with great care, afraid of crushing it.

"Do you know what user experience is?"

Jiang Feng walked up to it, his finger almost poking its nose.

"Zero points! Your user experience is zero!"

"Scraping off flesh and blood to plaster walls? How about you pave the road first before talking tough? What about streetlights? What about drainage ditches? You don't even have a decent signpost, and you call this a land of the dead?"

"I think it's a land of poverty."

The hunched figure lifted its head.

A look of utter bewilderment appeared in its small eyes, as if it had seen a ghost.

A confusion that said, "I've lived for so many years and have never encountered a situation like this."

Its withered lips trembled, and it squeezed out half a syllable from its throat before swallowing it back down.

Jiang Feng waited for three seconds.

The other party couldn't manage to form a complete sentence.

"Forget it."

Jiang Feng rolled his eyes and, with a look of utter disdain, pushed the business card further into its hand.

"You're so poor, you couldn't even afford to pay for emotional damages."

He turned and walked away.

His shoulder slammed directly into the hunched figure's obstructive frame.

The hunched figure staggered; it wasn't used to being treated this way by a living person.

A low hum came from behind him.

The fog gathered toward Jiang Feng, its density rising sharply.

The gatekeeper was making a move.

Jiang Feng didn't even look back.

"I advise you to clear the path."

"If you don't, I'll come back and dismantle this boundary marker and sell it by the ton as stone."

"It's not like you have a property deed anyway."

The fog was still pressing in.

It pressed for two seconds.

Then it stopped.

After stopping, it began to recede to both sides.

That mass of white fog, which had been churning for so many years, obediently parted to the left and right at that moment, like a pack of wild dogs being chased away.

A path was revealed in the middle.

The fog on both sides stayed obediently along the edge of the road, not daring to cross the line by even an inch.

Jiang Feng shook his collar and strutted onto the road.

The hunched figure behind him stood by the boundary marker, its fingers still clutching the business card.

It looked down for a long time before slowly crouching back down.

It retreated back into the low-hanging fog.

Jiang Feng walked along the stone path, and buildings began to appear on both sides of the road.

First, a low wall, a rammed-earth wall covered in withered vines.

Then, a streetlight pole, the kind that stood at the gates of factories in the 1970s.

Further ahead, a three-story gray-white building appeared on the right side of the road.

The building structure was a standard township style, but the carvings on the eaves were in a pre-Qin style.

There was a shop on the ground floor.

The rolling shutter door was half-open, the inside was pitch black, and a neon sign hung above the entrance.

The font was very new.

It was a design style popular after 2026.

It read "Convenience Supermarket."

Jiang Feng slowed his pace.

He stood in the middle of the road and turned around.

Cast-iron streetlights, pre-Qin eaves, modern neon.

Things from three different eras pieced together.

A small town shattered by time and then forcibly mashed back together.

Human voices came from not far ahead.

The sound of an argument.

The volume was high, full of confidence and vitality.

Jiang Feng walked thirty paces toward the sound, and his view opened up completely.

A crossroads.

At the street corner, a middle-aged woman wearing rough linen clothes was standing with her hands on her hips.

Her hair was tied up with a wooden hairpin, and the cuffs of her sleeves were embroidered with patterns he didn't recognize.

Opposite the woman stood a young man in a Lenin suit, made of green fabric, with a faded enamel badge pinned to his chest that read "Serve the People."

On the ground between the two lay a bunch of wilted, rotten chives.

The woman stood with her hands on her hips, her voice loud enough to shake the plaster off the walls.

"Are there none among your eighteen generations of ancestors who knew how to farm! Look at these chives yourself! Are they yellow? Are they wilted? You're dreaming if you think you can trade this trash for my pottery bowl!"

The young man's face turned red, but he didn't back down.

"Old comrade! That bowl of yours is a remnant of feudalism! It's worthless to begin with! My chives might look a bit poor, but they are the sweat and blood of the laboring people!"

"Pah! The laboring people grew this rotten vegetable? You've disgraced them completely!"

Jiang Feng stood at the street corner, watching a middle-aged woman in pre-Qin linen and a young man in a 1974 Lenin suit cursing each other's ancestors over a bunch of rotten chives.

He suddenly understood.

This place was really not normal.