Chapter 147 – The Carpenter’s Workshop - Part 3

On the remote hillside outside Flowerpath County...Pang Yuanhua, her face gaunt and skin stretched tightly over her bones, regarded Li Yuan, who looked like nothing more than a teenage boy.

“I never imagined you wouldn’t see my letter,” she said softly, “and yet you managed to leave unharmed. I’m impressed.”

“Nothing more than luck,” Li Yuan replied. “What exactly happened?”

“We’ve run into a ghost domain.”

Li Yuan frowned. “Ghost domain? I assume Flowerpath must have a dark history—perhaps many deaths, or a buildup of resentment?”

Pang Yuanhua shook her head. “No. Our county is small, with only four wards in total. We don’t even have a black market. The dead are always buried outside the town. If you’re wondering how this ghost domain came to be, I don’t think it has anything to do with old grudges or lingering spirits.”

Li Yuan gave a thoughtful nod, waiting for her to elaborate.

“The ghost domain in our county is in a carpenter’s workshop. Anyone who enters that workshop is marked by the carpenter and disappears. I believe it started with a few unfortunate people who wandered inside by chance. As more people went in, the string of missing-persons cases grew. Our sect master and the abbess of the Floating Moon Abbey began investigating, and they too disappeared after visiting the carpenter’s workshop.

“Then even more people vanished. I happened to return from out of town at that time, so I started looking into it myself. Eventually, I found the place...and went in.”

Li Yuan’s expression tensed. “What did you see?”

“It was completely empty,” Pang Yuanhua answered quietly, “and I left after a quick look around. But afterward, I fell seriously ill, becoming weaker by the day. I thought I was done for. Then a few days ago, I opened my bedroom door and found myself back in that carpenter’s workshop.”

Tang Nian, listening with wide-eyed dread, clutched her puppet even tighter.

“This time,” Pang Yuanhua continued, “the shop wasn’t empty. A strange man stood there, swinging a hammer, carving something. On the shelves behind him were countless wooden dolls, and beside him a lit furnace. I spoke to him, but he never responded. His face was terribly pale, and his eyes were cold...filled with malice and a strange numbness, so inhuman.

“I looked more closely at the dolls on the shelf and recognized our sect master and the abbess of the Floating Moon Abbey. Their carvings were lifelike, right down to the expressions of horror on their faces. But there they were, lined up like playthings.

“I tried to lift them off the shelf, but they were impossibly heavy, far beyond my strength. Just then, the carpenter seemed to finish whatever he was working on. He stood up, grabbed a doll from the edge of the shelf, and tossed it into the furnace. It screamed. It sounded just like a living person being burned alive.

“Then the carpenter placed a new doll on the shelf. That doll was my niece, Pang Qian. I remember how her tiny, doll-like eyes darted around in terror, silently begging me for help. Frightened out of my wits, I ran.

“Yet later that same day, I saw Pang Qian again. She’d been just as sick and emaciated as me. But all of a sudden, her illness was gone, and her strength was returning at a startling pace. She was talking and laughing as though nothing had happened. Shortly after, I heard rumors that the missing sect master and abbess had also come back.

“It was all too bizarre. I hurriedly wrote a letter warning of ghosts and urging you not to come. At the same time, I took the replica of our life chronicle and fled, in case you never saw the message.”

Her account finished, Pang Yuanhua fell silent. Tang Nian, eavesdropping with rapt attention, sat frozen in horror.

Li Yuan spoke quietly. “So you’ve been avoiding doors altogether, afraid that opening any doorway might lead you back to the carpenter’s workshop.”

“Yes. I’ve been staying outside the township ever since. That’s where your white finch found me. I realized how the carpenter workshop ghost domain operates.”

Li Yuan nodded thoughtfully. “When someone enters the carpenter’s workshop, the

carpenter ghost

notices them. Then it carves a new doll. Once that carving is finished, the real person is replaced by the doll, ending up trapped on the carpenter’s shelf.”

Pang Yuanhua added, “If the shelf isn’t full, then anyone who meets the carpenter will be locked away in that workshop, so they simply vanish. Once it’s full, new arrivals end up

in line

, so to speak. They can still walk around outside for a while, but they waste away under the carpenter’s curse, losing flesh and becoming skin and bones.

“Eventually, the carpenter will throw one of the dolls from the shelf into the fire, freeing up a space. That’s when someone in the

queue

, like me or Pang Qian, finds ourselves stepping through a door, only to emerge in the workshop. The moment we’re fully replaced by a perfect wooden replica, our true bodies become lifeless dolls on the shelf.”

Pang Yuanhua lowered her head slightly and said quietly, “None of them... Sect Master Pang Dantai, the abbess of Floating Moon Abbey, or Pang Qian...are truly human anymore.”

“Then why is this ghost doing all of this?” Li Yuan asked.

“I looked into the carpenter’s workshop,” Pang Yuanhua replied. “The man who lived there was named Shen Jiliang. A loner, he rarely spoke to anyone. At first, he did odd carpentry jobs around town, but once he saved up some money, he stopped working and holed up in his house. He even hired a matchmaker to arrange a marriage, but she swindled him. We managed to catch her and recover some of his money, but not long after, he fell ill with some mysterious disease that local doctors couldn’t diagnose.

“It began with numbness in his feet, then spread upward. First from below the knees, then higher and higher, as if the paralysis was consuming his entire body. He spent all his savings trying to find a cure, but nothing worked, and he had no friends to look after him.

“In the end, no one realized he had died until a terrible stench seeped out of his house. When they finally went in, they found Shen Jiliang’s corpse slumped in a chair, flesh rotting and crawling with maggots. It looked like the paralysis spread until he couldn’t move at all, not even to cry for help. If he still had any feeling at the end...that kind of death is too awful to imagine.

“They also found a few poorly carved wooden dolls scattered around his place,” she finished.

Li Yuan nodded grimly. “Everything lines up.”

“Yes. That carpenter ghost is Shen Jiliang, or at least it kills in a way that mirrors his past suffering,” Pang Yuanhua said, her dull gaze fixed on the ground.

At that moment, Li Yuan suddenly thought of what Yan Yu had shared about her dream. In that dream, everything was pitch-black, as though a thick cloth hung over the outside, and there were iron bars at the window, with scorching light beyond them, light so intense it felt like it could burn one’s very soul.

That place wasn’t a room. It was more like those iron cages of a black market wagon that transported living

goods—

the black market ghost domain. But how had that connected to his wife?

Realizing this, Li Yuan’s heart clenched. Turning back to Pang Yuanhua, he asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

She let out a bitter laugh. “You’ve helped just by learning the truth. I hope you can use this knowledge to save as many people as possible. As for me, I’ll stay in the wilderness and see how long I survive. Don’t worry, I still have people looking out for me... and I have some ways to protect myself.”

Li Yuan had no interest in probing deeper into her secrets. He considered inviting her into the carriage, but realized the carriage door was, after all, a door. So, instead, he climbed onto the driver’s seat to retrieve some silver to give her, wanting to help at least a little. After that, he planned to hurry home.

He pulled aside the curtain and stepped into the carriage—

A choking smell of sawdust rushed up his nose, and the jarring clank-clank of an iron chisel scraping across hardwood echoed all around. At the far end of his vision, a blood-red rack stood laden with twisted, human-shaped dolls. Wood shavings littered the floor.

A gaunt, sinister man squatted nearby. His eyes were numb and hateful, a hammer in one hand and a red-tinted chisel in the other, carving something into the wood.

Li Yuan’s pupils shrank to pinpoints, his scalp prickling. He spun around. The doorway he’d just come through was gone.

His heart pounded wildly. In one swift move, he summoned his shadow blood power, forcing it out through every pore until he was drenched in it, his entire body covered as though dipped in blood.

In the next instant, he stomped the ground, whirled around, and hurled himself at the workshop wall with a thunderous crash.

And then—

BANG!

He burst out onto the barren land outside, landing heavily on the ground.

The abrupt change stunned everyone. Wang San, Tang Nian, and Pang Yuanhua all gaped. Why had Li Yuan suddenly turned into a blood-soaked figure?

“G-godfather, what happened?” Tang Nian exclaimed.

“Senior?” Pang Yuanhua added nervously.

Li Yuan raised a hand, indicating he was fine. Then he looked at Pang Yuanhua. “Go. Leave this place.”

“Senior...?”

“I said go!”

Unsure of what had just happened, Pang Yuanhua hastily bowed and departed. One of Li Yuan’s white finches trailed after her, unseen, and circled around for a while. Finding nothing amiss, it brought her back.

Only then did Li Yuan speak again. “I’ve already stepped into that carpenter’s workshop. Do you have any ideas on how to fix this?”

Pang Yuanhua stood there in shock, finally grasping the implication. “I’m so sorry, Senior...”

With a cold edge in his voice, Li Yuan added, “Or maybe the next doll the carpenter wants is actually tied to you. Every door around you leads back to that workshop!”