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Wrapped in swaddling cloth was a pair of rusty scissors, the blade still smeared with a darkened piece of placenta. Chen Siye felt the uneven notches on the handle and, illuminated by the evening light, recognized the family crest of the Magistrate.
At a quarter past the Hour of the Rooster, a fragment of the land god temple's stone tablet in the west of the city suddenly cracked open. The two men dug out a ceramic urn beneath the pedestal, inside which was an unsent blood letter from Scholar Zhou: "On Mid-Autumn of the Ding You Year, meet Advisor Wang for a secret meeting with the Superintendent. That night, a servant reported that all the cypress trees in our ancestral grave had withered; it is suspected that there is some kind of nightmare suppression technique at play..."
The back of the blood letter bore strange talismans, which surprisingly shared lineage with the Demon-Subduing Talisman from the Yin Contract. Suddenly, Shopkeeper Zhang's Paper Men collectively erupted, tearing open their own chests to reveal a list written in Corpse Oil—those were the names of the Twenty-Eight Yamen Runners who had participated in the massacre years ago, each name slowly oozing blood.
At the Hour of the Dog, a fierce wind howled as a loud crash echoed from Yizhuang, signaling that a coffin had fallen to the ground. When they arrived, they found that the Soul-Suppressing Coffin was spinning above a beam; with each rotation of the Coffin Lid, it expelled bloodied Legal Complaints. A thick pile of Lawsuits had accumulated on the ground, with the latest one dated today and bearing Chen Siye's fingerprint.
As the Hour of the Pig approached, a chilling wind swept through, and the eternal lamp on the Offering Table suddenly turned a ghastly green. The lingering spirit of Scholar Zhou appeared in the firelight, maggots crawling out from his neck's strangulation marks: "They placed a curse in my son's full moon feast, forcing me to strangle my first wife with my own hands..." The ghost's Official Robe suddenly tore apart, revealing a beating heart within his chest—nailed down with seven Coffin Nails, each head engraved with positions of the Twenty-Eight Constellations.
At midnight during the Hour of the Rat, hundreds of Kongming Lanterns rose from the Southern Graveyard. Each lantern bore drawings of Zhou Family's Birth Date and Time, and their oil was rendered from Corpse fat. The shadows cast upon the broken tablet unexpectedly pieced together a map of secret passages leading to the county office's underground chambers. The marked location indicated where original records of past imperial examination fraud were buried.
In the final moments before dawn's crowing rooster, Chen Siye unearthed a paulownia wood box from behind the Coffin Shop. Inside lay a secret letter between the Magistrate and a geomancer: "...it is necessary to use a Nine Yin Fate Bearer to craft the coffin, borrowing its life force to nourish the soul-locking array. On blood moon night, using this coffin as a sedan chair, send Li Gui into hell to settle accounts..."
The cinnabar seal at the end of the letter began to rise from the paper, transforming into droplets of blood suspended in midair as dawn broke over the eastern horizon. Shopkeeper Zhang dipped his brush in Rooster's Blood and drew soul-chasing talismans on Yellow Rice Paper. In that instant when the talisman ignited spontaneously, they saw Scholar Zhou's Vengeful Spirit standing in the blood moonlight, followed by an imposing procession of Yokai. Leading this procession were Headless Ghosts carrying a decaying Human Head—the very head of the Current County Magistrate.
As the blood moon emerged from behind clouds, thick Black Blood seeped through cracks in the old site’s floor tiles at the county office. Chen Siye clutched that secret letter from within the paulownia box as he watched its cinnabar seal gradually swell up into droplets of blood hanging in midair.
The Paper Men of Shopkeeper Zhang suddenly screamed in unison, their Cinnabar eyes bursting and splattering onto the compass, revealing a map of the underworld's routes.
"At the Hour of the Rat, the Ghost Gate opens," Shopkeeper Zhang declared, biting his tongue to spray blood onto the Peach Wood Sword. "Scholar Zhou intends to borrow the Yokai to carry the coffin and drag all his enemies into the Eighteen Layers of Hell!"
No sooner had he spoken than the Remnant Bell of the City God Temple erupted with a thunderous crash. The Seventy-Two Thin-Skinned Coffins broke through the earth, forming a funeral procession along the long street.
Each coffin bore a Headless Paper Man, with a neck severed and hanging from it were pieces of Yellow Rice Paper inscribed with their crimes. The chilling wind gathered Paper Ash in the air, forming a County Magistrate's Sedan Chair, while droplets of blood from the Jiao Lian fell to the ground and transformed into Poison Scorpions.
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