"It shouldn't be like this..."

Wu Liang was immediately somewhat perplexed.

For the past few days, it seemed that his hypothesis had no issues at all.

In Taohua Village, only those Fierce Ghost Minions he brought could appear, and the Fierce Ghosts outside couldn't enter this peaceful place.

Currently, all the Fierce Ghost Minions have been recalled, and they all claimed they didn't kill the residents of Taohua Village.

"Boss, could it have been the Tower Ghost?"

Nightmare said with some doubt, noticing that there seemed to be one minion missing from the Ghost Compendium.

However, Wu Liang just shook his head and said, "It didn't make it into the Heavenly Mountain; I left it outside before entering."

He was certain that the deaths of the Taohua Village residents were due to some other reason!

With this doubt in mind, Wu Liang quietly circled around to the homes of the ten victims that the Kitchen Knife Ghost mentioned, wanting to see if there was any commonality among them.

But an even more eerie phenomenon appeared—

These ten individuals were actually living together!

"Wait a minute, they all seem to be...madmen?" Wu Liang carefully recalled the large grass house where these ten people lived.

It appeared that this place was where those who had ventured outside the village at night, even though they returned alive, had lost their minds and went insane.

The villagers had gathered these people together in a place similar to a nursing home in reality, with people coming daily to care for them. However, due to the issue of Fierce Ghosts entering the village, this place had few visitors recently.

Coincidentally, the person on duty today had an upset stomach and went home to rest, leaving the entire large grass house without a villager to supervise them for the night.

Now that an incident had occurred, there's no telling how they died.

"Boss, there's only the presence of Kitchen Knife Ghost here, with no other scents." Nightmare stepped forward timely to help analyze the issue.

The Mist Ghost conjured a thin, almost invisible layer of mist around Wu Liang's hand to erase any fingerprints or information that might be left when he touched the corpses.

Wu Liang moved closer to examine the corpse, pulling open the eyelids to inspect the pupil's condition and checking the oral cavity.

He found a male corpse and stripped it to check for injuries or puncture marks on the body.

After spending a good half-hour examining most of the corpses, Wu Liang grimly stated:

"They were definitely killed by a Fierce Ghost. None of them have any external injuries, and some even have remnants of dinner in their mouths. And all of them fell simultaneously, which is impossible through natural causes."

Hearing this, Nightmare furrowed its brows.

It hadn't sensed any other Fierce Ghost presence, and just as it was about to remind Wu Liang of this, he spoke again, saying, "But the peculiar part is that they don't seem to have died today; rather, they've been dead for many years?"

This puzzled Wu Liang as well.

Because he noticed that several corpses were incredibly desiccated.

Lying on the bed like withered wood, their flesh had not only lost elasticity but had shrunk so much that only skin clung to their bones, resembling a skeleton.

The water content in their bodies had long evaporated.

This state clearly couldn't result from just a few days or even weeks of death, akin to being exposed and decomposed in the wilderness for years.

Yet, some corpses, though also withered, seemed to have died only a few weeks ago and not fully reduced to skeletons.

Almost each corpse had a different time of death, which was even more baffling.

"Boss, when I entered the house, they were all alive, and after slaying them all, their bodies turned like this," the Kitchen Knife Ghost timidly stated.

It indeed felt extremely guilty now.

After all, if it really had slain ordinary villagers under a loss of sanity, it would have caused Wu Liang a significant amount of trouble for nothing.

Listening to the Kitchen Knife Ghost's description, a startling thought suddenly flashed through Wu Liang's mind.

He inspected the clothing and the state of decay of each corpse once more.

Finally, he sat down on the doorstep, looking up at the moon hung high in the sky.

The pure moonlight cast on Wu Liang's face filled him with an unreal feeling.

Sighing, he then said, "Could we have all forgotten a crucial question?"

The Fierce Ghost Minions: "?"

Wu Liang: "This is, after all, a place within the Tianshan Mountain Range that supposedly doesn't exist! It shouldn't naturally have any living people here; even if they did, it'd likely be only my mother trapped here alone."

Pointing at the corpses behind him, he asked, "So how did they end up here?"

A wake-up call!

The Fierce Ghost Minions also realized it!

This group of villagers could not have entered through the cave at the top of Bogda Peak!

With so many Fierce Ghosts outside, especially with the White-haired Fierce Ghost, how could it allow so many people to reach the summit?

Thus, the origin of the villagers shouldn't be regarded as ordinary people!

"Have you ever heard of an alternative interpretation of 'The Peach Blossom Spring'?" Wu Liang picked up a twig and began drawing some shapes in the dirt by the steps.

Upon closer inspection, it seemed to be the layout of the village houses.

"Folklore suggests that peach trees ward off evil spirits, and a peach forest acts as a barrier between the two realms. Coupled with the description of entering the cave—narrow at first, only allowing a person to pass before it suddenly opens wide."

"In ancient times, to prevent grave robbers from stealing tombs, tomb passages were often narrow at the entrance and wide at the end, implying that the fisherman might have entered a tomb leading to another world."

After speaking, he pointed to the layout he had drawn.

"The land is flat, and the houses are neatly arranged."

"Normally, village houses should be intricately interwoven. A neat layout indicates either a big city or a tomb structure meticulously planned."

"Fertile fields, beautiful pools, and mulberry and bamboo."

"The season for lush mulberry and bamboo growth is usually May and July, while peach trees bloom in March. They shouldn't appear simultaneously."

At this point, the Fierce Ghost Minions showed expressions of awe without understanding, having a kind of clear but ignorant look from a lack of education.

After all, they truly hadn't read books.

And Wu Liang continued speaking clearly and fluently, "Men and women wore clothes like those of outsiders. It means their attire was indistinguishable from those in the outside world."

"The people in the Peach Blossom Spring retreated there to avoid the chaos during the Qin Dynasty and never ventured out. With a gap of several hundred years from the fisherman's period, how could their fashion and style remain unchanged?"

"Hence, their clothes weren't self-woven; they were offerings burned for them by later generations, thus keeping up with the times."

"There are other analyses I won't bother detailing here; the few points just mentioned can interpret—truly, the Peach Blossom Spring is nothing more than a village of the dead."

With that, Wu Liang rose and patted the Kitchen Knife Ghost on the shoulder, remarking with some emotion, "Well done! With that one strike, you cleared my mind."

"In this Taohua Village, perhaps only my mother is the living person; the other villagers are most likely corpses that died on Bogda Peak over the years."

"Currently, they are being driven or forced into an unusual 'living' state by a force I couldn't detect, such as—the power that alters the time on the Ghost Compendium and our bodies!"

"The life or death of the villagers doesn't matter; they're already dead!"

"What we need to do now is break this power!"

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