Chapter 197: Filial Piety

Li Feng followed closely behind. The door to the room was ajar, and the lights were on inside. Being tall, he could see over Miaomiao’s head and noticed the room was empty.

Miaomiao stood in the doorway, holding the handle, showing no intention of letting them in. Li Zhi quickly scanned the room and then looked down to ask her, “Where’s the person who knocked on your door just now?”

Miaomiao looked confused. “What person? No one knocked.”

The night wind carried frost and moaned lowly. Li Zhi keenly caught a faint metallic scent of blood in the air. Miaomiao, standing before them, had clean, tidy clothes and showed no sign of anything unusual.

“If nothing’s wrong, I’m going back to sleep,” she said, starting to close the door. Just as it swung shut, Li Feng blocked it with his hand.

Li Zhi seized the chance to grab her wrist. “Miaomiao…”

The moment her fingers touched Miaomiao’s exposed skin, Li Zhi immediately noticed something was wrong.

It was ice-cold.

Like the corpse of a dead person—completely devoid of warmth.

She snapped her head up and met Miaomiao’s gaze. Her expression remained calm and composed, but her eyes were empty and hollow, like a corpse walking in a living shell.

Drip—

A drop of blood fell from her back onto the concrete floor.

Li Feng frowned, then reached out and forcefully turned Miaomiao around by the shoulders.

In the dim light, Li Zhi saw a patch of exposed brain tissue.

The entire back of Miaomiao’s skull had been hollowed out.

It looked like a half-eaten, flattened apple. The edges were jagged with bite marks. Blood and brain fluid streamed down her hair, soaking her entire back, finally pooling at the hem of her shirt where it slowly dripped to the ground.

Even after witnessing many bloody scenes in the instance, Li Zhi still felt a wave of nausea rise in her throat.

Outside the instance, viewers watching this scene turned green:

【AAAAA I just threw up!!!】
【Holy hell, I’m never eating grilled brains again!!!】
【So that’s what a human brain looks like on the inside—those white parts with the tiny red veins—ugh, I’m gonna be sick—】
【These ghosts are disgusting! They actually eat people raw?!】
【They move so fast! Li Zhi came out right after the NPC opened the door, and in less than a minute they’d already started eating?!】
【Lychee was right—these ghosts really are growing stronger by eating people, and now they’re mimicking human voices. Terrifying.】
【Because Lychee warned everyone, no one came out tonight. Since they didn’t catch any prey, the ghosts decided to attack first.】

Li Zhi didn’t have time to be sick. Her instinct for danger kicked in, and she suddenly turned, swinging her curved blade.

A gust of cold wind came at her from behind. As the ghost was driven back by the blade, a creepy wheezing laugh echoed out.

Li Feng shoved Miaomiao’s now-dead body back inside and slammed the door shut. In the moonlight outside, the two of them saw two hunched figures standing in the misty darkness.

A man and a woman—it was Uncle Zhang and Aunt Liu, who had played Xiaoxue’s grandparents in the film crew.

But now their faces were ashen, mouths full of blood, their dark-rimmed eyes filled with greedy malice—just like starving ghosts.

Li Feng quickly grasped the situation. “They’ve been possessed.”

Li Zhi’s blade only worked effectively against pure ghosts. When it came to ghosts inhabiting human bodies, its power was significantly reduced.

Uncle Zhang, skeletal and hunched, stared at them with a dead gaze, his shriveled hands reaching out. “Son… I’m so hungry…”

Li Zhi swung her blade. It slashed across his bark-like hand, and blood gushed out, but he didn’t even flinch. In fact, he moved even faster, his blackened, bony fingers clawing at them with sharp precision.

They looked like fragile elders, but their movements were a blur.
Li Zhi and Li Feng, both highly skilled and reactive players, still had close calls, with the ghosts nearly grabbing the backs of their heads multiple times.

Li Zhi even had several strands of hair ripped out.

These ghosts clearly preferred to start eating from the brain.

The blade left gashes on the elderly pair’s arms, but it did nothing to slow them down. Hiding inside human bodies, the ghosts couldn’t be killed by simply killing the host.

Li Zhi withdrew her blade. Li Feng shouted, “Tie them up first!”

He pulled out a coil of fine, dragon-whisker-like cord from the prop pool. Each of them grabbed one end, and with a few swift movements, they wrapped the ghosts tightly.

The two ghosts growled eerily, struggling hard, but the binding rope restrained both humans and spirits. Even after being dragged back to their room, they couldn’t break free.

Li Feng locked the door from the outside, and the siblings returned to Miaomiao’s room.
The corpse that had spoken with them earlier was now completely lifeless, lying in a pool of blood.

While it was still dark, they quickly disposed of her body, cleaned up the blood, and packed her belongings to place in their own room—staging it to look like she had left voluntarily, so as to avoid another panic.

Nothing else happened for the rest of the night.
The next morning, before Li Zhi had even opened her door, she heard a commotion outside.

“Director! Uncle Zhang and Aunt Liu were tied up and locked in their room by someone! They’re yelling for help!”

“What? What’s going on? Quick, break the lock! Are they okay?”

Things were chaotic outside. By the time Li Zhi and Li Feng came out, Uncle Zhang and Aunt Liu had already been freed.

They looked exhausted. Uncle Zhang’s hand still bore the crusted-over gash Li Zhi had left, the dried blood on it extra horrifying. Neither of them remembered what had happened—only that they woke up tied up.

Everyone was uneasy, speculating wildly.

The director, shaken and angry, shouted, “Who did this?! Huh? I’m asking—who did this?!”

Li Zhi rubbed her nose.

“Could it have been a thief from the village?” a player suggested. “This poor rural place, our crew’s arrival must’ve stood out. Everyone should check their things—see if anything’s missing.”

That one sentence turned a supernatural crisis into a suspected burglary.
Sure enough, the others stopped speculating and rushed to check their belongings.

A few players exchanged glances, then joined in the chaos.

“My wallet’s gone!”

“The watch I wore yesterday is missing too!”

“Definitely thieves! Everyone be careful at night!”

Everyone started swearing and tucked their valuables away safely.
No one paid much attention to Miaomiao’s disappearance anymore.
Though Uncle Zhang and Aunt Liu’s strange binding still felt suspicious, self-preservation kept everyone from probing too deeply.

Just two or three more days until filming wrapped.
As long as no one else got hurt, no one wanted to rock the boat.

During breakfast, Uncle Zhang and Aunt Liu were clearly hungrier than yesterday—a side effect of having been possessed by starving ghosts.
The way they devoured food made Ning Xue glance over repeatedly.

“Like they’ve been reincarnated as starved ghosts,” she muttered, motioning for Jiang Can to fetch more food for them.

Aunt Liu looked at her, and her old, honest face twisted into an eerily gentle smile. “Thank you, Xiaoxue.”

Ning Xue shivered and quickly looked away.

After breakfast, everyone headed up the mountain to film the big grave-relocation scene.
Li Zhi, walking at the back, recounted the night’s events to the other players.
Yuan Qing shuddered in the broad daylight—he hadn’t expected his guess about the ghosts eating brains to be spot on.

Yan Yingrui analyzed,
“The first two nights, they didn’t knock—probably not strong enough yet. But they caught Asong during his bathroom trip. After eating him, their strength grew.
Last night, when no one came out, they started mimicking human voices.
Now they’ve eaten Miaomiao’s brain—tonight they’ll be even stronger.”

Xing Qingyue looked fearful. “Just one brain can make them stronger? The night before they ate an entire person—no bones left!”

Asong’s room was spotless—not a single drop of blood remained.

Everyone recalled the two hunched figures licking the floor clean of blood—a truly horrifying image.

“The brain is the most vital part of the human body,” Yuan Qing said. “So one brain is enough to make them stronger.”

Li Zhi added, “The ghosts are getting stronger. Their kill conditions are evolving.
Tonight, they might break the door down directly—we need to prepare.”

“Can we just kill the two old people?” someone asked.

“Probably not,” Yan Yingrui replied, glancing at the speaker.
“Uncle Zhang and Aunt Liu are just hosts. Kill them, and the ghosts can just find someone else.
If they go into hiding and don’t expose themselves, we won’t even know who’s possessed.”

They reached the mountaintop again, filled with old clay-pot graves.

Mist still clung to the morning air. Their shoes and pant legs were soaked with dew.
The crew had built some new grave props yesterday and weathered them to blend with the old.

Once the set was ready, the filming began.

The grave relocation scene went smoothly—until the final step: breaking open the sealed grave wall to move the bones inside.

Props had placed fake skeletons in the grave.
But as soon as the actor playing the priest broke the bricks, he let out a terrified scream, falling back and scrambling away, white-faced and speechless.

The director’s heart dropped. He threw down the monitor and ran over.

Li Zhi and the others followed.
As they crouched near the grave mouth and shined their flashlights in, they saw several blood-stained human bones piled tightly inside.
Skulls lay scattered in front, their empty eye sockets staring out at them.

These were clearly not props.

The director’s legs gave out and he collapsed. The other crew members were scared stiff.

That grave had been sealed yesterday.
Who had opened it and put real bones inside?
Could someone have broken it open, inserted the remains, and resealed it—just to scare them?

Li Zhi’s eye twitched.

She suddenly remembered Miaomiao, whom she and Li Feng had hastily buried behind the factory last night.