Chapter Thirty-One: Ingenuity in a Crisis

The autumn frost, having tasted blood, instantly lost all reason. She seized the villager’s entrails with both hands, frantically tearing them out, flinging bloody chunks of flesh everywhere. The villager, however, could not die right away and continued to wail in agony with every ounce of strength left.

The remaining people were all so terrified that they collapsed to the ground, unable even to stand, let alone run.

Hu Sanqi once told me: “When fighting ghosts, courage is life itself. If you lose your courage, you lose your life.” I still remember, back then, Hu Sanqi pointed to a mouse cornered by a cat and said, “See that mouse? If it ran faster, it might have a chance to escape, but fear froze its legs. Without the will to run, how can it survive?”

It’s the same with people. Have you ever seen someone whose courage has been utterly broken? All they can do is cry and beg for mercy, not even daring to look a demon in the eye.

I hadn’t seen it before, but now I had. Of the four remaining villagers, only the village chief could barely move; the others frantically squeezed toward the edge of the cave, desperate to shrink into the cracks of the stone.

I hid behind a stone statue and shouted to the chief, “Chief, the tethering stone is useless now! Hurry up and choose someone! Move fast and we might still survive!”

But my words weren’t really about survival—they were about life and death. At this moment, who wouldn’t want to live?

Don’t be fooled; those who are helpless against ghosts can still turn on each other. The chief said that if they could chop off a head and place it on the stone figure, they could suppress the autumn frost.

Now, there were four heads available.

As the chief instinctively glanced at the man at his feet, someone stabbed a knife into his lower back.

The attacker was his own nephew.

Even now, the chief had tried to shield his nephew, never imagining that the first to turn on him would be his own flesh and blood.

The nephew, gripping the knife and choking on his sobs, said, “Uncle, out of all of us, only you ever thought of the village! Didn’t that Xie fellow say it? Only someone who’s genuinely willing can suppress the autumn frost! Please, bear with it!”

As soon as he finished speaking, two other villagers, who had been collapsed on the ground, stood up and each stabbed the chief in the stomach.

Before he even died, the chief was pinned to the ground by three people and beheaded.

When I saw someone carrying the chief’s head—his eyes still open in disbelief—running toward the coachman, I immediately ducked low and slipped away into the distance.

Sure enough, before the man could reach the coachman, the autumn frost pounced from the side and pinned him to the ground. The grotesque sound of her teeth crushing his throat echoed from afar. Meanwhile, I chased after the rolling head and ran to the center of the cave.

If possible, I would not have exposed myself to the autumn frost. But the two remaining villagers were clearly useless—besides me, who else would retrieve the head?

Hu Sanqi’s words rang true: never pin your hopes of survival on others, or else you’ll only die a little slower than the rest.

I grabbed the chief’s ear and lifted his head, but suddenly felt a chill behind me.

I turned my head slightly and saw a pair of pale human feet appear behind me.

This time, the autumn frost didn’t eat her victim—she killed him and came straight for me.

Clutching the head in one hand and my bayonet in the other, I was about to thrust the blade backward when I heard a shout behind me: “Run!”

At that cry, I instinctively turned and saw the second-in-command of the Clear Breeze Bandits clinging to the autumn frost in the “ghost-blindfold” hold—his legs looped around her waist, feet hooked in front of her, both hands clamped over her ears.

After shouting “Run!” he gave no further sound, but kept gesturing at me with his eyes.

With her eyes covered, the autumn frost froze in place, one hand raised and motionless.

That second-in-command had died at the hands of the autumn frost years ago. All these years, he had never let go of his hatred, never reincarnated, always waiting on the mountain for his chance at revenge.

Today, it wasn’t so much that he finally got his chance, as that Hu Sanqi had given it to him. For years, the second-in-command hadn’t even been able to enter the Coachman’s Cave, let alone suppress the autumn frost. For him to appear at the right moment and save me, Hu Sanqi must have intervened, sending him down from the mountaintop into the cave.

I didn’t have time to think further. Clutching the chief’s head, I ran to the statue. As I placed the head on the statue’s neck, nothing happened.

My heart sank—did I really need to offer two heads to activate the coachman?

Looking back into the cave, I saw the last two villagers escape while the autumn frost was immobilized. Before I could consider chasing them, two shrill screams echoed from outside.

They were gone. In their panic to flee, they’d forgotten the life-saving torches and never made it through the haunted grass.

When I looked at their bodies on the ground, a fresh chill gripped me—their faces had been chewed to shreds by the autumn frost. Even if I cut off their heads now, they’d be useless.

Only then did I realize why the autumn frost always destroyed her victims’ faces. She was afraid someone would place a dead person’s head on the coachman’s statue. Human or ghost, their fate and vitality reside in the features; once the features are destroyed, they can’t be restored. If I put a blind head on the statue, it would be a blind coachman—how could he suppress the autumn frost?

As I was anxiously pondering, the second-in-command shouted, “Blow a breath into the dead man’s mouth.”

Was he telling me to pass my living energy to the dead?

There’s an old belief that if a living person blows into a corpse’s mouth, the dead may steal their life force. Some even say that certain corpses lure the living to blow air into them, so they can steal their years and vitality.

But at this point, I had no choice. If the second-in-command couldn’t hold back the autumn frost, I wouldn’t have to worry about future years—I wouldn’t even survive the present.

I pried the chief’s mouth open with both hands and blew a deep breath into it.

Whether I blew too hard or the dead really stole my energy, I don’t know, but as soon as I finished, my vision went black, my head spinning, legs stumbling backward so hard I nearly fell.

Once I steadied myself and looked at the statue, blood was already streaming from the chief’s eyes, and his eyeballs rolled toward me, glaring with murderous hatred.

Did the chief want to kill me?