Chapter 251: Ghost Marriage Tales (4)
"The stove opening is so small, how could anyone be stuffed in there?"
"Only the head went in. It's really sinister."
"Who did it?"
"No idea."
Ji Ning felt a chill run down her spine.
Who would commit such a torturous, vicious act? Stuffing a living person into a stove hole like a piece of firewood—even if she wasn't burned to death, she would have suffocated, right? Her nose and mouth full of ash, just imagining it made one feel a visceral, full-body discomfort.
Before long, the crowd at the door parted to either side, and the deceased bride was carried out from inside.
No one knew how long she had been dead; her body was already stiff, carried out in a kneeling posture. Her hands were bound behind her back with rope, and her legs were also tied.
All her hair had burned to ash, and her facial features had melted into a blackened, charred, indistinct blur, unrecognizable from her former appearance.
People in the surrounding crowd with weak constitutions began to retch one after another.
The person who had gone to fetch a white cloth finally arrived, hastily covering the bride's head before escorting her away with the body carriers.
As they passed by Ji Ning, she noticed the bride's wrists were already purple, and the skin color on her hands differed from that of her arms, leading her to guess the bride had been bound before death.
Analyzing the reason, she figured it was because the bride was marrying a dead man; they were afraid she'd be unwilling and try to run away from the marriage.
The main house was in an uproar, occasionally interspersed with the wailing of an older woman, which vaguely sounded like someone demanding justice for the dead bride.
The bride's family and the Yang family were likely inside.
After something like this happened, who could still sleep? Everyone who had come for the wedding, the kitchen helpers, the neighbors—all gathered in the courtyard to watch the spectacle.
Ji Ning blended into the crowd, listening to people repeatedly recount the process of discovering the bride's death, finding it full of suspicious points.
She heard people say that no suspicious sounds had been heard beforehand, and the firewood in the stove had long since gone out.
So who had silently taken the bride from her room, gone to the trouble of lighting a fire, and killed her in this manner?
Was the murderer human or ghost? What was the murderer's motive?
Just as Ji Ning was hypothesizing various possibilities, an elderly couple with disheveled hair rushed out of the main house, knelt at the doorway facing the outsiders, and began wailing and lamenting loudly.
"Those damned Yang family tyrants… not only making my daughter marry a dead man and live as a widow, but now they've gone and killed her…"
"My daughter was only nineteen, how could anyone be so cruel… so vicious…"
"Your son drowned and still wants a wife, my poor daughter had the misfortune to end up with your family, what a sin!"
Hearing what the Du parents said, the surrounding crowd immediately erupted in an uproar.
A living person marrying the dead—this was such an ancient, feudal, and inhumane evil custom.
Amidst the chaos, the Yang parents also rushed out, pointing at the bride's parents and cursing: "You money-grubbers knew she was marrying a dead man and still agreed to send your daughter over. Taking fifty thousand from our family wasn't enough, so you killed your own daughter to extort more money from us, is that it?"
The four of them argued back and forth, the scene growing more and more chaotic. It gradually became impossible to make out what each of them was saying.
However, Ji Ning had already pieced together the whole story.
The Du parents knew before sending their daughter off that she was to marry a dead man, having accepted fifty thousand yuan from the Yang family. They knowingly pushed their daughter into a pit of fire.
After the bride's death, the Du family believed their daughter had been murdered by the Yang family, the purpose being to send the bride to accompany the Yang's son in the afterlife.
The Yang parents, clearly also unaware of the situation, believed instead that the Du family had personally killed their daughter to extort another large sum of money from the Yangs.
Finally, the Yang family spat out a hateful parting shot: "Your daughter's turned into that ghastly thing, our family won't marry her anymore! Take the money for her funeral, get the body out of here now, what bad luck!"
This remark thoroughly enraged the Du family. Subsequently, they chose to lay the corpse in front of the Yang family's door, with an attitude suggesting they would stay and make trouble indefinitely unless they got a satisfactory resolution.
A joyous event had turned into a funeral, and even the onlookers dispersed.
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