PD -Chapter 32 The Officer’s Widow

In the dim darkness inside the vehicle, Li Zi started the engine. The instant the high beams flashed on, all three men heard an ear-piercing howl from outside.

It was not a sound any human could make. It was more like the cry of some wild beast none of them had ever encountered.

Later, one of Li Zi’s friends recalled that it sounded like the roar of a bear.

That howl shattered the last psychological barrier the three men had left. The grown men screamed in terror. Gritting his teeth, Li Zi ignored the fact that his entire field of vision was blocked by the torn quilt plastered against the windshield and slammed down on the accelerator.

The vehicle shot forward.

The friend in the passenger seat, who had been battered senseless by the airbag and was bleeding from the nose, reached out to pull the quilt away. But no matter how hard he tugged, it would not come off. It was as though it had been glued to the windshield.

Only after they had driven several hundred meters did the wind finally lift one corner of the quilt. Li Zi seized the opportunity and yanked it free.

“Brother, I’m not afraid of being laughed at,” Li Zi said, scratching his head, lingering fear still evident in his voice. “The three of us are known around here for being fearless. But we’ve never been as pathetic as we were that night.”

Afterward, he took me to see his vehicle.

It was a Toyota Prado. The front-right side near the passenger seat had indeed been smashed inward by a massive dent. The airbag that had deployed from the passenger side had long since deflated and now hung there pitifully.

“I deliberately haven’t repaired it,” Li Zi said, pointing at the damaged front end. “When the haunted-house project opens, I’m going to park it right at the entrance and tell visitors that this is what got smashed by the evil spirit inside.”

I didn’t comment on his marketing plans. Instead, I asked him to bring out every piece of information he had on the villa: documents, photographs, floor plans—everything.

If I was going to completely eliminate the entity haunting that house and transform it into the fake haunted house Li Zi envisioned—a venue that could actually open for business—I needed to understand every detail of the property from top to bottom.

The first things I examined were the floor plans and photographs.

From the pictures, I could tell it was a large two-story villa built in an old Republican-era Western style.

The interior layout was equally old-fashioned: orderly, symmetrical, and surprisingly practical. In fact, the floor plan seemed more scientifically designed than many modern developments.

Nothing immediately stood out as unusual.

I opened my laptop, located the villa on a map, and used satellite imagery to study the feng shui and terrain surrounding the property.

Within a radius of one kilometer, there were no other residential buildings.

A narrow road lay in front of the house, connecting it to the main highway.

Behind it stretched a forest.

To its right stood a severed-looking mountain ridge that blocked the landscape entirely.

I had seen houses with terrible feng shui before.

But I had never seen one this bad.

I genuinely could not understand what the original owner had been thinking. Why build a solitary residence in a place where a “Head-Cutting Mountain” obstructed the flow of energy and generated deadly winds? It was almost as if he had wanted the place to become haunted.

“Li Zi,” I asked with a frown, “don’t you find it strange? Why was the house built in such an isolated location?”

Being a local, Li Zi naturally knew more about the area than I did.

He pointed at the mountain on the map.

“Brother, you don’t know this area. We’re famous for iron ore. There used to be a huge iron mine beside that mountain. Before Liberation, it supposedly belonged to the Nationalists, and the man who built this villa was a military officer responsible for supervising the mine.”

“Our elders say that a lot of the laborers there were conscripted workers rounded up by the Nationalists. They spent day and night mining underground. There used to be a camp near the mountain to house them.”

“But later there was a major accident in the mine. The camp disappeared long ago.”

Rubbing his nose, he continued.

“My guess is that the officer built the villa there because it was closer to the mine and easier to oversee operations. He probably never considered feng shui. Between the barren hills, the harsh terrain, and that creepy forest full of cold winds behind it—even I can tell it’s not a good place.”

“What happened afterward?” I asked. “You said the mine was abandoned. What became of the officer’s family?”

Li Zi thought for a moment before replying.

“I heard this from some of the older folks in my family. No idea whether it’s true or not. Supposedly, when the war against Japan broke out, the officer was transferred to the front lines and never came back.”

“The only person left in the villa was his wife. She spent the rest of her life as a widow.”

“Not long after that, the mine suffered a major collapse. The Nationalists no longer had time to care about the place. The surviving workers all scattered and fled. But the widow stayed.”

“She lived a long time too. Didn’t die until sometime in the 1980s. And she committed suicide.”

“Suicide?” I frowned. “Inside that villa?”

I truly couldn’t understand it.

Why would an elderly woman nearing the end of her life choose suicide? If her life had been so miserable, why hadn’t she followed her husband long ago?

“Yep. Suicide.” Li Zi raised his eyebrows. “According to the stories, she was almost a hundred years old when she died, but she looked like she was only forty or fifty. She dressed elegantly every day and loved wearing qipaos.”

“Honestly, I’ve wondered whether the thing that locked us in the room during our livestream was her ghost.”

“A hundred years old and looking forty or fifty? That sounds a little exaggerated.”

Li Zi laughed awkwardly.

“I don’t really believe it either. But the old folks say the widow was actually some kind of spirit in human form. She’d dress herself up beautifully, go out, lure young, healthy men back to the villa, then use sorcery to drain their yang energy. That’s how she stayed youthful and lived so long.”

“That makes even less sense,” I replied.

“If she was some creature trying to cultivate immortality, why would she kill herself?”

I frowned again.

Deep down, I knew that while local legends often sounded absurd, most of them weren’t completely fabricated out of thin air.

As I was thinking about it, Li Zi suddenly leaned over and motioned for me to get up.

He sat down in front of my laptop and opened a website.

“Brother, take a look at this.”

He pointed at the screen.

It was a digitized archive from the local records office.

I carefully read the title. It appeared to be an excerpt from a local historical gazetteer.

The document described a horrifying and notorious criminal case.

And the person at the center of it was none other than the widow who had lived in the villa.

Among the materials was a black-and-white photograph.

Because it had been scanned and reproduced so many times, the image appeared blurry and deeply unsettling.

It showed a woman in a qipao, her face impossible to make out, hanging by the neck inside a room.