Chapter 63: The Yellow Immortal (1 / 2)

That suggestion—to go hunting—won the unanimous approval of everyone, both the guys and the girls. But it was already nearing dusk, and rabbits were live creatures. With the dense underbrush all around, using bows or rifles to hunt them wasn't going to be easy at all.

Just then, a classmate named Cui Hai spoke up. He said he'd grown up in the countryside and used to go hunting in the mountains with his grandfather as a kid. Catching rabbits or wild pheasants was nothing to him. As he spoke, he made bold promises: as long as there were rabbits in the wild, he'd definitely catch them.

Honestly, I didn't doubt him. Kids who grew up in the countryside usually know how to set traps and hunt birds—it's second nature to them.

But the timing worried me. It was twilight, the transition point between yin and yang. Both dusk (before complete nightfall) and dawn (before sunrise) are periods when human yang energy is at its weakest. At dawn, the yang is beginning to rise again, so it's a bit safer—but at dusk, it's a dormant phase. That makes it especially easy to bump into… something unclean.

And we were in an abandoned mountain village, deep in the wilderness. This place rarely saw human visitors. If any classmate were to get lost and wander deeper into the forest, things could get truly dangerous. What worried me more was that the western part of the village had a chaotic graveyard and a grove of twisted, crooked trees—a place steeped in yin energy. If something strange was going to happen, it would probably happen there.

So I warned the excited classmates, urging them not to run off blindly.

"This is wild terrain," I said. "You never know what dangers might be lurking out here. If something happens, what then?"

But not only did the guys scoff, even the girls sneered at my concern. Especially Liu Ruoyi—she said mockingly,

"Zhang Dabao, are you having another one of your 'professional episodes'? Don't tell me the 'danger' you're talking about… is ghosts?"

Everyone burst into laughter.

It was obvious—they didn't take my warning seriously at all.

Seeing their reactions, I had no choice but to let them be. They were adults, and they clearly didn't believe in the stuff I knew to be real.

One by one, they broke into pairs or small groups and disappeared into the tall grass and woods, supposedly to hunt. I watched them scatter and sighed. Fine, let them go. No point sitting around doing nothing—I might as well follow along and keep an eye out.

By now, darkness had fully descended. Out here, in the remote wilderness, it was nothing like the bright city nights. Under the pale moonlight, everything was silent and still—eerily so.

Truth be told, it would be hard to actually catch any rabbits out here. It's not that they didn't exist, but with so many people stomping around, any animals nearby would've long since fled. Wild rabbits aren't stupid—they weren't going to wait around to get caught. Everyone probably knew that, deep down. This whole "hunt" was just something to kill time—a bit of entertainment, nothing more.

Just as I was thinking about heading back to the campsite, I noticed a few classmates suddenly darting off toward the west.

That direction caught my attention—because I knew the west side held the old graveyard. What were they doing running that way?

I stopped one of them and asked,

"Hey! What's going on over there?"

One of the running classmates shouted back,

"Quick, come on! They said Cui Hai caught a whole nest of yellow weasels! Let's go take a look!"

And without stopping, he sprinted off toward the western woods.

A whole nest of yellow weasels?

That immediately made my skin crawl.

Could Cui Hai really have caught a nest of huang shulang—yellow weasels? Anyone who knows even a little about animals knows that yellow weasels are extremely agile and suspicious by nature. They're notoriously difficult to catch. The whole thing didn't sit right with me at all.

This was definitely not normal.