Samuel looked at him suspiciously and asked, “Are these words true?”

David Carter sat up and raised three fingers to swear, “I swear on the lives of my entire family, I am telling the absolute truth! If I am lying to you, may my whole family die miserably and never reincarnate after death!”

That was quite a vicious oath.

Yet Samuel was still half-convinced, half-doubtful. He asked, “Do you really know nothing about that big yellow croaker? Then why would you rather hide in this forest than spend the night at our temple?”

David Carter said, “That was the advice given to me by a master. He told me that after delivering the incense money, no matter how much you try to keep me, I must not stay overnight at the temple—I have to leave!”

As he spoke, he frowned and hesitated, then continued, “To be honest, this whole thing is rather strange.”

“The master told me to go up the mountain and donate incense money, which is a good deed, but he made three rules with me.”

“First, I must deliver the incense money to the temple at dusk. So even though I arrived on the mountain early in the afternoon, I could only hide in the shade of the trees to cool off.”

“Second, after delivering the incense money, no matter how much you try to keep me, I must not stay overnight—I have to leave before nightfall.”

“Third, if the Four-Eyed Daoist asks about him, I can only say ‘an old acquaintance from the martial world, an old friend with nine eyes,’ and nothing else!”

An old friend with nine eyes? What does that mean? Samuel was puzzled.

He then said with some annoyance, “Stop calling him ‘master’ this and ‘master’ that. Doesn’t he have a name?”

David Carter hurriedly said, “Of course he does. He is called Mr. Brooks!”

Samuel asked again, “You also know these three rules are strange, but didn’t you ever suspect there might be something wrong with the gold bars he asked you to deliver?”

David Carter replied helplessly, “Honestly, I never thought about it, because the gold bars have always been in my possession. Why would I suspect there’s something wrong with them?”

“Besides, if the gold bars were haunted, I carried them all the way from town to the temple—they would have latched onto me by now.”

“Most importantly, this Mr. Brooks acts in mysterious and unpredictable ways. I just thought that’s how masters are—eccentric and unconventional. I never suspected anything was wrong with him.”

David Carter spoke very frankly, his expression sincere.

So, did Samuel believe him?

Believe you, my ass!

This fat rascal is up to no good!

As someone who has read “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” the complete works of Agatha Christie, and watched thousands of episodes of “Detective Conan,” could he really be fooled by a few lies like this?

He knew that most of what David Carter had just said was probably true, with only a small part being false—otherwise, he wouldn’t dare to swear such a vicious oath.

But he also knew that, in this kind of information, it’s often that small bit of falsehood that’s the most useful.

The rest of the information wasn’t useless either—at least it cleared up one suspicion he had about David Carter.

Earlier, seeing how suddenly David Carter appeared and how mysteriously he disappeared, he had even suspected the man might be a ghost.

It turned out that David Carter had been staying in the woods outside the temple all afternoon. He simply walked from the woods to the temple gate, which is why Samuel never saw him on the mountain path.

By the same logic, after leaving the temple, he didn’t go down the mountain path either, but instead slipped back into the woods to spend the night there. So when Samuel later tried to bring him a walking stick and looked for him on the mountain path, how could he have seen him?

With this doubt resolved, a new one arose in Samuel’s mind:

“Since you followed Mr. Brooks’s instructions not to spend the night at our temple, why didn’t you just go down the mountain at night, instead of staying in the woods?”

As soon as he asked this, David Carter’s face showed a baffling expression.

That look was quite intriguing, as if Samuel had just asked a stupid question.

But he still answered, saying, “My offering of three sacrificial meats was kept by you, little Daoist, so I couldn’t possibly travel the Beheaded Path at night. I could only wait out the night and go down the mountain at noon tomorrow, when the sun is at its strongest.”

Hearing this, Samuel was now the one confused.

What three sacrificial meats?

What Beheaded Path?

What’s the connection between them?

A series of questions left him completely bewildered, but judging by David Carter’s reaction, these shouldn’t be questions at all—they were common knowledge.

Realizing this, he quickly became aware of a problem: as an outsider, he really lacked understanding of this world and couldn’t speak carelessly anymore, or he’d arouse suspicion.

At this point, David Carter showed a puzzled expression.

Samuel’s heart tightened, but his face remained calm and composed: “Blessings from the Supreme Celestial Lord. Tell me more about the Beheaded Path. Just now, I fought fiercely against the ghosts drawn by the haunted coin and managed to break out of the temple, but my Daoist heart was damaged, and my mind is a bit muddled right now.”

David Carter said, “Oh, I see. Well, on this Yunqi Mountain, there’s an abandoned village called Beheading Village. The mountain path leading to it is called the Beheaded Path.”

“Beheading Village is strange. Many years ago, all the villagers were beheaded in a single night. After that, the whole village seemed to turn into a demon, able to manipulate the mountain path and lure travelers into the village to kill them.”

“At such times, if you want to survive, you have to burn incense, paper money, and offer three sacrificial meats at the entrance of the village. As long as you make a sincere offering, the village will disappear.”