Hell’s Handbook

ck because they said they couldn’t get used to city life.
But a lot of the villagers are saying that they probably couldn’t survive in the city.
After all, here, you can literally find food by digging in the vegetable patches, but you can’t do that in the city.
Speaking of digging up stuff, a bunch of people dug out a black-colored stone from the area behind the shrine.
It looks really scary, and it looks like a gigantic black eyeball.

16 July, Cloudy

The Catholic priest said that the black eyeball was demonic and told us to hand it to him.
The Daoist priest also said that that thing was unlucky and even performed a rite.
Even the monk from the Buddhist temple came to take a look at it.
Actually, it seems like Fengxi Town didn't have any such priests and monks in the past.
These people only suddenly appeared some years back.
But they're all good people who take care of the old folks in the village who don’t have anybody else to rely on, so everyone’s quite happy.

17 July, Drizzle

I heard something bad happened! The black stone that looks like an eyeball was placed in the shrine, but this morning, everything in the shrine had been broken, and Uncle Wu, the old man who keeps watch over the shrine by himself, is dead too.
Nobody can find that black eyeball stone either.
Today was such a mess.

18 July, Drizzle

Grandpa isn’t in very good physical health, and he seems to be out of it too.
He keeps talking about gods and ghosts, and he even kneeled in front of the altar in the house the whole morning.
Neither Mom nor Dad could get him to get up, and Grandma was the one who finally managed to persuade him.
After eating lunch, he went into his own room to sleep and never came out again.

19 July, Cloudy

The black eyeball stone has been found, and I heard they dug it out from Uncle Wu’s mouth.
How gross! Grandpa’s health doesn't seem to have gotten any better, and he even needs Grandma to bring his food into the room.
Also, the Catholic priest, the Daoist priest, and the Buddhist monk have all stopped coming to the town.
Everyone's faces are grim, and nobody knows what’s going on anymore.

The diary entries continued all the way until the end of August, and most of it was about how her grandfather wasn't in good health and how her grandmother had to take care of him as well as how Auntie Li was a nice person who gave Lin Yue things she bought from the capital city.
The creepiest part was how several people died one after another, and it always had something to do with that black stone that resembled an eyeball.
The villagers were able to pry that stone from the mouths of every person who died, but it didn’t make sense.
There was only one black stone, but they had pulled it out from more than a dozen people’s mouths.

Lin Yue’s entries also became more and more frantic, and the last entry was on 30 August.

30 August, Partly cloudy

Grandpa passed away this morning, but I think it's more like a release for him.
My brother's behaving more and more strangely.
He kept hiding in Dad's room and refused to come out even when we told him that Grandpa had breathed his last.
Also, I'm really scared.
The black stone has already killed more than a dozen people, and nobody knows who's next.
Grandma consoled me by saying that I don't have to be afraid since we have the protection of God, but that's crazy.
Neither the Catholic priest, the Daoist priest, nor the Buddhist monk comes to the town anymore, so what God is going to protect me? I heard that they had all moved to the top of the mountain on the west side of town, but I don’t know why they did that.
Also, Grandma was really depressed over Grandpa’s death, so she kept all of his hand rolled cigarettes, saying that she wanted them as a memento.

It seemed like there were more entries after that, but they had been torn out.
There were probably another ten odd pages that had been torn out of the diary.
But whatever Su Jin had read contained a lot of information already.

“A black stone that looked like an eyeball, a Catholic priest, a Daoist priest, a Buddhist monk … and Lin Yue’s dead grandfather!” Su Jin began tapping his nose with his index finger out of habit again.
It wasn’t quite possible for him to draw a link between all these pieces of information yet, so he had to put them aside for the moment.

“Wait, a Buddhist temple, a Daoist temple, and a Catholic church would all have bells!” Su Jin's eyes lit up suddenly.
The bells they had been hearing all this time had probably come from one of these places.
The diary mentioned that all three religious men had moved to the top of the mountain on the west side of town, so he looked towards the west and saw that there was indeed a low mountain located over there.

The mountain wasn’t too far off, so it was probably still within Fengxi Town’s boundaries.
Now Su Jin had a destination to head for.

But just then, he suddenly felt a chill down his spine.
He turned to see someone wrapped entirely in a cloak holding a longbow made from white bones.
The bowstring had been pulled back and had shiny sparkles gathered on it.

Su Jin and Chu Yi felt all their hair stand on end.
Something told them that those sparkles were very dangerous, as if they would die on the spot if just one of the sparkles hit them.

“Run! Run up that mountain!” yelled Su Jin before the two of them quickly ran in two different directions instinctively.

“Haha… Hey hey! Heee heee… haha…!” The person covered in the cloak started laughing creepily as he released his hand, and the sparkles shot out, heading straight for Su Jin's back.

Su Jin didn’t need to turn around to know that the sparkles were headed for him, because the flying sparkles were accompanied by a roaring sound.
He quickly jumped to the side and rolled on the ground.

But some of the sparkles still brushed past his arm.
He felt a sudden pain in his arm before his entire arm turned to ash and vanished into the air.2

In case it's confusing, the first bell was the one that was heard at midnight, which signified the beginning of the challenge.
Then they heard another one 2 hours later, and Su Jin says that the third one would ring in a bit of time.
So then, it would be 4 hours.↩ Bruh.↩