I saw Lin Zhao's face turn deathly pale, and I reached out and flicked her forehead. "Are you trying to die? Who are you trying to scare?"

Lin Zhao yelped and returned to her original self.

Later, I learned that the Gui Guan School (Ghost Coffin School) had a special skill for feigning death. They could convincingly fake any death except being dismembered. Even experts several levels above them would have difficulty seeing through their act.

I could see through Lin Zhao's trick because she deliberately revealed a trace of true qi circulating in her body.

Lin Zhao rubbed her forehead and glared at me fiercely. "That ghost thought I was dead, so it just stood at the window watching you deal with the people outside."

"It waited until you were about to reach a conclusion with the people outside before it started controlling the puppet and putting on a show for you."

"After you came in, the ghost hid, preparing to kill you. I used the wardrobe to trap it from behind."

I glanced at the wardrobe lying on the ground. "Where's the ghost?"

Lin Zhao pulled out a Soul-Confining Pouch from her pocket. "Here! Huh..."

Lin Zhao originally wanted to extract the ghost from the Soul-Confining Pouch, but instead, she pulled out a slip of paper.

Lin Zhao was stunned, holding the memo-like paper. "What is this?"

The slip of paper was the size of a spirit talisman commonly used by warlocks, but it was just a plain piece of white paper. There wasn't even a trace of ink on it.

Lin Zhao handed the paper to me. I looked at it repeatedly, but I couldn't figure it out. "Lin Zhao, when that cloth figure exploded, did you see anything?"

"I saw the ghost put its hand into the cloth figure's chest… paper…" Lin Zhao searched the room for a long time and finally found another slip of paper under the bed.

What did these two slips of paper mean?

I went through all the secret techniques I could think of, but I had no clue. The only thing I was sure of was that there was a high-level warlock in the Noble Mansion.

Lin Zhao and I couldn't sense the ghost, not because our cultivation was insufficient, but because what appeared in the Noble Mansion wasn't a ghost at all, but a spirit body controlled by a warlock.

As I lightly tapped the paper in my hand, Lin Zhao asked softly, "What do we do now?"

"We'll talk about it when it's light!" I said in a deep voice. "Get the owner's registry and compare it with the people who come and go. I want to see who has the ability to control ghosts."

People began to enter and leave the Noble Mansion. I kept an eye on the owners entering and leaving the community. It wasn't until noon that Ye Yang and Feng Ruoxing arrived.

After Feng Ruoxing read the slip of paper in my hand, he frowned. "Li Po, you encountered ghosts twice last night. Didn't you deduce anything?"

I said, "I thought about it all night. I came up with a possible conclusion. But I feel like my deduction isn't very reliable!"

"I think this gate is like a boundary line. The people inside may not want to go out, but there are people outside who want to come in."

"The delivery guy and the food delivery guy, to put it bluntly, were bringing things into the courtyard. As long as I bring the things to a specific location, or they replace me with themselves, the ghost's goal is achieved."

I paused there and continued, "If that ghost who impersonated Lin Zhao wanted to attack, it had plenty of opportunities to do so while I was in the house. Why did it have to wait until I went out?"

"If my deduction is correct, it wanted to kill me because it saw me accepting things from outsiders! That's why I said the gate is a dividing line. No one outside moves, and the people inside won't die!"

Feng Ruoxing nodded at that. "Then how do you explain the gatekeeper's death and the truck driver's situation?"

I shook my head slightly. "That's what I can't figure out. Logically speaking, the gatekeeper had already left the Noble Mansion's boundaries. Killing him wouldn't make any sense. Why didn't the ghost want to let him go?"

"More importantly, if the old man was a living lion, he should have understood where the real danger was. If there was real danger, he wouldn't have run out. Besides, would a warlock be so easily killed by a ghost?"

"If the gatekeeper wasn't a warlock, how would he have guarded the gate here for decades?"

"The old man's death is the puzzle I haven't been able to solve. I thought about it all night yesterday, but I couldn't figure it out."

Ye Yang said, "Your deduction is correct!"

"You haven't found the answer, not because you're stupid, but because you don't understand feng shui and earthworks."

Ye Yang was right. Among my many masters, there were plenty who were skilled in evil arts, but none of them knew anything about tomb raiding.

Jiangyang bandits and tomb raiders may both have the word "raid" in their titles, but the former prefer to be straightforward. Therefore, most of the Nine Ghosts disdained the ways of tomb raiding. They hadn't even touched those things themselves, so naturally, they wouldn't teach them to me.

However, Ye Yang was different. He was a descendant of Bei Yi Ye.