Cen Dongsheng stretched out his hand to push open the creaking wooden gate and stepped into the courtyard, where a damp, musty smell assailed him. The courtyard's stone path was covered with moss, and the once blooming flowers in the garden had withered into mud; in the corner stood an ancient well, its edges similarly covered with moss, its water long since dried up.
The main structure of the ancestral home featured the classic layout of a Qing Dynasty Jiangnan Siheyuan, with many of the green bricks of the walls peeling off and cracks visible everywhere on the grey-tiled roof eaves; a tattered red lantern hung beneath the eaves, swaying "wu wu" in the wind.
"It's just like a setting from a ghost film."
"Yeah. I remember when I was a kid watching 'The Old Corpse of the Village', it had a similar scene..."
