The Isolated Island (30)

Chu Yi stood at the edge of the crowd, neither of them spoke, watching as the villagers exchanged anxious glances, clenching their fingers, and glancing at the tall beam from time to time.

Finally, the old man's body was dragged out carelessly, his mutilated lower body was ground on the soil, leaving a dark trail of bloodstains one after another. Interspersed between the slight rustling noise during the dragging, was the sound of Granny Li's ubiquitous hymn 

The makeshift beam was created very quickly. The old man's features were the only flesh intact, perhaps, but his face is as pale as a dead man, his lips were also black and blue, and countless dense thin lines penetrated through his thin and hunched body, connecting his limbs and torso; a white silk rope was tied around his neck and hung from the beam. The old man's body was supported and hung like a doll