"What the hell is happening here!?" The leader of the bandits stormed out of his tent, confronting the mass of people that had gathered in the middle of the hideout.
He could see a lot of his people, at least half of them had pale faces, and only some looked fairly normal.
He didn't know what had happened, but one of the bandits soon answered his earlier question.
"Boss, a lot of them said that they had been haunted by a ghost last night."
"Haunted? Ghost? What are you all dumbasses talking about? Did you all drink spoiled water and shrank your brains?"
A shouted reply soon replied to the boss' question.
"No boss! I swear, I couldn't move my body last night and a corpse with a mutilated and bloody face staring down at me!"
"Yes boss, me too! The same thing happened to me, but it was a decaying corpse that had its face intact!"
"It was a rotten face filled with holes that haunted me last night!"
The bandits, the ones that were visited by the ghosts last night began shouting altogether as they described the ghost that had haunted them on their bedside.
And despite almost half of the bandits each descripting the ghost that haunted them, none of them described the same ghost except for the common theme of rotting, bloody, and mutilated bodies.
"You all must have gone crazy!" The boss shouted out loud, silencing the bandits that were pouring their hearts out about what they had gone through last night.
"There's no such thing as a ghost! We've been coming and living here for years and we've never seen any ghosts before!"
The boss then stayed silent for a few seconds as he stared at all the members of his bandit group. After seeing that none of his people began ranting again, the boss finally lowered his voice.
"It seems laying low here for too long has sent you all to madness."
"We will depart in three days to find our next target. So prepare yourselves."
Before going back into his tent, the boss looked at them all once again.
"And stop spewing bullshit about ghosts. I don't want to hear any of them anymore."
The bandits, especially the ones that had experienced it for themselves, certainly couldn't just forget about what happened to them last night.
However, since their boss had barred them from talking about it anymore, they could only stitch their mouths shut about anything related to ghosts and continued doing their activities.
But of course, airborne seeds that had been released couldn't just simply disappear like that, especially if the seeds were spread by more than a dozen people.
If the bandits were doubtful before when they heard the cook's story, almost all of them were convinced by at least a dozen other stories that came from their other comrades.
The seed of wariness and fear had infected more and more people as now only a slim number of people didn't get the story inside their hearts and took it only as delusions of hallucinating people.
As the number of people being wary of their surroundings and afraid of the forest that bordered their hideout increased, strange things began happening in the hideout.
The door of their tents closed itself despite them remembering having opened it.
The sudden shifts in the position of the stuff that they usually use every day, disappearing from one place and appearing in another without them noticing.
And not a small number of them heard the same distant crying voice in the middle of the bright day.
But since their boss had banned them from talking about their fears, most of them kept it to themselves and let their mind foster their fears inside themselves, cultivating them to root deeper and deeper in their hearts.
All of the strange happenings in the day could still be neglected by the bandits and they could still do their activity as normal.
The bright shining sun and the company of others helped them gain the strength to temporarily block out their fears.
However, when the night came, the situation in the hideout became tense as their fears crawled back up from the depths of their hearts.
The fear of what would happen to them the second they got into their tents to sleep.
The bandits then finished their meals and some people returned to their tents to sleep or either continue their other activities.
However, a lot of the bandits stayed rooted in their place, refusing to go near their own tents as long as possible as they stayed with each other, trying to keep each other strong and huddling over the bright flame of the campfire.
But as the last few embers of the campfires died out, they all reluctantly returned back to their tents, hoping and praying that they wouldn't be visited by the ghosts again in their sleep.
They all went inside their sleeping bags curling up their bodies, making sure that they wouldn't sprawl and stare at their ceilings again if they ever woke up in the middle of the night again.
They didn't want their eyes to roam around the tent anymore, hoping that they wouldn't see the corpses again even if they were visited by them tonight by curling their bodies.
Some of them had their hands close to their ears, some had begun chanting in their minds, and some even positioned their sleeping bags near the entrance of the tent so that they would be able to get out and tell the others as soon as they heard the woman's crying voice.
They all had been prepared for it, and they all knew that they would expect for the worse the second they heard the voice of a crying woman in their ears.
However, as the seconds passed and the minutes flew, none of them actually heard the crying woman's voice.
A few of them felt that it was weird that the voice suddenly disappeared, but most of them took it as a good sign as they let themselves close their eyes, hoping that they would be able to sleep in peace tonight.
They breathed a sigh of relief as they closed their eyes, their chest felt lighter as they all fell into dreamland.
They thought that their nightmares were finally over, and they could go back to their usual routine.
However, the second they all opened their eyes at the same time when it was still midnight, they knew that their thoughts of peaceful life were only a dream.
One wishful dream that they couldn't get.
The second they opened their eyes, they all realized that no matter what was their sleeping position before they closed their eyes, they would find themselves staring at the ceiling of their tents.
With their limbs on their side and their head straight, forcing their eyes to see the whole tent.
And this time, it didn't take them longer than just a few seconds to see the familiar corpses that visited them the night before.
Not even seeing a black silhouette anymore, they instantly saw the complete features of the corpses appearing somewhere near them.
They knew that struggling wouldn't get them anywhere, but faced with a corpse-like ghost that stood near them, of course, the bandits wouldn't just stay still.
They fought with all their might, trying to break free and get away from the ghosts.
But the same as before, their whole body was paralyzed.
Different from the night before when they just passed out and saw the morning sun, this time, they actually saw the corpse-like ghosts reaching out to them, touching their limbs and slowly moving up their faces.
And despite being touched by an ethereal being, they all could feel the corpses' hands touching them, slowly creeping up towards their faces before they finally couldn't handle it anymore.
And soon, the scene of tens, even dozens of the bandits now passing out from fear repeated once again in the bandits' hideout, this time affecting a third quarter of the whole hideout.