IBGSW Chapter 3
Bygones
"The Demon-Suppression Bureau!"
Zhao Fusheng reeled and stumbled backward until her back struck a damp wooden pillar and she stopped.
"The Great Han Dynasty, the Demon-Suppression Bureau, Zhao Fusheng—"
Her expression was grim. She thumped the pillar behind her with her fist. The thudding echoed down the street, and the force of the blow rebounded into her fist. It was all utterly real.
The street was deathly still. It seemed everyone who lived here had instinctively shrunk their presence down. The sound of her pounding quickly drew a watcher from the coffin shop.
A head leaned out around the door frame. The man had a broad bald forehead and a tangle of hair tied up in a messy knot on top of his head, and narrow eyes. When he looked over, Zhao Fusheng instinctively turned her head. Their eyes met, and he sucked in a breath with a hiss, his eyes filled with terror, and he ducked back in.
Then a heavy bang sounded and rang down the whole street. The door of the coffin shop had been slammed shut, so hard the sign hanging beside it swayed.
His details surfaced in Zhao Fusheng's mind: Old Zhang of the coffin shop.
As the man's identity came to her, more related information rose up with it.
The old Zhao Fusheng had been at the bureau only a short time, and most of her days had been spent with the Fan brothers. The two had bought her and, instead of selling her to some evil place, had taken her into the bureau and bound her with a blood pact, making her master of the whole office. She had been delighted and nervous.
The Fan brothers hadn't done anything improper to her. Apart from the way they looked at her, which made her afraid, the three of them mostly got along peacefully. At first the brothers watched her very closely and hardly let her go out, so that she spent nearly all day inside the bureau.
Later, as her luck turned remarkably good, they relaxed their control. She could stand at the door of the compound and look out, and gradually learned something about this street.
As time passed, the Fan brothers relaxed further and almost stopped following her. When she went out alone, she noticed that people nearby looked at her oddly. Puzzled, she once worked up the courage to talk to them. But the moment she looked their way, people in the coffin shops and joss paper shops looked at her as if she were bad luck and fled, treating her like a plague god.
Young, timid and meek, she was too afraid to approach again after being shunned like that. Later, as strange things piled up and she realized she was probably entangled with some ghostly evil, her injuries grew worse and worse until she could no longer go out at all, and finally she died.
Because of that, she had some impression of the street, but no real dealings with its people. When she saw the coffin shop owner, she couldn't even put a name to him. She only dimly remembered the Fan brothers mentioning 'Old Zhang of the coffin shop.' What his name was or how his family stood, she had no idea.
"..." Zhao Fusheng's face went iron grey as she thought it through. She realized things were bad. Last night had apparently not been a mere dream. In all likelihood the dream had come true: she'd died in an accident in her rented room, her soul had crossed over to the Great Han Dynasty and revived in the body of a girl with her own name.
To return from the dead by borrowing a corpse should have been a great stroke of luck. But she remembered the dream: a strange world, an orphan girl whose parents were dead, an eerie bureau, and a host entangled with a ghost entity, who finally died at the hands of a malignant ghost.
While Zhao Fusheng stood dazed, the Fan brothers in the courtyard looked as if they'd seen a ghost. They stood shoulder to shoulder, their faces grim.
From where she stood, she could see the ruined courtyard with run-down wing rooms on either side. The main hall, which should have been the place for official business, now held two corpses. After last night's lightning strike it was also damaged, and looked even more wretched.
In the daylight, light fell through the hole in the roof onto the black, heavy furniture below. Perhaps because the bodies hadn't been removed, the room gave her a strange, chilly feeling.
She rubbed her arms and glanced around nervously. Apart from the Fan brothers, there was no one in sight. But she still felt a pair of 'eyes' on her in the dark, emotionless, cruel and cold. It was the same feeling of being watched that the Zhao Fusheng in her dream had felt before her death.
She gritted her teeth, took a deep breath, hesitated several times, and stepped back into the courtyard.
"You... you. Are you a person or a ghost?"
When she came in, Fan Wujiu shrank behind his brother in terror, retreated two steps, and then, working up his nerve, peeked out and asked.
"A person—" Fan Bisi was bolder and more careful. His eyes fell on the ground behind her, and only when he saw she cast a shadow did he force himself to stay calm and speak.
"When a malignant ghost kills, it first makes a ghost domain around itself..."
Seeing Zhao Fusheng frown, he realized that, as a country girl, she probably had no idea what a ghost domain was.
His eyes flickered, and he explained: "A 'ghost domain' is what folk tales call a ghost wall1."
Before a malignant ghost killed, it first created a ghost wall of a certain size and trapped people inside. Lower-tier malignant ghosts made small ones, with a small killing range, meaning fewer victims. Fiercer ghost entities could create territories of a given size, which were not only widely influential but where the ghost moved like a fish in water. Anyone who entered the ghost domain became the ghost's prey, to be slaughtered at will.
"Fusheng has a shadow and is walking. And just now Old Zhang of the coffin shop peeked out, which shows this place isn't under any ghost domain. So she should be alive, a normal person..."
"But—" Hearing his brother's words, Fan Wujiu first sighed with relief, then seemed to think of something and was startled. "She already died of—"
"Shut up!"
Fan Bisi barked and glared at his brother, forbidding him to finish. Fan Wujiu, scolded, ducked his head, then glanced at his brother. Twins understood each other without words, and with that exchange he understood and hastily lowered his head.
"Fusheng, yesterday when you died, I checked your breathing myself and confirmed you were dead. How have you—"
Having silenced his brother, Fan Bisi turned to Zhao Fusheng with a smile. He was both curious and a little alarmed. Zhao Fusheng had a ghost entity wrapped around her and had long since triggered the malignant ghost's killing rules. By all logic she was certain to die.
In fact she had died: the day before, after the Zhao couple, she'd been disemboweled by the ghost entity, and he and his brother had personally laid out all three bodies. A wound like that would have killed her even if she hadn't died on the spot.
Yet now she was up and about, her wounds healed. Her face was pale, but her eyes were bright, as if she had shed the ill luck of the ghost entity's grip and become sharper. How strange!
In all his time at the bureau, Fan Bisi had never encountered such a thing. He was curious, and seeing Zhao Fusheng calm and no longer shrinking and meek as before, he also began to suspect her. His mind raced through every record in the bureau for anything about a case like this, and before long he indeed came up with a possibility.
Zhao Fusheng said nothing. She looked at the two brothers while struggling to recall last night's dream and search the scraps of knowledge in her head, trying to understand her situation.
Putting together what she had of the original Zhao Fusheng's memories, she assembled a simple outline. Zhao Fusheng was eighteen, born in Jiumen Village under Wan'an County. Her parents were destitute. Three months ago, two men who claimed to be order envoys of the Demon-Suppression Bureau came to Jiumen Village and bought her for five copper coins.
At first she thought they weren't good men. In this chaotic age, human life was worth no more than straw. Rogues and drifters kidnapped girls and children and sold them into foul places, and the authorities did nothing. Trembling, she followed the two into Wan'an County, never imagining they would not sell her to a brothel but really take her to the bureau.
Speaking of the bureau, one had to mention the Great Han's system. The original Zhao Fusheng was an illiterate country girl whose farthest trip in life had probably been this journey to Wan'an County with the Fan brothers. The court's rules and systems were utterly incomprehensible to her, but she did know of the Demon-Suppression Bureau.
Ghost entities now ruled the world and often took human lives; some were so ferocious they could slaughter whole villages and towns. To suppress malignant ghosts that killed, the court had set up a Demon-Suppression Bureau in every prefecture and county, each with a commanding officer to hold it down.
The commanding officer handled ghost cases and kept the peace, with order envoys serving under him. Wherever a ghost entity appeared, the village elder would report to the town, the town to the county, and the county bureau would send people to remove the danger.
Thus the bureau mattered enormously to the people of the Great Han. The Fan brothers were order envoys of the Wan'an County bureau, a status that put them beyond the control of the county magistrate and above the county's officials. To the original Zhao Fusheng, they were great personages.
When the twins actually took her into the bureau, she was nervous and terrified. What alarmed her more was that they didn't harm her. They told her that the previous commanding officer had died unexpectedly while destroying a ghost, and that the post of commanding officer in the office was vacant.
They said that on his deathbed the previous commanding officer had told them the next one would come from Jiumen Village in Wan'an County, that they had found her by his guidance, and that she should take the master's seat.
Like a startled quail, she dared not refuse as the two talked her round, and obeyed whatever they said. In the end she bound her soul with a drop of blood and became master of the office.
...
Thinking it over now, Zhao Fusheng felt the original Zhao Fusheng had not only been muddled in her duties at the bureau, but had died without understanding why.
