IBGSW Chapter 126
Setting Out for the Ghost Mausoleum
Zhao Fusheng looked at Magistrate Pang. His eyelids were puffy from lack of sleep, his eyes brimmed with tears, his bags drooped like goldfish bladders, and his whole face was full of hope.
She shook her head:
"I can only deal with the ghost calamity. I can't promise I'll be in time to save your wife."
This ghost was savage in its killing. Yu Weide, lying on the floor, was barely breathing, clinging to his last breath.
Clang, clang— The tapping kept on, and each time it sounded, his chest bulged upward heavily.
The seal on the Ghost Mausoleum probably hadn't been completely destroyed yet. The ghost's power was being suppressed by a ghost of higher rank, so it hadn't yet been able to use its killing strength to the fullest, which was why Yu Weide had held out until now.
But humans and ghosts are not evenly matched in strength. If this dragged on, the ghost would surely drill through Yu Weide's chest from the inside.
What would happen to his body then, Zhao Fusheng couldn't say, but she was certain the old gentleman's life could not be saved.
"Let's go! To the Ghost Mausoleum, now."
Saving a life was like putting out a fire. Time was short and she dared not linger. She rose at once and signaled Fan Bisi to follow.
Fan Bisi was afraid, but since he had once fallen out with Zhao Fusheng, he didn't dare refuse. He hesitated a moment, then stood up.
He called out:
"Old Zhang, you're coming too."
"..."
Zhang Chuanshi wanted to hit someone again.
This kid held a grudge against him today. He hadn't called him for the good errands, but twice now in a row it was dealing with ghosts.
"I..."
Zhang Chuanshi racked his brain for an excuse. Fan Bisi looked at Zhao Fusheng:
"We've only just come back to Wan'an County and now we're going to the Ghost Mausoleum. There's a lot we need to find out."
And Zhang Chuanshi had dodged the Baozhi County trip. He'd stayed in Wan'an County and knew best what had erupted at the Ghost Mausoleum.
"Old Zhang comes with us."
Zhao Fusheng nodded.
In truth, even if Fan Bisi hadn't spoken, she would have wanted Zhang Chuanshi with her. The bureau's usable manpower was so thin; there were only the same few people again and again.
"I—"
Zhang Chuanshi was about to wail, but met Zhao Fusheng's icy gaze.
She was gentle with people in ordinary talk, but her will was firm, and once she decided there was no room to change it.
He had come to grief in her hands before, and it was only because they had handled the Goutou Village case together, escaping death side by side, that he'd dared to be a little cheeky and test her tolerance.
Now one look at Zhao Fusheng's eyes told him that further fuss was useless, and that at a time like this, dragging things out and wasting time might well anger her.
A good man doesn't take a beating he can avoid.
Realizing this, Zhang Chuanshi rolled over at once, sat up, kicked his legs and stood:
"I'll go with you, my lord."
"I'll go too—"
Seeing this, Magistrate Pang quickly called out as well: "I can explain to you in detail what has happened these past two nights."
Zhao Fusheng nodded:
"Let's go."
She had only just returned from Baozhi County and the carriage hadn't even been unhitched. It was still outside the bureau gates.
By now the sky was pitch black.
Looking at the nervous, uneasy officials and gentry, Zhao Fusheng said gently:
"You stay here in the bureau and wait for news from me. You needn't come along."
They had feared she would force them to go, and on hearing this they all breathed a sigh of relief and said:
"Thank you, my lord."
The secretary worried about the magistrate's safety and wanted to go too, but Magistrate Pang waved him off: "Go back to the yamen at once and look after my wife—"
A malignant ghost's killing could hardly be watched over by ordinary people, but at this point that was all the secretary could do.
"Yes."
The secretary answered.
Zhao Fusheng ordered the menials to bring tea and snacks, and told Fan Wujiu to guard the bureau.
She led Fan Bisi, Zhang Chuanshi and Magistrate Pang out the gates. Fan Wujiu looked at his brother, wanting to speak but holding back. Fan Bisi said only: "Follow Lord Zhao's orders. Guard the bureau well and don't let her gold be lost."
Fan Wujiu suppressed his panic and nodded, looking at his brother:
"You must come back."
"I will."
Fan Bisi nodded.
"Why act as if this were a final farewell?"
Zhao Fusheng sighed:
"I have some confidence I can resolve this case."
Fan Bisi had been waiting for her to say that.
When she finished, not only Fan Bisi but even Zhang Chuanshi brightened. He shook off his heavy steps and leapt onto the carriage like a monkey, waving to her:
"My lord, hurry up!"
"..."
Zhao Fusheng gave him a speechless look. Just before boarding, she turned inexplicably to glance back at the bureau.
The sky was black. Two lanterns had been hung on either side of the gates.
But inside the lanterns a layer of dense water beads clung, and the flames within were suppressed and pitifully small, barely casting a patch of light before the gate.
The plaque above the gates had sunk into the dark. The three characters "Demon-Suppression Bureau," which had been barely legible, were now covered by black qi and almost invisible.
Her eyes flickered, and she climbed into the carriage.
Fan Bisi and Magistrate Pang boarded after her.
The coachman was afraid, and Zhao Fusheng said:
"Don't be afraid. Just take us to half a li from the cemetery in West City and let us off."
Fan Bisi seemed to want to say something.
He appeared to know Zhao Fusheng's ways by now and didn't say more, but Zhang Chuanshi did:
"Why not have him drive right into the Ghost Mausoleum, my lord?" He folded his arms, puzzled:
"There aren't many of us. We'll need to find the ghost, and we'll need someone to scout the road."
Magistrate Pang nodded.
The coachman shook with fear, but with the magistrate and the three from the bureau there, he didn't dare speak.
Zhao Fusheng wasn't angry. She only looked at Zhang Chuanshi for a long moment, then reminded him:
"We are the ones from the bureau."
"What do you mean?"
Zhang Chuanshi didn't follow:
"He's from the bureau too."
Zhao Fusheng simply said:
"We are the commanding officer and the order envoys. We're the ones who handle ghost cases. They're only menials, who drive carriages and do odd jobs."
"But that's how Zhao Qiming and the others always did it. They didn't make the distinction. Whoever at the bureau was useful went." Zhang Chuanshi lightly scratched his scabbed face:
"After all, someone's got to die."
"..."
The carriage was silent for a moment.
Zhao Fusheng glanced at Magistrate Pang and Fan Bisi. Neither spoke. Whether the three from the bureau or the coachman Zhang Chuanshi had mentioned, all seemed to tacitly accept his words, with no sign of objecting.
"But that rule isn't right."
Zhao Fusheng shook her head:
"Everyone has their own duties. Whether in the court or the county yamen, each should keep to their post."
Zhang Chuanshi still didn't understand, so Zhao Fusheng said:
"Unless it's necessary, I don't want to break the rules."
She looked at Zhang Chuanshi deeply:
"Just as when we handle ghost cases, I won't just send you all off to die."
That one sentence instantly convinced Zhang Chuanshi.
He and Fan Bisi exchanged a look, and there was alarm in both pairs of eyes.
In the Great Han Dynasty, now that ghost calamities raged and propriety and rules had collapsed, Zhao Fusheng seemed to be deliberately binding herself with rules she had made for herself.
Without them, by Zhang Chuanshi's account, she should treat order envoys as expendable in dangerous cases.
Yet in the past month and more, in every case she had gone in person, never leaving it to others.
And of the four order envoys registered at the county yamen, apart from Liu Yizhen, the other three had handled cases with her and not one had died!
In the bureau that was an unprecedented miracle.
Now she held to her bottom line while Zhang Chuanshi was urging her to break the rule.
Once the rules fell apart, besides the menials who would suffer first, not one of these few would fare any better.
Thinking this, Zhang Chuanshi broke into a cold sweat and quickly praised:
"You are wise, my lord. I was foolish."
Zhao Fusheng smiled at him. He looked uneasy, lost his usual smoothness and couldn't meet her eyes.
She smiled and said no more on the subject, instead telling the coachman:
"Let's go."
Her earlier show of support soothed the coachman's anxious, tense mood enormously, and he felt grateful to her, vowing in his heart to repay Lord Zhao.
So the moment she finished and he nodded, the carriage started, racing toward West City.
As the carriage moved, Zhao Fusheng asked Zhang Chuanshi:
"Old Zhang, where have you been staying these two days?"
Zhang Chuanshi was still in a daze. Hearing his name, he hurriedly collected his tangled feelings and answered:
"My lord, after you left with Big and Little Fan, that afternoon I saw it get dark very fast and realized something was wrong. That very night I moved into the bureau."
Zhao Fusheng had just come back from Baozhi County and knew little of what had happened in Wan'an County.
Zhang Chuanshi, though often a rogue, knew what was important, and added quickly:
"That night I did hear a faint tapping, but I couldn't hear it clearly. It was annoying, but I could still sleep."
In other words, he was not like Yu Weide, Magistrate Pang and the others, who had suffered all night.
Hearing this, Zhao Fusheng felt sure there was some hidden secret in the bureau.
That the bureau could to some degree block a ghost's marking was no wild guess. In fact, back on the pleasure boat in Baozhi County, during her talk with Zheng He, she had already suspected it.
Zheng He had known of the Ghost Carriage's existence for a long time, yet had never been marked by it.
And he had said something: ghosts that revived when bureau personnel died in service would have no effect on the people of the bureau yamen.
Zheng He had been very sure of this.
He had spoken with conviction, even seeming to want to argue with Zhao Fusheng at the time.
Only when Zhao Fusheng told him he had already been marked by the Ghost Carriage had he deflated like a punctured ball.
Zheng He had been confident enough to speak so, and he must have had something behind it. At least as far as he knew, the court had had no such problem in decades.
And this ran against the rules of malignant ghosts.
The Ghost Carriage's killing rule: whoever hears of it or mentions it is marked, then their name is entered into the ghost name register, and the ghost drives the carriage to take them away.
Yet the bureau could reverse this rule: even if bureau people knew of the Ghost Carriage and spoke of it to others, the carriage would not take them.
When something is out of the ordinary, a demon is behind it.
Zhao Fusheng thought of a possibility.
By Fan Bisi's account, a ghost's killing rule could not be forcibly twisted, but a malignant ghost of higher rank could suppress one of lower rank.
"..."
Only when the two sides were unequal in rank could a ghost's rule of marking be suppressed and screened.
But the Ghost Carriage had already reached Disaster-tier or above. What could be higher than the carriage, able to suppress it and shield the bureau's people from a ghost rule's marking?
In her mind rose the plaque hanging before the local bureau yamen.
Zhang Chuanshi was kin to Paperman Zhang.
On the day the Wan'an bureau fell into trouble, everyone else had moved away, and only Zhang Chuanshi had not left.
Fan Bisi had mentioned later that the reason Zhang Chuanshi stayed was to do coffin business, and that the bureau owed him a large sum of silver, which was why he wouldn't leave.
With Paperman Zhang behind him, making money would not be hard for Zhang Chuanshi. He must have had a reason for staying.
Zhang Chuanshi feared Paperman Zhang and wouldn't tell her much.
But though he wouldn't say, Zhao Fusheng reasoned and guessed her way to the answer.
She thought of the plaque on the bureau's gates.
Every prefectural bureau of the court probably hung a plaque like it, and Wan'an's plaque was sometimes clean and sometimes seemed covered in dust.
Of course it wasn't really dust. It must be linked to the county's ghost calamity.
If the county's ghost cases disappeared and the people weren't affected by ghost calamities, the plaque should be especially clean; otherwise it would be clouded by the ghosts' baleful aura.
Zhao Fusheng suspected this plaque was also a malevolent object, similar to the ghost coffin and the ghost door plank.
The court had probably obtained an extremely malevolent object, and by some means broken it up, shipped the pieces across the country, and hung them above the yamen of the local bureaus.
Such a malevolent object should hold a certain power of resisting malignant ghosts and could protect the people in the bureau from ghosts to some extent. That was why Zheng He, in his early years, had heard of and mentioned the Ghost Carriage without being marked.
And the reason Zhao Fusheng herself had been marked by the carriage on hearing of it was most likely because the bureau's plaque had grown dirty, its power suppressed, and so it had lost some effect.
When this ghost calamity in Wan'an County broke out, Zhang Chuanshi had immediately moved into the bureau yamen. So compared with Magistrate Pang and the rest, for the first two nights he had been protected by the plaque's power and heard the tapping only dimly.
This was also why, on her return, she had found the plaque grayish and dull, its characters nearly hidden by haze, impossible to read.
All this was only Zhao Fusheng's inference. Whether true or not, she would know when the ghost case was solved and she returned to the bureau for a look.
Having thought this through, she looked at Magistrate Pang again:
"You mentioned the Ghost Mausoleum earlier. How did you determine the ghost's location?"
Magistrate Pang looked haggard. Hearing her question, he roused himself:
"Yesterday we didn't know. It wasn't until this morning that someone mentioned in passing that the fog in West City still hadn't lifted by the middle of the Si hour1, around ten o'clock."
Wan'an County wasn't ringed by mountains, and mornings at this time of year might have fog, but it would clear once it was fully light.
Recently the sky had been brightening slowly, but by early Si it had been getting light, and any fog should have gone.
The speaker had been a yamen runner, and when Magistrate Pang heard it, he felt something was wrong.
Anything to do with a ghost case, he paid more attention to than anyone.
He thought at once of the West City Ghost Mausoleum, which had to have its imprint laid every year by a general-rank figure from the bureau.
The court had last sent someone to lay the imprint in the middle of the eighth month last year. By the usual schedule the court should have sent someone at the end of the seventh month this year, but Wan'an County's situation was special, so it had lost that protection.
Now it was the eighth month, and the imprint laid last year must be gradually losing effect.
Thinking of this, Magistrate Pang had felt sick at the time.
