IBGSW Chapter 152
Flowers Bloom from Bones
“Zhuang Laoqi came along to show us the way. Old Zhang, follow his directions,” Zhao Fusheng instructed calmly.
“Ah, this—”
Zhang Chuanshi’s face crumpled. Afraid and dithering, he didn’t move. Hunching his head into his shoulders, he put on a wheedling face and called:
“Your Honor, I’m scared. Could you sit behind me? Only then will I, Old Zhang, dare go forward.”
He’d said it already braced for a refusal. Resigned, he picked up the reins and was about to urge the horses on when he heard Zhao Fusheng say briskly:
“Fine.”
“Huh?”
While he was still gaping, he felt the carriage jolt slightly. Zhao Fusheng stood up inside, took a few strides, bent down and sat behind Zhang Chuanshi.
For some reason, the moment she sat, the fear in Zhang Chuanshi’s heart was pressed down by an invisible steadiness.
“Hold on tight, everyone. Zhuang Laoqi, which way?”
The guilty hesitation from when he’d been talking with Zhuang Laoqi was gone, and even his voice came out louder as he asked the way.
Zhuang Laoqi lifted his arm, slowly and stiffly. The more he moved, the louder the water sounded in his body.
He pointed ahead:
“That way—”
The direction Zhuang Laoqi pointed was exactly where the ghost road had opened.
Zhang Chuanshi stopped shrinking back and shouted:
“Let’s go!”
He drew a deep breath and cracked the whip.
The horses, stung, whinnied and took a step forward.
That step pulled the carriage on. The shadow of the carriage was bathed in red light, and the abyss that had stretched without end suddenly opened out the instant the carriage stepped onto the ghost road.
The sky-darkening fog vanished in a moment without a trace, and the black-and-red ghost road was gone too.
Splash, splash. The sound of flowing water rang out.
Zhang Chuanshi had been about to gallop forward. His motion stiffened and a lost look crossed his face:
“Your Honor—”
“Your Honor, what happened?”
Inside the carriage, Fan Wujiu, Gou Laosi and the others also sensed something was wrong, and they all asked at once.
Zhao Fusheng looked up and glanced around.
The carriage was now traveling along a yellow-earth road about a zhang wide1. On the left was a very deep slope, at a rough guess ten zhang high at least.
The slope was overgrown with weeds and trees hung with unknown berries.
Below the slope ran a rushing river.
The river was wide, its current carrying silt, a muddy yellow.
On the other side of the path was a crisscross of fields.
It was the ninth month, the autumn harvest season. The paddies were heavy with grain, and vegetables and fruit weighed down the branches.
In the distance lay a village made of countless shabby houses. From where she stood, smoke rose in slow wisps from the chimneys of every home.
Zhao Fusheng froze.
Just then Zhuang Laoqi sighed:
“We’re at Zhuang Family Village.”
At those words, Gou Laosi in the carriage felt a rush of panic.
Before he’d known the truth, Zhuang Family Village had been very familiar to him. But now that he knew it was haunted, and that it had dragged him into this calamity too, he was filled with resistance to the place.
“Since we’re here, we’ll get out and walk. Let’s go into the village first and have a look.”
After the first moment of shock, Zhao Fusheng quickly mastered her emotions. She was the first to jump down from the carriage, loosened her hands and feet, and called into the carriage:
“Come down.”
Fan Wujiu, Wu Shaochun and the others knew this trip was for handling a ghost case. The two were terrified of the unknown malignant ghost, but with Zhao Fusheng’s intimidating presence before them, they didn’t hesitate and got out one after another.
Gou Laosi was very afraid.
Since arriving, he’d felt a ubiquitous gaze somewhere in the dark sizing him up from behind. Even with his back pressed to the carriage wall, he couldn’t block that malicious peeking.
Now he finally understood how Zhuang Laoqi had felt, restless and uneasy, these last few days.
If someone were to poke him in the back with a bamboo pole right now, knowing everything he knew, he’d definitely have lashed out.
“I don’t want to get out, I don’t want to get out—”
He kept muttering, so frightened he was incoherent, and he sat in the carriage without moving.
He’d made up his mind not to go, but once Wu Shaochun and Fan Wujiu got down, and Zhang Chuanshi jumped down too, Gou Laosi’s resolve collapsed.
He scrambled and tumbled off the carriage, sticking close to Zhao Fusheng’s back.
Once he’d steadied himself he looked around, saw the golden paddies and the orchards heavy with produce, and froze:
“Th-this—”
It was as though something so bizarre had happened that his fear had vanished entirely.
His eyes went wide and he kept looking around.
To the left of the carriage was the Shangjia River. Zhuang Family Village really did sit at one end of the river, and every year in the fifth and sixth months the water rose and even flooded both banks.
But outside that season, this branch of the Shangjia was very calm and its water clear. It was nothing like this raging torrent, which looked terribly dangerous.
Gou Laosi was frightened by the roar of the water.
Though he was still far from the riverbank, he instinctively took two steps to the right, and then saw the fields and houses.
“Your Honor—”
He called Zhao Fusheng softly, wanting to tug her sleeve. As he spoke his eyes fell on Zhuang Laoqi, silent off to one side. His heart quivered: my cousin looks worse, even more frightening—
But perhaps because Zhuang Laoqi had shown nothing strange during the trip, Gou Laosi’s fear of him had eased, and it was the strangeness of Zhuang Family Village now that scared him to death.
“It wasn’t like this the last time I came—”
He mumbled, “That is, when I came looking for my cousin—” As he spoke he anxiously stole a glance at Zhuang Laoqi, afraid he’d said too much and given something away, and that this living-dead cousin would suddenly turn on him.
“It’s all right. I have a good idea of it.”
Zhao Fusheng answered calmly.
Her words made the big stone in Gou Laosi’s heart drop at once.
If Zhao Fusheng had a handle on it, that was fine.
Zhuang Family Village was terrifying!
The village was very poor with infertile soil, and its yearly harvest was meager. At harvest time the fields were never this heavy with fruit.
Besides, it was already the ninth month, long past the harvest season for grain.
When something is out of the ordinary, there is a demon behind it. Something terrible must have happened in Zhuang Family Village.
Gou Laosi had wanted to warn Zhao Fusheng but didn’t dare say it outright. Once she answered, he knew this lord had a plan in mind, and he fell quiet.
“Zhuang Laoqi, where is your home?”
Zhao Fusheng had a feeling that the strangeness in front of them was connected to Zhuang Laoqi.
He was a malignant ghost’s vessel. It was odd that the carriage had come to Zhuang Family Village so uncannily after leaving the city, and it might well have to do with him.
She stayed on guard, but her face was perfectly calm:
“We’ll rest at your place for a bit, ask around about how things are in the village, and then think about how to get to Kuailiang Village.”
When the others had got down, Zhuang Laoqi was still sitting on the front of the carriage, in the same posture he’d held sitting side by side with Zhang Chuanshi.
Since entering the area of Zhuang Family Village, he’d been like a stiff corpse long dead and not moving: feet hooked together, palms pressed together and clamped between his thighs, shoulders up, head drawn in, chin lifted, staring toward the village.
At Zhao Fusheng’s call, he moved his eyeballs with effort.
A thin gray-white film over them was pushed aside by the movement and gathered at the corners of his eyes like discharge.
His pupils had long since dilated to a gray.
“Your Honor, I’m already home—”
He said calmly.
Then he turned his eyes again, sweeping across Zhao Fusheng, Fan Wujiu, Zhang Chuanshi and the rest in turn, and finally they landed on Gou Laosi, softening into regret and remorse:
“Cousin—”
At that cry, goosebumps rose in layers on Gou Laosi’s body. His eyes darted left and right, and just as he was about to look to Zhao Fusheng for help, he saw Zhuang Laoqi had already looked away. His stiff, blue-tinged face showed no expression now.
“Your Honor, follow the road in front of the village. There’s a path that leads straight to the river.”
Zhuang Laoqi went on by himself:
“A boat comes there every morning and evening. It can take you across the river—”
Hearing his instructions, Zhao Fusheng felt a stir:
“You—”
Had Zhuang Laoqi realized something? She was about to ask when Zhuang Laoqi suddenly grinned:
“Your Honor, am I dead already?”
His words struck terror into everyone present.
Gou Laosi, the most timid, was nearly frightened to tears.
Zhao Fusheng’s brow twitched. Fan Wujiu looked wary, and he and Wu Shaochun took up positions on either side of her.
“I really don’t want to die, Your Honor.”
Black tears suddenly welled from Zhuang Laoqi’s eyes. “My cousin and I agreed to work for wages together and save up money, and I haven’t even worn the new clothes you gave me—”
“I don’t want to die—”
In the midst of his wailing came a pfft of something bursting at his back.
Like an eggshell cracking, water burst out with a splash.
“Cousin—glug—”
Zhuang Laoqi had only time to cry out hurriedly once more before his cervical vertebrae snapped with a crack and his head rolled to the ground.
His body pitched headfirst off the carriage, and a flood of dirty water gushed from the middle of his back.
The black water was highly corrosive. In an instant it rotted the clothes he had only worn for a short while.
The cloth clung limply to his corpse like paper soaked through, then merged with the corpse water and exposed the body beneath.
The corpse’s flesh turned to rotten water and slid bit by bit off the pale white skeleton, until all that remained was a headless, clean frame of bone lying prone at the side of the road.
Strangely enough, after Zhuang Laoqi’s death, his organs turned to black water and his flesh vanished, but the skeleton alone looked polished bright.
The bones were translucent like fine jade, flawless.
And the thick corpse stench that had clung to everyone’s noses since the Demon-Suppression Bureau vanished without a trace as Zhuang Laoqi’s body rotted away.
From the moment Zhuang Laoqi realized he was dead until his body turned to bone took less than half a quarter-hour.
“...”
“...”
Everyone was silent, deeply shaken by the sight.
The black skull had rolled off to one side, the dehydrated facial skin wrapped limply around the bone, the eye sockets, empty of eyeballs, facing the direction of his own skeleton in an eerie twist.
After a while, Gou Laosi, who had been shaking with fear, was the first to break the silence:
“Cousin—”
A sudden, inexpressible regret and heartache hit him.
Zhuang Laoqi hadn’t hurt him as he’d feared. He’d actually been dead all along. But Gou Laosi felt caught off guard.
A belated grief welled up and he burst into loud sobs:
“Cousin!”
He shouldn’t have avoided Laoqi. Before dying, Zhuang Laoqi had looked at him and called to him. Had he been reluctant to part, with so much to say?
His remorse turned to impulse. Gou Laosi darted out from behind Zhao Fusheng and crouched beside Zhuang Laoqi’s remains, tears streaming down.
Drip, drip.
Two hot tears fell on the white bones. Just as Gou Laosi was about to scoop the bones up, Zhao Fusheng, who had been watching his every move, grabbed him:
“Wait!”
The moment she shouted, something strange happened again.
The tears Gou Laosi had dropped on Zhuang Laoqi’s bones did not slide off the bare bone like the rotten water from the body before. The moment they landed, they seemed to seep slowly into the jade-white bones and be absorbed.
Large, darker round marks spread across the bone, and from within these marks a thin, pointed bump suddenly pushed out.
In a blink the bumps swelled bigger and bigger like fermenting bubbles, until each was a lump the size of a peanut.
“This—”
The change drove everyone who’d been staring at the bones back in a rush. Even Gou Laosi, who’d been wracked with grief, was startled. His body jerked back, he fell on his backside, planted both palms behind him and scrabbled backward on his heels.
Creak, crack.
A faint sound came from inside the bones. Unless you held your breath, you couldn’t hear it at all.
“Is it a ghost?”
Fan Wujiu swallowed and asked with difficulty.
“Doesn’t seem so.”
Zhao Fusheng shook her head, her eyes fixed on the skeleton as she spoke.
The instant her words ended, the bone bumps raised by the tears suddenly cracked open.
A thin brown shoot pushed out of the cracks in the bone, grew quickly, and formed a slender bud.
The bud swelled fast, its outer skin peeled back, and a pitch-black bud showed inside.
Then the bud opened fast, petal over petal, the pointed-tipped petals turning from black to red from the inside out. In a blink it had bloomed into a flower as red as blood!
The snow-white skeleton and the exquisitely beautiful, uncanny nameless flower that had bloomed from it set each other off, strange and yet somehow harmonious.
It was as if the utmost evil and the utmost beauty had been joined.
Everyone’s eyes went wide, and for a moment they were too astonished to speak.
Rumble, rumble.
The river rushed below. The Demon-Suppression Bureau men and Gou Laosi seemed overawed by the flower that had bloomed on the bones before them.
After a long while, Zhao Fusheng slowly straightened.
Her movement broke the spell of stillness. Gou Laosi came to his senses, his eyes unfocused, and asked:
“Wh-what is that?”
“A flower?”
Zhao Fusheng frowned:
“A flower grown from bone. It was a strange phenomenon set off when Gou Laosi’s tears fell on Zhuang Laoqi’s bones.”
“In other words, the tears made the bones bloom. Is it only tears, or would any water do?” Zhao Fusheng mused to herself:
“If it’s the tears, does it have something to do with the cousin relationship between Gou Laosi and Zhuang Laoqi?”
“And what does a flower growing from bone signify?”
Zhao Fusheng sighed:
“And does the strangeness after Zhuang Laoqi’s death have anything to do with Fourth Madam Zhuang of Kuailiang Village?”
It was still uncertain whether the ghost case at Kuailiang Village came from Fourth Madam Zhuang reviving as a malignant ghost after her death. Now Zhuang Laoqi’s post-death strangeness made a new mystery, and no one knew whether these flowers were poisonous.
One riddle after another.
Truly, one wave had barely settled before the next rose2.
