IBGSW Chapter 154
Searching the Village
The village chief’s old house stood at the innermost point of the village’s center. It had a big courtyard outside, and though it was also old, it looked noticeably more spacious than the other shabby homes.
Now the two leaves of the main gate stood half shut and half open.
After a few days the courtyard had grown weeds, and a faint smell of blood drifted from it.
Gou Laosi led Zhao Fusheng there, not daring to look inside, and blurted:
“Your Honor, the village chief of Zhuang Family Village lives here.”
Zhao Fusheng nodded and, stepping past Gou Laosi, took several paces forward to the courtyard gate.
She took out the ghost arm and used its power to push the half-closed gate inward. With a creak the door swung open, and a faint corpse stench mixed with blood wafted from the yard.
Gou Laosi retched, then looked anxiously at the ghost arm in Zhao Fusheng’s hand.
The ghost arm was clearly a corpse’s severed arm, an abnormal gray-brown, giving off a faint stink.
He had seen with his own eyes how she’d used it to rap Zhuang Laoqi’s body after the ghost’s influence. That severed arm had come back to life, and it was terrifying.
Now the ghost arm had pushed the door open and showed no unusual reaction, only trembling fingers. Zhao Fusheng’s tight nerves loosened a little:
“Looks like there’s no ghost aura in this house for now.”
The ghost arm hadn’t been suppressed, which showed no ghost entity was present.
With that, Zhao Fusheng stepped inside.
Gou Laosi didn’t dare follow. But when he looked back, he saw fog on every side. After the incident at Zhuang Family Village it was practically a dead village, and it seemed that apart from the two of them there wasn’t another living soul.
With the Demon-Suppression Bureau men split up, only he and Zhao Fusheng were left as a pair, and now she’d gone in and left him standing outside alone.
If a ghost came, he’d certainly die.
Images of every kind of strange death flooded Gou Laosi’s mind. He scrambled in after her in a blind panic and stuck close to Zhao Fusheng’s side.
Zhao Fusheng ignored his behavior. As long as he wasn’t stupid, he wouldn’t wander off on his own.
Inside the courtyard she simply held up the ghost arm and looked around warily.
The yard looked as though it had been deserted for some time.
On the left as you entered stood an unidentified large tree, about an armspan thick, but now mysteriously dead.
Opposite the tree, on the right, was a thatched shed with a stove, pots and bowls, and some firewood stacked behind.
Zhao Fusheng walked to the kitchen. A big pot sat on top, and when she lifted the lid, a scorched stink mixed with a sour reek burst out.
The bottom of the pot was blackened with a layer of mushy burnt food, as if the family had been cooking when the incident happened and left.
She put the lid back and reasoned: villagers under the Great Han Dynasty were mostly poor. The village chief’s family might be better off than ordinary villagers, but not by much.
If a family had known they were going out, they wouldn’t have cooked food and then left it uneaten for no reason. It was very likely that something sudden happened while the chief’s family was cooking, forcing them to leave in a hurry with no time to look after the house.
“Gou Laosi, open all the doors.”
She ordered, pushing open a door at the side as she spoke.
The room looked like a pen for poultry, but now the fowl were all dead, and a rotten-corpse stench mixed with animal dung and mold hit her in the face. She peered in, saw no human figure or corpse, and quickly closed the door again.
Once the door was shut the smell was cut off. She breathed slowly, then went on toward other places.
Gou Laosi was afraid, but this was a matter of life and death and he dared not disobey. He quickly pushed open the doors of several side rooms, and the two of them took a brief look at each from outside. Finally their gaze fell on the main hall directly facing the courtyard gate.
Zhuang Family Village was shrouded in thick fog. By the hour it should have been broad daylight, but the yard was dim.
The main hall took in light only from its doorway, with a bedroom off the back. From outside looking in, the hall was deep and dark.
“Your Honor, there doesn’t seem to be anyone here either.”
Gou Laosi quickly peeked in, then said timidly.
“Let’s go in and look.”
Zhao Fusheng answered.
With that she stepped inside, and Gou Laosi followed, steeling himself.
Their arrival disturbed the stillness of the house. The dust, quiet for ages, was startled awake and flew up everywhere, joining the beads of mist in the air.
In the middle of the village chief’s hall stood a long table, and facing the door were two old chairs whose backs had peeled bare of lacquer.
After entering the hall, Zhao Fusheng’s eyes fell on the floor.
The floor was rammed earth, and about half a zhang from the two chairs lay a heap of unidentifiable ash.
It looked as if a big bundle of firewood had burned there, leaving charcoal strips of different lengths.
“This is—”
Gou Laosi was shocked at the sight.
Having watched Zhuang Laoqi’s death with his own eyes, he instantly thought this must be a heap of leftover bone ash, though he had no proof yet.
Zhao Fusheng had arrived at the same thought and said:
“Kuai Mancai?”
According to Zhuang Laoqi, after the incident at Kuailiang Village, Kuai Mancai had come to Zhuang Family Village to ask for help and said that Fourth Madam Zhuang had been drowned for committing adultery with a man.
When he finished telling the story of Kuailiang Village, he was suddenly claimed by a malignant ghost and died a violent death in the village chief’s house.
“Too bad we can’t tell if this is human bone anymore—” Gou Laosi sighed.
Zhao Fusheng’s eyes flickered:
“By reason, if Kuai Mancai died the way Zhuang Laoqi did, his flesh would have turned to water, head and body parted, bones white as snow, and only when some condition was met would the bones flower.”
After the flowers bloomed, the bones would wither gray and turn to ash.
Seven or eight days had passed since the incident, and the flowers on those bones had probably rotted. But going by Zhuang Laoqi’s case, his head should still be somewhere nearby.
The village chief’s main hall wasn’t bare; jars and pots lined its walls and farm odds and ends were heaped in the corners.
But the center of the hall was tidy and clean, with little clutter.
Zhao Fusheng’s gaze landed on the two chairs. Behind them was a narrow table with an incense burner on it, and in the wall was a recessed shrine niche holding a simple clay deity statue.
A dirty red cloth was draped over the table, hanging all the way to the floor, completely concealing the space behind the table.
“Your Honor.”
Seeing her staring at the shrine niche in a daze, Gou Laosi called carefully.
Just then hurried footsteps sounded outside. Gou Laosi, used to the village’s stillness, jumped at the sudden noise and shot to Zhao Fusheng’s side. He was about to speak when Zhang Chuanshi’s shout came from outside:
“Your Honor.”
Zhao Fusheng did not answer. Gou Laosi quickly called back:
“Your Honor’s in here.”
As he spoke, Zhao Fusheng walked past the pile of bone ash. She counted: it was three or four paces from the chairs and the long table. If Kuai Mancai had died as soon as he finished speaking that day, his head might have rolled this far.
She went up to the chairs, pushed the two aside, and lifted the red cloth covering the table.
Under the slender table legs, a black, withered skull indeed sat there, staring with hollow eyes toward the direction of its bones, mouth stretched open in pain.
Kuai Mancai had been dead a long while. The skin on his face had dried black like a layer of old ox-hide paper stuck to his skull.
The shriveled lips couldn’t cover his teeth, and the sight was chilling.
When Gou Laosi saw Zhao Fusheng bend to pick something up and straighten with a human head in her arms, he screamed:
“AHHH!!!”
His scream rang out, and the footsteps and voice that had been heard outside suddenly stopped, as though Zhang Chuanshi’s arrival moments before had been an illusion.
“Stop screaming.”
Zhao Fusheng scolded him, and Gou Laosi, in a panic, clasped both hands over his mouth.
“Your Honor, this is, this is—”
Zhao Fusheng ignored him and called:
“Old Zhang, come in.”
There was silence outside for a while, then Zhang Chuanshi’s voice came:
“Old Zhang’s not here.”
“...” Zhao Fusheng’s brow twitched. Before long half of Zhang Chuanshi’s head poked furtively around the courtyard gate, looked left and right inside, and only when he saw no ghost did he dare to appear fully.
“What the hell were you shrieking for? You nearly made your master Zhang piss his pants.”
Entering the hall, Zhang Chuanshi glared angrily at Gou Laosi. Gou Laosi’s eyes dropped to Zhao Fusheng’s hands. Zhang Chuanshi jolted and then made out the head she was holding.
“This is—” Zhang Chuanshi’s face changed. He scanned the floor and saw the pile of bone ash on the ground:
“Kuai Mancai?”
While they spoke, Fan Wujiu and Wu Shaochun, who had split off, came following the voices, one after the other.
When the Demon-Suppression Bureau men were all together, they saw the ash on the ground and the skull in Zhao Fusheng’s arms and guessed the dead man’s identity.
“Looks like Zhuang Laoqi, though under the ghost’s control and with a few inaccurate memories, got one thing right: Kuai Mancai really did come to Zhuang Family Village for help, and he died here.”
This way of dying matched Zhuang Laoqi’s death exactly. Zhao Fusheng said:
“I suspect his head and body separated, his flesh turned to water, and his bones bloomed—”
“Flowers?”
Zhang Chuanshi flinched at the mention of flowers. He even felt a tingle in his palms and wiped them hard on his trouser legs again:
“I don’t see any flowers—”
“Did some meddling hand pick them again?” Wu Shaochun asked, and when Zhang Chuanshi gave him an unfriendly look, he guiltily turned his head away.
“I don’t know.”
Zhao Fusheng shook her head with a frown:
“But look at the situation in the village chief’s house. There’s food in the pot in the kitchen, and nobody collected Kuai Mancai’s bones after he died. That means the chief’s household ran into trouble right then, which is at odds with what Zhuang Laoqi said.”
When she finished, she asked the other three:
“Is there anyone else alive in the village?”
Wu, Fan and Zhang all shook their heads:
“Not a single survivor, and no bodies either. Some houses have dead livestock, but beyond that, this is like an abandoned village with no sign of people.”
“Maybe they went to Kuailiang Village.”
Thinking of this, Zhao Fusheng put the skull on a chair: “Come on, let’s go to the river and then see Kuailiang Village.”
She went out first and the others looked at each other, then followed behind her.
“Your Honor, do you have any confidence about this ghost case?”
Fan Wujiu asked, bracing himself.
“We haven’t even worked out the ghost’s killing rule. How can we talk about confidence?”
Zhao Fusheng shook her head, and her words made them tremble:
“If we haven’t worked out the killing rule, then if we rashly go to Kuailiang Village—”
“Anything worth doing involves risk,” Zhao Fusheng said:
“At present the malignant ghost is suspected to be Fourth Madam Zhuang, and Kuailiang Village is where it happened. According to Zhuang Laoqi’s leads, everyone marked by the ghost ends up going to Kuailiang Village. If we keep hiding and never go, we’ll never figure out the ghost’s rules.”
And the ghost calamity was spreading fast. “If we don’t stop it, this place isn’t far from Wan’an County, and it could easily spread to the county town.”
Then Zhao Fusheng could slip out of Wan’an County, but she looked at the others:
“You’re in the Soul-Life Register. What would you do?”
They couldn’t run. All they could do was face it.
The group was silent for a long while, then all nodded.
“Your Honor is right,” Wu Shaochun said.
Thinking that he was bound to Wan’an County and couldn’t leave, Zhang Chuanshi drooped like an eggplant hit by frost1. After a while of hanging his head, he suddenly said, “Since it’s to do with Fourth Madam Zhuang, why don’t we go to the house of Zhuang Laoqi’s eldest uncle first?”
For some reason, the thought of going to Kuailiang Village filled him with fear and resistance.
“It wouldn’t help,” Zhao Fusheng replied:
“Fourth Madam Zhuang was Zhuang Laoqi’s eldest uncle’s daughter, but she married out many years ago and her traces have long been gone from there. She died at Kuailiang Village, so that’s where her malignant ghost revived.”
Gou Laosi bit his lip and asked:
“Your Honor, will Fourth Cousin really be that terrifying after death?”
“Don’t judge a malignant ghost by human thinking!” Zhao Fusheng said, her expression a little stern:
“However pitiful her life was, once she died she lost human feeling and memory. All that’s left is the instinct to kill.”
After a malignant ghost revives, its killing isn’t for revenge. Its resentment doesn’t fade when its enemy dies. It only drags more innocents in.
“Zhuang Family Village and Kuailiang Village affected her while she was alive, and some fixation from before her death may have formed her killing rule. We’ll have to find living people to ask for the details.”
But Zhuang Family Village had become an empty village with no living people. Staying to look into the past was pointless.
From Zhuang Laoqi’s words, it was clear that Zhuang Laoqi’s eldest uncle and aunt hadn’t cared about this fourth daughter. Whatever mark she’d left in her parents’ home before marriage had probably been wiped clean when she married out.
Zhao Fusheng said:
“All I hope now is that there are still survivors at Kuailiang Village. Otherwise things get truly hard.”
When they’d finished discussing, they left the village chief’s house at once.
By Zhuang Laoqi’s account, after leaving the village there was a path leading straight to a branch of the Shangjia River, stained yellow by silt. At the riverbank a boat arrived at dawn and dusk to carry people to the opposite shore.
The group skirted the weed-choked paths between the fields and got back onto the main road. Following the dirt road down, after about half a quarter-hour, they did find a man-made path hidden in dense grass.
“Your Honor, there.”
Wu Shaochun pointed.
And they saw the steps leading down along the slope.
