IBGSW Chapter 158
Ghost Versus God
The ghost vanished?
Everyone froze.
The ghost wrapped in black hair, having failed to take the flower, had disappeared, as though very well mannered, and didn’t pester them further.
But the soul-shaking, terrifying chill had not dispersed. The shiver-inducing eeriness remained.
The ghost hadn’t left. It had simply hidden at the bottom of the river!
Zhao Fusheng’s eyes went wide and she signaled Zhang Chuanshi with a look.
Zhang Chuanshi was as frantic as an ant on a hot pan1. He wanted to escape, but the soles of his feet were firmly stuck to the boat and he couldn’t get free. All he could do was turn his head left and right under Zhao Fusheng’s gaze, trying to find the ghost’s shadow.
But the water all around was murky, and beyond the remains and bones and bits of clothing, silt mixed with the current so that he couldn’t see his surroundings.
While he struggled, the black air reappeared.
Countless long, thin black hairs fell from above like a sudden downpour.
The five looked up belatedly, and a sight enough to drive anyone mad appeared before them.
The pale, blue-purple face of a woman ghost looked down, staring at them coldly.
Her whole mass of long hair spread out in the water like a blooming flower in all directions, wrapping her head in the middle, forming an enormous underwater “sunflower.”
Her naked body was twisted in an uncanny posture, as though bound.
The ghost’s body swayed stiffly like a fish and in a blink vanished from their sight, the hair turning to black smoke, an afterimage flashing before them.
Immediately alarm bells rang in Zhang Chuanshi’s heart.
With his gift for fearing death, he sensed that the ghost flower in his hand might be the main thing attracting the malignant ghost.
He wanted to throw it away, but the flower grown from the dead man’s bones seemed bound to him, and no matter how he flung his hand, he couldn’t toss it off.
A cold aura rushed closer. This time it pressed toward his back.
Zhang Chuanshi wanted to turn.
But his soles were stuck, and he couldn’t move at all.
In the black air, masses of hair wrapped around him, and the woman ghost who had vanished suddenly appeared behind him.
Her ghost head became a huge octopus-like head and tried to burrow into the middle of his back.
The instant the malignant ghost approached Zhang Chuanshi’s back, his clothes were eaten away by the baleful aura and fell off soundlessly. A pair of horrifying ghost hands joined and stabbed at his back.
“Aaggghhhhgh—”
Zhang Chuanshi’s scream turned into bubbles gushing out. The moment the ghost hands touched his flesh, his back suddenly blazed with red light.
Another icy ghostly breath escaped from his body.
The Door Gods!
The taut string in Zhao Fusheng’s heart suddenly slackened.
She knew the Zhao couple’s power after being enshrined was formidable, and she’d used a malignant ghost imprint during the Ghost Mausoleum case, so she understood a ghost seal’s might.
But this was the first time she’d used the seal on a person, and she hadn’t personally verified its power when facing a ghost.
In the red light, the tattoo on Zhang Chuanshi’s back “revived.”
The ghost shadows carrying door planks stepped out of Zhang Chuanshi’s back and grew larger and larger, becoming in a moment the shadows of the Zhao couple carrying their door planks.
The moment the two ghosts appeared, they seized the woman ghost, one on each side.
The long-haired malignant ghost in the water struggled desperately as soon as she was gripped.
The Zhao couple were cold-faced and without any pity, tearing the ghost’s body as if fighting over spoils.
A ghost normally has no physical form, but when ghosts fight, they restrain each other.
Once the river-bottom female ghost’s corpse was caught by the Zhao couple, she could no longer vanish as before.
The two ghosts each hugged and pulled at her head and feet—
The next instant, the woman ghost was torn in two by the Zhao couple, and once she was dismembered, each of the two, expressionless, carried half of the woman ghost’s remains on their back.
The black ghost door planks instantly blazed with blood-red light, becoming nets of baleful aura that sealed each half of the woman ghost’s remains inside the ghost door planks.
A battle that should have been terrifying ended in an instant.
The already murky water at the bottom of the river grew even fouler from the clash of the three ghosts, and many bones and flesh on the rotting corpses were shredded by the force of the ghosts’ tearing and came loose from the skeletons.
Was it over?
Zhao Fusheng desperately shook her head to avoid the rotten flesh flying around her, her mind full of questions.
Fan Wujiu and Wu Shaochun looked delighted. When Zhang Chuanshi had sensed the ghost’s appearance and its hair wrapped around him, he’d looked back and happened to see the pair of ghosts dismembering the woman ghost.
He nearly wept with joy!
At that moment a prompt from the Investiture of the Gods sounded in Zhao Fusheng’s sea of consciousness: The Door Gods have received a devout believer’s faith, incense value +1.
Merit +1.
Since activating the Investiture of the Gods, this was the first time Zhao Fusheng had seen a ghost, after being enshrined, produce incense value. Unfortunately this wasn’t the moment to look into it.
Seeing how awesome the Door Gods’ imprint was, having killed the ghost in an instant, the group was rejoicing, when sudden change followed.
The door planks on the Zhao couple’s backs suddenly began to bleed. The woman ghost’s body seemed to melt, turning into big clots of congealed blood that dripped down from the door planks.
As the two halves of the ghost’s body broke down, the Door Gods’ imprint, no longer stimulated by baleful ghost aura, showed signs of going out of control.
The ghost-deity imprint, red to the point of black, turned to blood flowing across Zhang Chuanshi’s back, and in an instant dyed his back red and swallowed the whole imprint.
But when the blood light kept pushing outward, it was blocked by the door frame Zhao Fusheng had carved with her blade.
However the baleful, murderous blood light surged, it couldn’t break the frame’s restraint. In the end it could only be contained inside the scar, and it gradually returned to the shape of two resentful ghost shadows carrying door planks, and grew calm again.
Meanwhile—
The blood clots that the woman ghost’s remains had turned into flowed into the riverbed, spreading, and clumped together, and in a moment re-formed.
One by one, black hairs grew again from this reassembled flesh.
As the blood clots merged, Fourth Madam Zhuang’s body was pieced together again, and her black hair spread wildly once more at the bottom of the river, a dreadful blue-purple ghost face reappearing in the huge masses of black hair.
The woman ghost that Fourth Madam Zhuang had become surged toward Zhang Chuanshi once more.
She was so anxious to get the flower in Zhang Chuanshi’s hand that half of her body wasn’t even fully reassembled yet.
Beneath the river, countless blood clots wriggled, searching for the ghost’s main body.
She looked even scarier than before.
Zhang Chuanshi was scared out of his wits.
But the ghost-deity imprint Zhao Fusheng had stamped was no ordinary thing. Though the shadows of the Zhao couple weren’t their true bodies, as long as the imprint’s power wasn’t entirely used up, it could still work wonders.
The instant the half-bodied woman ghost approached Zhang Chuanshi again, the ghost-deity seal was triggered once more.
The shadows of the Zhao couple carrying ghost door planks reappeared in red light, and the ghost couple stepped out and once more seized the ghost’s corpse.
...
It was like a new cycle.
Zhao Fusheng realized that after this the woman ghost would very likely be dismembered again by the ghost imprint and temporarily suppressed on the ghost door planks.
But the ghost-deity seal wasn’t the Zhao couple’s true bodies. It was only a trace of their lingering aura.
The Kuailiang Village case had long since grown into a formidable force, and Fourth Madam Zhuang’s malignant ghost was extremely hard to deal with. Clearly it wasn’t realistic to expect to deal with her through sealing alone.
And this woman ghost seemed to command some uncanny law: her corpse could shift from real to unreal and unreal to real even under a malignant ghost’s aura, which made her extremely hard to handle.
The thought of summoning the Zhao couple’s ghost bodies to seize the ghost flashed through her mind, but she suppressed it as soon as it arose.
The Zhao couple were very powerful, but if the woman ghost wasn’t fully subdued, the five at the river bottom would be in danger.
Though she was controlling a ghost and her vitality was far hardier than others’, Zhao Fusheng was still a human being.
Wu Shaochun, Fan Wujiu and Zhang Chuanshi had been suppressed under the river a long time, and they’d already reached their limit. A moment’s hesitation and they’d suffocate.
Anyway, they now knew ghosts were attracted by the flowers on the corpse bones. After escaping the river bottom, they could think of another way to lure and trap the ghost.
Having made up her mind, she signaled Zhang Chuanshi with her eyes.
While the malignant ghost that Fourth Madam Zhuang had become was trapped by the Door Gods’ phantoms, the others thrashed their arms wildly, trying to flee the riverbed.
Zhao Fusheng bent to smash the ghost boat.
But the boat, affected by the ghost’s power, did not budge at the river bottom.
Zhao Fusheng took out the ghost arm and struck hard.
The ghost arm was badly damaged, and at the bottom of the river it was suppressed in turn by the ghost and the ghost boat. Not only did it fail to smash the boat, it broke apart itself, leaking black blood.
Seeing this, Zhao Fusheng felt regret. Earlier, because she’d been reluctant to spend merit points, she hadn’t pieced the Beggar Ghost’s body together, so the Beggar Ghost’s ghost arm kept getting weaker and couldn’t exert power in ghost cases.
The four from the Demon-Suppression Bureau struggled to break free.
Among the five at the river bottom, Gou Laosi was just an ordinary person.
Before this he hadn’t personally seen a ghost. Suddenly learning he’d been entangled in a ghost case and watching Zhuang Laoqi die strangely before his eyes, his mind was already near collapse.
Now trapped in the river, seeing the woman ghost appear and corpses and shattered bones all around, he was scared witless and lost his reason.
He struggled desperately with astonishing force, heedless of hurting himself.
The river-bottom silt was stirred up by him as he kicked his legs hard and swung his arms, trying to break free from the boat.
In his panic he took everything in the riverbed he could use for leverage as a lifeline and clutched a drifting human skeleton outside the boat.
The moment he grabbed that riverbed skeleton, the balance between the corpses and the uncanny black boat seemed to break.
The black boat seemed a domain of its own.
A black hole suddenly opened in Gou Laosi’s waist.
Threads of blood seeped from it. He heard a plop, froze for a moment, and instinctively tried to look down.
The blood flowed out of the wound but didn’t scatter in the river. It turned in an instant into a bright, dripping red flower that bloomed at his waist.
That was only the beginning.
Then large, bewitching ghost flowers bloomed one after another, spreading quickly along his flanks to other parts of his body.
The flowers bloomed fast.
The look on Gou Laosi’s face went from confusion to horror, and in a moment his expression froze.
A brilliant red radiance enveloped his body, and his flesh was like a giant seedbed for the flowers.
Countless flowers vied to burst out of Gou Laosi’s body and spread quickly in all directions, instantly joining into a peculiar river-bottom enclosure that trapped everyone along with the black boat.
Gou Laosi’s head and face were covered with petals at lightning speed, and his clothes turned to shreds that drifted in the riverbed.
From Gou Laosi’s panicked bid to escape to his death, everything happened in a flash, too fast for anyone to react.
Wu Shaochun and Fan Wujiu, who’d been frightened by the ghost’s appearance and had tried to break free with brute force, saw this and were terrified out of their wits and didn’t dare act rashly.
A malignant ghost’s power was extraordinary and couldn’t be matched by human strength. They could only fight uncanny power with uncanny power.
Right then ghost and ghost imprint were locked in struggle.
All four from the Demon-Suppression Bureau were trapped, life and death hanging by a thread. Zhao Fusheng, at the end of her rope, was about to risk everything to summon the Door Gods in person when, at that moment, the river-bottom woman ghost broke free once more after being torn apart.
The malignant ghost broke free faster. This proved the Door Gods’ imprint was losing out.
Countless strange black hairs threaded through the gaps between the blooming ghost flowers, twisting into thousands of tentacles, and coiled again toward Zhang Chuanshi.
Damn it.
Seeing this, Zhang Chuanshi finally exploded in silent rage:
Bullying honest folk, are you?
He cursed inwardly, and seeing the ghost kept clinging to him, guessed it had to do with that uncanny red flower.
Ever since picking this ghost flower he’d been living in constant dread.
The ghost flower clung to him like a lingering spirit, and the malignant ghost was terrifying and hard to shake.
Now everyone was trapped on the ghost boat, and the ghost flowers had formed a unique cage that trapped everyone in it, so no one could flee.
If he couldn’t get away, then nobody would get anything!2
No one could take anything from him. That was Zhang Chuanshi’s creed after decades in business!
Believing he’d surely die, he was seized by a mad impulse instead.
Seeing the sky-blotting black hair coil toward him, Zhang Chuanshi suddenly raised the flower, clamped a petal in his teeth, and in three or five bites, chewing together with the muddy river water, swallowed down the red flower picked from the dead man’s bones, stalk and all, eating it clean.
“...” Zhao Fusheng.
“...” Wu Shaochun.
“...glug, glug...” Fan Wujiu’s eyes went wide and he wanted to speak, but the moment he opened his mouth, only a stream of bubbles came out.
After eating the ghost flower, Zhang Chuanshi’s face changed utterly.
The smug look of a man who’d come into luck froze on his face, and his skin turned deathly pale.
Ghost aura spread through all his limbs and bones.
The malignant ghost’s power sought to burst out through his body, and in an instant countless purple-red spots the size of copper coins appeared on his cheeks, arms and body.
Something uncanny seemed to lurk in those spots.
Just as everyone thought Gou Laosi’s death would repeat itself on him, the Door Gods’ power again played a crucial role.
The power inside the purple-red corpse spots stirred and pushed against the spots, a fingertip-sized lump bulging outward, but just as it was about to break through, red light blazed on Zhang Chuanshi’s body.
Two phantoms of black-red ghost door planks, front and back, appeared and sandwiched him between them.
The ghost door planks’ power suppressed the ghost flower, putting him in a strange balance.
In a moment the two powers were contained, the purple-red light left Zhang Chuanshi’s body without a trace, and even the copper-coin red spots on his face vanished.
He’d thought he was surely dead, only to find himself still alive and kicking.
The discovery filled him with delight.
Having eaten a ghost thing without dying, Zhang Chuanshi at once gave up any thought of fighting to the death, and his will to survive rose again.
The water was ghostly dark, a murky mix of black and red. All around were flowers of black and red, and countless dense hairs wove through every gap, so that nothing could be made out.
Having lost the ghost flower, the river-bottom ghost seemed to lose its target for a moment.
Taking this chance, he reached to his waist and pulled out an oval human-skin pouch.
He shook the pouch, and it instantly inflated, as if blown up with a breath, into a lantern about the size of a large serving bowl.
The old man, from somewhere, produced a small box, and when he opened the lid, a foul corpse stench wafted out.
The next instant, with a hiss inside the box, a flame lit up.
A ghost candle!
That familiar stench stirred Zhao Fusheng’s memories of the thing, and her intention to summon the Door Gods stopped.
The moment the ghost candle lit, the countless black ghost hairs shrank back at once as if they’d met their natural enemy.
