IBGSW Chapter 159
Arriving at Kuailiang Village
Zhang Chuanshi lit the ghost candle and drove the malignant ghost back for the moment.
He clamped the ghost candle in his mouth and reached to tear at the ghost flowers.
Strangely enough, earlier, Gou Laosi in his panic had tried to flee, and the moment he left the boat’s boundary, his body was torn apart by the ghost flowers and he died.
But when Zhang Chuanshi tore at the ghost flowers, he wasn’t hurt by the ghost’s power at all.
The instant his hand touched the flowers, they withered, and he tore a huge rift in them.
Gou Laosi’s head was caught among the flowers, eyes still wide open in unrested death1.
As Zhang Chuanshi tore at the ghost flowers, the balance of the cage they formed was broken. Gou Laosi’s head came off in response and was swept away on the current, drifting.
The cage of flowers collapsed at once.
The pale bones were churned apart by the water, and bones of different lengths drifted off, held aloft by the water.
With the Ghost Lantern lit, a cold white light brightened the dim riverbed.
A woman’s corpse lay curled with her face up, sunk in a falling posture in the depths of the river.
Countless corpses and bones kept her company, and her wildly spread black hair soaked up river sand and silt, forming granules that orbited the ghost.
The ghost was entirely naked, not a stitch on her, but that horrifying black hair wrapped her body, exposing only a thin line of blue-purple-and-white face.
Her eyes were open, cold and malevolent, staring grimly at her surroundings.
From her terrifying face one could faintly make out how comely she’d been in life, which made her eerie aspect in death all the more chilling.
After the Ghost Lantern lit, the formerly savage and fearsome malignant ghost seemed suddenly to lose her target. She wandered aimlessly along the riverbed as if patrolling her territory.
Her long black hair, like seaweed waving wildly on the bottom, probed wherever it went as though searching for a target.
But where the ghost hair passed through the lantern’s light, it seemed disturbed by some uncanny force and automatically avoided the illumination.
Everyone whose nerves had been stretched taut, who’d thought they would surely die today, in this foul, cold white light felt for the moment a thread of protection.
The ghost stayed at the bottom of the river, her long hair writhing like a living thing, but she no longer attacked the four from the Demon-Suppression Bureau on the boat.
Taking the chance, Zhang Chuanshi grabbed around at random, snatched two human bones, and stirred them hard in the water like oars—splash!
The water was shaken.
The black boat, which had been stuck fast to the riverbed without moving, was lifted softly off the bottom by Zhang Chuanshi’s paddling.
Splash.
The water rippled, many corpses and bones were swept apart, and they swirled around the woman ghost’s body.
Zhang Chuanshi held up two human bones as oars, and the black boat, driven by him, rose from the water and passed beside the woman ghost.
He held the pale Ghost Lantern in his teeth, and in its light the long hair spread beside the woman ghost parted by itself.
The black boat threaded through endless black hair. Zhao Fusheng, Fan Wujiu and Wu Shaochun held their breath and brushed right past the woman ghost.
As they passed her, Zhang Chuanshi instinctively lifted the bones.
Hiss, hiss.
The lamp oil burned faster, releasing a foul stink that enveloped the four.
The woman ghost in the river didn’t move, like a sleeping corpse, nothing like the fierceness she’d shown earlier.
The ghost boat shot off like an arrow and burst up from the riverbed.
Once past the woman ghost’s side, Zhang Chuanshi paddled desperately with his bone oars, and the hull rose at an uncanny speed.
In a matter of breaths, when everyone looked up, they could see hazy firelight at the surface, and the boat broke the water and surfaced.
Huff, huff—
Huff!
...
Escaped from danger, the four gulped for air.
Zhang Chuanshi gasped like a fish out of water, mouth wide open. The Ghost Lantern he’d been clamping in his mouth fell, and he caught it in a trembling hand and, with a pang of regret, snuffed it.
Hiss. The flame dimmed and the foul stench faded.
Forcing himself to pull together, Zhang Chuanshi looked down inside: in the human-skin lantern sat a strange little black bowl, in which a thin layer of lamp oil, no bigger than a thumbnail, remained.
He grimaced with pain at the waste, but remembering he’d at least kept his life, he relaxed, lay down in the black boat like Zhao Fusheng and the others, like a dead fish, gasping for air, with no strength left even to speak.
The raging river at Zhuang Family Village was now unusually calm.
The black boat no longer pitched and floated quietly on the water. The few who had barely survived lay still in the black boat, savoring this rare brief moment of peace.
Zhao Fusheng felt her frantic heartbeat gradually settle. With the danger past, she quickly sank her consciousness into her sea of consciousness.
When Zhang Chuanshi’s Door God imprint had activated in the river, the Investiture of the Gods had prompted her: the Door Gods had gained faith and increased incense value.
At that time it hadn’t been the right moment, and she hadn’t had time to look closely.
Now the Hell’s Investiture of the Gods was still stirring with ill wind. The Door Gods’ tablet, though still blood-spattered and chillingly cruel, seemed brighter than before.
When her consciousness sank onto the Door Gods’ divine position on the list, she did see the change.
Door Gods: 1 devout believer, incense value +1.
Note: The deity has sensed the existence of incense value. Offering a certain amount of incense value will let the Door Gods advance in rank.
Note: After the Door Gods advance in rank, they will be able to awe malignant ghosts.
Zhao Fusheng’s eyes lit up.
She didn’t yet know how much incense value the Door Gods needed to advance, but with incense and devotion now in play, she had gained a way to upgrade the strength of the malignant ghosts she’d enshrined.
Once a ghost she controlled in its enshrined state was upgraded, her own power would rise with it, and naturally she’d have another layer of insurance in handling ghost cases later.
Her promise to draw ghost seals for Fan Wujiu and the others had at first been only a temporary comfort. But now that incense value existed, Zhao Fusheng had begun to consider that once this case was done and she’d saved enough merit points, she could slowly imprint others and also advance the Door Gods.
...
She caught her breath and sat up.
The boat rocked gently, the ripples made faint sounds, and the sounds woke the other three, who opened their eyes one after another.
None of them had been hurt.
The ghost-and-god battle at the river bottom had been a clash between ghosts and hadn’t involved humans, except for Gou Laosi’s accidental death in his panic. The four from the Demon-Suppression Bureau had merely been exhausted from shock and fright.
But Zhao Fusheng still asked as routine:
“Are you all right?”
They shook their heads.
Zhang Chuanshi, with a tearful face, suddenly seemed to remember something and twisted around to look at his back:
“Is the mark on my back still there?”
He couldn’t see it himself, so he turned for Fan Wujiu and the others to look.
Fan Wujiu and Wu Shaochun wiped their faces and leaned in, and they saw that inside the door frame Zhao Fusheng had carved on Zhang Chuanshi’s back, a few more blood lines seemed to have appeared.
The lines looked as if scratched by something sharp, and they stopped at the edge of the scar as if forcibly cut off.
The ghost shadows Zhao Fusheng had stamped, after the clash with the river-bottom woman ghost, had dimmed in blood light somewhat, but when the two looked, red light still glowed in the shadows’ eyes, making their scalps prickle.
Wu Shaochun and Fan Wujiu turned their heads away together and said:
“It’s still there—”
“It’s there, but the color seems a bit lighter.”
On hearing it was lighter, Zhang Chuanshi couldn’t help getting nervous.
He thought of the danger at the riverbed.
Because of the ghost flower, the malignant ghost had attacked him first once drawn out.
If Zhao Fusheng hadn’t had the foresight to stamp the ghost seal on him, so that the Zhao couple’s ghost shadows appeared and tangled the woman ghost, he’d probably have died in the river then. Even with the Ghost Lantern in his hand, he’d never have had time to light it.
The ghost seal’s uses were endless. It had saved his life at a crucial moment.
Without hesitation Zhang Chuanshi turned and wailed:
“Your Honor, touch it up for me—”
“I can’t touch it up for now.”
Zhao Fusheng shook her head.
Hearing this, Zhang Chuanshi was about to wail, but seeing the warning in Zhao Fusheng’s eyes, he swallowed back the cry:
“I’m just worried the woman ghost will come again—”
“This can’t be touched up for now.”
Zhao Fusheng softened her tone and repeated:
“Besides, this is a ghost seal. It will always affect you.”
Her gaze fell on Zhang Chuanshi.
When the old man turned earlier, she’d noticed the scratch marks on his back too.
As she’d expected from the start, the seal had probably gone briefly out of control after the battle with Fourth Madam Zhuang at the river bottom, but in the end it was stopped by the door frame she’d carved and caused no great disaster.
If a ghost seal were stacked repeatedly without the ability to suppress it, it might go out of control and in turn endanger the life of the person who carries it.
Having said this, Zhao Fusheng glanced at Zhang Chuanshi, who was itching to speak:
“Besides, you ate the ghost flower. You may not need the ghost seal anymore.”
“What does Your Honor mean by that?”
Hearing this, Zhang Chuanshi froze.
Fan Wujiu and Wu Shaochun also remembered Zhang Chuanshi’s frenzy at the river bottom. Fan Wujiu said: “Old Zhang, I really couldn’t tell you were this tough, eating the ghost flower picked from Zhuang Laoqi.”
“...”
Zhang Chuanshi glared at him, ignored him, touched his chest, and asked Zhao Fusheng with a fawning face:
“What does Your Honor mean, I may not need the ghost seal after eating the flower?”
“Do you feel uncomfortable anywhere after eating the ghost flower?” Zhao Fusheng asked.
Zhang Chuanshi tilted his head and thought hard, patted his body, and shook his head firmly:
“No.”
“Earlier we were pulled to the river bottom by the malignant ghost’s power. At first we couldn’t struggle free.”
When she said this, Fan and Wu both remembered the scene and nodded with lingering fear.
Zhang Chuanshi nodded too:
“My feet were stuck to the boat then.”
It seemed everyone had felt the same.
Zhao Fusheng lowered her head and lifted both feet.
Apart from some heaviness in her legs because her body had lost much heat from soaking in the water so long, she no longer had that feeling at the river bottom that her feet couldn’t leave the black boat.
That meant the malignant ghost’s power of trapping them with the black boat was gone.
She just didn’t know whether that power came from the river bottom (the ghost’s own domain) or from the black boat’s own strangeness.
“But I saw that once you ate the flower, the ghost boat was under your control at once.”
Zhao Fusheng’s words were as good as an explicit hint.
Zhang Chuanshi was startled and said nothing more.
Fan Wujiu was reckless, but he’d been in the Demon-Suppression Bureau a long time and had some knowledge. When Zhao Fusheng finished, he also thought of a possibility and stared at Zhang Chuanshi oddly.
Only Wu Shaochun didn’t understand.
Though he’d been through one ghost case, with Goutou Village he knew only the cause and effect, and the middle was a blur.
Though he’d crammed experience afterward, his understanding of malignant ghosts was still shallow, and he couldn’t follow what Zhao Fusheng meant.
Seeing his puzzled look, Zhao Fusheng explained:
“After a person dies and the malignant ghost revives, it becomes a ghost entity. But after the ghost revives, anything connected with the ghost in life or in death may turn into a malevolent object.”
“For example, after my parents died, their corpses were laid on a door plank, and in the end the door plank became a ghost entity.”
Wu Shaochun was no fool, and once she’d said this he understood:
“Your Honor means this black boat and the ghost flowers are both malevolent objects born together with the ghost?”
“Probably.” Zhao Fusheng was only guessing here and didn’t state it definitively:
“After Old Zhang ate the ghost flower, he happened to gain control of the ghost boat, so we escaped death then.”
“But he’s human, not a ghost, and nearly met disaster after taking control of the ghost boat. The ghost seal I put on him beforehand probably suppressed part of the boat’s backlash.”
At this, Fan Wujiu nodded:
“Old Zhang had big purple spots on his face then, and the ghost door planks appeared on him and pressed the ghost spots down.”
Zhang Chuanshi also remembered the ghost door planks at the river bottom, but he couldn’t see his own face then and didn’t know how dangerous things had been.
Now hearing Fan Wujiu, he felt a chill of belated fear.
“Then I—” Zhang Chuanshi began urgently, but Zhao Fusheng cut him off:
“You don’t need to worry. You have the ghost seal.”
The ghost seal couldn’t fully suppress the river-bottom malignant ghost for now, but suppressing one malevolent object born from that malignant ghost should be no problem for the time being.
“But this is only my guess. Whether it’s true, you’ll have to try yourself.”
“How do I try?” Zhang Chuanshi asked blankly, instinctively.
“First try rowing, and steer the boat toward the bank,” Zhao Fusheng said.
“The bank?” The three were astonished.
Zhao Fusheng looked into the distance and said with a smile:
“Yes, the bank. We’re nearly at Kuailiang Village.”
The three followed her gaze. The black boat lay on the river, rocking slightly only from the three’s own movements when they’d gotten up, with ring after ring of ripples spreading outward from the hull.
If the river at Zhuang Family Village had been a raging torrent, the river beneath their boat now was like a calm mirror.
The boat sat in the middle of the river.
Some ten zhang off, the bank could be seen.
From afar the shore was a flush of blood-red, with rows of orderly village houses beyond.
The sky was pitch black, no moon overhead, but in the village scattered points of firelight burned like stars in the night sky, lighting up this stretch of ghost domain.
At the sight of the lights, the group looked delighted, but after their delight, Zhang Chuanshi was the first to notice that Zhao Fusheng had just said three important words:
“Kuailiang Village?!” he yelped.
“Your Honor, is this Kuailiang Village? Have we reached Kuailiang Village?”
Zhao Fusheng’s eyes were still on the village ahead. Hearing Zhang Chuanshi’s question, she answered casually:
“Should be.”
