IBGSW Chapter 176
The Ghost Case Replays
The light from the dim bronze lamp reached only about half a zhang1.
Through the crumbling mud-brick doorway the light showed a ramshackle bed with its curtain half pulled back and half hanging down, and a man sitting right in the middle.
His hair was disheveled and tied in a careless knot on top. His face was greasy, his eyelids slack, with two fish-bladder bags under his eyes, his mouth flat and the corners turned down.
A cold gaze shot from beneath his drooping eyelids and fixed on the unfamiliar intruders.
The figure had appeared so suddenly that Wu Shaochun had noticed nothing beforehand, and the sight gave him a bad start.
“You...” Wu Shaochun’s heart pounded and he opened his mouth to curse.
But before the foul words came out he remembered Zhao Fusheng was there.
He swallowed the curse. He was about to ask whether this man was Kuai Wu when Zhao Fusheng shoved him aside, strode into the room, hauled the man up from the bed, and slapped him left and right, pa pa. He collapsed on the bed like a puddle of mud.
“Ow, ow...”
Before Kuai Wu could even curse, he’d been knocked down on the bed.
“...”
Wu Shaochun watched, dumbfounded.
“Was it you who was making all that noise?”
After slapping him, Zhao Fusheng felt a sticky film on her palm.
Kuai Wu stank. The room gave off a revolting smell.
It was like feces mixed with something she couldn’t name, and it made her frown.
He was so drunk he hadn’t washed in who knew how long.
His hair was matted in clumps, and he wore layer upon layer of clothing, the inner ones hanging longer than the outer, each crusted thick with grease. It felt sticky to touch.
When she grabbed his clothes, her palm felt as though it were coated in thick black grime.
Zhao Fusheng wiped it in disgust on the hem of her clothes.
“What... what noise?”
Having been slapped twice, Kuai Wu lay limp on the bed, still groggy.
“Who are you? Who are all of you? Where’s Zhuang Si? That slut, is she out sleeping around again?”
“Zhuang Si... Zhuang Si... urp, urp...”
After two shouts he suddenly let out a huge belch. A wave of stink rolled over them, and Fan Wujiu and Wu Shaochun both nearly threw up.
Their faces changed.
“You dare... urp... come into the village and beat people, they’re killing me, killing me...”
His voice was shrill. As he shouted, his hands grabbed back at Zhao Fusheng’s wrist, the one holding his collar.
At first Zhao Fusheng hadn’t taken him seriously.
This village was strange, but Kuai Wu was just a drunk who bullied the weak and feared the strong. She controlled a malignant ghost, her strength far above that of ordinary people, and she relied on the Door Gods she’d enshrined, so she wasn’t the least afraid of him.
But the instant Kuai Wu’s hand closed on her wrist, she knew something was wrong.
A cold ghost aura poured through his palm into her skin, and her wrist stung from the shock.
Her eyes narrowed. She looked down and met Kuai Wu’s gaze. He grinned, “Heh heh.”
“Without ten coins, you’re not walking out of Kuailiang Village.”
His voice was cold, like a curse.
On the place he gripped, black mold spots rapidly appeared on Zhao Fusheng’s skin, like food spoiling in damp.
The spots were like living things. Once branded onto her wrist, they moved to crawl up her arm.
Zhao Fusheng’s eyes dropped to her wrist. Just then, Kuai Wu’s body underwent a grotesque transformation.
His body melted fast. In an instant it became a puddle of pitch-black, stinking mud.
On that mud Kuai Wu’s distorted face looked coldly at her, and then the mud flowed upward along the hand still gripping Zhao Fusheng’s, and quickly covered her arm.
Zhao Fusheng’s arm turned black.
The stench that had been on Kuai Wu was transferred to her, suffocating, flooding over her.
Cold, damp black shadow wrapped around Zhao Fusheng’s whole body, as if “dressing” her in a filthy coat.
Kuai Wu’s cold voice came by her ear. “Got any money? Without money, you won’t leave Kuailiang Village alive...”
“Money...”
“Got any money?” The cold, eerie substance invaded her limbs and bones, trying to bore into her skin and fuse with her blood and bone.
At the same time, the Investiture of the Gods in her sea of consciousness gave a prompt:
You have been possessed by the Disgusting Ghost.
Note: The Disgusting Ghost will seep into your skin and merge with your blood and bone, eat away your flesh, and hollow you out into an empty husk.
Zhao Fusheng pressed her lips together, a cold light in her eyes.
Even possessed by the ghost, she didn’t panic. She was about to spend merit points to summon the Door Gods and drive off the Disgusting Ghost.
But something strange happened again.
The filthy coat formed from mud wrapped around her body, but the moment the stench touched her skin it didn’t join with her body smoothly.
It was as if her skin sealed her flesh off from it.
The eerie thing, at the instant it invaded her skin, found no nourishment, and could only float on the surface.
The human-skin quilt that Village Chief Wu Liren had been covered with before he died at Goutou Village!
She thought of it in an instant, then, expressionless, ran her hand over her cheek.
A big lump of stinking mud came off in her palm, writhing like a living thing.
Zhao Fusheng was delighted. She scraped down her neck, shoulders and arms with both hands, and the ghost skin formed of stinking mud was stripped off. It fell in a puddle of filth at her wrist.
She flicked her hand in disgust.
With a crisp pa, the black, sticky mass was flung to the ground.
Kuai Wu, who’d been lying drunk on the bed, had vanished without a trace.
All this happened in a flash.
Fan Wujiu and Wu Shaochun, overwhelmed by Kuai Wu’s belch, were dizzy and gagging, and hadn’t even noticed a ghost had appeared in the room.
Zhao Fusheng had broken free of the possession. Once the filth was flung off, she was worried the ghost would harm others, and was about to crouch down to look for it when torches suddenly began lighting up one after another outside.
The sound of hurried footsteps came, ta ta, nonstop, and a murderous atmosphere settled over the whole village.
The three of them heard people shouting loudly:
“Kill the adulteress!”
“Cleanse the household! Enforce the family rules! Set the clan’s ways straight!”
“...”
The sudden change startled Fan Wujiu. He turned to look at Wu Shaochun, alarm in his eyes. “My lord, what’s happened?”
Since they’d entered the village, Kuailiang Village had felt deathly still. Perhaps because of the malignant ghost’s influence, everyone seemed on guard, spoke little, and moved silently. Earlier, as they’d followed Kuai Changshun from Sixth Uncle’s house toward Kuai Wu’s house, the whole village had been so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
From the time the three arrived, through Zhao Fusheng’s talk with the four Kuai sisters-in-law, to now, less than an hour had passed, yet the village that had been so silent suddenly roared with voices. That was clearly abnormal.
But after asking, before they could get an answer from Zhao Fusheng, the two men’s pupils contracted sharply:
“My lord, Kuai Wu’s gone!”
The Kuai Wu who’d been knocked down on the bed, drunk, had vanished before their eyes. The eerie sight made both their hearts clench. Before the word “ghost” could leave their mouths, the lamp in Fan Wujiu’s hand went out again without a sound.
“Let’s go!”
Zhao Fusheng was still congratulating herself on having broken free of a ghost’s entanglement without spending merit points.
Many fragments of clues now joined into the truth in her head.
“Outside...”
Fan Wujiu, however slow, could tell from the shouts that something big had happened.
An aura of killing intent spread through the village. The three ran out of the house and saw torches flickering in the distance.
The whole village seemed to have come alive at once, countless people carrying torches through fields and woods, rushing swiftly in this direction.
“We’ll leave here first. We’ll talk on the way. Something big is about to happen.”
Zhao Fusheng had no time to explain and told the two to follow her at once.
“Where to?”
Wu Shaochun’s heart pounded like a drum as he asked.
“To the Kuai Clan Ancestral Hall,” Zhao Fusheng said.
The three dashed out of the house. In the distance, villagers of Kuailiang had already come out.
Many carrying torches came down the small road.
In front of the Kuai brothers’ yard, which had been empty before, a crowd already stood. They’d been in the house and hadn’t heard a sound, and had no idea when these people had come.
Fan Wujiu was bold to the point of recklessness, but even he was startled at the sight of so many villagers.
Strangely, though they carried torches, these people were as if blind. They didn’t see the three standing right across from them, who’d just come out of the house.
Some were bare-chested, some had their outer robes hanging open. Their faces were fierce, with a strange cruelty and a hint of excitement. They were shouting:
“Cleanse the household! Enforce the family rules!”
Fan Wujiu and Wu Shaochun had realized something was wrong.
They stood dumbfounded. Fan Wujiu grimaced. “What’s going on?”
“We’re trapped in a ghost dream,” Zhao Fusheng said in a low voice.
“What ghost dream?” At the word “ghost,” Fan Wujiu could no longer laugh. His body began to shake on instinct and he hid behind Wu Shaochun.
“The darkness in the village isn’t normal. I suspect Kuailiang Village has fallen into a time loop.”
Fan Wujiu and Wu Shaochun had no idea what a “time loop” was. They looked baffled, and Zhao Fusheng explained:
“It’s the night Fourth Madam Zhuang was to be drowned in the pig cage! We’re right at the moment she’s about to be drowned. Soon she’ll be pushed into the river and die, and then her malignant ghost will revive!”
She’d confirmed this from the timeline the four sisters-in-law kept mentioning in their talk.
When Kuai Er’s wife had said “last night” and “today,” Zhao Fusheng realized the timing was wrong. It contradicted what Zhuang Laoqi had said, that the ghost case had broken out in Kuailiang Village seven or eight days earlier.
To confirm it, when she’d talked with the four sisters-in-law she’d deliberately pulled the timeline to the day Fourth Madam Zhuang was drowned, also using phrases like “last night” and “tonight.” The four hadn’t objected.
That was how Zhao Fusheng confirmed the village’s time wasn’t a few days after the ghost case but the night it broke out.
Putting together what she’d seen, her original deduction had been: her talk with Sixth Uncle and the four sisters-in-law took place on the night Fourth Madam Zhuang was subjected to the lynching, and after her death her malignant ghost revived, and darkness covered Kuailiang Village.
The frightened villagers had returned to the village, which went into heightened defense.
(Sixth Uncle’s words had confirmed this.)
Her suspicion began after she questioned Kuai Changshun, who let slip that the Kuai Clan Ancestral Hall couldn’t be entered.
He’d casually mentioned that after the incident the lamps in Kuailiang Village couldn’t be lit, and the lamp he’d been carrying had been taken from the Kuai Clan Ancestral Hall.
Wu Shaochun had also said he’d seen such a lamp before, as a burial item in an old tomb.
That was very telling.
Whether burial items or lamps in the ancestral hall, these were things used by the dead.
Later the lamp had gone out when it fell into Fan Wujiu’s hands, then lit again when they entered Kuai Wu’s house. By then Kuai Wu in the room was no longer human, and when the Disgusting Ghost, what Kuai Wu became after death, vanished, it confirmed Zhao Fusheng’s guess once more.
Still, she had doubts.
If time really was flowing backward to the night Fourth Madam Zhuang was lynched, then at that moment Fourth Madam Zhuang, though she’d soon revive as a malignant ghost, would at most be Baleful-tier. With the Door Gods, an uncontrollable Baleful-tier ghost of her own, and merit points, Zhao Fusheng had a real chance.
But she was afraid it wasn’t that simple.
A rule that could manipulate time was beyond an ordinary ghost’s means. It would take at least a Disaster-tier ghost like the Ghost Carriage’s Golden Bell.
Besides that, did a malignant ghost really manipulate time? Might the three of them have strayed into some special space the moment they climbed up out of the bottom of Yellow Springs and entered Kuailiang Village?
The two men were frightened out of their wits by her words.
At the brink of death, both found boundless reserves in themselves. They followed Zhao Fusheng and squeezed out of Kuai Wu’s gate.
Just then someone shouted:
“Tie her up!”
A shrill woman’s voice cried:
“Strip her clothes too. She did something shameful like that, don’t leave her any face.”
Those two shouts proved Zhao Fusheng’s earlier words true: the three had walked into the night Fourth Madam Zhuang was lynched.
Though they knew what would happen next and ought to be running for their lives, for some reason, as if driven by some unseen force, Zhao Fusheng, Fan Wujiu, and Wu Shaochun all wanted to see how Fourth Madam Zhuang looked now.
The three turned their heads together.
A figure was lying in a corner, hog-tied and thrown down, thrashing desperately like a fish out of water.
Fan Wujiu took one look and his eyes nearly popped out. “Old Zhang?!”
“Master Zhang?!”
Wu Shaochun had thought he’d see a horrifying ghost face and had steeled himself. He hadn’t expected to see Zhang Chuanshi, who had parted ways with them at Sixth Uncle’s house, bound like a dumpling and thrown in a corner.
“...”
The absurdity mixed into the horror left them stunned.
Zhao Fusheng was dumbfounded too, and somewhat at a loss for words.
Zhang Chuanshi had been struggling hard. But Kuailiang Village’s people were many and powerful, and these people seemed to have suddenly gone mad. They insisted he was “Fourth Madam Zhuang,” tied him up, gagged him, and left him nowhere to turn. He was bitterly regretting that to be lazy, he hadn’t gone out with Zhao Fusheng.
He’d thought something terrible would surely happen tonight and was frantic with fear, when he suddenly heard Fan and Wu calling. He looked up, overjoyed.
The group looked at each other. Zhang Chuanshi’s eyes lit up and a flood of hope burst on his face. He arched his back, kicked his legs, and thrashed along the ground with all his might, making mmm mmm mmm sounds in his nose.
“My lord...”
Wu Shaochun saw the scene and wanted to go help. Fan Wujiu looked at Zhao Fusheng too.
Zhao Fusheng looked around, gave a not-so-kind smile, and shook her head.
“We’re leaving.”
