IBGSW Chapter 178
Trapping the Malignant Ghost
Zhao Fusheng’s words carried a message: Zhang Chuanshi’s situation looked dire, but it wasn’t yet at the brink of death.
“But if we get carried into the ghost dream out of an urge to save people, we might be left in this ‘village,’ and then we’d all die together,” she said calmly.
Fan Wujiu and Wu Shaochun understood that.
“Then what do we do now?” Wu Shaochun asked.
Zhao Fusheng looked into the distance.
“Wait.”
“Wait?” Wu Shaochun didn’t understand what she meant, but Zhao Fusheng didn’t answer. She was looking into the distance.
Villagers filled both banks of the river.
They stood with their backs to the village, torches in hand, the firelight lighting the shore.
At some point the roaring shouts had stopped.
After the pig cage holding “Fourth Madam Zhuang (Zhang Chuanshi)” was pushed into the river, there was a moment of silence, then restless, uneasy emotions spread through the villagers.
Noisy murmurs rose one after another. Zhao Fusheng and the others at the ancestral hall gate realized something had happened at the river.
After a while someone seemed to have gone into the water and pushed the cage back up. Something happened, and someone suddenly screamed:
“Ghost!”
The sharp, piercing shout split the night sky. Fan Wujiu jumped and instinctively wanted to flee deeper into the hall.
The villagers who’d been watching the lynching wanted to scatter as well, when someone yelled:
“It’s not a ghost, it’s a fish, a fish!”
Sixth Uncle’s voice rang out, calming the crowd.
The villagers who’d been about to flee were awed into standing where they were.
The cage was pushed up. The crowd looked at “Fourth Madam Zhuang” inside and debated how to deal with “her” corpse.
“...Burn her body,” said Sixth Uncle.
At his words the villagers returned to their homes.
Leading the people carrying torches back to the village was a familiar face: Kuai Changshun, who had led them earlier with the bronze lamp.
Sixth Uncle’s house stood beside the ancestral hall.
The Kuai Clan Ancestral Hall had no door leaves, just an open gateway. Zhao Fusheng, Fan, and Wu were standing at its entrance. If Kuai Changshun went home to fetch firewood, he’d see the three at a glance.
Wu Shaochun said worriedly, “Your Honor, shall we hide in the hall?”
“Not yet.”
Zhao Fusheng hesitated, then shook her head.
“Now isn’t the time to go in. We’ll stand right here and see if Changshun greets us.”
“All right.” Wu Shaochun nodded.
Fan Wujiu was scared, but he was never one for thinking. Before they set out, his brother had told him to follow only Zhao Fusheng’s orders, whatever she commanded. So he forced his feet to stay where they were.
The villagers returned to the village.
Kuai Changshun split from the crowd, and as he passed the ancestral hall, the light from the lamp he held lit his body.
Zhao Fusheng stood inside the hall and suddenly called to him:
“Changshun.”
The whole of Kuailiang Village was gripped in a strange, tense atmosphere. “Fourth Madam Zhuang’s” corpse hadn’t sunk, which already felt ominous, and the cruelty and excitement the villagers had shown during the lynching had been replaced by fear and heaviness.
Kuai Changshun was downcast, anxious, and uneasy.
In that quiet, Zhao Fusheng’s call rang out clearly and startled Fan Wujiu and Wu Shaochun.
But Kuai Changshun heard nothing.
Head lowered, torch in hand, looking utterly dejected, he walked past the three of them.
He hadn’t heard Zhao Fusheng’s greeting, and it was as though he hadn’t seen the three standing right beside him either.
“Phew...”
Wu Shaochun let out a long breath, and Zhao Fusheng smiled.
“A ghost dream, as expected.”
The villagers of Kuailiang were already dead. They were just repeating the lynching they’d carried out in life.
The three stood inside the ancestral hall, outside the killing rules of the malignant ghosts, and so couldn’t draw Kuai Changshun’s notice.
Kuai Changshun came out carrying firewood and passed in front of them again.
The woodpile was built. The villagers opened the cage, dragged the corpse out, and set it on the pile.
“Your Honor...”
Wu Shaochun, seeing this, grew alarmed.
“Is that Old Zhang?”
The ancestral hall was some distance from the village, and the corpse dragged from the cage was so tightly bound that from afar all they could see was strips of white flesh, hair tangled all over it, impossible to tell male or female, let alone whether it was Zhang Chuanshi.
“It doesn’t look like him.”
Zhao Fusheng stayed outwardly calm, but her nerves were stretched to the limit. She shook her head.
She sensed a heavy malignant ghost’s baleful aura from this corpse.
When the villagers had drowned Zhang Chuanshi, they’d sunk him in a bamboo cage, but when they pulled the cage up, they’d probably pulled up the real Fourth Madam Zhuang.
The villagers lit the fire, and flames shot up and soon engulfed the corpse.
In the flames the corpse wasn’t burned. The ominous feeling grew stronger.
Suddenly someone shouted:
“Where’s Manzhou?”
Manzhou!
Kuai Manzhou!
That name, which Zhao Fusheng had forgotten for so long, burst back into her mind with startling force, and the lost memory returned.
Zhuang Laoqi kneeling before the Demon-Suppression Bureau gate, mentioning Fourth Madam Zhuang’s daughter, “Kuai Manzhou!”
Her eyes lit up and she murmured the name.
In the distance the villagers were calling out Kuai Manzhou’s name. She hadn’t been among the crowd during the lynching.
Just then the corpse in the flames began to change.
The once pale body, scorched by the roaring fire like a red-hot iron brand, in the next instant burst apart with a boom!
Great gouts of blood sprayed and scattered into fine crimson blood mist.
At some point ghost fog had covered the riverbank. Under the blood rain, a great crowd of villagers were enveloped.
Before the villagers in the blood rain could even cry out, their bodies, like snowmen roasting, lost their heads at once, and their corpses fell among the grass on the bank.
The eerie scene happened with terrifying speed. In the space of a blink this wave of villagers was dead.
The blood rain that scattered in the sky didn’t fall to the ground but hung in the air.
“That blood isn’t right,” Zhao Fusheng said, pupils contracting.
When she’d spoken, Fan Wujiu and Wu Shaochun saw it too.
Between the blood droplets of every size ran thread-thin lines like spider silk. These countless threads connected every drop, weaving a gigantic web of human blood on the bank that harvested the villagers’ lives.
The next instant the threads retracted and the blood drops, wriggling, flowed back along the countless strands and assembled into a naked female ghost with long, loose hair.
Fourth Madam Zhuang!
Fourth Madam Zhuang was back.
The baleful aura of a great ghost spread, and its ghost domain instantly enveloped Kuailiang Village.
“Ghost!”
Some villagers shouted.
Sixth Aunt wept:
“Retribution! Karma!”
“Don’t panic! Don’t be afraid! We can’t let her find Manzhou!”
In the chaos, Sixth Uncle’s breathless voice rang out:
“Trap her at the riverbank. We can’t let the ghost harm the village, or harm Manzhou.”
When Fourth Madam Zhuang was lynched, the villagers had all turned out, and watched this man-made ghost calamity. But her daughter had been left in the village and had missed the chance to see her off.
As Sixth Uncle spoke, the malignant ghost into which Fourth Madam Zhuang had turned took another barefoot step forward.
Her body burst open, blood mist sprayed, a ghost net formed, and once more it caught a wave of villagers.
Wherever the malignant ghost went, corpses strewed the field and blood ran like a river.
The blood flowed into the river that had drowned Fourth Madam Zhuang and dyed it red.
“Don’t let her leave! We can’t let her find Manzhou!” Sixth Uncle roared.
He watched the villagers fall, wave after wave. These were faces he knew, his clansmen, brothers, sisters-in-law, and nephews.
At other times they treated him with great respect and obeyed him. Tonight they were dying of a ghost calamity.
Memories of the past surged into his heart.
He had pitied his cousin Kuai Jumin and Fourth Madam Zhuang as a girl, and had made the match between Fourth Madam Zhuang and Kuai Wu, that unhappy couple.
He knew Kuai Huaide was ruining Fourth Madam Zhuang’s name in the village, and had heard the village rumors, and had wanted to send Fourth Madam Zhuang away.
“Why didn’t you go?” The old Sixth Uncle stamped his foot.
Everyone feared malignant ghosts, but he had lived to this age and treated life and death lightly. The shock of watching the villagers die at the ghost’s hands dulled his fear.
“Since you didn’t go, don’t go anywhere!”
He saw the villagers fall wave after wave, and the blood mist gather again along the threads into Fourth Madam Zhuang, who stepped forward once more.
Sixth Uncle gritted his teeth and rushed at her:
“I won’t let you hurt anyone. I won’t let you kill...”
“People have their places and ghosts have theirs. Don’t kill indiscriminately, Fourth Madam. You’re good...”
He spread his arms, trembling, and embraced the ghost.
“I was wrong...”
“If you want to kill, kill Sixth Uncle...”
Sixth Uncle was still repenting.
But the malignant ghost no longer had feelings or memories of life, only the instinct to kill.
Fourth Madam Zhuang wouldn’t stop for Sixth Uncle’s remorse.
Her body seemed to swell all at once, or perhaps left an afterimage from moving too fast, and passed through Sixth Uncle’s body.
Only Zhao Fusheng, whose eyesight had grown remarkable since she took control of a ghost, saw her body split, as she passed through Sixth Uncle, into countless tiny blood beads strung together by blood threads.
Passed through by this human-shaped web of blood, Sixth Uncle, who’d been speaking and pleading a moment before, died at once.
The long-haired ghost took another step, trying to go on.
Sixth Uncle’s corpse was completely dismembered. After his head fell to the ground, his body collapsed like a heap of sand.
But on the spot where he died, on his corpse, great swaths of eerie blood-red ghost flowers suddenly bloomed.
The flowers swayed in the wind.
The malignant ghost, about to step forward, was stopped the moment the ghost flowers bloomed.
When a person dies, the lamp goes out1.
Emotional entanglements and knowledge from life are wiped away the moment breathing stops. When a malignant ghost revives, all that’s left is a vicious, terrible walking corpse.
But the deep emotion Fourth Madam Zhuang had felt in life had been burned into her heart and could not be erased, and after death it still ruled the malignant ghost’s every move.
That day, the outsider had urged her to elope with him.
This place had left her with plenty of pain.
A broken house, a drunk, disgusting man, an empty old stove, a rice jar that was often empty.
The malicious Kuai Huaide next door, the gossip around her, the increasingly lewd looks from some people, and the hidden ill will that threatened to drown her.
But there were also her sisters-in-law.
Eldest Sister-in-law, quick-spoken and kind.
Second Sister-in-law, silent but often lending a hand.
Third Sister-in-law, sharp-tongued and unforgiving, but if anyone said a bad word about her, Third Sister-in-law would grab a sickle and go to that person’s door, ready to tear their hair out, cursing.
Fourth Sister-in-law often watched Manzhou for her.
When tax time came and she was fretting, Sixth Uncle and Sixth Aunt had already seen to it for her, which made her feel both guilty and moved.
When she began her affair with the outsider, her sisters-in-law saw but never said.
She’d finally made up her mind. She wanted to give up everything, follow the outsider, and start over.
That day Eldest Sister-in-law had smiled and asked for her help, asking her to cross the river and fetch something at Eldest Sister-in-law’s parents’ home. Third Sister-in-law had told her fiercely to hurry along and not dawdle and miss the time.
She knew in her heart that her sisters-in-law were afraid she’d stay, afraid she couldn’t bear to leave.
Then Manzhou had gone missing.
That tiny person had been the first to sense that her mother was changing.
She was still young, but she watched how hard her mother worked, how Kuai Huaide harassed her, how her wild father beat and cursed her.
She knew her mother was leaving.
Kuai Manzhou also knew her mother was worried that if she left, her daughter would suffer. She feared her husband would take his anger out on the girl, and had wavered.
But once the girl knew her mother had decided, she didn’t think so much. She was happy for her mother.
She remembered that all these years her mother had never dressed up. She was pretty, prettier than most in the village, but with the recent rumors she’d grown more silent and hadn’t dared tidy herself, hadn’t dared say much to anyone, and worked with her head down.
Her aunts had said that when a woman marries, she wears new clothes and flowers in her hair. If her mother could do that too when she left, that would be good.
The girl was still small and had no money to buy her mother new clothes. She wanted to pick her mother a flower and put it in her hair, because her mother would look best like that.
With that idea, the girl got up before dawn. She’d been so excited about finding a particularly beautiful flower that she hadn’t cared about falling down.
She found a fully bloomed white perilla.
Fourth Madam Zhuang had never owned anything in her life.
In her parents’ home she hadn’t been loved by her parents or respected by her siblings. After marriage, she faced Kuai Wu’s resentment and the hardship of life.
Kuai Wu’s mother had given her brief warmth, but most of the time her mother-in-law lay sick in bed, and even if she’d pitied her, she was powerless to help.
The sisters-in-law had cared for her, but mostly by speaking up for her, helping her work, and giving her some food.
Sixth Uncle and Sixth Aunt had also looked after her, but that care was mostly financial.
Only her daughter, bound to her by blood, owed her nothing. She had been brought into this world by her, and loved her with her whole heart, and wanted to pick her a white perilla to send her off.
That one flower had played a crucial part, changing the outcome for many things and many people.
......
After Sixth Uncle died, the flowers that bloomed from his bones stopped the malignant ghost.
It was still doing what it had done in life, seeking the blood-stained flower.
Sixth Aunt, holding her grandson, let out a heartbroken scream.
The malignant ghost’s body burst, and the blood mist became a great net that came down.
The villagers died wave after wave. Sixth Aunt, clutching her grandson, was enveloped in the blood mist too.
A thick smell of blood instantly filled the whole village.
Lives fell wave after wave, but at the moment of every death, strange red flowers bloomed, crop after crop, from the bones, trapping the roaming female ghost at the riverbank.
