IBGSW Chapter 18
The South City Ghost Case
After a moment of silence, Zhao Fusheng set the scroll in her hand back on the table.
She'd read several case files and now had a rough idea of how the bureau had handled cases in the past. Time was short. She didn't know when the ghost on her body would go out of control, or when the deadline for the bureau's cases fell, so the Beggars' Alley matter had to be settled as early as possible.
With that in mind, she meant to look for the forty-year-old case first.
Fan Bisi hadn't mentioned what year of the Great Han it was in their earlier talk. Luckily, from the original Zhao Fusheng's memory she knew it was Great Han Year 246, which meant fifteen years had passed since the ghost case in the first file she'd looked at.
The Confucian temple's ghost case was forty years ago, which put it in Great Han Year 206.
Tragedy had struck in this room and scattered many files, but a large share still rested on the shelves.
She picked up a scroll from the middle shelf on the leftmost wall and unrolled it. The date marked on it: Great Han Year 227.
She didn't read the details of the case or the participants. She rolled it back up, returned it, and tried the next compartments over.
Her goal was clear: the urgent task was to find leads on the forty-year-old Confucian temple case. These other files could be read after she finished the task. If she didn't come back from this trip, wasting time on other cases to satisfy curiosity would do no good.
She pulled another scroll from the neighboring shelf and opened it a little. It was still 227, April.
Files were dated exactly, and going by the dates, each row of compartments probably held cases from the same year. She took the next, and sure enough it was earlier.
Once she understood how the files were arranged, she soon found, in the lower left corner of the right-hand shelf, cases from Great Han Year 206!
At the sight of the date, her eyes lit up. She slowed her search and read each file carefully, first the investigator, then the ghost record.
Some seven or eight minutes later, she finally drew from the dusty scrolls a document thick with dust.
There were many cases that year, which showed that the commanding officer and envoys of the Wan'an bureau at the time were quite capable. But she'd been through a dozen or so scrolls, and not many remained.
When she took this one out, she paused, then unrolled it.
Her luck this time was good.
When she opened the case file, the paper was faintly yellowed by time. It read:
A malignant ghost appeared at the Liu Clan's Ancestral Hall in the south of Wan'an County.
Seven handled the case.
Chief Commanding Officer of the Wan'an County Demon-Suppression Bureau: Su Long, with five order envoys: He Jing, Zhao Yi, Wang Dan, Liu Cai and Chen Shou.
She wasn't unfamiliar with these names. She'd already read a dozen files. The first several files of Year 206 had been led by the previous commanding officer, and the four after those had all been led by Su Long.
Su Long had been exceptionally capable back then. Facing malignant ghosts, he had managed to save his own skin multiple times—and most of the envoys who accompanied him survived as well, which was no small feat.
But Zhao Fusheng's attention didn't linger there. At the words "the Liu Clan's Ancestral Hall in the south of Wan'an County" she breathed a barely perceptible sigh of relief, then looked pleased at her luck.
The file read:
The Lius of the south of Wan'an City are a local powerful clan. In earlier generations they produced a juren1 and held office at court, and built up considerable wealth.
The descendants have done well too. In recent years the clan has grown and flourished, with many heirs.
Liu Huacheng, the current patriarch of the household, is known for his charitable nature. He has a principal wife and two concubines, and has fathered nine sons and six daughters.
As it bore on the Beggars' Alley case, Zhao Fusheng read carefully.
The record of the case forty years ago showed that, between collateral and main branches, the Liu clan had 103 descendants and relatives, plus 489 servants, 592 persons in all including blood relatives and household servants, and the clan estate covered a very wide area.
In Wan'an County, this was a bona fide prominent and wealthy family.
The Lius' ancestors had been farsighted and shrewd, and over several generations the family fortune had snowballed.
By the time of the head of the house, Liu Huacheng, it had prospered even more.
Liu Huacheng himself was a legend in Wan'an County.
Before he was born, his mother had a recurring dream. She often dreamed of him holding a strange red book, walking down a long street—a truly miraculous occurrence.
On the day Liu Huacheng was born, the sky glowed with crimson clouds. Wan'an County saw the sight as an omen of good fortune and believed that Liu Huacheng was a star deity descended from heaven.
In his youth he was extraordinarily bright and studied hard. Before thirty he had passed the provincial examination, far exceeding his forebears.
His father once boasted drunkenly to others that his son had the talent to take first place in the palace exam.
Sadly, after that Liu Huacheng never placed high again. At forty, with money the Lius donated, he bought an official post, and for a while served as Right Supervisor of the Tingwei2 in the Capital, and then for some reason inexplicably resigned and returned home.
Having returned, Liu Huacheng took over the Liu family estate. He was not only good at his studies, but skilled in business as well. Under his management, the Lius' enterprises thrived, and the family became fabulously wealthy. Still, the record noted the Lius were not callous in their wealth, as Liu Huacheng spent money every year on repairing bridges and roads and gave to the poor year-round.
As luck would have it, the day of the incident was Liu Huacheng's sixtieth birthday, and his sons had begun preparing the banquet for it half a year earlier.
Because he was generous, the Lius laid out a flowing banquet on Wenchang Road near the ancestral hall, inviting townspeople and common folk from across the city. Anyone willing to come and wish Liu Huacheng long life, whether high or low in status, could sit down for a full meal and a cup of wine.
The banquet had begun three days earlier and countless people had attended.
And it was precisely on Liu Huacheng's birthday that the household became haunted.
That same day, six people from the Liu family died. The malignant ghost was terrifying: after killing them, it advanced in rank and quickly developed a ghost domain.
A fine birthday banquet turned into a funeral. The guests who'd come to pay respects were scared half to death and trapped inside the ghost domain.
Because so many people were involved, the ghost incident escalated at once.
The bureau's chief commanding officer at the time was named Su Long. He was formidable, a ghost-controller who'd taken over as commanding officer only a few months before, yet had already handled several ghost cases, each one cleanly, and had made a name for himself in Wan'an County.
After the ghost case broke out at the Lius', Liu Huacheng, for some reason, escaped the ghost domain and came in person, paying a heavy price to ask both Su Long and Zhang Xiongwu to join hands.
The file was near its end at this point.
Zhao Fusheng held the scroll as it gradually unrolled, with a bad feeling. It read:
We entered the Liu estate and found it enveloped by a ghost domain—one that was simple enough to enter, but near impossible to leave.
In the end seven of us went: the bureau and Zhang Xiongwu. Afterward only four of the bureau and Zhang Xiongwu left safely. Wang Dan and Chen Shou of the bureau stayed forever within the Liu mansion.
Su Long hadn't recorded in detail how those two triggered the malignant ghost's rule and were killed on the Liu mansion trip.
On the ghost itself, the file only said:
Headless Ghost.
Further on it read:
No one knew when the ghost would kill, and Su Long had no way of knowing when those beside him would meet their end.
The ghost's lethality exceeded everyone's imagination. The first sign that someone had died was a head suddenly dropping to the ground.
Su Long had been terrified, and had paid a considerable price to withdraw to the bureau.
Later, unable to resist the Lius' repeated pleas and the high reward Liu Huacheng offered, he worked with Zhang Xiongwu again and finally put an end to the case.
Su Long hadn't written down how they handled the case.
This commanding officer, once famous across Wan'an County and thought to have a bright future, left a warning to later readers at the end of the file: this ghost at the Liu Clan's Ancestral Hall in the south of Wan'an County is of unknown rank, and might well have reached Baleful-tier or even the Calamity-tier above it.
He wrote:
After this affair, the ghost I control shows signs of slipping out of control.
Within a year I will either die at a malignant ghost's hands or from the Soul-Life Register claiming my life.
When a man is about to die, his words are good3.
If any later bureau member is willing to read this file, the South City case has surely gotten out of hand.
Here Su Long's brush grew ragged:
If you read this file, report to the court at once. Do not try to solve it yourself.
Anyone who does not control a ghost entity of Calamity-tier or above must not lightly set foot in the south of the city. Enter, and you die!
"..."
Reading this, Zhao Fusheng felt her chest ache from holding her breath so long, her head swimming from the lack of oxygen. Slowly, she exhaled a long, heavy breath.
