IBGSW Chapter 32
The True Form Revealed
Zhao Fusheng nodded and tucked away the lamp oil, and her face promptly darkened.
"You kill people like cutting grass, and you took my life before. I'll keep that debt on the books for now. I'll go and see Beggars' Alley, and if things are as you say, then your gift of the lantern and your account of the past count in your favor, and the old grudge can wait." A moment ago she had been all smiles, but now that she had what she came for, she turned on him without a blink. "But if you dare lie to me, I will have your life."
"Wan'an County is under my jurisdiction now, and you dare to kill so many people and skin them for lanterns. You are utterly lawless, your crimes are monstrous—" As she spoke she stood up and yanked at the human-skin paper, dragging along the oil lamp pinned on top of it.
Her elbow knocked the pulled-in lamp over.
The lamp oil spilled out and spread everywhere. The human-skin paper piled haphazardly beneath the lamp was soaked through, the rotten stench of the oil billowed out, and the flame still alive on the black wick went whoosh and flared up.
It all happened in a flash. Paperman Zhang didn't even have time to react before the fire shot skyward.
Whatever the oil was refined from, it burned fast wherever it spread. Sheets of human-skin paper were swallowed by the flames, and black energy surged out of them, forming one pained, venomous face after another. Screams and groans rang out without pause.
"You—"
Paperman Zhang was furious and stunned. He had never expected Zhao Fusheng to turn on him so suddenly, but he seemed constrained by the flames. He reached out to grab her arm, then remembered the ghost she controlled, and the hand he had stretched out jerked frantically back.
Boom, rumble—
The flames grew and grew, and thick smoke surged upward.
Seeing how flammable the human-skin paper was, Zhao Fusheng shoved the stacked mountain of paper beside her toward the fire, and in the same motion snatched several sheets and stuffed them into her robe.
Thud.
The great heap of paper collapsed and smothered the flames.
But the oil was eerie, and she had a feeling that once lit, this fire would not easily die. Sure enough, thick smoke poured out of the gaps between the sheets. She turned at once and dashed toward the door, calling as she ran:
"No need to see me out! I'll come find you again when I'm done!"
"Zhao Fusheng, you—" Paperman Zhang watched the paper he had collected over so many years get shoved into the fire. He knew the oil's potency far better than she did, and he scrambled to dig it out—
But the instant he pulled the paper apart, the flames that had been pressed down beneath found their chance to break free. With a rumbling roar, the fire shot to the sky.
"Aaah!"
As he screamed, the flames caught his hand, pale as jade. At the touch of fire it ignited like paper and burned to ash in a moment.
Just before she left through the door, Zhao Fusheng glanced back and saw Paperman Zhang's hands on fire. The blaze stopped abruptly when it reached his sleeve cuffs. His palms had burned off, fingers and hands scattering as paper ash, and the stumps at his wrists were black, as if made from a rolled-up hollow tube of paper.
Paperman Zhang really was a paper man!
Zhao Fusheng had transmigrated into the ghost-ridden Great Han Dynasty and accepted that malignant ghosts existed, but seeing that a living person was in fact made of pasted paper, she was shaken to the core.
"Aaaah!!!"
Shrill, eerie screams rose without end. They were old and young, male and female.
Paperman Zhang raised his wide sleeves and pressed the cuffs together, hiding his severed wrists inside. Held high like a door plank, the sleeves blocked his face. The fire soon shot to the heavens and swallowed every sheet of human-skin paper in the room.
Between the gaps of his sleeves, a pair of eyes glowing red glared at Zhao Fusheng with venom.
"Zhao Fusheng, you dare burn down my Zhang family—"
"I'll—"
Before he could finish, the flames leapt with a whoosh and wrapped him inside the blaze.
And in the instant the fire rose, Zhao Fusheng sensed an icy, bone-chilling presence envelop Paperman Zhang.
"Aaah! Help, help!"
Zhang Chuanshi's screams joined in.
While Zhao Fusheng had been talking with Paperman Zhang, he had used making tea as an excuse to stay out of sight and never showed himself. He must have been hiding in Paperman Zhang's house all along, and now, with the fire, he couldn't sit still any longer and was trapped inside.
The two shared the surname Zhang, were even related, and were birds of a feather, both ill-disposed toward her and the bureau. Zhao Fusheng had no intention of saving him. What she was wondering was whether Paperman Zhang would die.
True, he had strange abilities and seemed to have some sorcery on him. Ever since she saw that his body was made of paper, she had wondered whether this was even his real body. But the fire she had set today had offended him thoroughly. The two of them had made an enemy of each other, and it could only end in a fight to the death.
For now she could only hope that whatever sorcery he had, paper was still vulnerable to fire, and that Paperman Zhang would die in this blaze.
Just as she thought this, a sudden change struck.
An extremely cold, malevolent aura rose from beneath her feet. With the keen instinct she had developed toward malignant ghosts, she felt a ghost aura surge to the sky.
She looked down instinctively.
In the burning house, a shadow had somehow begun spreading outward.
Within the firelight, Paperman Zhang's body, which should already have been devoured by the flames, reappeared.
But now his body had changed. The black robe he wore swelled like a balloon being blown up.
Before Zhao Fusheng's horrified eyes, Paperman Zhang's body, wrapped inside the black robe, grew taller and larger at a frantic speed.
The house soon could no longer hold him. The walls and wooden pillars cracked under his wildly growing body, and he in turn "swallowed" the flames of the whole room into his belly.
His body was stretched ever larger, his skin pulled taut inch by inch, the deep wrinkles on his cheeks smoothed out bit by bit, and his flesh-pink color faded to pale, translucent white. He swelled like something being inflated, and in an instant stood roughly two zhang tall.
The roaring flames had not gone out. They lit up his belly and made his body semi-transparent, the light flickering inside, so that from a distance Paperman Zhang looked like a terrifying ghastly lantern.
His body burst the house apart and appeared before Zhao Fusheng.
Atop the huge "ghastly lantern," Paperman Zhang's head turned. His face was stretched out of shape like a steamed bun that had fermented a hundredfold, his features magnified, and his venomous eyes stared down at her from above.
"You dare burn down my Zhang family—"
His voice, after his body swelled, was different from before, muffled and droning, as if mixed with echoes.
"Destroy my human skins—"
"……"
Zhao Fusheng had never seen anything so bizarre in all her life. Not even the horror movies of her past life could have staged a plot this outlandish.
Horror overwhelmed reason. Under Paperman Zhang's "gaze" she tore down a lantern hanging beneath the eaves on one side, then, spinelessly, took to her heels and fled that terrible house.
She ran madly forward and didn't dare look back.
She could feel Paperman Zhang's head standing atop the tall "human-body lantern," those blood-red eyes fixed on her the whole time, a cold laugh dogging her steps.
The stare was like a poisoned needle, stabbing her in the back again and again.
With a whistling sound, Paperman Zhang's legs twisted and "stood" limp and floppy, and from his sleeve a soft, slender arm shot out.
The arm swayed in the wind like the arm of an inflated figure, and reached for her.
When she heard the wind rush, Zhao Fusheng turned her head in terror and saw the dreadful sight.
A thick stench of corpses hit her face, a shadow covered her body, and her heart stopped.
A pale, swollen hand swept toward her, and the pale, bloated fingers and palm bore down like a mountain.
At that moment, just as she was certain she was done for, like the Monkey King pinned beneath the Buddha's hand1—
Buoyed by the force of the burning flames, Paperman Zhang's inflated body floated high into the air like a kite.
"Aaah!!!" Paperman Zhang screamed shrilly.
Freezing, icy fingertips brushed past her, and amid Paperman Zhang's furious, unresigned roar, his body flew toward the sky like a sky lantern.
Having escaped death, Zhao Fusheng watched with her own eyes as Paperman Zhang's "lit" body rose into the air and gradually put distance between them.
"Huff... huff, huff!"
Staring at the bizarre sight in midair, she gasped desperately.
"That was terrifying! Terrifying!"
Her heart thudded as if it would burst through her chest.
She had transmigrated into the Great Han Dynasty and accepted that ghosts existed in this world. From Fan Bisi she had learned how frightening ghosts were, she had witnessed ghost curses, and she had even seen with her own eyes the scene of the original Zhao Fusheng's parents, the Zhao couple, nearly reviving as malignant ghosts. She had used a malignant ghost's power to subdue them back then, and had thought she was already somewhat mentally prepared for what lay ahead.
But in her first clash with Paperman Zhang, seeing him turn in an instant into a giant lantern with firelight swallowed in its belly had still struck her mind with tremendous force.
This era was dangerous to the extreme!
Only now did she truly understand Fan Bisi's warning, and what he had meant when he said she'd be lucky to last a year or half a year.
Her face was ashen, afraid and unwilling in equal measure.
Had she come back from the dead only to cower in fear and wait for death in despair?
Her expression kept shifting as her trembling hand felt for her waist. Tucked there was the case scroll recording the ghost case of forty years ago, the box of lamp oil she had taken from Paperman Zhang, a roll of human-skin paper, and, held in her hand, a half-finished lantern.
After a while her violent heartbeat gradually calmed, the fear receded, and reason returned.
"No." She shook her head. "I'm not doomed yet. I still have capital."
She still had time.
True, she was bound to a malignant ghost, but the ghost was also one of her sources of power. And she carried the Investiture of the Gods, so in the future she could still open a divine position, enshrine the malignant ghost, and send it into that position.
She had human-skin paper and lamp oil, so she could make ghost lanterns to hold off ghosts.
If she resolved this ghost case, she could earn merit—
Her expression gradually steadied, her eyes going from panic to calm.
"I won't die. I won't die—"
She looked at the sky. In the space of a moment Paperman Zhang had risen more than ten zhang high, his enormous body shrinking in her sight, and the shock it had dealt her mind gradually eased.
Zhao Fusheng wiped the cold sweat from her forehead, knowing that for now Paperman Zhang could do nothing to her. Her heart settled, and she couldn't help glancing back.
In truth, having fled Paperman Zhang's home in blind panic, she had no idea where she'd run to, or which direction his house lay in. Still, she looked behind her, and what met her eyes was a stretch of low, dilapidated houses.
A commotion like the Zhang house's was surely no small matter in Wan'an County, with Paperman Zhang turning from a living person into a "ghastly lantern" and soaring into the air. She could sense that in many of the shabby houses, plenty of eyes were secretly watching the sky.
Yet no one screamed or wailed, as if ordinary people were long accustomed to such strange happenings and simply endured in silence.
This county city, abandoned by the court, was as quiet as a ghost domain.
She realized with clear-eyed certainty that this was an unfamiliar era, where human lives were cheap as mud. She was alone here, with no backing, no friends, no family.
When danger came, no one would save her and no one would help. She could only rely on herself!
She looked up once more at the flying Paperman Zhang, and her gaze gradually hardened.
Whatever happened, she had no way back. She would settle the matter of Beggars' Alley before the Fan brothers returned!
Fan Bisi had mentioned that Beggars' Alley lay in the south of the city, but in the original Zhao Fusheng's memories she knew nothing of Wan'an County's roads. Fortunately, by Fan Bisi's account the Confucian temple in the south was very famous. She worked her way out of the remote alleys, came out onto a street, and walked a long while before finally seeing a few scattered figures.
It seemed that most of the houses in this sprawling Wan'an County stood empty.
She grabbed someone to ask directions. At first he was unwilling to say much and, seeing she was alone, even showed ill intent. Only when she revealed the name of the Demon-Suppression Bureau did the man she'd caught turn fearful and point the way to the south of the city.
Worried that he might be lying and pointing at random, she made him lead her.
The man was around thirty and skin and bones. When he heard she meant to force him to go south, he shook his head wildly.
"I won't go, I won't."
His face was full of terror, and he nearly fell to his knees. "Beggars' Alley in the south is haunted. Many people went in and couldn't come out. They're all trapped there."
"If there were no ghost, I wouldn't be going either," Zhao Fusheng said, gripping his arm tighter. "You lead the way. When we reach the mouth of Beggars' Alley, I'll let you go home."
Though she said so, she was anxious inside.
The Beggars' Alley affair was clearly no small matter.
Common folk in this world knew ghosts existed, but if the court chose to hide things, most people still believed the world was at peace, and many even thought themselves unusually lucky, since only a minority died in ghost calamities.
Yet in Wan'an County things had deteriorated to the point where the haunting of Beggars' Alley was known to the whole county. Clearly, in the time since the Demon-Suppression Bureau had gone wrong, the situation in the county had spun out of control.
