IBGSW Chapter 37
Still Giving Alms
Thinking this through, doubt rose in Zhao Fusheng's mind.
The ghost's characteristics, as she had just worked them out, didn't seem to match the rules of the ghost calamity at Liu Huacheng's birthday banquet forty years ago.
Liu Wu had said clearly that most of the survivors at the banquet back then lived because Su Long had brought the chaos under control. He gathered everyone in one place and forbade them from moving around, which kept the ghost from having too many chances to "swap heads."
But the way people in Beggars' Alley shut themselves in one to a house and never came out matched Su Long's old order of "forbidding everyone to move." Zhao Fusheng couldn't tell whether the ghost had advanced a tier because it had killed so many.
She felt something suspicious about all of this, but she hadn't yet actually dealt with the ghost, so she couldn't leap to conclusions.
What also unsettled her was the Confucian temple.
Everything else was dark, but the temple alone was still lit. She had no idea what was going on over there.
The boy Fan Bisi had mentioned, who came to the Demon-Suppression Bureau to report the case, had been turned away. Where had he gone afterward?
Paperman Zhang's information was half true and half false, but he'd said the ghost was kept in the temple, and that a temple keeper presided there. Had the keeper been living under the same roof as a ghost for forty years?
...
She looked calm and composed on the surface, but this was her first time actively handling a malignant ghost case, and she was alone. Fear and unease still churned inside her. All she could do was think furiously, to keep fear from swamping her thoughts and costing her her reason.
Time passed minute by minute, and the sky grew darker.
The house she had chosen didn't have a speck of light. Beggars' Alley was utterly quiet.
Every survivor hiding in this place seemed to have deliberately stifled any sound. In the dark, it felt as if danger were brewing, about to arrive.
Zhao Fusheng had a feeling that someone had died in this house before. The smell of blood was heavy.
The endless waiting was torment.
With darkness falling and her sight gone, her other senses seemed sharpened. After an unknown stretch of time, perhaps because she hadn't eaten all day, she suddenly smelled the aroma of rice gruel.
'Gurgle—'
Her stomach churned wildly and growled in protest.
The sound was loud and almost harsh in this room.
She'd been in extreme quiet for so long that when she first heard it her heart clenched, but soon she had no thought to spare for that.
As the fragrance drifted over, a 'clang' of a gong rang out from the distance.
From the moment she stepped into the ghost domain and into Beggars' Alley, her first impression had been: silence. The survivors here seemed to want to erase their very presence. Whether fearful or hiding, they kept quiet, even running hunched over and on tiptoe for fear of making noise.
So at the first stroke of the gong, she was dazed for a moment and had an absurd thought: she must have misheard. In this ghost street where everyone was trembling with fear, who would deliberately beat a gong?
But the thought was ruthlessly crushed as soon as it came. She wasn't hallucinating. Someone really had struck a gong, because two more loud clangs followed and spread across the whole of Beggars' Alley.
Then a man shouted at the top of his voice, "Come and eat!"
Perhaps from hunger, the moment Zhao Fusheng heard "eat," her mouth flooded with saliva.
The man said nothing else. His voice was clear and not very old, like a young man past the voice-breaking years, perhaps around twenty.
His shout, along with the gong, spread quickly through the whole street. The extreme quiet here let it reach everyone's ears fully.
Clang!
Another heavy gong stroke sounded, and the young man shouted again.
"Come and eat!"
Clang!
"Come and eat!"
The gong and shout were repeated three times in all, and then Zhao Fusheng heard movement "next door."
Only then did she realize she had a neighbor. Not just the one next door, but others too had stirred, rising one after another as if they understood something.
The creak of doors opening sounded again and again. Quite a few of the hiding people were coming out after nightfall.
Zhao Fusheng was bewildered.
At first Beggars' Alley had been one person to a house. It was the exact opposite of Su Long's method of "gathering everyone," yet by avoiding each other, people also reduced the chance of a lone person running into the ghost.
Now a single shout of "dinner's served" and the hiding survivors were getting up and gathering again. It clearly violated the principle of hiding separately.
She dimly sensed that the ghost of Beggars' Alley might be a strange one.
According to Paperman Zhang, the ghost in Beggars' Alley was the same one as the ghost in the Liu Clan's Ancestral Hall forty years ago.
According to Liu Wu, the carriage driver, the ghost in the ancestral hall back then mainly took heads, taking people's heads while the crowd was in chaos and fitting them onto its own body.
Under those circumstances, the quieter everyone was, the safer they were naturally.
Yet now, after the gong, the survivors were leaving their houses, which was strange.
Those who had survived here to this day should have a clear understanding of the ghost's killing rules. They couldn't be heading down a road they knew meant death.
Zhao Fusheng felt that Paperman Zhang's and Liu Wu's words contradicted each other, and one of them must be lying.
She didn't fully trust either. But although Liu Wu was suspect, he was so afraid she'd drag him into the ghost domain that he'd probably told her everything he knew in answer to her questions, and the chance he was lying was low.
Paperman Zhang, on the other hand, had had a blood feud with the original Zhao Fusheng. Now she had succeeded in ghost-control, taken over the Demon-Suppression Bureau, and shown her strength at their first meeting, so he surely saw her as a source of disaster and wanted to be rid of her.
The quickest way for him to kill her was to kill with a ghost.
His words were perhaps eight parts true and two parts false, which made them all the more convincing. He only needed to hide the key information and mislead her a little, and she could very well be pushed into danger.
Zhao Fusheng reasoned that what Paperman Zhang had said about Liu Huacheng, while posted in the Capital, triggering the revival of a malignant ghost in a case was true. It was also true that Liu Huacheng later atoned through meritorious service, brought the dismembered ghost corpse back to Wan'an County, and suppressed it with the Liu family's fortune.
But on the ghost's killing rules he'd been vague and glossed over them, so the ghost's origins were suspect.
And he'd been eager to get her to link the ghost calamity of forty years ago with the present case in Beggars' Alley, which put her on guard.
Though he'd later taken the initiative to be friendly, giving her a ghost lantern and bringing up the Liu family's past, it hadn't dispelled her suspicion.
By comparison, Liu Wu's appearance and identity were also too coincidental, but what he said seemed more credible.
Her thoughts grew clearer. If Liu Wu's account was true, then the ghost calamity in Beggars' Alley probably wasn't caused by the same malignant ghost as the one in the ancestral hall forty years ago.
The thought gave her a splitting headache.
Before entering Beggars' Alley she'd prepared thoroughly for the ghost calamity of that year. If the two calamities were unrelated, she knew nothing about the ghost here, and she was trapped in the ghost domain besides.
Her expression kept shifting.
But everyone else was moving, so naturally she couldn't stay put.
If you don't enter the tiger's den, how can you get the cub?1 Sometimes staying still wasn't necessarily good. Once things moved, there might be a turn.
She rallied herself inwardly. After two or three deep breaths she finally made up her mind, stood up with the others, and flung open the tightly shut door.
Outside, the sky was already fully dark.
But she had been hiding in the dark for a long time and her eyes had adjusted, so she could still make out the street.
Beggars' Alley was completely different from when she'd first entered. The people who'd hidden in the daytime had all come out, drifting like wandering spirits, pouring onto the street and heading deeper in.
And the direction they were heading was exactly toward the lit Confucian temple.
The street, desolate in daylight, quickly filled with people.
Zhao Fusheng didn't understand what was going on, but she hurried to blend into the crowd and follow.
She noticed that although these people were moving forward, each kept a gap from the others, as though everyone was consciously avoiding each other.
She tried moving close to one person. His face was full of fear and unease, and he bit his lip constantly, afraid of something. But the instant he sensed her approach, he instinctively shied to one side.
She followed again, and he dodged again.
After several rounds, the man finally realized something. He turned a skin-and-bones face toward her in alarm, terror still in his eyes, and looked at Zhao Fusheng with a warning, signaling her to keep away from him.
"Fellow villager." Zhao Fusheng stepped up, grinning, and greeted him. The man turned to leave, and she reached out and grabbed him.
The instant she touched him, he looked as if he'd had a terrible fright. He flung his arm wildly, made a hoh-hoh sound in his throat, his legs went soft, and he sank to the ground.
His reaction startled Zhao Fusheng in turn. She didn't let go, and crouched down instead. He kicked and crawled frantically away.
The survivors behind and beside them caught up, deliberately going around the two of them, moving toward the Confucian temple.
Zhao Fusheng hesitated. The man's eyes were rolling back and he was foaming at the mouth. She loosened her grip, and the instant he was free, he pulled in his lolling tongue and crawled quickly forward, putting distance between them and melting into the crowd.
"..."
Her eyebrow twitched. She watched him weave left and right through the crowd until, in the dark, he was lost in it and impossible to pick out.
Forget it!
There were people all around anyway. If she wanted to ask questions, she didn't have to cling to that one.
But there was definitely something strange about the Confucian temple, and she decided to follow the crowd there to see for herself first.
After a stretch of walking, the smell of food grew thicker, filling the air and making Zhao Fusheng so hungry her chest felt stuck to her back.
But she looked around and saw the faces of those walking with her. They looked deeply complicated, both afraid and uneasy, with none of the joy of people about to eat.
Could there be something wrong with the food?
When Fan Bisi and Liu Wu had talked about the ghost case in Beggars' Alley, both had made one point: whether it was the Liu family before or the temple afterward, they had always been in the habit of giving gruel to the poor.
Thinking of this, an outlandish thought occurred to Zhao Fusheng: could the temple still be giving alms right now?
"That can't be..."
The ghost domain was already in place and a malignant ghost was out and about in Beggars' Alley. Could the Liu family's charity really still be going on at a time like this?
But she turned to look around, and the people heading toward the temple were like people facing a deadly enemy, as if disaster was about to strike. They didn't look like people going to receive alms.
Zhao Fusheng pushed her doubts down and hurried forward. She slipped into the crowd, and people shied away as she approached, surprise on their faces.
About a quarter of an hour later, she finally saw the Confucian temple.
The temple was still brilliantly lit. The lanterns hung in several tiers gave off white light, and from the upturned eaves hung a blue cloth banner with one large character on it: 施 (alms).
施
The temple's main gate stood open.
Compared with the bright lights outside, there was no light inside. The main hall was deep and dim, seemingly a thousand feet deep at least.
Several massive pillars, each so thick it took two people linking arms to encircle it, held up the hall.
Standing in the lamplight, Zhao Fusheng looked in from afar. Light reached most of the way into the hall, but the interior was so deep it seemed like a bottomless abyss. It was all hollow blackness and she couldn't see clearly.
In front of the temple gate was a wide open space paved with blue stone bricks. Outside one side of the gate stood a stone table like an offering table, with a large bronze cauldron on it and several tall stacks of bowls beside it.
An expressionless young man stood behind the table, holding a ladle, watching the approaching crowd coldly.
It really was almsgiving!
Even after Beggars' Alley had fallen to ghosts, the temple was still giving alms.
Zhao Fusheng immediately realized something was off.
When something is out of the ordinary, there is a demon behind it.2
With Beggars' Alley covered in a ghost domain and a malignant ghost on the loose, everyone had their hands full just saving themselves. Yet the temple carried on as usual, as if ignoring the terrifying scenes of ghost killings. There had to be a reason.
She had meant to stride forward and ask the young man what was going on.
But she hesitated for a moment and held herself back.
Having found something amiss at the temple, and thinking this boy's behavior might have its reasons, she didn't hurry to reveal her identity and ask questions. Instead, she stood to one side and began studying the scene.
To her surprise, the crowd that had been rushing here also didn't push forward.
Everyone hurried when they left their houses, but upon arriving they looked fearful, as if no one dared to be the first to eat.
Could it be that the earlier you eat, the more strange things happen? Zhao Fusheng wondered.
Her eyes fell on the young man holding the ladle, and she began to size him up.
He was young, at most twenty.
Compared with the sallow, gaunt people around him, he was tall. By her estimate, at least 1.8 meters, and rather imposing.
His cheekbones were sharp and his features handsome enough, but the gloom in his expression made him look listless, without the vitality of a young man, and rather dark in complexion.
Behind him sat a gong, with two wooden mallets wrapped in red cloth beside it. Clearly he was the one who had struck the gong and called "come and eat."
But Zhao Fusheng's eyes weren't drawn to those things. She noticed a not-very-thick booklet lying at the young man's left hand.
It was bound with cotton thread and had no writing on the cover, so she couldn't tell what it was. But the way the people around looked at the booklet was full of terror and dread.
