IBGSW Chapter 39
Working Out the Rules
After finishing the alms gruel, all the survivors had hidden away, and Beggars' Alley fell into an eerie quiet.
As the young man giving alms at the Confucian temple had warned, the malignant ghost would come once the almsgiving was over, so everyone had hidden away as if playing hide-and-seek.
Anything still walking the streets openly now could be nothing other than the ghost.
"..."
The ghost had come!
Zhao Fusheng's hair stood on end. Her first thought was: the ghost's pressure is terrifying.
At the critical moment she instinctively reached into her robe and pulled out the box of lamp oil Paperman Zhang had given her.
According to Paperman Zhang and Zhang Chuanshi, this lamp oil had the power to block a ghost's gaze.
Anywhere the lamplight covered, the ghost wouldn't be able to detect her.
Thinking this, Zhao Fusheng felt a little more at ease.
With a protective item in hand, her fear gradually faded, and the urge to take action came crawling back.
She had entered Beggars' Alley to resolve the ghost calamity. Now that the ghost was before her, she naturally couldn't dodge.
"Huff—hiss—huff—hiss—"
After several deep breaths, she forced down the urge to flee and crawled toward the door. Amid frantic heartbeats she carefully pried the door crack open.
The door was old and aged, and the slightest touch made it creak.
A sound that wouldn't normally have seemed loud was piercing in the extreme stillness.
When she heard it, her mind went blank for a moment, her heart rate soared, her hand shook twice, and the lamp oil box nearly fell from it.
She paused, gripped the box tight, and forced herself to calm down.
No danger came at her. Suddenly she remembered what Fan Bisi had said: rules.
A malignant ghost kills by rules.
Once a ghost's rule was triggered, holding your breath wouldn't help; the ghost would still claim your life.
But if you hadn't triggered its killing rule, even sharing a room with a ghost entity might not mean certain death.
From what she'd seen and heard since entering Beggars' Alley, the ghost's killing seemed to be tied to the One-Name Register.
On the register, "Sun Fu," who had been called earlier, was clearly the unlucky one who had triggered the ghost's killing rule next.
With this in mind, her thoughts quickly became active again.
Gathering her nerve, she pressed her face up to the door crack. After all, she was about to deal with a ghost. She had been reborn into this era and had a malignant ghost bound to her, so she had already prepared herself to face one eventually, yet it still took her quite a while to steel her mind before she suddenly opened her eyes.
The scene on the street entered her sight.
The streets of Beggars' Alley were empty. At some point, black sinister energy had spread across them.
A damp, moldy, rotting smell came first, with a sharp reek of blood twisted together with the specific stench of rotting corpses, forming a smell of death that drilled into Zhao Fusheng's nose.
She held her breath and stared wide-eyed at the ghost fog.
In that black fog a blurry figure was moving slowly.
Tap, tap, tap—
Footsteps sounded. The stiff silhouette walked out of the mist, gradually clearing, and approached the street where Zhao Fusheng hid.
A ghost!
Zhao Fusheng hadn't yet seen the figure's face, but the unique sinister energy and chill of a malignant ghost had already spread ahead of it. The figure drew closer, gradually shedding the wrapping of the black fog, and appeared before her.
Her free hand clutched the door plank, desperately trying to steady her trembling body and suppress the urge to run and hide.
Zhao Fusheng knew fear would only ruin things. If she didn't seize this chance to remember the ghost's features, then when her own turn came to trigger its rule, it would be her time to die.
She opened her eyes wide and watched the "shadow" come out of the black mist step by step.
Once she saw the ghost's appearance, her face went dark.
The ghost now before her was completely different from the Headless Ghost Liu Wu had described.
This ghost had a head!
Its body was emaciated and slightly hunched, its limbs thin as hemp stalks.
The ghost's head, covered in gray-white tangled hair, sat atop a long thin neck. What caught Zhao Fusheng's attention was the pair of hands hanging at its sides, which looked to be one long and one short.
Its body was blotched with blood, its exposed skin a mix of purple and blue, covered with corpse spots of all sizes.
A forehead band1 stained with blood and flesh hung loosely and slanted across one of its eyes, gray like a dead fish's, while the other eye was coated with a gray film of mist.
The ghost's corpse was stiff. Its knees didn't bend when it walked, and its footfalls were heavy, which made its movements odd and made it easy to tell a ghost from a person at a glance.
"..."
Zhao Fusheng's face turned very ugly.
She knew Fan Bisi and Paperman Zhang were no good. They knew she was going to investigate the ghost case, and they might even hope she would die in Beggars' Alley, and wouldn't tell her the real clues about the ghost in full.
So she had been extremely careful before entering Beggars' Alley and had prepared repeatedly. Still, the worst had come true: the ghost in Beggars' Alley was not the one from the Liu family's ghost calamity forty years ago.
The two ghosts had completely different features, and the clues she'd collected before were worthless in one stroke.
But on second thought, things might not be quite that bad.
After all, Liu Wu had said that although the ghost calamity at the Liu Clan's Ancestral Hall forty years ago was the work of a Headless Ghost, a Headless Ghost kills precisely by taking living people's heads.
Perhaps the head on the ghost's neck now wasn't its original face, and might be one it had taken by killing.
Thinking this, Zhao Fusheng felt slightly relieved.
She forced down her unease and strained her eyes to see whether there were splice marks on the ghost's neck. But black fog hung thick, and she was affected by her body's instinctive fear. She stared with wide eyes yet couldn't make anything out.
The ghost wandered aimlessly back and forth along the street, and at the end of the lane turned toward the other end.
The ghost's shadow trailed black fog and vanished into the night. The sound of footsteps faded into the distance.
Her heart pounding, Zhao Fusheng pressed her face to the crack and watched and listened for a long time. She heard no screams from far away.
The ghost had gone who knew where. She was hesitating about whether to light the ghost lantern and go out to investigate—
The heavy tapping of footsteps sounded again.
The ghost seemed to have turned back, and quickly.
Before long the black energy, carrying the smell of blood, mildew and rot, came rolling back, and the ghost reappeared from the other end of the lane.
At the corner of the lane it suddenly turned. Its terrible blue-purple face swung around and, expressionless, looked at Zhao Fusheng, who was pressed against the crack looking out.
!!!
At that look, Zhao Fusheng's heart contracted sharply. Just as she thought disaster had come, the ghost turned its head away again and walked slowly toward the houses across from where she hid.
It walked along the thresholds. The people in the houses opposite had long since heard the ghost's footsteps.
The survivors who had held out in Beggars' Alley this long knew a malignant ghost's presence far better than Zhao Fusheng did.
Perhaps knowing their time had come, the hearts of those hiding in that row of houses leapt into their throats.
The ghost passed house after house and finally stopped before one tightly shut door. After pausing a moment, it suddenly began to knock.
Knock! Knock knock!
This was beyond Zhao Fusheng's expectations. She had never thought a ghost could be so polite as to knock before entering a house.
The absurd sight dulled her fear somewhat. The people inside naturally didn't dare open the door.
But upon realizing they had been chosen by the ghost, a despairing wail of someone facing death came from the house.
The sobbing instantly carried through the whole street, echoes reverberating.
Knock knock knock!
The ghost was unaffected by the screaming and kept knocking.
After the third round of knocking, the ghost's solid form gradually dissolved.
Its terrible blue-purple body seeped into the door plank like liquefied tar, and a huge hole melted through the door.
Through the black hole in the door plank, Zhao Fusheng saw the ghost's shape re-form inside the house. It dragged its heavy, stiff body in, then the ghost shadow was swallowed by the dark, and a moment later a man's soul-shattering scream came from inside.
"Ahh—"
But the scream cut off abruptly, and then came a hair-raising sound of tearing.
The ghost domain over Beggars' Alley was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. The survivors were holding their breath.
Because of that, even the slightest sound was magnified to the extreme.
The sound of blood spraying, the delicate rustle of a hand stirring through rotten mud, came clearly into Zhao Fusheng's ears.
Tension, fear, and the relief of a narrow escape mingled in the thick smell of blood and spread, along with the particular miasma of entrails, stinging the eyes slightly.
The ghost, its hunt successful, soon walked out of the darkness, now completely different from before.
Its formerly shriveled belly had swollen several times its size, as if after a full meal. Several lengths of bloody intestines were wrapped around its body and arms, and blood and bits of undigested feces dripped from it.
In the ghost's hand was a human head. Its eyes were wide open and its lips drawn back to show sparse bloody yellow teeth, the terror and horror of its final moment frozen on the unlucky one's face.
Zhao Fusheng, having witnessed a ghost's hunt with her own eyes, was deeply shaken.
This was a shock the Demon-Suppression Bureau's case scrolls could never convey in a few words.
But she knew this was no time to be afraid. She forced herself to ignore the terror the ghost's killing brought her, and focused her eyes on the face of the head in the ghost's hand.
The face was twisted by agony before death, but Zhao Fusheng could vaguely recognize it. It was "Sun Fu," the first living person called at the almsgiving in front of the Confucian temple that evening.
The ghost really did kill according to the One-Name Register.
In other words, the almsgiving at the temple was linked to the ghost's killing, and the One-Name Register was no ordinary object; it must be closely tied to the ghost.
From the clues so far, after the temple's almsgiving, everyone who had taken a bowl from the temple would probably be recorded in the register.
And the ghost killed according to the register. When the almsgiving began, the first person called came into the ghost's "sight" and became the target of the ghost's hunt in this round of its wandering.
Her mind worked fast. From these clues she quickly saw that avoiding the ghost's killing rule was simple: don't accept the temple's bowl.
If you didn't accept the temple's alms, your name wouldn't appear in the One-Name Register.
People not on the list weren't in the ghost's sight.
If Fan Bisi's claim that the rules were absolute was accurate, then someone who hadn't violated the ghost's rule might not even be noticed if they stood right in front of it.
At this thought, Zhao Fusheng's face turned livid.
She realized the darkness of human nature.
The survivors who'd lived here until now surely knew this all along. Yet in front of the temple, someone had still forcibly shoved the young man's gruel into her hands, pushing her onto the ghost's register.
Thinking of it, irritation and disgust welled up in her, and the anger quickly became killing intent. She wanted nothing more than to drag out that malicious survivor right then and let him taste the ghost's methods.
Zhao Fusheng soon recognized the violence in her own mood. Such emotion clearly wasn't normal.
She had used the malignant ghost's power once. Although she had removed its influence with merit from the Investiture of the Gods, it now seemed the aftereffects of controlling a ghost were stronger than she'd imagined.
Though she had shaken off the ghost's control at that time, the ghost's influence over her was still great. She did her best to calm her anger and keep from being disturbed by the rage, and turned her attention back to the ghost's killing rules.
The ghost killed by calling names from the One-Name Register. She had thought of a way to avoid the ghost's rule, but it didn't apply here.
Beggars' Alley was covered by a ghost domain, and the survivors trapped in it had nowhere to flee.
A person has to eat the five grains to live. At the end of their rope, the temple's alms were their only chance of survival, and even if this bowl was a condemned man's last meal, they had to take it.
She could guess the rest: the trapped survivors in the temple's area stayed alive on alms, while the ghost killed by the almsgiving list.
Together they formed a perfect deadlock. Those living here couldn't flee or avoid it, and could only wait for death in anguish and passivity.
If she didn't enter Beggars' Alley, didn't drive out the ghost, and couldn't complete the task, everyone would be trapped here to death in the ghost domain!
After working it all out, Zhao Fusheng let out a long sigh. One life was gone.
The ghost "went away satisfied," retracing its steps with a soft tapping as it receded, its figure wrapped in black fog, its footsteps gradually fading until they vanished.
All the survivors let out a great sigh of relief, and faint sobbing began.
That sound was a signal. Though the trapped people feared the ghost, the many deaths had let them work out its killing rules well before Zhao Fusheng.
Trapped here, they awaited the day of their deaths in despair. Every day they lived in fearful relief, over and over again.
Black fog filled every corner of Beggars' Alley, and two opposite moods, despair and relief, blended into the ghost aura and spread through this ghost domain.
Having finished summarizing the clues, Zhao Fusheng quickly realized she'd made an oversight.
"No, that's not right."
She had roughly summarized that the ghost appears after each almsgiving and kills one person whenever it appears.
But she then remembered that the houses covered by the ghost domain were one person to a house, and that when the young man giving alms in front of the temple handed her the gruel, he had warned her to find an empty house.
In other words, the ghost's killing rule might not be counted by "number of people," but by "house."
At the moment the ghost knocked, the person inside was undoubtedly marked as the ghost's prey, and their time was up.
She still didn't know the ghost's origin, how it had formed, or how it killed, but she could be sure it was not the same ghost as the headless ghost that appeared at Liu Huacheng's birthday banquet forty years ago.
She had taken on this ghost case out of necessity, but Paperman Zhang had indeed deceived her, using her needs to lure her into a deadly trap.
Luckily she'd burned down Paperman Zhang's den, which was a bit of revenge in advance.
She began to think about the ghost's origin.
The ghost was inseparable from the Confucian temple's almsgiving. Its killing involved the temple's almsgiving list, and the temple had been converted from the Liu Clan's Ancestral Hall, so the two must be connected.
And the young man who tended the almsgiving at the temple was the key to solving the puzzle.
Her eyes turned deep.
She sat down on the floor and gathered some strength, then put the box of lamp oil back inside her robe and crawled back into the corner on all fours.
Though she'd prepared before coming in, and had a ghost hidden on her, witnessing a ghost's killing still gave Zhao Fusheng, who'd grown up in a peaceful age, a great psychological shock.
Seeing a life vanish on the spot was different from a dream; it was more shocking and cruel than any dream.
Fan Bisi's warning echoed in her mind: dealing with ghosts means nine deaths for one survival.
She patted the lamp oil in her robe, then the Soul-Life Register she carried against her body, then felt behind her back, and sank her mind into her sea of consciousness to look at the divine positions of the Investiture of the Gods. Only then did she feel a little reassured.
The ghost had killed and left, but Beggars' Alley's vigilance hadn't faded.
Everyone's heart was full of fear. The thick smell of blood floated in the air, and the breath of death spread across the street, inhaled deep into everyone's lungs.
Though Zhao Fusheng had guessed she was safe for now, she wasn't yet mentally prepared to meet the ghost head-on, having just seen one kill for the first time.
The young man's warning at the temple echoed in her mind, and she didn't dare gamble or open the door lightly.
Time passed bit by bit. The black fog gradually dispersed, the whole street was covered in gray mist, and that suffocating chill receded like a tide.
Zhao Fusheng slowly got to her feet and moved her limbs. She had much to do today and couldn't stay trapped here, waiting for death for no reason.
After a night to settle, she'd adjusted her state of mind.
Once her blood was flowing again and her numb hands and feet had recovered, she pulled open the door she had braced against all night.
As the door creaked open, she could sense many gazes peering at her through door cracks, just as she had spied on the ghost the night before.
Uncomfortable, she turned her head toward the feeling of being watched. The peering gazes quickly looked away, then fell on her again without restraint.
Zhao Fusheng frowned.
Her time was tight, and there was no need to waste it standing off against these people.
She quickly looked up in the direction of the temple.
Since entering Beggars' Alley the day before, she had noticed that there seemed to be no day or night in the ghost domain, but she could still roughly tell the time from small details.
When the temple had been giving alms, the young man's words had suggested it was "night." The ghost appeared at night, and after it killed and left there was a short "safe time." The black fog turning gray was probably when the young man's "daytime" began.
The temple stood out as ever in the ghost domain, and its lit lanterns still hadn't gone out.
She steadied herself and strode toward the temple.
She had a good memory, and this ghost case concerned her life, so the night before, both before going to receive the alms and after leaving, she'd made a point of noting the layout. She had fixed every building and every road detail in her mind.
Such caution and care had served her well in her work, and now might save her life at a critical moment.
She soon reached the temple.
The temple now was in sharp contrast to the night before. The hall front was cold and empty and silent all around, the stone table for the alms gruel was bare, and all the odds and ends had been cleared away.
There was no wind in the ghost domain and no birdsong or insect noise. After the ghost's killing the night before, the survivors were keeping quiet, so still you could hear a pin drop.
The temple gates were still wide open, and the lamplight lit half the hall inside. All around was extremely quiet, with no hint of anyone living.
The blue-stone paving of the open ground before the temple gate was wet, as though it had just rained before she came, washing the stones and the gaps between them, the water seeping into the earth between them and raising the smell of soil.
But maybe because of the aftereffects of watching the ghost kill the night before, she felt that beyond the smell of wet earth, a faint scent of blood and the mildew of the ghost still lingered around her nose.
She couldn't help lowering her head, pinching her clothes and sniffing them, then let her gaze sweep over the washed ground.
It was almost dawn and the ghost had just vanished, and the survivors didn't dare come out to move about.
Beggars' Alley lay within a ghost domain with no day or night, and every natural phenomenon was cut off here. A heavy rain couldn't have appeared out of nowhere, so the ground in front of the Confucian temple couldn't be accidental. Someone must have washed it ahead of time.
She bit her lip, and ground a flake of dry skin from it between her teeth.
Zhao Fusheng looked up.
The lanterns above the temple still hadn't gone out. From the look of it, they had been lit from last night all the way to now.
The lantern light was pale and lit the azure plaque above, enveloping the open ground around in its white glow.
Standing in the light, Zhao Fusheng instinctively felt discomfort and wanted to hide her form.
With the bustling crowd gone, the Confucian temple, the only brightly lit place in the ghost domain, looked unusually eerie and sinister, chilling to look at.
