IBGSW Chapter 48
Dismembering the Malignant Ghost
In her first true face-to-face clash with a ghost, Zhao Fusheng's escape plan was nipped in the bud.
The strength of a ghost that had long since revived was far beyond that of freshly revived ghosts like the Zhao couple. Dealing with a ghost for the first time, Zhao Fusheng finally understood what was truly terrifying about malignant ghosts.
The ghost's strength was astonishing. It carried her along as easily as playing with a toy.
The skin of her neck caved in quickly, and from the fragile bones there came the crack of breaking under the ghost's power.
Suffocation came, a taste of blood filled her throat, and the shadow of death instantly covered her heart.
Cold spread from her neck. Under the terrifying aura of the ghost, she felt none of the sharp pain of her neck bones being twisted.
But she still had a backup and had not yet fully despaired.
Perhaps because she controlled a ghost, Zhao Fusheng's vitality was far tougher than an ordinary person's. With her neck bones almost twisted like a rope, she had not yet died and still had strength to strike back.
Now, fighting off the blackness that kept flooding her vision, she gripped the pole in her hand and struck out as hard as she could by instinct.
Thud!
It was as if she'd hit an indestructible boulder. A huge recoil came back, her hand loosened, and the pole flew out and landed with a clang.
At the same time, as the ghost lifted her and the world spun, she heard a hissing from the ghost lantern.
As the ghost drew nearer the flame burned stronger, its light turning green.
In the green flame, she strained to open her bloodshot eyes and look around, but the ghost had vanished from in front of her at some point.
Yet the choking feeling at her throat was still there, with cold wind blowing overhead, and a chill gaze looked down on her from above.
She turned her eyes with effort and saw that the vanished ghost had its feet planted upside down on the roof beam, with its head and face hanging down, close enough to touch, face to face with hers, upside down.
The ghost's cold, numb face had long since shriveled, like cured meat left to dry for a long time. Its gray-white eyes "looked" at her.
This was by no means a living body.
Cold and dried out, the skin lusterless, with all the hair on its head withered like wild grass in winter, scattering in disorder. All these proved its life had long ago ended.
Death hung about the ghost's body, yet this dead thing still moved with a strange strength.
Caught by it, Zhao Fusheng had no power to fight back.
The mud walls shook with the ghost's movements, and the entire house hummed and trembled.
Now Zhao Fusheng at last understood what Fan Bisi meant by "human beings cannot resist a malignant ghost's power."
The ghost's pale, numb eyes did not move, and boundless malice poured out of it.
Then it suddenly released one of the hands that held her.
The ghost letting go gave Zhao Fusheng a brief chance to breathe, but she didn't feel lucky.
Because the ghost's slightly long right hand ran down her throat, cold seeped into her lungs, and the palm, covered with corpse spots, crawled onto her chest, then its five fingers stiffened and thrust hard down into her chest and belly.
Blood spurted out and splashed over her face.
At the edge of death, she felt no pain, only cold boring into her organs.
But the next moment, something changed.
The instant the ghost's palm pierced her chest, the Soul-Life Register she carried on her sensed the ghost's aura.
The "ghost servant" belonging to it was about to be taken away, and the register could not tolerate that.
The ghost talismans were activated at once and spread over her body on their own.
Only a ghost's power can deal with a ghost!
Wherever the ghost tongue talismans spread, the ghost hand couldn't advance an inch.
The talismans crawled from her body over the mottled blue-purple arm of the ghost, and the two cold forces strained against each other. The ghost's movements paused.
That pause was crucial and bought Zhao Fusheng a sliver of a chance to live.
But Fan Bisi had been right. The Soul-Life Register was controlled by Jia Yi, and Jia Yi was far away in the Capital, ten thousand miles from here.
The ghost tongue talismans were powerful but no match for the ghost in front of her.
In a moment, the ghost's arm closed its grip, and the talismans covering its whole arm shattered.
The talismans vanished, and the ghost hand touched her body again.
"Looks like I have to rely on myself."
Zhao Fusheng sighed inwardly.
Now she dared hold nothing back. She resolved to fight to the death and activated the ghost's power.
At the thought, the ghost she had suppressed revived at once. Cold came from behind her back and shadows swallowed her.
In her sea of consciousness the Investiture of the Gods sounded again:
Borrowing the Malignant Ghost's power; one-third of life force consumed.
The ghost she controlled worked by the rule of giving first and taking later, and at this life-and-death moment the fortune she had borrowed reached its peak.
As the ghost handled her body, her arm fell limp, and in her flailing she happened to seize the ghost lantern that had somehow dropped to the floor.
She felt she had grabbed a lifeline, and the fortune of controlling the ghost kept working.
The ghost's bloody hand shattered the ghost talismans and was about to break through her chest and rip out her intestines. But the blood was slick, and the ghost hand slid along her chest to her arm and lifted the ghost lantern she held!
The moment the lantern was in the ghost's hand it burned wildly.
The lamp oil inside the human-skin lantern boiled up quickly, bubbles striking with a gurgling sound.
The flame grew huge in an instant. As if satisfied the moment it held the lantern, the ghost slowly released its grip on Zhao Fusheng's neck.
The light in the lantern soon burned itself out, and the ghost, as if its rule were complete, made to turn and withdraw.
At that moment Zhao Fusheng was possessed by her ghost. The instant it revived, death energy spread over her whole body.
With a series of cracking sounds, her twisted neck snapped back into shape, the broken vertebrae set straight and pushed back into place.
The marks left by the ghost hand were erased, her ripped chest closed, and the skin of her chest was smooth, pale, and cold.
A bloodthirsty, violent urge to destroy filled her heart. Her face was numb and pale.
Influenced by the ghost she controlled, she was desperate to take something from the ghost that was trying to flee.
Seeing the lantern-carrying ghost turn to leave, Zhao Fusheng finally stopped suppressing her urge to destroy.
"Don't go!" she said hoarsely, then seized the ghost's arm that held the lantern.
The ghost's body switched back and forth between corporeal and incorporeal, but once Zhao Fusheng called on her own ghost, the Beggar Ghost lost that advantage.
She wanted to force the ghost to stay, but the ghost's strength was not to be underestimated.
The ghost of Beggars' Alley was Baleful-tier, and the ghost she controlled was Baleful-tier too. Being equal in rank, in theory neither could do anything to the other.
But a ghost's killing has rules.
The ghost of Beggars' Alley killed by the register. It was enshrined in a niche. After killing, it took intestines and a head as tribute, which also matched the origin of the name of Beggars' Alley.
The Beggar Ghost!
Now, after borrowing fortune, Zhao Fusheng had used the human-skin lantern in place of herself, completing the ghost's rule.
And the ghost she controlled worked by giving first and taking later. The Beggar Ghost had already taken something from her, so it was now the turn for her ghost to "take later."
When two ghosts met, one had to win.
A ghost could not be killed or destroyed. It could only be driven off, dismembered, or suppressed.
At the thought, she turned to tearing at the ghost's arm.
The ghost's body was itself one of the peerless malevolent objects.
As she thought it, the rule power of the ghost she controlled surged to its limit, and with a crisp sound of bone tearing, the Beggar Ghost's right arm was ripped off and she held it in her hands.
At the same time the Beggar Ghost not only lost its right arm but also lost the offering it had received. Just as it was about to move again, Zhao Fusheng acted quick as a flash. She took the long-extinguished, broken ghost lantern from the ghost hand and stuffed it into the Beggar Ghost's other hand.
Ghosts have no thoughts and feel no pain, and once they receive something, it counts as completing the rule.
Even with black air pouring out of the stump, the ghost showed no other reaction. It simply turned, wooden-faced, with its one hand holding the broken lantern, and walked out the door toward the Confucian temple.
The ghost hand that Zhao Fusheng gripped did not "die" after being forcibly separated from the ghost corpse. It grasped and clenched, as if still instinctively asking for something.
When all this was done, the Investiture of the Gods sounded in her sea of consciousness:
Successfully dismembered the Malignant Ghost's corpse in Beggars' Alley; obtained one ghost hand;
Successfully broke the Beggar Ghost's rank, lowering it to Vicious-tier, and changed its killing rules;
Successfully resolved the ghost calamity in Beggars' Alley and saved the remaining living beings within it; merit +150.
Liu Clan's Ancestral Hall ghost case: 1/3 complete.
The Malignant Ghost you control has successfully completed its rule and grown stronger.
......
The prompts came one after another, but Zhao Fusheng had no time to be happy about completing the task.
Because at the moment she forcibly tore off the Beggar Ghost's arm using the power of the ghost she controlled, the ghost she controlled had also completed its rule and grown stronger.
Almost at the same moment as the Investiture's prompts, she felt an icy chill she hadn't felt in a long while come at her.
The scene from her nightmare happened again.
A ghostly figure silently drew close to her. Its cold gaze fell on her, covetous of her lifespan and fortune.
A pale, bone-chilling hand reached toward the middle of her back, and the moment its fingertips touched her back, the familiar horror spread over her whole body.
Immediately the Investiture's prompt sounded again:
You have been affected by a Baleful-tier Malignant Ghost; consume 10 points of merit to clear the ghost entity's lingering will.
As the prompt faded, the Investiture of the Gods unfolded in her mind.
On the blood-soaked roll, red light flickered and a fierce baleful aura spread. The ghost was suppressed by the Investiture's power, and its ghost hand jerked back as if shocked by electricity.
She whirled around and saw a deathly pale ghost one step away, its cold eyes fixed on her.
The ghost's two hands were raised high as if to grab her, frozen in midair. Finally, suppressed by some mysterious force, a resentful, unwilling aura came off the ghost, and its body began to dissolve piece by piece into shadow.
When she turned, the ghost shadow tried to reach out again.
The cold air struck her body, and a heart-stopping killing intent flowed into her chest.
She stepped back in fear, but the ghost was faster.
The next moment the shadow of the ghost's claws pierced her chest, but because the ghost was suppressed it had lost its lethal power, and in the end, resentful and unwilling, it turned into ten lingering wisps of pitch-like black air.
The ghost's figure collapsed like a toppled sandpile and poured down.
Its clutching afterimage became strands of black air, the shadows scattered and shrank, then flowed like water into her own shadow and vanished without a trace.
This chilling scene happened in a flash. Taken by surprise, Zhao Fusheng nearly suffered a backlash from the ghost she controlled, ending up like the original host.
The ghost had disappeared, but through that cold ghost hand, the resentful killing intent of trying to rip her open passed into her heart.
A sense of danger rose in her.
She had used the ghost's power twice, and it had drawn away two-thirds of her life force.
With the Investiture of the Gods, the harm the ghost did to her was quantified. But by Zhao Fusheng's own observation, every time she used the ghost's power, the ghost came closer to her.
When the day came that the ghost could reach out and touch her, that would be her day of death.
The more she thought, the more uneasy she felt. In the middle of her anxiety, the ghost hand she was hugging twitched and brought her thoughts back.
This was not the time to deal with the ghost she controlled.
By the Investiture's notice, the ghost calamity of Beggars' Alley had been curbed for now, so she had succeeded in the task she'd come for.
Her gaze fell on the ghost hand she held tightly. Even after leaving the body it hadn't died. It seemed to retain some of its original consciousness and kept opening its fingers and groping for something.
A ghost hand of the Beggar Ghost.
She reached out to touch it, and the Investiture of the Gods announced:
When this hand asks for something, no one, human or ghost, can refuse.
"..." Hearing this, Zhao Fusheng's eyes lit up, and the Investiture warned again:
Use the Malignant Ghost's items with caution; in the end, what it takes may be your life.
A chill ran through her, but she was still not fully out of danger.
The power of the ghost she controlled could not be used again until she found a solution. And to finish a ghost case she needed something to rely on. The arm wrenched off the Beggar Ghost could solve her current predicament.
She held the severed arm like a treasure, turning it over and over, not minding at all how ugly and fierce it looked.
Seeing its dry ghostly fingers open and close, she thought it over, then tenderly took out the human-skin paper she'd gotten from Paperman Zhang and pressed it into the ghost hand's palm, "Here, take this."
She stroked the ghost hand as if it were a treasure and said to herself.
"Be good and obedient. Next time I drive out a ghost, I'm counting entirely on you."
Once the ghost hand held the human-skin paper in its palm, it was perfectly content.
Then the ghost hand, which had been moving ceaselessly, stopped moving as it gripped the paper. The ghost arm shriveled and shrank at a visible speed until it became a palm-sized miniature withered hand, lying quietly in her hand like a model.
The change startled Zhao Fusheng at first, and she thought the ghost hand had lost its ghostly power after being separated from the body.
She pulled at the human-skin paper, but black air suddenly surged over the dry, tiny fingers, and the hand, which had been perfectly still, quickly clenched its five shrunken fingers.
Her mind stirred, and she understood at once: the ghost hand had completed its rule.
