IBGSW Chapter 58
Memory Interference
Hearing this, Zhao Fusheng fell into thought.
The room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Fan Bisi, Magistrate Pang, and the others, seeing her silent, all instinctively held their breath, afraid to interrupt her thoughts.
From what Wu Dajing had said, Zhao Fusheng had pieced together a clear timeline.
Wu Dajing and Wu Datong had grown up as brothers. Wu Datong's family was poor, and he had not been able to marry as an adult; only after thirty did he have a son, Wu Liren. Perhaps after having a son he went out to make a living. For the people of this age, leaving the village and going to the county seat meant seeing the wider world. Wu Datong had been lucky, found a good boss, finally came home in glory, and took several concubines for his son. From then on Wu Datong's line rose in Goutou Village, and Wu Liren was chosen village chief; the family was probably one of the village's major households. Once Wu Liren had wives and concubines, the line branched out and he had many children over the years, but strangely all sons, not one daughter.
By this point, the reason Zhao Fusheng focused on Wu Datong's family was that, though no malignant ghost had yet appeared in this story, it was strange throughout.
Having straightened out her thoughts, she turned her eyes to Wu Dajing.
"I understand Wu Datong's family now. Go on with Wu Lifu and Wu Jiu—" Here Zhao Fusheng waved her hand.
"Don't talk about their feud."
Even without Wu Dajing saying it, she could guess that the grudge between the two was small stuff piled up over time. But Wu Dajing had started from their fight and mentioned Wu Liren in passing, which suggested the village's strange events had begun after the two went to Wu Liren, the village chief, for judgment.
"Did the two of them go to Wu Liren's house and find something wrong?" she asked.
Wu Dajing was dumbstruck and plopped down on the floor, and after a long time cried out:
"Is my lord a god come down to earth? You've got it exactly right."
He looked utterly convinced, spraying spit as he spoke.
"Those two had been feuding for more than a day or two, and everyone in the village knew and was happy to watch the show. Until half a month ago, when the two bumped into each other in the fields again and came to blows after a few words, nearly causing a death. Some fellow villagers dragged them to the village chief's house to ask him to settle it."
At this point, fear finally showed on Wu Dajing's face.
"I heard a great commotion outside then and followed along, and from a distance I saw the village chief's front gate tightly shut."
At this, Zhao Fusheng realized something was off. From the original host's memory she knew that in this era people were poor and backward, and thieves and petty crooks were not rare, but in the countryside, if someone was at home, the front gate generally wasn't shut tight, unless the whole family were going out and had padlocked it1. In broad daylight, with Wu Liren's household large and strong, with more than twenty sons, they wouldn't fear ordinary petty thieves.
"Was the gate shut, or locked?"
She pressed, and Wu Dajing understood her meaning at once and praised.
"Lord Zhao, you have sharp eyes! It was shut! Not locked. The family didn't seem to be out. The gate was barred from inside with the bolt, not padlocked as when people go out."
Then he said, "Even if some of them had gone out, they have servants at home, and Wu Liren has so many sons, there'd be somebody left to mind the house. Why would they lock the gate?"
"And then you saw a ghost?" Fan Bisi, hearing this, found it strange too and asked.
"No—"
Wu Dajing's expression was frightened as he muttered, "If we'd seen a ghost, that would've been better. We didn't see any ghost."
Magistrate Pang was as baffled as the ten-foot monk who can't reach his own head2. He instinctively turned toward the elder beside him, whose face was flushed red, hands clasped with fingers tightly interlocked. They had all been eager to use the ghost case to test Zhao Fusheng's reaction, and had only half-listened to the outline. All they knew was that the village chief's family in Goutou Village in Wu'an Town had met a ghost calamity and the situation was urgent, and they hadn't expected that no ghost had even appeared in this case. If they hadn't been in the bureau, Magistrate Pang would have flown into a rage and thrown this Wu Dajing into prison on a charge of disrespect.
He was choked with anger, afraid Zhao Fusheng would blow up. As he sat uneasily, he heard Zhao Fusheng ask: "Then what did you see?"
Her tone was mild, not like someone angry at being toyed with by Wu Dajing. The stone in Magistrate Pang's heart dropped. He turned toward her and saw her half smiling as she turned to look at him. Their eyes met, and Magistrate Pang felt that his thoughts were laid bare before her. Feeling guilty, he lowered his head.
"The villagers knocked for a long time and got no response, and then everyone began to talk," Wu Dajing continued.
By then the people of Goutou Village no longer cared about the feud between Wu Lifu and Wu Jiu and were all discussing whether something had happened at Wu Liren's house. Counting servants, the whole household numbered several dozen, and they were still not up at midday. With such a commotion outside, even the soundest sleepers would have been woken. After debating for a long time, they wondered whether the village chief's family had been robbed the night before.
"I've heard that nowadays child-snatchers and 'flower-patters3' have a kind of knock-out drug they put in water, and once people drink it they lose consciousness without knowing it and are at their mercy," said Wu Dajing.
"Wu Liren's house happens to have a well. Maybe somebody put drugs in it, and the whole family is sleeping like the dead."
"That's only speculation," Zhao Fusheng said mildly.
Wu Dajing flattered her quickly: "You're right, my lord."
Then, a little proudly, "At that moment someone suggested that I come up with a way to handle it."
He was quite pleased to mention this. Wu Dajing was not young, and in his day had been a brother to the village chief's father Wu Datong, so he held a respected position in Goutou Village and was seen as an elder of some standing. With Wu Liren's household in trouble, the villagers naturally pushed him forward to take charge.
"What did you come up with?" Zhao Fusheng followed along with his story.
"I thought—" He hurried to answer, but his slightly murky eyes darted, as if afraid the bigwigs would blame him.
And with a trace of cunning he said, "I was afraid something had happened to Wu Liren's household, and they'd only recently held a funeral. If anything else happened, what would they do? So I suggested that a few strong men in the village force the gate open and take a look at what was wrong."
The old man was not stupid and knew how to protect himself when talking. Zhao Fusheng didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
"What did you find in the end?"
"Wu Liren's house was empty!"
At this, the smile on Wu Dajing's face gradually faded and fear returned to his eyes. Recalling the scene, he felt his scalp go numb, and before Zhao Fusheng could ask again, he hurried to repeat: "The Wu family had vanished from the house, there was nobody at all!"
"..." Magistrate Pang and the others were dumbfounded and speechless. The old man had rambled all over the place and finally hit the main point.
"Nobody?"
Zhao Fusheng frowned. She wasn't trained in criminal investigation and didn't know the routine process of cases, but there was one thing she did know.
"Did you check whether the other doors and windows showed signs of being opened or closed?"
Wu Liren's family was large, so the Wu compound shouldn't be small, and there would probably be more than one door. At first this case had sounded eerie, but since no ghost had yet shown up, human involvement could not be ruled out, and Zhao Fusheng had to rule out the other possibilities one by one.
"This—this we didn't pay attention to—"
At Zhao Fusheng's question, Wu Dajing also felt guilty and instinctively looked at Magistrate Pang and the elder seated beside him.
"We are only country villagers, and we don't understand these things—"
Magistrate Pang knew he had come in haste, and hearing this, was both afraid and anxious, and hurried to say: "I'll first send runners immediately to Goutou Village in Wu'an Town to investigate the case, and report to Lord Zhao afterward."
"No hurry." Zhao Fusheng shook her head.
Facing a ghost case, she displayed extraordinary patience and tolerance. By her intuition, Zhao Fusheng had already judged that this case in Goutou Village was no ordinary one. Wu Liren's household was strange throughout, and though no malignant ghost had appeared, in all likelihood it was tied to ghosts. From that angle, Magistrate Pang had not sent the wrong case.
"Wu Datong, Wu Liren, seven or eight wives and concubines, over twenty sons—" She first listed the people she knew to be involved in this case, setting aside for now people like Wu Lifu and Wu Jiu, who had no relevance to the ghost case.
"It seems like I'm overlooking something—" As she said this, she vaguely felt she'd missed something.
Zhao Fusheng had a good memory. She liked to rough out a draft in her mind before doing anything, so she'd be prepared and act methodically, reducing the chance of errors. Especially since her rebirth, when she handled ghost cases tied to her own life, she was even more careful, and by rights she should not have missed anything. Perhaps because she'd been affected by the ghost possessing her and because she had come back in a borrowed body, her physique was far better than before, and her memory was a bit better than before as well. How could she not remember something now?
She sensed something was off, and instead of dwelling on what she'd forgotten, she thought of something else: when Wu Dajing had spoken earlier, there had been moments when he looked confused, as if he'd lost some memory. Coming at it sideways like this, her disrupted memory seemed to revive all at once. She remembered that when she asked about Wu Datong's children, Wu Dajing had hesitated and seemed not to remember.
The broken memory suddenly flowed unobstructed, and she realized in a flash what she'd missed: Wu Datong's son!
"Wu Datong has two sons—" Zhao Fusheng said with a smile.
"Besides Wu Liren, he has a youngest son."
As she said it, the back of her ear seemed to itch, and she couldn't help reaching up to scratch twice. She found a scab the size of a fingernail that had formed there at some point and picked at it until it came off. The wound had probably healed only recently, and when the scab came off it stung a little. She touched her ear and found she had somehow been injured. Thinking back, the only time she'd been in a fight was grappling with the Beggar Ghost in Beggars' Alley, so she might have been hurt then. Luckily the wound behind her ear was small, and with the scab off there was no bleeding, and she didn't take it to heart.
She should have flicked the skin flake to the floor, but for some reason she found herself, as if possessed, unfolding the scab. After all, it was evidence from her first fight with a ghost. How could she toss it casually? Thinking this, she tucked the scab into the case scroll to serve as a "bookmark."
Having done this, she looked up at the others and saw blank faces as if they didn't understand: "My lord, what son?"
From their reactions, Zhao Fusheng was now certain this case was uncanny. Wu Dajing's forgetfulness was no accident but the work of some strange force. He had grown up with Wu Datong and knew him intimately, yet when Wu Datong's descendants were mentioned, he seemed unable to recall. And not just Wu Dajing: even the others at the bureau, who had just heard her question, now showed bewilderment as she mentioned Wu Datong's other child. These people might not fully submit to her, but they certainly feared and respected her and would never dare play dumb on ghost matters. The only possibility was that they were influenced by some terrifying power and had lost their memory of Wu Datong's other son.
In other words, the center of this strange affair was that "youngest son" of Wu Datong.
Through her talk with Wu Dajing, Zhao Fusheng quickly locked onto the core of the problem. The others were still puzzled.
Zhao Fusheng looked at Wu Dajing, who, with his own memory lost, thought for a long time before suddenly understanding: "Oh—yes, yes, yes, Wu Datong did have another son."
He seemed a little embarrassed, tugged at his trousers, and unobtrusively gripped the outer layer of his trousers and rubbed hard at it a couple of times.
"There was a son."
Zhao Fusheng did not rush to press for clues on this youngest son.
Instead she changed the subject to another matter, "With so many people, they couldn't have vanished silently overnight, unless they left on their own. Since you didn't notice whether the doors and windows were open, did you hear any commotion the night before?"
"No."
Wu Dajing shook his head with certainty, "The village isn't big. My house isn't far from Wu Liren's. Normally when the wives in his house argue, I can hear them through the wall on my side."
Then he pursed his lips and shook his head, "That night, I heard no sound at all."
"And in the daytime? Did anyone see Wu Liren's family leave?" Zhao Fusheng asked.
"N-no, no one."
On this he was not as certain as before, but then he added, "But my lord, it's the autumn harvest, everyone's busy and nobody's idly wandering. There were people in the fields and the plots. Wu Liren's family is large, so if they'd really gone out, how could nobody have seen?"
But many days had passed, and the villagers had circulated all sorts of rumors, yet nobody had mentioned seeing Wu Liren's family leave.
