IBGSW Chapter 6
Raising the Past
Having made up their minds, the brothers came out from behind the wing chamber. Before they could get close to Zhao Fusheng, they heard her ask softly:
"My parents didn't die in an accident like you said, did they? They died at a malignant ghost's hands too, didn't they?"
Her sudden words caught the Fan brothers completely off guard.
Fan Bisi had meant to seize the initiative first, to give Zhao Fusheng a show of strength and frighten her with words. Instead he was the one frightened.
Fan Wujiu's face showed wariness. The brothers looked at each other, and a measure of panic showed in both their eyes.
"..."
"..."
Fan Bisi, always the quicker of mind, found his head empty. It was a good while before he recovered and forced himself to stay calm.
"That's right—"
Zhao Fusheng's parents were already dead. Their bodies lay in the mourning hall, and they had died in a ghost calamity. The proof was beyond dispute, and denying it was pointless.
"So yesterday I really was killed by a malignant ghost?" Zhao Fusheng asked again.
"...Yes," Fan Wujiu forced out. Before he could say more, Zhao Fusheng went on:
"Let me do the talking. You tell me whether I've got it right."
She had her back to them, still wearing yesterday's clothes. When the malignant ghost killed her, it had torn through her heart and lungs, and the blood had soaked her whole garment. Now the dried bloodstains had gone black and stiff, which made her silhouette look chilling in the extreme.
On top of that, she might be controlling a malignant ghost, which must now be hiding inside her body.
The more the brothers thought about it, the more wary they became, and they instinctively backed away half a step.
"Go on," said Fan Bisi, who was far bolder. Things had come to this, and he only wanted to cut through the knot quickly. He didn't want to keep avoiding it, so he forced himself to gather his nerve and nodded.
"Normally a Demon-Suppression Bureau has a chief commanding officer and order envoys to keep a region at peace. After the Wan'an County bureau's commanding officer died, there was no way the post should have fallen to a country girl."
Zhao Fusheng had been turning these words over in her mind for a long time.
This world had ghosts!
She was new here. Apart from part of the original host's memories and what she'd seen in last night's dream, she knew little about the people and affairs of this time and place. She was deeply wary of the Fan brothers, but she could also see that they were on their guard against her, the girl who had come back from the dead.
She didn't know why, but Zhao Fusheng decided to bluff these two and see whether she could draw out any useful information.
"I suspect the story you told me, about being guided to me by the previous commanding officer, was a lie. You deceived me and my parents."
She suppressed her inner unease and deliberately showed a calm, composed manner.
"Has the bureau suffered some great disaster? A calamity like a curse, one that drags in everyone in the bureau?"
This was not baseless speculation.
By the original Zhao Fusheng's memories, apart from the Fan brothers and, later, 'her,' the bureau had no other survivors.
And the bureau, by rights, existed to keep a region safe. If ghosts killed indiscriminately and made everyone anxious, the safest place under heaven should have been near the bureau. Yet nearly everyone on the streets around it had moved away.
The few remaining shops were coffin shops and joss paper and incense shops, and their owners treated Zhao Fusheng as though she were a raging flood or a savage beast. Whenever she approached, many hurried away as though fleeing a plague.
The original Zhao Fusheng, muddled as she was, had assumed it was because she was a country girl, unfit for her position and disliked. The Zhao Fusheng of now suspected that people might not fear Zhao Fusheng herself, but the deadly curse she carried.
She thought of the original Zhao Fusheng being killed by the malignant ghost in the nightmare, and felt uneasy. But it also confirmed that the 'curse' on the original Zhao Fusheng was probably the very malignant ghost that had entangled her.
Still, she had deliberately guessed wrong, to give the Fan brothers a false impression.
The Fan brothers were indeed thrown off by her sudden counterattack, but Fan Bisi still tried to take control and objected, "It isn't a curse..."
He had barely begun when Zhao Fusheng nodded.
"Right, it isn't a curse. It must be a ghost calamity."
"..."
At this the brothers looked at each other and exchanged a helpless look of horror.
Neither had expected that the once quail-timid, ignorant Zhao Fusheng would seem so much smarter after coming back to life.
Her every reaction made even Fan Bisi feel the matter was thorny, and he even felt that she had gained the upper hand over him.
Could it be that ghost control brought not just stronger power but better wits as well?
The brothers were in turmoil. Fan Wujiu looked at his elder brother and called out, "Brother—"
Fan Bisi steadied himself and told himself not to lose his footing. At last he drew a deep breath, calmed his unease, and said, "That's right."
He had a faint foreboding that the two of them had chosen the wrong target and were dropping a rock on their own feet.
Zhao Fusheng's performance was not just clever. It was clever enough to unsettle him.
"What do you want to know?" He was decisive, though. Having decided not to clash head-on with Zhao Fusheng for now, he looked for another path and tried to see whether he could make peace with her.
"What can you tell me?"
In the verbal duel, Zhao Fusheng held a slight upper hand.
She had noticed the Fan brothers' forbearance toward her. It certainly couldn't all stem from her coming back to life. Very likely there was something else about her that made the brothers wary.
She didn't know what that reason was, and the unknown made her uneasy, but she forced the unease down and instead put on a show of composure and answered Fan Bisi with a question of her own.
Fan Bisi was silent for a moment, then suddenly said, "Fine. I'll tell you from the beginning."
He wiped his face and kicked his brother.
"Wujiu, go fetch the bureau's roster of past personnel, and bring a chair too, so the commanding officer can sit."
His words tacitly acknowledged Zhao Fusheng's status as commanding officer. She found it odder still, but did not stop him.
Fan Wujiu hesitated, glancing at his brother and then at Zhao Fusheng, before he did go into the house to fetch things.
"Three years ago, our Wan'an County bureau actually had one commanding officer, two deputy generals, and eight order envoys."
After the mutual probing, both sides had a rough idea where they stood. Fan Bisi saw that some things couldn't be hidden from Zhao Fusheng, so he simply told the whole story from the beginning.
"In other words, three years ago the Wan'an County bureau had eleven people."
That number was still small, but considering that the people who dealt with ghosts were a special few, a county with eleven ghost-controllers matched Zhao Fusheng's own estimate.
"More than that."
Maybe it was because the Fan brothers had been suppressed in speech and bearing ever since she came back to life, but Fan Bisi felt aggrieved, and as he spoke he kept wanting to catch her in a mistake, to win one back.
"Counting the twenty-three menial workers, there were thirty-four of us in all."
At that time the Wan'an County bureau had been the strongest in the neighboring counties.
"Oh," Zhao Fusheng answered mildly.
"..." Fan Bisi felt as if he'd punched cotton. Anger rose in him and he was about to flare up, but saw that Zhao Fusheng hadn't even turned to look at him.
Her gaze remained fixed on the hall. His anger stalled, as though a bucket of cold water had been dumped over his head, and his mind cleared a good deal.
Since coming back to life, Zhao Fusheng had changed completely.
In the verbal sparring she was unusually calm, while he was as short-tempered as Wujiu, led around by the nose in the conversation.
Arguing over how many people the bureau had held would, in the past, have seemed to him a pointless contest of pride, beneath his notice. Yet just now he hadn't been able to control his temper.
Realizing this, Fan Bisi frowned.
He quickly regained his composure and stopped rambling.
"The bureau really had only eleven people who could suppress ghosts."
This man had a steady temper. Provoked with words, he'd calmed down this quickly. Zhao Fusheng grew even more wary of him. Fan Bisi went on.
"Our commanding officer back then was surnamed Zhao, named Qiming, a man who commanded a ghost entity."
His tone was complicated when he mentioned Zhao Qiming, but the emotion lasted only a moment before he mastered it again.
Zhao Fusheng caught the oddity sharply and guessed: it seemed this Zhao Qiming had quite a history with the Fan brothers.
She didn't rush to probe that now, and asked about something else that concerned her more, "Commanding a ghost entity? What does that mean?"
However remarkable she had been since coming back to life, before that she was only a country girl with limited horizons. About this world, the original Zhao Fusheng had known only that ghosts existed and killed. Where ghosts came from and how to deal with them, she had no idea.
Seeing her ask, Fan Bisi was strangely relieved.
Perhaps her earlier first strike, deducing so much from so little information, had made him feel threatened. And on top of that, she might be possessed by a malignant ghost, which had thrown even him off balance.
"Ghosts can't be killed outright," he said calmly.
"Didn't you know?"
"I didn't." Zhao Fusheng's heart gave a heavy jump at the news, but she truly knew nothing about ghosts and couldn't fake it on a matter like this, so she honestly shook her head.
That reaction was normal enough. Fan Bisi thought for a moment, composing his words.
"Many people really don't know. The court has kept it hidden all along, for fear of provoking riots among the people."
Those who did know were the bureau's people, and the bureau's people were bound by the Soul-Life Register, so naturally they dared not defy the court's decree and blab about it.
He went on, his face serious.
"Ghosts can't be killed outright. We currently have only two ways of handling them once we meet one." He paused. "One is to drive it away, to make it leave the bounds of Wan'an County."
"What?" Zhao Fusheng was truly shocked to hear this method.
"Drive it away?"
"Right." Fan Bisi nodded.
"If you only drive it away, won't it still kill people wherever it goes?" Zhao Fusheng asked in bewilderment.
The original Zhao Fusheng's whole family's deaths showed how terrifying malignant ghosts were. If a ghost entity like that couldn't be subdued and could only be driven off, wasn't that treating the symptom but not the cause?
"Yes. And the more people it kills, the more resentment energy it absorbs, and it may even advance in rank and grow into a wide-scale ghost calamity."
Fan Bisi knew she didn't understand the situation, so he explained it all.
"Once a ghost domain covers a larger area, it becomes harder to deal with."
"What happens then?"
Zhao Fusheng listened with growing disbelief.
"Nothing can be done," Fan Wujiu said.
"If you drive it into another county, what about that county's people?" she asked again.
"As long as it isn't on our Wan'an County ground, the ghost calamity isn't our business. Wherever the ghost drifts, that's that county's headache. If the calamity grows too large, it becomes the court's headache." Fan Bisi's expression was a little cold as he said it.
"What if the calamity grows too large and even the court can't resolve it?" Zhao Fusheng had thought herself long since hardened and made indifferent by society's rules, but hearing Fan Bisi say this still shocked her.
"If even the court can't resolve it, they simply give up that region and let it fend for itself."
"..." His words left Zhao Fusheng stunned. She was silent for a moment, unable to think how to respond.
"Go on." She sighed silently, frowned, and pushed down the discomfort in her chest.
