IBGSW Chapter 61
Past Causes and Effects
Earlier, at the Demon-Suppression Bureau, the village elder had said Wu Datong had a younger son besides Wu Liren. Now he was saying that before Wu Liren was born, Wu Datong had an elder son. The two accounts contradicted each other, but rather than blame Wu Dajing’s old age and muddled mind, Zhao Fusheng thought it more likely the malignant ghost was interfering.
The same memory disturbance, plus the flash of ghostly aura when he mentioned Wu Datong’s firstborn, was enough for her to be sure. The ghost nobody was allowed to speak of had to be Wu Datong’s “eldest son.”
“This was Wu Datong’s eldest son, named... named...”
Wu Dajing’s hand was still frozen mid-flick, brushing off flakes of skin, but the moment he spoke of the eldest son, he could not for the life of him recall the name.
“What was he called? I can’t remember.” As he spoke, his eyes began to turn red, his lips cracked and dried, and his expression took on a wild, unhinged look. Something was clearly wrong with him.
Zhao Fusheng sensed the ghostly aura thickening. The red veins in Wu Dajing’s eyes grew thicker, and two streams of blood crept slowly from his nostrils.
This is bad!
Her pupils contracted. She flicked her sleeve, and the Beggar Ghost’s arm, the one she had tucked inside, slid out into her palm.
Gripping the withered ghost arm, she rapped Wu Dajing hard on the head and barked, “If you can’t remember, then forget it!”
A crisp thunk rang out.
Only a ghost’s power can deal with a ghost. After that blow, the resonance rippled outward, and the cold, venomous aura vanished in an instant.
The wild, twisted look left Wu Dajing’s face and the blood vessels in his eyes faded. He looked dazed. Heart pounding like a drum, Zhao Fusheng raised her right arm and loosened her grip, and the ghost arm slipped back up her sleeve with a swish.
The human-skin paper the ghost hand had been clutching turned silently to ash. Zhao Fusheng’s heart bled, and she heard the Investiture of the Gods announce that another point of merit had been deducted.
Still, the blow had clearly done its job, and the invisible ghost was pushed back once more.
“Lord Zhao—” Wu Dajing still had no idea what had just happened. The moment he opened his mouth, two streams of blood ran over his upper lip and into it.
“Pah! Ptoo! What’s going on? My nose is bleeding!”
The village elder cried out, then quickly wiped the blood away with his palm, sighing. “Must be the journey these past few days. My ailment’s gotten worse.”
“...” Zhao Fusheng hadn’t yet decided how to comfort him, but he had already found a reason to reassure himself.
He seemed completely unaware that a ghost had latched onto him and that he might be dead at any moment.
“You...” Zhao Fusheng hesitated and was about to speak, but Wu Dajing said calmly, “Don’t worry about me, my lord. It’s an old complaint.”
He gave a couple of chuckles, wiped the blood from his palm on the wall of the carriage, then spat several mouthfuls of bloody saliva onto the ground. Zhang Chuanshi, driving the carriage, kept turning his head, and at the sight he cursed nonstop.
“You damned country bumpkin, spitting all over the place. Disgusting.”
“...” Wu Dajing, embarrassed by the scolding, hurriedly stuck out a foot to scuff away the bloody spit.
Zhao Fusheng sensed the seriousness of the matter and quickly cut Zhang Chuanshi off. “Shut up.”
Zhang Chuanshi turned and glared fiercely at Wu Dajing, but did not dare talk back to Zhao Fusheng.
“What is this symptom of yours?” She ignored the sputtering Old Zhang and asked Wu Dajing, “How long ago did it start?”
“You wouldn’t know, my lord.” Wu Dajing sighed at the mention of it. “This trouble runs in my family. My mother used to get nosebleeds all the time, too.”
“Have you ever seen a doctor?” Zhao Fusheng’s heart stirred as she asked.
A terrible thought had surfaced in her mind. She watched the oblivious Wu Dajing and asked in an even voice.
“A bit of a nosebleed, what’s so strange about that?” Wu Dajing was surprised by the question. “In the countryside, getting hurt and bleeding a little is an everyday thing. Who needs a doctor for that?”
Zhao Fusheng saw a bead of blood clinging to his whiskers and pointed. He lowered his eyes, followed her gaze to the blood on the tips of his beard, and hurriedly wiped it off.
“Your mother didn’t have this nosebleed trouble in her earlier years, did she?” Zhao Fusheng asked, without seeming to.
With blood from his beard now on his palm, Wu Dajing instinctively moved to wipe it on the carriage wall, but from the corner of his eye he glanced toward the front. Zhang Chuanshi was driving dutifully. But the old man was a fierce one; he had scolded him several times already and plainly found him revolting.
He timidly pulled his hand back, agonized for a long while, then, with a look of heartbreak, wiped the blood on the side of his cloth shoe. Only then did he answer.
“Earlier years? No, no.” He shook his head repeatedly. “My mother was always hale and hearty. She never had this problem.”
“Then when did the nosebleeds appear?” Zhao Fusheng asked again.
Wu Dajing thought, and a blank look crossed his face. “When... my old mother’s been dead several decades now...”
But soon he seemed to recall something, and his eyes lit up. “Though I vaguely remember that my third son was just eight that year.”
At that, Zhao Fusheng thought of something. “The year Wu Datong’s eldest son was born?”
The moment she finished speaking, her arm began to itch, a bone-deep itch. She couldn’t help rubbing it hard through her clothes, rubbing until the arm burned and ached, and only then did the itch subside.
At the mention of Wu Datong’s “eldest son,” Wu Dajing’s face went blank again for a moment.
Zhao Fusheng simply said, “You said earlier that when your third son was seven, Wu Datong hadn’t taken a wife, and then one day he suddenly announced, delighted, that he’d found one.”
She had an excellent memory. And since this involved a ghost case, no detail could be overlooked, so she had firmly committed almost everything Wu Dajing said to memory and kept replaying it in her head, afraid of missing a key clue.
“Ah! Yes, yes, yes!” At her reminder, Wu Dajing suddenly nodded. “What a memory you have, my lord.”
“A year later, Wu Datong’s son was born, and your mother went to help with the birth, didn’t she?” By now Zhao Fusheng was fairly sure of herself.
“Yes, yes, yes.” Wu Dajing nodded quickly.
“And your mother died not long after Wu Datong’s son was born, didn’t she?” As soon as she finished, Wu Dajing nodded hard. “Half a year!” he said, and slapped his palms together. “How could I forget the day my mother died? I’m old, I’m old!”
He sighed a couple of times. “I remember now. My mother died on the seventeenth of the ninth month. Wu Datong’s son was born on the thirty-first of the seventh month.” The ghost arm’s blow had temporarily suppressed the invisible ghost’s influence, and it seemed to have opened the floodgates of his memory. “That day, when my mother came back from helping, she was full of pity, and she said...”
He stopped there, looking wary, as if there were things he didn’t want to say. But Zhao Fusheng simply stared at him without a word, her gaze carrying a sense of pressure, and he said sheepishly, “I shouldn’t be telling these things, but now that Wu Liren’s whole family has disappeared and nobody knows if they’re alive or dead...”
Then he changed tack. “But my lord, could you keep this secret for me? I’m old, whether I live or die hardly matters, but my family has several generations, a dozen or more mouths. If Wu Liren found out I’d been spreading his family’s business, he wouldn’t let us off.”
Heaven is high and the emperor is far away¹. To people in a remote mountain village, the village chief was little different from the local tyrant, with the power to decide a family’s fate.
Zhao Fusheng had a feeling that what he was about to say was important. “This concerns a ghost case, so I can’t promise to keep everything secret. But I can promise that Wu Liren will not be able to cause trouble for you or your descendants.”
This case involved a malignant ghost, and Wu Liren’s family had probably been dead for some time, their bodies simply not yet found. And even if he weren’t dead, with Zhao Fusheng’s present status, preventing him from taking revenge on Wu Dajing’s family would be effortless.
“With those words from you, I’m at ease.” Hearing this, Wu Dajing looked as though a stone had been lifted from his heart. He went on, “After my mother came back, she said strange things had happened the day that child was born.”
As he recalled it, fear surfaced on his face. “Before that, none of us had ever seen Wu Datong’s wife. We only knew there was such a person. Until that time...”
“When my mother got to his house, he’d hidden the woman away tightly. The door was locked, and the windows were nailed over with boards. The woman still had a breath left in her then. When my mother arrived, she grabbed my old mother’s hand and kept crying, ‘Mother, save me.’”
The lamplight had been dim, and Wu Dajing’s old mother couldn’t see the woman’s face clearly, but from her voice she could tell the woman was quite young.
Wu Dajing held up a hand and made the number two. “My mother guessed the girl wasn’t even twenty.”
Wu Datong, mind you, was not young then. He was the village’s well-known old bachelor, poor and old and notorious for miles around. Who would marry a young daughter off to a man like that?
“And though the girl was thin, her hands were soft, with no calluses. My mother guessed right then that Wu Datong had abducted some young lady from who knows where...”
He sighed. “That’s what she thought, but she had no time to ask, because the girl was in critical condition. The baby hadn’t come out yet, and she breathed her last.”
If the mother was already dead, how was the child born?
Zhao Fusheng’s eyes flickered. Wu Dajing lowered his voice. “Wu Datong panicked and took a knife and slit his wife’s belly open.”
The answer was what Zhao Fusheng had expected, but she frowned anyway.
Wu Dajing’s mother had been badly frightened by Wu Datong’s act. When she came to her senses, Wu Datong was holding the baby and calling her to lend a hand.
With something like this happening, the room must have had an oil lamp lit, and only then did Wu Dajing’s old mother see the surroundings clearly.
“The whole room was covered in blood!” said Wu Dajing. “And there was something wrong with the child, too. Its whole body was ice-cold, not like a living baby at all...”
Wu Dajing’s mother had experience tending newborns. His wife had already borne three children, and each time his mother had assisted the village midwife.
But no matter how she rubbed and massaged, this newborn neither cried nor fussed.
“The strange thing was that the baby had its eyes open, and it looked alive.” Wu Dajing seemed to recall everything about that year now, even some details quite clearly. “My mother wondered whether, because the mother died in a hard labor, the child had been stifled in the womb for so long that it missed the hour to be reborn, and so lost its soul.”
He said this in clear, fluent speech, no longer jumbled and out of order as before. Even Zhang Chuanshi in front found it odd and turned to glance at him.
“After that, Wu Datong kept cursing his bad luck and drove my mother out of the house.”
Wu Dajing’s old mother had been badly shaken, and dared not linger. She hurried home.
Afterward she sighed and said she had been afraid at the time that Wu Datong would kill her.
She had watched him grow up, and as his elder she had known him all his life, but as Wu Datong grew older his temperament had grown ever stranger. He had gotten hold of some young wife from somewhere, kept her out of sight, hadn’t dared let anyone see her through pregnancy and labor, and when she died in childbirth he had dared to cut open her belly to take out the child.
“My mother guessed the girl was of no ordinary background,” he said. “After that, we heard nothing more about Wu Datong’s child. But before long, my mother started getting nosebleeds, then took to her bed and never got up again.”
Not long after, she was gone.
“After she passed, some people came to the village asking whether anyone had seen a young woman, saying a rich family’s youngest daughter had gone missing in the county...”
Wu Dajing glanced at Zhao Fusheng as he said this. “I thought of my old mother’s last words, and I guessed it must be her!”
“And did you report it?” Zhao Fusheng asked.
Wu Dajing’s eyes slid away at once, and he stammered, “I, I wouldn’t dare—”
His hands waved nonstop and his head shook like a rattle drum. “They were richly dressed and very anxious, and they looked rather fierce. It was only a guess. How could I dare stir up trouble? Besides, it was Wu Datong’s family’s business and nothing to do with me. Why would I meddle?”
Zhao Fusheng gave a couple of cold laughs.
Seeing her laugh, Wu Dajing felt guilty, his lips moving as if to defend himself, but Zhao Fusheng did not press the point. “And then?”
“Then it came to nothing. How would they find anyone?” Seeing her return to the original subject, he felt relieved. “Even though I guessed it was the same person, it was only a guess, and there was nothing certain about it. Even if she was the same girl, after so long the body would be buried in the earth. How could anyone find her?”
Besides, the outsiders had had no evidence at the time. They had only gone village to village asking questions, and when the routine inquiries turned up nothing, they soon left.
Wu Datong had kept the secret well beforehand and gave nothing away in that crisis, so he escaped for the moment.
"A little while after that, Wu Datong came to borrow money from me.” Perhaps feeling guilty over Zhao Fusheng’s earlier questioning, Wu Dajing hastily steered the subject back to Wu Datong. “He said his old mother was coughing up blood without stopping and probably wouldn’t last long. He wanted to borrow some money to bury her once she passed, then take the child out into the world to earn a living and leave Goutou Village²."
It seemed the people who had come looking for the daughter had spooked Wu Datong, and he wanted to flee his home village.
Zhao Fusheng mused. “Coughing up blood without stopping?”
“I don’t know,” Wu Dajing said. “The villagers didn’t associate with him. After he got himself a wife, he wouldn’t even let us visit his house. Anyway, not long after, his mother was gone.”
He went on, “I lent him some copper coins and helped arrange his mother’s funeral. As soon as she was buried, he left Goutou Village.”
Zhao Fusheng asked, “Where in Wan’an County did he go, and what work did he do? Do you know?”
“I heard he went into the city and found a master there. Later he had someone bring money back to me and mentioned that the master seemed to be... seemed to be surnamed...” At the critical moment, his memory seemed to go muddled again.
Whether the ghost arm’s power was too weak to suppress the invisible ghost, or he really was old and the events were decades past and he couldn’t recall clearly, it was hard to say.
But this past concerned a ghost case: Wu Datong’s old deeds were the cause, and Wu Liren’s family’s disappearance the effect. If the thread broke now, it would be of little help to Zhao Fusheng’s trip.
Her heart tightened, and she was about to speak when Wu Dajing, after long, painful thought, seemed to finally remember and said joyfully, “I remember now! They said his master was surnamed Zhang, and ran a Paper Effigy Shop in the city!”
