IBGSW Chapter 62
The Timeline Matches
Wu Dajing had spoken without thinking, but the listener took it to heart.
Zhang Chuanshi, who was driving the carriage, jolted and turned his head, straight into Zhao Fusheng’s sharp gaze.
“You’re talking nonsense...”
The words burst out of him, the two thin wisps of mustache on his upper lip quivering.
“Getting flustered?”
Zhao Fusheng asked with a half smile.
“I’m not.” At her words, Zhang Chuanshi nearly leapt up as though stabbed by a needle under his backside.
The reaction was nothing short of “Here lies no silver, three hundred taels1.” He felt guilty himself the moment he’d shouted it, and fell silent.
“Go on,” Zhao Fusheng said to Wu Dajing, not pressing Zhang Chuanshi further.
This ghost case seemed to implicate the Zhang family of Wan’an County, and her mind began racing, searching for the connection.
“Yes.” Wu Dajing, scolded for no reason by Zhang Chuanshi, was terrified, unsure what he’d done wrong this time. But the Demon-Suppression Bureau’s “Lord Zhao” was reasonable and always took his side, which eased his nerves a little.
“Several years later, Wu Datong came back, with a son in tow. That was Wu Liren.” Then he hastily added, “He said he’d married a wife outside and she left him the child.”
Wu Datong’s return had been like coming home in silks. It caused a great stir in the village.
He had made a fortune outside. As soon as he got home he threw a flowing banquet2, then built a new house, and people from ten miles around came to watch the spectacle.
“After that, you know the rest. Wu Datong devoted himself to finding concubines for Wu Liren and getting sons, and then Wu Liren was chosen as village chief, up until this strange business.”
Zhao Fusheng now had a rough grasp of the whole chain of events.
But she still had some doubts, so she told Wu Dajing, “From here, I ask and you answer.”
Wu Dajing nodded and answered quickly. “Yes, yes!”
“You said Wu Datong left the village for the city after he held his mother’s funeral.” As soon as Zhao Fusheng finished, Wu Dajing said, “Yes.”
“And his mother died shortly after his first son was born. The woman who bore his eldest was of unknown origin and quite likely a missing daughter of a wealthy family. He may have abducted someone’s daughter and killed her, then didn’t dare make a sound, so he buried the body and quietly left the village.”
Wu Dajing felt a little guilty hearing this, but Wu Datong was dead now and Wu Liren’s family had vanished without a trace. His courage grew a little. “...Yes,” he agreed again.
“Before that, his father died young, and he and his widowed mother depended on each other.” Wu Dajing had already said all this, and couldn’t see why Zhao Fusheng was asking again.
But Zhao Fusheng was the chief commanding officer of the Demon-Suppression Bureau, and however puzzled he was, he had to obey.
Just as he was about to answer, Zhao Fusheng asked, “Once his mother died and the abducted woman had died too, that means he was living with the newborn alone.”
“...” Wu Dajing froze, and after a long moment said, “A child?”
Zhang Chuanshi, driving, asked too. “What child?”
While they spoke, the carriage had left the city without their noticing.
The road outside the city had been neglected for years, the surface rough and uneven, and the jolting was fierce.
Dense foliage lined the road on both sides. At some point the thick branches had blotted out the sun, and shadow lay across the whole road, making the speakers shiver for no reason.
Zhao Fusheng again sensed the malignant ghost’s aura, faint and half-vanishing, as though there were a layer of gauze between them, so she could never sense where exactly it was.
“Wu Datong’s eldest son is the child born of the abducted woman, the one your mother delivered.”
She simply said the rest in one breath.
Wu Dajing’s face cleared in sudden understanding. “Yes—”
“Besides your family, he had no close ties in Goutou Village. If he was going into the city, he couldn’t have left the child with anyone, could he?”
Zhao Fusheng looked at Wu Dajing. “He took the child with him when he left the village?”
“Yes, he left in secret with the child. Before leaving he borrowed some food from me, too...”
Wu Dajing nodded instinctively, then lifted his head in confusion. “...My lord, what did you just ask?”
Zhao Fusheng had already gotten the answer she wanted.
Behind her ear the itching began again, right at the spot that had scabbed over from an earlier injury. She rubbed it a couple of times and again rubbed off a large piece of dead skin.
This made Zhao Fusheng wary.
When something is out of the ordinary, there is a demon behind it. Once could be a scab. But scratching a second time and tearing off another piece of skin?
She remembered, back at the bureau, Wu Dajing had rudely scratched his backside. When he scratched, Magistrate Pang and the others had assumed it was just the village elder’s bad manners, but looking back, it was clearly wrong. Wu Dajing had apparently been scratching at the very moment he first mentioned Wu Datong’s eldest son.
Then in the carriage Wu Dajing had scratched several more times. When the birth of this eldest son was mentioned earlier, he had even peeled a large flake of skin off his head.
“This is bad,” Zhao Fusheng sighed. Without realizing it, she had been attacked by the ghost again.
And the first time, she hadn’t noticed or guarded against it at all.
“What’s bad, my lord?” Hearing her sigh, Zhang Chuanshi turned his head and saw Zhao Fusheng holding a thing about an inch long in one hand.
It was thin as a cicada’s wing, rather like a snake’s shed skin.
“What is that, Lord Zhao?” he asked.
“Dead skin,” Zhao Fusheng answered mildly.
When she finished, she took a rolled-up scroll from her sleeve, unrolled it, and tucked the piece of skin inside.
“...” Zhang Chuanshi stared, speechless.
Just after tucking the skin in, Zhao Fusheng suddenly thought of something. Her pupils contracted, and she unrolled the closed scroll again.
Inside were two pieces of shed skin of different sizes. She thought for a moment, peeled off the piece she had just put in, tried a few orientations, and finally, seemingly certain, pressed it against the earlier fingernail-sized scab.
The two fragments joined together, the seam closing without a gap.
Zhao Fusheng’s gaze shifted, and without a word she rolled the scroll shut again.
Zhang Chuanshi’s face went pale, then green, and he kept sneaking looks at her from the corner of his eye, looking strange.
“I may have run into a ghost,” said Zhao Fusheng.
Her words startled both Wu Dajing and Zhang Chuanshi. But while Wu Dajing was still shaking all over, Zhang Chuanshi suddenly remembered that Zhao Fusheng was a ghost-controller herself, and thought she might be making a joke. He gave a couple of obliging laughs. “Hahaha, you do like to joke, my lord.”
Zhao Fusheng ignored him and looked at the trembling Wu Dajing. “You said that after Wu Datong went into the county he found work, then later sent the money he owed you back through someone, correct?”
She had already confirmed that Wu Datong’s “son” was taboo, and that each mention might make a body itch and, after the scratching, shed layers of dead skin, so she deliberately steered clear of it and avoided mentioning him.
Once the “son” was no longer mentioned, Wu Dajing’s memory improved considerably.
He nodded. Zhao Fusheng asked, “How much do you know about his master?”
Wu Dajing thought it over carefully. “I don’t know much. I only remember the man who brought the money back saying Datong was now doing very well, helping Master Five3 make paper effigies. He said Datong had handled a big matter for Master Five earlier, rendered great service, and Master Five rewarded him with a large sum.”
He added, “Beyond that, I heard Master Five was surnamed Zhang, a big man in Wan’an County’s city, an honored guest at the gentlemen’s banquet tables. Other than that, I don’t know anything.”
When he finished, he said with a pained face, “My lord, I really don’t know anything more.”
Zhao Fusheng nodded. “I think I already know who this Master Five is.”
Surnamed Zhang, a paper effigy shop, a prominent man in Wan’an County, an honored guest at the gentlemen’s banquet tables: it was practically one step short of naming Zhang Xiongwu outright.
“Old Zhang, that uncle of yours, did he ever hire a hand named Wu Datong back then?” She turned to ask Zhang Chuanshi.
Zhang Chuanshi inwardly groaned.
He had never imagined that a remote little village whose name he’d never heard, with a ghost case of its own, would somehow be tied to Zhang Xiongwu.
Zhao Fusheng was already wary of him because of Paperman Zhang, and now this ghost case had a link to the Zhang clan...
The more he thought, the more uneasy he became, and he cried out in protest. “Lord Zhao, I’ve been wronged...”
“This was decades ago. How old is Wu Datong now? How old was I then? How could I possibly know?”
He wailed. “Besides, I’m only a distant relative of Paperman Zhang’s line. I just borrow his name to feed my family. It really has nothing to do with me, my lord...”
“What are you so anxious about?” Zhao Fusheng said with a smile. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I don’t know whether the rest of what you said is true, but one thing you said was right.”
Her tone gave nothing away, but Zhang Chuanshi had suffered at her hands before and dared not let his guard down. He was about to speak again when Zhao Fusheng said, “This was indeed decades ago.”
Zhang Chuanshi nodded vigorously. Zhao Fusheng asked, “But exactly how many decades? Have you worked it out?”
“This...”
Zhang Chuanshi hadn’t expected the conversation to swing back around to the timing.
Zhao Fusheng’s question wasn’t really meant for him anyway. Without waiting for him to answer, she turned back to Wu Dajing. “You said Wu Datong was thirty and still unmarried, then at some point abducted a girl and brought her home, then had a son, his mother died, and he left home. What year was that?”
“When he was thirty-one!”
Wu Dajing didn’t understand the point of the question either, but answered quickly.
“Sure?” Zhao Fusheng asked.
“Sure!” Wu Dajing nodded firmly. “Like I said, my third boy was eight the year the child was born. He left at thirty-one. Yes, no mistake, thirty-one!”
“He left at thirty-one. He died this year in the seventh month. That means he left forty years ago,” Zhao Fusheng said meaningfully.
“Forty years ago...”
Now Zhang Chuanshi shuddered too and murmured. He no longer dared to state firmly that this case had nothing to do with Zhang Xiongwu. Zhao Fusheng had only recently finished the Beggars’ Alley ghost case.
And the reason the Beggars’ Alley case had arisen was that forty years ago Zhang Xiongwu and Su Long had artificially created a malignant ghost to suppress a reviving Headless Ghost.
The characters involved and the timing were too coincidental, as if an unseen hand had linked together two ghost cases that had no business being connected.
“Right! It was forty years ago.” Wu Dajing, still clueless, asked, “My lord, what about forty years ago?”
Zhao Fusheng ignored him. She had thought of another detail. “You said Wu Datong’s eldest son was born on the thirty-first day of the seventh month, correct?”
“Yes—” Before Wu Dajing could finish, Zhao Fusheng cut him off. “That’s not right.”
“It is, my lord, my old mother saw his child born with her own eyes—” Wu Dajing said, scratching his head.
“That’s not right,” Zhao Fusheng said, shaking her head.
The clues from the Liu Clan's Ancestral Hall ghost case in the south of the city and the clues from the Goutou Village ghost case surfaced in her mind one by one, and her remarkable memory assembled every detail into a tight “mind map”:
“The Liu Clan's Ancestral Hall ghost case in South City happened on the fifteenth of the sixth month.”
She remembered the timeline clearly. In year 206 of the Great Han, the fifteenth of the sixth month was Liu Huacheng’s birthday, and also the day the South City ghost case broke out.
In the present Goutou Village case the malignant ghost had not shown itself, but she had grasped the outline of the whole case, and she’d also gotten some sense of the ghost’s origin and killing rules.
Zhao Fusheng could say with certainty that the Wu Liren family’s disappearance in Goutou Village really was tied to a malignant ghost, and that there was an eighty percent chance the ghost was Wu Datong’s mysterious “eldest son.”
She went over the whole affair from the start.
Back then, Wu Datong had gotten hold of a woman by despicable means and had a son who could never see the light of day. Later, to escape pursuit, he left home and entered Wan’an County, and by a twist of fate entered Zhang Xiongwu’s paper effigy shop as one of his hands.
(Zhao Fusheng had doubts about this point, too.)
Zhang Xiongwu was no ordinary man. He had a certain uncanny “talent” for unorthodox arts and was quite scheming.
It could not simply be a coincidence that Wu Datong had caught his eye. Wu Datong must have had something on him that Zhang Xiongwu coveted.
(Afterward, according to what the man who brought the money back told Wu Dajing, Wu Datong had performed a great service for Zhang Xiongwu and was rewarded.)
That sentence had to be read together with the timeline.
Forty years ago, was there anything Zhang Xiongwu needed someone else’s help with, a service worth rewarding?
Zhao Fusheng immediately thought of the stolen coffin nail!
The ghost coffin in the Liu Clan's Ancestral Hall that suppressed the Headless Ghost: how had the coffin nail been stolen without a sound, with people guarding it and a ghost sealed inside?
She had first suspected Zhang Xiongwu of using some unorthodox method, but now, combined with the clue from Wu Dajing’s account, a bizarre idea surfaced. Had Zhang Xiongwu used Wu Datong to steal the coffin nail?
The thought made her heart leap, and it felt as though more of the mist of the past had cleared.
But she quickly realized she was being too hasty.
Because of the timeline!
All of this reasoning rested on the remarkably coincidental “forty years ago.” And yet the very same reasoning had a flaw, and that flaw was also the timeline.
As Zhao Fusheng had said, the Liu Clan's Ancestral Hall South City case had occurred in year 206 of the Great Han. Wu Datong’s departure from Goutou Village for Wan’an County was, by the timeline, also year 206 of the Great Han, but the two events fell in different months.
One was mid-sixth month, the other at least after the eighth.
What had gone wrong? Or had her earlier deduction been headed the wrong way entirely?
