IBGSW Chapter 66
Collective Amnesia
The thought made Zhao Fusheng turn and look around.
Nobody seemed to be acting strangely. The skin of Zhang Chuanshi’s face, as he stood beside her, looked very dry, and a large flake had lifted from it.
He was absently peeling dead skin from his face and muttering complaints. “What is my lord doing?”
“We drove a whole day, finally got to Goutou Village, and haven’t had a bite, and now we’re rushing off to handle a ghost case, and then we just stand around here...” he grumbled under his breath. “When the bureau used to handle cases, how grand it was! Local officials accompanied us everywhere, and there was fine wine and meat.”
Then he went on muttering. “Risking our lives out here and standing in the cold wind besides.”
“All right, enough!”
Zhao Fusheng felt something was off, but when she thought it over carefully she couldn’t find anything odd.
A faint, indescribable yin energy seemed to hang all around, yet she sensed no ghost aura.
Was she being overly suspicious?
She silently tucked the case scroll back into her sleeve.
For now she found nothing wrong in her memory, but that scroll appearing out of nowhere was highly suspicious. After she’d looked over Wu Liren’s house and reached her lodging, she would go over it carefully.
“Let’s go.”
At her words, everyone headed toward Wu Liren’s house, torches in hand.
“What else would you like to know, my lord? Just ask.”
“Does anyone know where Wu Liren’s mother came from?” Zhao Fusheng thought a moment and asked.
As she mentioned Wu Liren, she felt oddly uneasy, as if she had forgotten some important clue.
As soon as she finished, the villagers began speaking at once.
“We never saw Wu Liren’s mother. Wu Datong said he found a young wife in the city.”
Someone suddenly seemed to remember something and said in a mysterious tone, “Speaking of Wu Datong’s wife, I know something...”
“What?” someone asked.
The man said, “Forty-one years ago, remember? A group of outsiders came to our village looking for a missing daughter.”
Goutou Village was remote, just a little hollow under Wu’an Town’s jurisdiction, and outsiders rarely appeared.
The group that had come looking for the girl forty-one years ago had been well dressed and obviously no ordinary people, so when the man brought it up, an older woman’s eyes lit up. “Yes, yes, yes, that did happen!”
“I figure Wu Datong abducted her.”
“What?!” a young man said in disbelief.
The speaker was smug. “That whole year he never left his house. He bragged to people that he’d found a beautiful sixteen- or seventeen-year-old virgin...”
“My mother heard a girl crying from his house once, through the wall.”
...
Zhao Fusheng took note of this important piece of information.
She felt she had heard such news somewhere before, but however she tried to recall it, she couldn’t. It was as if it were only an illusion.
“Into Wu Liren’s house first.”
They crossed the field ridge and arrived at Wu Liren’s front gate.
Most houses in Goutou Village were mud walls with thatched roofs, but Wu Liren’s was built of square stone and mud walls, clearly the home of a major household in the village.
The peeling front door had already been broken open. No lamp was lit inside, and the place looked eerie.
Eager to earn credit, a few torch-bearers went into the house first.
They bumped the gate as they entered, and the opening and closing made a faint creaking sound.
Half a month had passed since Wu Liren’s family disappeared. Weeds had grown in the unattended courtyard, giving the place a sinister, gloomy feel.
“Do you think there might be a ghost in here?”
Someone had barely stepped in when goosebumps rose over his whole body.
If Zhao Fusheng hadn’t promised them bureau tax relief beforehand, the villagers would probably have fled long ago.
“There is a ghost in the village, but it’s not in this house.”
Zhao Fusheng answered in a low voice.
But the moment she finished, she froze.
The words had come out of her mouth as if she’d already been certain. What grounds did she have for such a suspicion?
“Then where is the ghost?”
The questioner paused, then asked again.
Zhao Fusheng shook her head, and her gaze fell on the pair of vermilion-lacquered doors.
The lacquer had flaked off in places with age, exposing the wood’s natural color underneath.
Many scattered footprints were left on it, and there was no bolt behind the door. She crouched and saw wood splinters trampled into the mud at the base.
“Did you break the door down that day?” she asked.
The others whispered among themselves, not daring to speak, until finally someone summoned his courage. “It wasn’t us who told people to break it, it was the village elder...”
“Uncle Dajing told us to break in.”
“Who is Uncle Dajing?” Zhao Fusheng asked, puzzled.
As soon as she asked, her heart tightened. She felt she had lost some important clue.
A figure seemed to have been wiped away by some mysterious force, and no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t recall him.
“Uncle Dajing...” the man stumbled, then turned and shouted, “Liyou, Liyou, they’re talking about your father.”
Wu Liyou hurried out. “My lord, Wu Dajing is my father. He’s senior in the village, so people honor him as the village elder.”
He explained, “We didn’t mean to break into an empty house. That day there was no sound from Wu Liren’s house, and everyone was worried, so we asked my father to take charge, and we broke down the door and found that Wu Liren’s family had disappeared.”
Zhao Fusheng nodded.
“When you came in that day, were the doors and windows bolted from inside? Are there any other ways in or out? Were they ever opened?”
“No.”
A young man answered loudly.
Zhao Fusheng turned toward him. Wu Liyou seemed to remember something, and his face changed. “Shaochun, did you sneak into your Uncle Liren’s house to take things?”
Wu Liren’s family was well-off. After the incident the front door had stood open and the house was empty, and some idle, bold young men in the village had slipped into Wu Liren’s mansion under cover of night and secretly carried off furnishings.
Shouted at by Wu Liyou, Wu Shaochun looked sulky. “Uncle...”
“Never mind that.”
Zhao Fusheng said, “Wu Shaochun, you tell me.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Wu Shaochun’s eyes lit up and he hurried forward. “My Uncle Liren’s house also has two back doors. After the incident that day, a few of my brothers and I checked them. They were bolted from inside and had never been opened.”
A whole houseful of living people had vanished without a trace overnight.
Zhao Fusheng’s gaze settled on him.
The young man was in his twenties, and compared with the other villagers’ numb expressions, his eyes were bright and his face lively. But what caught Zhao Fusheng’s attention wasn’t his expression, it was his face: several scratch marks stood out clearly, and around them floated fine, scale-like flakes of skin, scratched loose by his fingernails.
She glanced at it, then turned to Zhang Chuanshi and beckoned. “Old Zhang, come here.”
Zhang Chuanshi, hearing that a strange case had happened here, was already ill at ease.
He had lived beside the bureau for years and had seen how it handled cases. The mortality rate among order envoys was extremely high, like leeks cut one crop after another, dying and being replaced...
“My lord, spare my life,” he wailed, not daring to come closer, worried Zhao Fusheng would drag him into trouble.
“Come here!”
Zhao Fusheng barked sternly.
Zhang Chuanshi shuffled forward unwillingly.
As soon as he stood before her, Zhao Fusheng suddenly reached out toward his cheek—
Zhang Chuanshi tried to dodge instinctively but was too slow. Zhao Fusheng pinched a flake of dead skin on his face and tore it off. Hiss!
The old man sucked in a breath and clapped a hand to his face. “My lord, you...”
A leaf-sized scab landed in Zhao Fusheng’s hand, like a layer of shed snakeskin. Zhang Chuanshi touched his cheek and felt a faint burning pain.
“What is this?” As soon as he saw the dead skin in her hand, he realized he’d misjudged her.
But when had he gotten this dead skin, and why did Zhao Fusheng tear it off? He hadn’t a clue.
“Skin,” Zhao Fusheng answered.
She felt this skin tissue was important, but couldn’t yet string all the clues together. It was as if part of the crucial information were missing, leaving the ghost case shrouded in fog.
“Keep it safe,” she said.
She had a feeling there was more to the scab than met the eye.
Goutou Village’s feng shui really was bad. She noticed that the villagers all had scratch marks on their faces, more or less, and Zhang Chuanshi had them too.
A strange thought crossed Zhao Fusheng’s mind: what about her?
She reached up and touched her cheek and felt smooth, delicate skin, like a newborn baby’s, no flying flakes and no rough texture.
Her doubts did not go away, but she frowned and said, “Let’s go into the house.”
She shoved the scrap of skin into Zhang Chuanshi’s chest. “Keep it safe.”
Zhang Chuanshi shivered, held the skin in his hand, and looked at it for a long while with disgust. “Who’d want to keep this stuff...”
Then his eyes darted. He casually tossed it down and even ground it under his sole. When he looked around, nobody was watching. Zhao Fusheng, surrounded by the villagers like the moon among the stars, was already heading into Wu Liren’s mansion.
By the villagers’ account, Wu Liren’s father had been fairly long-lived, reaching seventy-one, and had died only on the twenty-first of last month. Wu Liren had one wife and eight concubines and had fathered twenty-seven sons.
So Wu Liren’s house was the largest in the village, built with extraordinary grandeur, a palace in the villagers’ eyes.
But the moment Zhao Fusheng stepped inside, she felt an uncanny aura of death.
The house was indeed big, built in a three-courtyard layout1, though not very strict about it.
Side chambers sat to the left and right between each courtyard, and a villager who’d once had the good fortune to enter Wu Liren’s house eagerly pointed to the left-hand side chamber of the first courtyard. “This should be Wu Shaoguang’s room.”
“Who is Wu Shaoguang?” Zhao Fusheng was careful but bold, and as she asked she pushed the door. With a creak the door swung open and a great deal of dust fell.
A spider that had been spinning a web in the door crack, startled, dropped a thread of silk onto Zhao Fusheng’s shoulder.
She picked up the spider and looked thoughtfully up at the top of the doorway.
Wu Shaochun answered eagerly. “Wu Shaoguang is Uncle Liren’s seventh son, five years older than me, born of Huang Sanniang.”
Zhao Fusheng nodded, tossed the spider away, and casually wiped her hand on her waist. “Has Wu Shaoguang been gone from home for a long time?”
“No.”
Wu Shaochun shook his head. “He was fine before Uncle Liren’s house had its trouble. Last time we arranged to go over and help run goods at nearby Huanggang Village...”
Before he finished, a woman suddenly cursed through gritted teeth and slapped him hard on the back. “You dog. You never learn anything good. The court will catch you and chop your head off.”
“Mother...” Wu Shaochun, slapped, glanced back and didn’t dare argue, then seemed to remember something and looked up at Zhao Fusheng. But seeing her frowning in thought, her mind clearly not on “running goods,” he let out a breath of relief.
“This doesn’t look like a house that’s been empty for just a few days,” Zhao Fusheng said thoughtfully.
She ignored the mother and son’s muttered bickering and stepped into the room.
It smelled of mildew and decay, as if no one had lived there for years.
The furniture was simple, covered in a thick layer of dust. The corners of the tables and chairs were rotting, with white mold spots growing on them.
She walked toward the bed.
Bedding lay on it, and beside it stood a large cabinet about half a man’s height, with a teacup on top. Zhao Fusheng lifted the cup lid and saw that half the cup was black, with a layer of soot-like stuff at the bottom, dried and cracked, the yellowed bottom of the cup faintly visible.
She put down the lid and reached out to feel the bed.
The bedding was damp. The cover was made of decent fabric but already sticky, giving off the nauseating feel of many years.
She lifted the bedding and found a yellowed crumb of something at the corner of the pillow.
Skin tissue!
The odd thought struck Zhao Fusheng. She reached to pick it up, but the crumb had already merged with the bedding, and the moment her finger touched it, it crumbled like burnt ash and was pressed into the sheet.
“Come on, let’s look at the other rooms.”
Zhao Fusheng beckoned.
The others, not understanding, followed.
After that, Zhao Fusheng inspected most of the rooms in the Wu mansion.
Many rooms were like Wu Shaoguang’s, giving off a desolate feeling of long vacancy, and some were worse.
In one room, belonging to someone named Wu Shaocai, she even found a cluster of mushrooms growing at the foot of the bed. Yet the villagers swore up and down that half a month ago Wu Liren’s family had all been there, and every one of them had often been seen out and about.
She had looked through all of the three-courtyard mansion except the inner main chamber where Wu Liren and his principal wife lived.
In each room she had found skin shavings, some old, some fresher, all different shapes and sizes.
She collected the fresher, larger ones. By the end of the tour she had gathered a thick stack.
Last came Wu Liren’s own room.
Standing before it, Zhao Fusheng felt a strong intuition: she would find something in Wu Liren’s room.
