IBGSW Chapter 70
The Incomplete Paper Figurine
Zhao Fusheng’s eyes felt swollen and her head throbbed, as if someone were digging out her eyeballs, and she frowned and let out a groan.
There was a gap in her memory. From the moment Wu Liyou left, her mind was blank, and the slightest attempt to think about it sent a stabbing pain between her brows.
She simply sat down on the floor and leaned against the low cabinet, panting.
After a while she lifted her hand and looked at her palm full of blood, wiped it carelessly on her waist, rested a moment, and only then opened her eyes.
Just then the banging at the door came again.
Hearing no answer, Wu Liyou grew anxious. “My lord, you...”
“I’m fine.”
Zhao Fusheng answered, forcing down the headache. “I kicked something just now. Don’t disturb me.”
Hearing her reply, Wu Liyou breathed out and said yes.
She pressed her brow with her hand a couple of times, then began sorting out her clues.
This whole trip to Goutou Village had been uncanny at every turn.
From beginning to end she hadn’t seen a ghost, yet the ghost seemed to be everywhere.
She turned and surveyed the room. Two lamp flames flickered, and in the quiet she could hear only her own faint panting. There was no one else.
On the bed lay the unpicked quilt, not looking as if anyone had touched it.
The tabletop was a mess, streaked with oil.
In a corner sat an ink tray with a little ink left in it, but most of the ink had been swept across the table.
Besides that, the table had no brush and no paper.
She looked at it a bit longer, and her head started to ache again. She sucked in a breath, closed her eyes for a moment, and at the same time reached into her robe.
An inner pocket was sewn into her clothing, and inside was a pouch.
She took out the pouch, and from it a jade book.
It was the Demon-Suppression Bureau’s Soul-Life Register.
The moment the register came out, the register, under the control of the ghost servant bound within it, seemed to sense something, and ghost curses immediately crawled over Zhao Fusheng’s palm, up her arm, and spread all over her neck and cheeks.
Eerie black-red runes, dense and ominous, gave off a cold, sinister aura.
Her head and arms were numb with cold, but the swelling pain from before faded away.
When she opened her eyes again, she had recovered most of her spirits.
“So the ghost really did appear.”
She didn’t know what she had done to trigger the ghost’s killing, but evidently the Goutou Village ghost didn’t kill in a single stroke, which was why she was still alive after it appeared, having only bled heavily and suffered a splitting headache.
Thinking this, she sat up.
The most urgent task was to find her lost memory.
“Given my nature, if it involved a ghost case I’d surely have been careful and thorough.” Having recovered, she calmly put the register back in its pouch and tucked it into the hidden pocket of her clothing.
She also felt her sleeve. The withered ghost arm was still tucked inside, clutching a grayed sheet of human-skin paper.
The human-skin quilt unpicked from Wu Liren’s bedding was folded into a bundle and tucked into the front of her robe. She had nothing else on her.
Confirming that her important things were intact, she let out a breath without realizing it, and thought: “With the Goutou Village case, unless I had no clues, if I noticed anything wrong I’d definitely have left a mark.”
Thinking of marks, her gaze fell on the tabletop.
An inkstone sat on the table. She remembered: she had asked Zhang Chuanshi to have Wu Liyou find it.
But looking at the inkstone now, she didn’t remember what she’d wanted it for. That was the biggest problem.
When it came to a ghost case, she wouldn’t do anything pointless.
Goutou Village was desperately poor, and the four treasures of the study were rare items there.
She had asked for brush and ink; the only possibility was that she’d found something important and, realizing she might forget, wanted to use writing to preserve her memory.
Her spirits lifted at that.
If she had meant to write, there had to be a brush and paper dropped somewhere.
Wu Liyou’s house had been cleaned, but countryside houses were laid out haphazardly, and a quick scan found no trace of brush or paper.
It struck her at once: these things only seemed to be lost, but might actually have been “hidden by the ghost,” like her memory disorder. She hadn’t really lost her memory; perhaps her perception had only been interfered with, so she had the memory yet could never recall it no matter what.
Missing things she couldn’t find worked the same way. They might be right in front of her, yet because she’d triggered the ghost’s rule, she could look right at them without seeing them.
She wasn’t flustered. She took a deep breath and slowly let it out.
She thought: suppose a moment ago I was controlled by the ghost and lost my memory, and in the instant I came to, I saw an overturned lamp, a burning tabletop, blood from my nose and mouth spilled across the table.
Combine that with Wu Liyou leaving after grinding the ink, and Zhao Fusheng was sure she had never left the table during the period of her memory loss.
Her gaze fell on the tabletop.
Messy ink marks mixed with spilled lamp oil, not yet dry.
She looked under the table too, but it was only dirt floor, nothing extra.
She bit her lip, tore off a flake of dead skin, then reached to feel across the tabletop.
The table wasn’t big. On it sat only an inkstone and a lamp. The surface was rough, but spilled ink, oil, and blood had made it slick.
She found nothing.
She wasn’t discouraged. She bent and felt under the table. The ground was uneven, and she crawled under and searched all around, still with no result.
She hadn’t found anything useful anywhere around the table. Was her guess wrong?
Zhao Fusheng frowned.
“Before my ‘amnesia’ I was near the table. If I lost anything, it would have fallen here.”
A ghost had no feelings or memory; it simply acted by its rules and couldn’t be clever enough to hide her things.
Unless she had recorded an important clue, triggered the ghost’s rule, and so the record had been forced into invisibility.
She suddenly remembered the fight with the Beggar Ghost at Beggars’ Alley: when she’d swung a wooden stick and struck the Beggar Ghost hard, its body had turned to a phantom and vanished.
To human beings, a malignant ghost’s body lies between illusion and reality, so people cannot fight ghosts, and only ghosts can counter ghosts.
The thought struck her, and her eyes lit up.
She flicked her sleeve, and the withered ghost arm slid out into her hand.
She swept the ghost arm around.
With a rustling sound, the ghost arm brushed across the empty floor, and its fingertip seemed suddenly to hook something.
Delighted, she hooked at the same spot again with the ghost arm.
That patch of floor was clean with nothing extra on it, but through the ghost arm she clearly sensed an object there.
It felt like an unrolled scroll.
She thought of the case scrolls piled at the bureau and gently lifted the object with the ghost arm.
The moment it left the floor, the rule interfering with her perception vanished under the ghost arm’s power.
The hidden thing took shape again: a sheepskin case scroll dangled from the withered ghost arm.
She was thrilled.
But just then the ghost arm, which had been suppressed by the power of merit, seemed to sense something and even stirred as if reviving.
Its fingers moved, the clenched five fingers slowly loosened, and its hand turned over and grabbed a corner of the scroll.
Her gaze sharpened. One hand held the ghost arm, the other gripped most of the scroll, and she yanked hard!
Since she’d become a ghost-controller her strength was considerable, and the ghost arm, having gotten hold of the thing, wouldn’t let go either.
Two forces pulled against each other, and a corner of the scroll tore with a rip.
The ghost arm twitched reluctantly twice and turned back into a withered arm in her palm.
Calmly she returned the ghost arm to her sleeve and only then looked at the scroll with its missing corner. At one look, her eyes fixed.
On the scroll, in rather untidy brush writing, was written: Ghost of Oblivion!
The ink was faint, but it was unmistakably her handwriting.
She didn’t hesitate. She dipped her index and middle fingers into the inkstone and dabbed a spot of ink on the paper.
The fresh ink was deep black, in sharp contrast with the color of the three characters “Ghost of Oblivion.”
She held up the scroll and moved close to the lamp.
In the lamplight the three characters looked uneven, the ink faint, almost as if they were fading away.
Beneath them were several lines of neat small characters, recording a different case file.
This was a Demon-Suppression Bureau case scroll, which she must have taken along for the moment and used to record events related to the ghost.
She moved the scroll, and by the lamplight she saw faint, half-vanishing traces around “Ghost of Oblivion,” as if something had also been recorded there but was now completely gone.
“Erased traces!”
Her heart chilled.
This was similar to erasing memory, both erasing what the ghost had left behind.
What had she written originally, that even the handwriting could vanish?
“Ghost of Oblivion...”
Zhao Fusheng was sure she had written these three characters. Not only did the name “Ghost of Oblivion” fit her present situation, more importantly her handwriting and the simplified characters, which only she would write, were proof too.
She was staring at the three characters, lost in thought, when suddenly her heart chilled and her scalp tingled.
A chilling feeling washed over her whole body, as if in the dark night an invisible pair of eyes were watching her.
Ghost!
The ghost was nearby.
The realization struck her, but she didn’t hurry to call anyone in, and she didn’t search the corners for the ghost’s trace.
She suddenly remembered the ghost arm’s earlier oddity: the severed arm had suddenly revived and gripped the sheepskin scroll tightly.
In that instant she spread the scroll and held it up to the lamp.
The lamp flame licked the back of the scroll, but the fire did not ignite it.
The red lamplight lit the thin leather paper, and a pair of dark red eyes, dripping blood, appeared on the scroll, staring coldly back at Zhao Fusheng.
Night, nobody around!
In the old house in the desolate village, the voices of Wu Liyou and the others had at some point vanished.
In the eerie, gloomy room, only Zhao Fusheng remained.
At some point the lamplight had dimmed. Those uncanny eyes were numb and cold, without a shred of feeling, and looking at them made her hair stand on end.
The mad, bold side of Zhao Fusheng’s nature suddenly took over.
At the peak of terror, she became calm.
She didn’t scream or throw the scroll in a panic. Instead, coolly and ruthlessly, she reached out and gouged hard at the pair of eyeballs!
Her fingers pierced the sheepskin and dug the eyes out—
But the gush of blood and sticky feel she had imagined didn’t come.
At the instant her finger broke through the scroll’s paper, every illusion vanished.
The bloody eyes were gone, and the blood that had run over the scroll melted away without a trace.
In their place, an incomplete paper figurine about the size of a palm dropped into her hand.
It was pieced together from scabs of different sizes, looked ready to fall apart, yet somehow stayed stuck together.
Zhao Fusheng stared blankly. The lock sealing her memory was pried open, and a tangle of memories began to churn in her mind.
She instinctively turned the paper figurine over. On its back were small characters: Year 205 of the Great Han, 31st of the seventh month!
Boom!
The shackles on her memory shattered in an instant, and the lost memory returned.
Wu Dajing reporting the case, Wu Datong’s son, back to Goutou Village, Wu Dajing’s horrible death when mentioning the birth date of Wu Datong’s son, going to Wu Liren’s house and finding the bedding, deducing the birth date of Wu Datong’s eldest son, Zhao Fusheng putting brush to the scabs she’d torn off and the scabs turning into a paper figurine, her seven orifices bleeding, her memory lost...
All the memories came back, as if she’d woken from a great dream.
“The second time...”
Before she’d finished, she realized. “No, the third!”
This was her third loss of memory.
The first time her memory was disturbed was at the bureau, when Wu Dajing mentioned Wu Datong’s eldest son and left a gap in her memory, which she’d recovered by indirect questioning.
That had been only the beginning. The next interference was after Wu Dajing’s death.
The villagers of Goutou Village had everything about Wu Dajing wiped away, even his son’s understanding of him was wrong, thinking his father had gone to the city and not yet returned.
And the third time was just now.
It seemed to happen without anyone noticing, but was extremely dangerous.
On the road here, Wu Dajing had said in passing that Goutou Village’s feng shui was bad, that people in the village sometimes bled from the seven orifices after they got old, and his mother had too, and had died not long after.
Before his death Zhao Fusheng had also seen him bleed from the nose twice, and he’d said the ailment had begun some days before.
The country people didn’t know this was the ghost’s killing rule.
In other words, Zhao Fusheng’s bleeding and loss of memory fit exactly the killing pattern of Wu Datong’s invisible eldest son.
But Wu Dajing, who grew up with Wu Datong and knew a great deal about his son, had held out for days and finally died only when he mentioned the ghost’s birth date.
And Zhao Fusheng, who had only just taken up this case, had bled from the seven orifices in short order and lost her memory immediately after recording the ghost’s birth date.
A light flashed in her eyes, and she murmured to herself, “It seems I’ve found an important clue and made something remarkable.”
The ghost’s trait: invisibility.
And mentioning it, probing into its past, was tantamount to digging it out of the hidden river of time, which triggered its rule and brought the backlash.
Rather than a killing rule, “curse” described it better.
