IBGSW Chapter 72
The Malignant Ghost Appears
Skin shavings flew about the dark bonfire.
Zhao Fusheng, sitting close, was sprayed across her whole head and face.
Having heard the ghost’s past, she too had triggered its rule.
The familiar bone-deep itch returned. She frantically scratched her face and clawed at her arms, rubbing off great quantities of skin and slapping it haphazardly onto the incomplete paper figurine in the scroll.
Blood poured from her nose in streams and gathered into a rivulet that became a natural adhesive, gluing the skin she had just torn off to the original human-skin figurine and “repairing” its body.
The blood flowed eerily, trimming the scabs, and the incomplete figurine was mostly made whole, looking more complete than before.
Gathering the last scrap of clarity, at the instant she saw the ghost appear, Zhao Fusheng opened Hell to capture it.
Hell spread out and enveloped the place where Wu Shaochun’s mother had been.
The Investiture of the Gods prompted:
Capture failed; the Malignant Ghost has already left.
Three points of merit were deducted. Before Zhao Fusheng could even feel the pain, her perception was twisted again by the ghost’s rule.
Boom! The flames suddenly flared. The cleaver Wu Shaochun’s mother had been holding in midair, now without a hand to grip it, fell back onto the chopping board with a clunk.
The human blood splashed over the chicken pieces and the board vanished eerily. Wu Shaochun, Wu Liyou, and the others, who had been scratching frantically, regained their calm and clarity.
The vanished owl’s call returned, hooting in a skin-crawling way.
...
Zhao Fusheng lifted her head, heavy with exhaustion, and for a moment looked blank.
Everything had returned to normal. Apart from Wu Shaochun’s mother being missing, nothing in the Wu Liyou household seemed changed.
“Who chops a perfectly good chicken halfway and then runs off?”
Having woken, Wu Liyou noticed nothing amiss, and looked with some pain at the chicken meat laid out on the chopping board on the ground.
Though he’d willingly killed chickens and ducks for the sake of tax relief, they were still his family’s fowl, and seeing the meat left in a heap with no one tending it hurt him. “Who left this lying around? Ligong, Ligong, get your wife over here to chop this up and put it on to cook.”
He looked at Zhao Fusheng, saw her dazed expression and her tired look, and hurriedly added, “You must be worn out from the road, my lord. Why not eat early, wash up, and rest early tonight? Handling the case tomorrow morning won’t be too late.”
Zhao Fusheng said nothing.
She had realized the ghost had come.
At the moment of waking, though her perception had been disturbed, her cautious and suspicious nature had her check her own sea of consciousness first.
The Investiture of the Gods was unopened, and Hell was open to one level. Everything looked as it had when she first arrived at Goutou Village, except her merit points had changed: from the original fourteen straight down to six.
Things unrelated to the ghost weren’t affected, and moreover the Investiture of the Gods stood above the ghost’s rules and was immune to its influence.
She remembered that when she left the Demon-Suppression Bureau for Goutou Village she had had fourteen points of merit. After arriving and staying at Wu Liyou’s house, she’d had nine.
In between, something had happened that left a gap in her memory, and now, in the short time since she’d come out of the room, she had lost another three points.
Her gaze fell on the half-opened scroll in her hand, which recorded an old ghost case the Demon-Suppression Bureau had handled years ago.
She turned the scroll and saw faint traces of ink, as if someone had written on this sheet.
But the ink looked washed away, leaving only a few marks, and she couldn’t tell what characters had been written.
In the firelight, the half-unrolled scroll became translucent, as if a pair of uncanny eyes were watching her through its far side.
“My lord...”
Wu Liyou, seeing her silent, called her.
“Mm?” Zhao Fusheng answered, then turned her wrist and flipped the scroll.
The other side was slightly yellowed, with no strange presence visible.
But the sense of being watched hadn’t gone away. She was certain this scroll held a secret.
Between the vanished merit and the fact that she wouldn’t carry a worthless old scroll for no reason, the scroll had to hide some clue to the ghost case, but for now she had not found the key to open its secret.
She steadied herself, rolled up the scroll again, and looked up. “Call Wu Ligong over.”
Wu Liyou froze for a moment, then answered and turned and shouted, “Ligong, Ligong, the lord is calling you.”
Beside him Wu Shaochun scratched his head and muttered to himself, “Chickens and ducks killed at Uncle Liyou’s tonight, a big spread, and my mother isn’t here yet...”
Zhao Fusheng had a distinct impression of this rather sharp young man, and looked up at him. “Does your mother like to join in the fun?”
He chuckled, scratching the back of his head hard, and said carelessly, “In these times grain is precious. Whenever a household sets out a table, who in the village wouldn’t come to join in if invited?”
“We haven’t had a greasy meal at home in ages. If my mother knew Uncle Liyou was killing a chicken and a duck tonight, she’d certainly come to help and eat a meal before going back.” He looked puzzled, then said, “Never mind. I’ll go back and check later.”
Wu Liyou, who had just called his brother, overheard them and glared at the young man, then turned to Zhao Fusheng with a smile. “Shaochun’s a filial boy. His father died early, and his mother raised him. He used to work with the Huanggang Village crowd and earned some money, but his mother wouldn’t allow it, saying it was against the court's prohibitions and she was afraid he’d get his head chopped off and she’d have nobody to see her to her grave.”
“Uncle!”
Wu Shaochun, afraid Wu Liyou would spill his secrets, shouted.
Wu Liyou hastily shut his mouth.
Zhao Fusheng was about to ask more when Wu Ligong, summoned by Wu Liyou, came over and interrupted the conversation.
Whether Wu Shaochun’s work was illegal had nothing to do with her. Breaking the great Goutou Village case was the first priority.
Zhao Fusheng looked at Wu Ligong. This man had been born in the Great Han year...
The thought had barely surfaced when it startled her.
She had never been to Goutou Village before and wasn’t familiar with Wu Liyou’s family. She was only staying here for the moment...
Thinking this, Zhao Fusheng noticed another oddity.
Since she wasn’t familiar with Wu Liyou’s family, why had she decided to stay at his house? And she seemed to know Wu Ligong’s birth date very well, as if it had been engraved in her mind, a conditioned reflex.
“You were born in...” She thought and followed her instinct. “Year 198 of the Great Han?”
She said it without thinking at all, purely on reflex.
Wu Liyou was startled by her words, then praised her. “You see everything coming, my lord.”
Wu Ligong stood to the side, not daring to speak.
He was forty-eight this year but looked much older than his age.
He was thin as a hemp stalk, in ragged clothes, barefoot, his back bowed from lifelong labor, one shoulder higher than the other, and he looked at people at a loss, seemingly even less skilled with words than Wu Liyou.
“Ligong, the lord has questions for you. Answer well, and the lord will lower our household’s taxes,” Wu Liyou cautioned.
At the mention of tax relief, Wu Ligong’s eyes lit up, and he tried to straighten his bent back.
Zhao Fusheng nodded and went straight to the point. “I heard from Wu Liyou that in year 205 of the Great Han, forty-one years ago, on the first of the eighth month, you pointed at the moon and said you saw a human figure on it.”
For Wu Ligong, forty-one years had passed since then, and a lifetime of daily labor had made him slow to react. But with Zhao Fusheng’s promise of tax relief, he struggled to remember...
Fortunately, that year Wu Dajing’s mother had had her nosebleed, which was a big deal for the Wu family back then. As he thought, he seemed to recall something and nodded repeatedly. “Yes, yes, yes!”
But after saying this, his lips moved, and he stole a glance at Zhao Fusheng, then lowered his head quickly again.
Seeing this, Zhao Fusheng’s pupils contracted and she barked, “Say what you have to say. Don’t hold anything back and ruin things. If I find out you’re lying, next year the Wu family’s taxes won’t be cut, they’ll be raised!”
She had seized the Wu family’s lifeline.
Wu Ligong dropped to his knees with a thud and cried out, “My lord, please see clearly. What I saw back then wasn’t a person, it was a ghost!”
“What?” The answer should have surprised Zhao Fusheng, but she felt a faint sense of “I thought so.”
“That time I saw a ghost on the moon, like a newborn baby ghost.”
As the floodgate of memory opened, that scene from long ago appeared in Wu Ligong’s mind, and he shook with a tremor. “That day, the first of the eighth month, I was naughty and wouldn’t sleep. While we were cooling off at night, I saw a child on the moon, like a newborn, dragging a blood-red cord, crawling around the moon, staring at my grandmother.”
He had been small then and didn’t know fear. He turned and saw his grandmother lying on a bamboo chair, half asleep.
The young Wu Ligong shook his elder awake and called, “Grandma, someone’s looking at you from over there.”
Wu Dajing’s mother, awakened by her grandson, heard his words and asked in confusion, “Where?”
Wu Ligong pointed at the moon. “Right there.”
The old woman, seeing her grandson point at the moon, hurried to stop him, saying it was bad luck and would cut off his ears.
When the Wu family looked at the moon later, the moonlight was clear, and there was no one there.
Everyone took it as a child’s innocent talk, perhaps a trick of the eyes.
But afterward Wu Ligong whispered in his elder’s ear: “Grandma, the one looking at you looks like a child, dragging a red cord...”
Just before this, Wu Dajing’s mother had gone to Wu Datong’s house to help deliver an uncanny child. Hearing her grandson’s words, she was scared out of her wits.
Wu Dajing had then come out and interrupted, and his old mother didn’t go on. But her nose began to bleed for no reason.
Wu Dajing’s mother had probably known by then that she didn’t have long to live. For some reason she never told her children and grandchildren the cause, which also gave Wu Dajing’s family a rare forty years of peace.
...
Zhao Fusheng was thinking this over when suddenly Wu Ligong said, “There’s a figure in the moon again!”
“Grandma, look!”
The hunched man seemed unable to tell illusion from reality, as if his perception had returned to forty years ago. He mistook Zhao Fusheng for his grandmother and reached out to tug her sleeve.
At some point the bonfire was suppressed again, and the air around them turned icy.
Wu Shaochun, Wu Liyou and the others, though they didn’t control ghosts, felt the terrible pressure that precedes a ghost’s arrival, and their faces changed at once.
Wu Ligong was completely unaware of everything around him. He tugged at Zhao Fusheng’s sleeve, pointing at the sky with one hand. “Look, there’s someone there.”
Zhao Fusheng felt as if a fist had suddenly closed around her heart.
She instinctively looked up at the sky and saw that the moon had changed color. A faint black mist wreathed it.
In the black mist, a dark shape slowly poked its head out from one corner of the moon.
Under the moon’s hazy halo, the shadow seemed to glow with a faint red light from within.
Then the blood-red eyes opened and met Zhao Fusheng’s.
The instant that shadow fixed on her, a chill enveloped her whole body.
Then the moon hanging in the sky began to sink, the round moon growing larger and larger, and the ghost shape, trailing a blood-red umbilical cord, silently crawled down from it.
Moonlight shone on the ground, a heavy smell of blood spread, and faint ghost fog appeared all around.
“Don’t point...”
Her head felt heavy as a thousand pounds, but she forced out the shout.
Wu Ligong, pointing at the moon in a daze, couldn’t hear her at all. His consciousness had gone back forty-one years, and he was still calling, “Grandma, someone’s looking at you.”
“...Looks like a child, dragging a red cord...”
His figure was bathed in moonlight, and a ghost shape followed the moonlight into the shadow behind him.
Wu Ligong still held his pose of pointing at the moon. In the next instant, the flesh of his face fell away like tiles dropping off, and his whole body collapsed into a pool of blood and flesh and vanished before everyone’s eyes.
...
Hah! Zhao Fusheng woke with a start.
She felt as if she had suffocated and drifted off without noticing, and now she gasped for breath, struggling to raise her eyelids and look around.
Her vision was blurry. First to enter her sight was a roaring bonfire.
On the ground sat a filthy chopping board with half an uncut chicken and a pile of chopped chicken pieces.
Several men stood around it. One of them, holding a chicken, looked vaguely familiar.
One of her hands gripped a scroll tightly, the other held a palm-sized thin piece of skin.
Zhao Fusheng blinked. Her head ached and swelled, and as she tried to restart her thoughts, the parts in her head seemed rusted. After a good while, fragments of memory flowed into her mind.
Wu Shaochun, Wu Liyou...
A few familiar names surfaced, and she finally matched these people’s identities with her memories.
She had taken on a ghost case, come to...
Thinking this, she paused, then understood: she had come to Goutou Village to handle a ghost case. The village elder's family here had vanished strangely.
She was staying at Wu Liyou’s house. His family was preparing a welcome feast for her. She had come out to chat with them and lost consciousness without noticing, falling asleep.
Perhaps it was from rushing along the road all day, too much exhaustion?
The thought entered her mind and was at once rejected.
She had encountered a ghost!
