IBGSW Chapter 79
Sealing the Malignant Ghost
Beside her, Zhang Chuanshi heard her sigh and looked at her in confusion.
“My lord, what’s perilous?”
His face was bluish and his eyes red.
Affected by the ghost’s rule, his perception had been badly disturbed. He had probably forgotten why he’d come, and like the local villagers lived in a perception controlled by the ghost.
Zhao Fusheng had no time to answer. With her memory restored, the clues gathered from several rounds of questioning converged in her mind and became the truth that surfaced in her sea of consciousness.
Forty-one years ago, Wu Datong of Goutou Village was poor, ugly, and burdened, and unmarried past thirty.
So by despicable means he abducted a young girl and hid her in his house.
The girl later died in a difficult childbirth, giving birth to a ghost fetus,1 and because its birth could never see the light of day, this special ghost fetus came with an “invisibility” effect.
Anyone who learned of its existence either died or lost memory, and mentioning it triggered the malignant ghost’s rule.
So forty-one years ago, in panic, Wu Datong left the village and entered Wan’an County, where his “peculiarity” was soon noticed by Zhang Xiongwu.
Wu Datong at that time probably realized he was entangled with a malignant ghost, and he and Zhang Xiongwu hit it off.
He agreed to do something for Zhang Xiongwu, and the price was that Zhang Xiongwu would resolve his calamity and keep him alive.
Afterward, Zhang Xiongwu used the nature of the ghost fetus clinging to Wu Datong to steal the coffin nail from the ghost coffin in Liu Huacheng’s house that suppressed the Headless Ghost.
...
As for the details of the deal between the two back then, now that Wu Datong was dead and Paperman Zhang had vanished, Zhao Fusheng couldn’t know.
But she guessed that this life-saving method was tied to Wu Datong’s second son, “Wu Liren.”
Perhaps after Wu Liren was born, by a quirk of fate he came to control his own “elder brother” and became another ghost-controller, and from then on a man and a ghost lived together.
Up until ten years ago, while Wu Datong was alive, he had somehow prolonged his own life, and the reason Wu Liren lived so many years without dying was perhaps that the villagers of Goutou Village who knew the truth early on had died one after another “in his place.”
When Wu Liren reached adulthood, the sons he fathered died horribly at the ghost’s hands one after another, extending the day of his death.
But in living with the ghost, Wu Liren must also have noticed something strange, hence the human-skin quilt tucked into his bedding.
The human-skin quilt and the case scroll Zhao Fusheng had taken from the bureau worked in the same way, both meant to remind oneself not to forget.
Unfortunately, though Wu Liren realized something was strange, he was only an ordinary man who could do nothing but wait passively for death, unable to act.
After all of Wu Liren’s sons were dead, it was finally his turn.
In the Goutou Village case, when Wu Dajing reported it he’d said Wu Liren’s family of several dozen had disappeared, but by the clues Zhao Fusheng had gathered, Wu Liren’s family had actually been dead for decades.
Wu Liren was the last to die, so his room was still fairly “clean,” with traces of habitation, and had the most human skin shavings.
The villagers all knew perfectly well that Wu Datong had abducted a woman and held her back then, and all knew that the ghost fetus was born that year.
So the villagers of Goutou Village had long been marked by the ghost, and over the years people died one after another, yet affected by the ghost’s rule, they had noticed nothing at all.
Had Zhao Fusheng not come, after Wu Liren’s death everyone in the village would have died at the ghost’s hands, and the ghost would have erased the world’s last trace of itself, and once it grew, no one in the world would know its origin or rule, and the consequences of meeting it in the future would be unthinkable.
The thought of such a scene chilled her to the bone.
She raised her head and looked toward “Wu Liren.”
His sons and wives and concubines huddled at his side, and a gloomy-faced Wu Datong sat to his left.
This man had lived alone in the mansion before his death, living with a ghost and with illusory human figures, now clear and now muddled, and she didn’t know what torment he’d endured before dying.
And all this evil had been caused by his father back then, and in the end he bore all the consequences.
The blood-red paper figurine in the ghost arm’s grasp trembled wildly.
This hidden malignant ghost should never have been caught by “people,” yet Zhao Fusheng happened to have a ghost hand that could demand anything.
The prompt of the Investiture of the Gods remained:
Detected a Baleful-tier Malignant Ghost. Use Hell to capture it?
Zhao Fusheng remembered that this prompt had appeared twice already, that she’d used Hell’s power once and come away with nothing.
The first level of Hell couldn’t capture or imprison a Baleful-tier malignant ghost, especially one that held the power of the rule of concealment.
But she was clever and sharp, and looking at the figurine she already had a plan in mind.
A Baleful-tier malignant ghost couldn’t be captured for the time being, but it could be sealed using its own traits.
To twist her perception and disturb her mind, the rule had brought “Wu Dajing” back the moment she and Zhang Chuanshi realized he was dead.
And after he returned he had mentioned events of forty-one years ago and unwittingly said one thing that Zhao Fusheng had noted.
When she asked about Zhang Xiongwu stealing the coffin nail back then, Wu Dajing had said: It was Wu Liren who stole it.
On entering the village last night, Wu Jiu’s father had also been quite certain that Wu Liren’s birth date was forty years ago.
Wu Datong had two sons: the eldest was unspeakable, the second was Wu Liren, yet under the ghost’s rule, the unspeakable eldest son had been mentioned as Wu Liren.
This was the crucial point.
Zhao Fusheng understood it this way: the ghost fetus and Wu Liren were of course not the same person, but the ghost’s rule doesn’t lie, and it takes the ghost by default to be Wu Liren.
Then was it possible that this Invisible Ghost couldn’t exist alone and could only be a substitute for someone, hiding behind that person?
She looked at the blood-red paper figurine tightly gripped in the ghost arm’s palm, struggling.
The figurine had been pieced together from the skin shavings she had torn from her own body, and the reason it had turned into a paper figurine was that she had written the ghost’s birth date on those skin fragments...
The instant the birth date was written, it had formed the paper figurine, and the human-skin paper figurine had gained the ghost’s concealment rule...
A bold thought surfaced in her mind.
Ever since then the ghost had been hiding around her, and though she was a latecomer to Goutou Village, her place on the “death list” was near the front.
If the figurine had the ghost’s concealment property, did that mean she had made a substitute paper figurine out of her own human skin and sealed part of the ghost inside it?
And the prompt of the Investiture of the Gods showed that the ghost had not yet been completely sealed, which meant she hadn’t completed the last part of getting the ghost fully into the substitute figurine.
Which part was undone, leaving the substitute figurine incomplete so it couldn’t fully seal the ghost?
At this thought, her nosebleed dripped steadily.
Zhao Fusheng could feel her life flowing away fast. The ghost servant bound to the Soul-Life Register, sensing the malignant ghost’s power on her, desperately cast ghost curses trying to keep her alive.
The malignant ghost she controlled was also about to revive, as if afraid she’d fall into another ghost’s hands.
Zhao Fusheng was unhurried. She even struggled to pull the ghost hand closer and let her bleeding nose drip onto the substitute figurine.
She was bleeding anyway, and the blood couldn’t go to waste.
The dripping blood was soon absorbed by the substitute figurine. Zhao Fusheng felt her life ebbing, and thought coolly.
The birth date was why the figurine took shape. If one condition was still lacking, it was writing the malignant ghost’s identity.
She had long known the ghost’s identity: Wu Datong’s eldest son.
She raised a trembling hand and tore the incomplete substitute figurine from the ghost arm.
The ghost arm, having lost the thing it held, was about to revive.
But Zhao Fusheng was hovering between life and death, and three malignant ghosts’ powers were contending for her life.
As she had said herself, she was now in the special position of “a rare commodity worth hoarding.”
Zhao Fusheng, who should have died in an instant, reached a delicate balance under the three malignant ghosts’ rules, winning a precious thread of life.
She let the ghost arm grab her palm and dipped her other hand in the dripping blood and quickly wrote on the figurine.
But as she wrote, memories surfaced in her mind of the figurine’s “stand-in” trait, of Wu Datong’s eldest son’s identity that couldn’t be shown to people.
The fine clues coalesced into a guess in her heart.
She bared her teeth in a smile and said indistinctly, “All in.”
Time was short. She was decisive by nature, and once her mind was made up she didn’t hesitate.
As the words fell, she wrote laboriously in the air: Zhao Fusheng.
The instant the three characters “Zhao Fusheng” were written, they turned into a red light that sank into the figurine’s body.
The blood-red figurine gripped in her hand erupted with a malignant ghost’s terrible baleful aura, and the blood light blazed.
At the same time, her face and body itched unbearably.
Under the ghost’s power she was also uncommonly clear-headed, so as skin tore off she felt bone-deep pain.
The terrifying power of the rule tore at her body, and the fallen skin was absorbed by the figurine.
As she wrote the name, the complete figurine finally formed, taking the invisible malignant ghost within it.
At the edge of death, the Investiture of the Gods in her sea of consciousness prompted:
Detected the presence of a substitute paper figurine. Take it into Hell?
Yes!
With her last strands of will, she gripped the human-skin quilt wrapped around her with her bloody, ruined hand: Hell was activated.
Shadows flowed in like water, covering Zhao Fusheng’s hand.
The blood-red-glowing substitute figurine in her palm was silently swallowed by the shadows.
The malignant ghost’s killing rule stopped abruptly.
All illusion was shattered; the disordered perception recovered.
The instant the substitute figurine was sealed by Hell, Zhao Fusheng felt sharp pain over her whole body.
Blood spurted from her body, and the human-skin quilt wrapped around her was sucked tight and clung firmly to her body.
She was glad she’d been mentally prepared.
The malignant ghost’s real killing method was to flay skin and strip bone. While her perception was disturbed, she had thought she was merely itching, but the dead skin she scratched off had in fact been skin flayed from her by the ghost.
At first she hadn’t realized this, but later, as she grew weaker and her whole body hurt, she realized something was wrong.
People at the mercy of the malignant ghost’s rule have their true sensations stripped away, and only at the instant of death do they feel the surprise and helplessness.
Zhang Chuanshi and the others had also been shedding skin and itching earlier without feeling any pain.
Only Zhao Fusheng, because she controlled a malignant ghost and carried the Soul-Life Register, though her perception was disordered, retained some sensation, and the real pain and weakness warned her the situation was critical, preparing her for the outcome.
And now in Wu Liren’s mansion, as soon as the malignant ghost was sealed and subdued, its influence vanished at once.
In the courtyard Wu Datong’s coughing stopped abruptly, and the hand Wu Liren had stretched out to support him turned to gray mist.
In Goutou Village, familiar faces, one after another, blew away into ash.
Wu Shaochun screamed.
Without the ghost’s power sustaining him, more than half of the skin on his body was stripped away, exposing the bloody muscle inside.
Blood stuck to his clothes, and he let out a heart-rending scream.
“Mother!”
He instinctively called for his mother, but when he turned his head he saw his mother, who had been sitting cross-legged beside him with a pale face, apparently turn to gray mist in an instant and scatter.
The disturbed memory returned.
He remembered that last night at Wu Liyou’s house, his mother had taken up a cleaver to kill a chicken and had been killed by the ghost in an instant, without a trace.
“Aaaaah!” The shrill scream became the agonized cry of a son who’d lost his mother.
Wu Liyou remembered his father’s and brother’s deaths, but the pain in his heart was soon covered by the greater pain of his body.
...
Screams rose and fell.
At that moment everyone woke into their nightmare. No, Zhao Fusheng couldn’t even say whether, for these villagers, the illusion under the ghost’s sway had been the nightmare, or whether the waking human world was more painful.
The illusion dispersed, and the ghost fog gradually faded.
The real condition of Wu Liren’s mansion appeared before them.
All around were broken courtyards overgrown with weeds.
Around the wooden pillars, from neglect, unidentified mushrooms had sprung up.
Countless crisscrossed bones lay scattered in the weeds. The various objects that the villagers had scrambled to carry off still bore blackened dried blood, and the Wu mansion was splashed all over with brown bloodstains. Bleached white bones lay in disarray, and countless torn pieces of human skin, tangled with filthy hair, hung from the eaves and fences.
Smeared blood was all around. The whole courtyard was like hell on earth.
Zhang Chuanshi was screaming too.
A moment earlier he had been diligently carrying out Zhao Fusheng’s orders, counting villagers, and the next moment he suddenly woke up.
The old man remembered the purpose of coming to Goutou Village, remembered Wu Dajing’s death, and remembered all the encounters with ghosts the night before.
After losing his memory he had eaten at the same table as ghosts and lived under the same roof as a crowd of ghosts...
The terror in his heart arrived belatedly, and he let out a piercing scream, and at the same time large pieces of skin vanished from his back, abdomen, arms and cheeks, and blood poured.
“My lord, help, help!” Zhang Chuanshi screamed.
But Zhao Fusheng had no time for him just then.
The instant the blood-red substitute figurine was taken by Hell, the prompts of the Investiture of the Gods came one after another:
Successfully sealed the Invisible Ghost; obtained one Baleful-tier substitute paper figurine.
(Note: this paper figurine shares the host’s name, surname, blood, and flesh.)
Successfully resolved the Malignant Ghost killings in Goutou Village, preventing a great ghost from advancing in rank and nipping a future Tribulation-tier ghost calamity in the bud.
Successfully saved the living beings of Goutou Village; merit +1000.
Hell is empty; the evil ghosts walk the human world.
Successfully subdued the first Malignant Ghost with Hell; reward: 10 points of merit.
Detected that the host is near death; consuming 10 points of merit to restore.
The Malignant Ghost the host controls shows signs of reviving.
The dismembered ghost arm shows signs of reviving.
Consuming 20 points of merit to clear it.
...
The prompts of the Investiture of the Gods kept coming.
With each prompt, the human-skin quilt wrapped around Zhao Fusheng strangely fused with her flesh, then turned into her outer layer of skin, adhering closely to her, and her injuries healed perfectly in an instant.
The pain vanished, and her mind grew clear within moments.
The ghost arm, which had clung to her after losing the substitute figurine, reluctantly let go under the power of merit, but before the human-skin quilt could fuse with her it stubbornly tore off a piece of skin and held it firmly in its hand.
Then the ghost arm was suppressed and shriveled again into a withered bone arm and fell into her palm.
The malignant ghost about to revive silently turned into a shadow and merged again beneath her feet, quietly waiting for the next chance to come.
