IBGSW Chapter 88
Riding Together by Fate
A carriage from the Demon-Suppression Bureau?
That was the thought that surfaced in Zhao Fusheng’s mind.
But she wasn’t glad at the carriage’s arrival. Tonight the sky had darkened very fast, and she’d noticed that at some point mist had appeared all around.
There were no other pedestrians on the road. She looked back and could hardly make out Meng Po’s stall, though the lights of the Confucian Temple in the distance were still visible, which eased the tension in her nerves a little.
Though ghost fog had appeared in Wan’an County and ghost cases were frequent, malignant ghosts couldn’t just appear out of nowhere.
And she hadn’t heard of anyone reporting a case. She couldn’t possibly be so unlucky as to run into a ghost, could she?
She comforted herself so, and before long the hoofbeats grew louder. Looking into the distance, she saw a carriage slowly approaching under the bluish mist.
It was coming against the light, and she couldn’t see the carriage clearly, but she could tell it was not the bureau’s.
The bureau had only just been revived and its trappings were not yet restored to former standards.
The carriage Zhao Fusheng rode was rather plain and could carry at most two or three people. And she had ridden it only that morning, and was quite sure it had no bell hung at the front.
The carriage slowly approaching in the distance couldn’t be seen clearly because of the distance, but she was certain a bell hung at its front, because she could already hear a crisp ding-ling-ling.
Clip-clop, clip-clop.
Hoofbeats rang without cease, the wheels clanked as they rolled, and the carriage advanced steadily, soon nearing Zhao Fusheng.
Besides the wheels on the ground and the hooves, Zhao Fusheng faintly heard lively talking from inside the carriage.
“...Whew.”
She let out a breath of relief at once.
If someone was talking, that was good. As long as it was people and not ghosts, she feared nothing in Wan’an County.
When the carriage drew near, Zhao Fusheng saw the horse that pulled it.
It was a magnificent animal, much sturdier than ordinary horses.
Its whole body was jet black, without a single stray hair.
Its mane flew behind its neck, and in the hazy night fog, it seemed to be wrapped in an unnerving aura of uncanniness.
But what surprised Zhao Fusheng most wasn’t the extraordinary black steed. It was that no one was driving the carriage.
Nobody sat at the front. It seemed the horse was just pulling the carriage along at random.
The cabin was large, made from some unknown wood and painted black, so up close it looked as if the horse were pulling a small mobile house.
A fist-sized gold bell hung from the carriage body, and as the horse neared Zhao Fusheng’s side it slowly stopped, and the bell rang twice and fell quiet.
A look of amusement came over her face.
“A driverless carriage?”
She’d heard people talking inside earlier, and now as the carriage stopped, all the sound vanished.
Everything was eerily still.
Zhao Fusheng stepped up beside the carriage. The planks gave off a strange fragrance. She sniffed twice; she had never smelled this scent before.
Her gaze fell on the gold bell, and she reached out to touch it. “Is this real gold or fake?”
A carriage traveling at midnight without a driver, yet openly hanging a bell the size of a fist, apparently gold, at its front was strange from any angle.
Just as her hand was about to touch the bell, the carriage door was suddenly thrown open and someone leaned out half a head. “Hey, in the middle of the night, why aren’t you going home? What are you doing wandering the streets?1”
Seeing someone come out, the hairs on her body stood on end.
By rights, a malignant ghost can’t speak or communicate, acting purely on instinct, so if someone could talk with her, the carriage wasn’t uncanny.
But being looked at by this person only made her more uneasy.
She wasn’t a rookie fresh from rebirth.
As Fan Bisi said, counting the suppression of the Zhao couple, she’d already been through three ghost cases, and she had fairly rich experience dealing with malignant ghosts.
Yet facing this carriage she felt anxious, even more tense than in Goutou Village.
“I came out to visit a friend and arranged for my family to pick me up at dusk. Maybe something delayed them. They still haven’t come,” Zhao Fusheng answered.
The person leaning out showed only a pair of eyes. Hearing this, he seemed to smile.
She couldn’t see his face, but the corners of his eyes crinkled into fish-tail lines. “Get in. The carriage will take you home.”
Hearing this, Zhao Fusheng thought: the person in the carriage hadn’t even asked her identity and yet said he’d take her home. Could it be that he’d recognized her and knew she was the new chief commanding officer of the bureau?
Her mind was busy, but she also felt something uncanny about a carriage suddenly appearing at night.
In her work of dealing with ghosts, Zhao Fusheng had become extraordinarily superstitious.
She promptly obeyed her inner guidance and decided to keep her distance from trouble.
So she shook her head and refused. “Sure.”
The word was out of her mouth before she realized and was stunned.
She had thought the carriage was suspicious, with no driver and a hanging gold bell, uncanny at every point, and on principle of avoiding trouble she meant to turn down this person’s invitation.
But when she opened her mouth, not only did she not refuse, her body instinctively went against her reason and accepted.
The person’s eyes narrowed again, as if smiling. “Hurry and get in. We’ve been waiting for you for a long time.”
Zhao Fusheng already felt resistance, but she nodded still. “Then I’ll trouble you.”
“No trouble. This carriage always runs like this.”
With that, though no one pushed the door, the two rear doors of the carriage suddenly swung open with a clang.
The Confucian temple’s lights had dimmed now, and the carriage was pitch black inside and hard to see.
Zhao Fusheng’s heart pounded, and her body, as if pulled by some attraction, slowly stepped onto the carriage.
As soon as she entered, she seemed to feel someone to one side.
Before she’d sat down she heard the person who’d spoken earlier say, “Sit tight. The carriage is about to start.”
As his words fell, the gold bell dinged, the horse’s hooves rang out again, and the carriage lurched heavily. Zhao Fusheng couldn’t keep her footing and dropped onto the bench.
As she sat, a heavy bang of the carriage door closing sounded at her ear.
The door brought a cold wind into the carriage.
As soon as the door shut, the figure that had been behind it poked out his head.
In the sound of puffing breath, a flame flared.
With the light, Zhao Fusheng saw the whole inside of the carriage at once.
She first looked at the person holding the fire.
He’d been standing behind the door, and with the door open, its wide door panel had blocked him, so she hadn’t been able to see his face at first.
Now, with light, she saw him immediately.
He had a strongly angular face, thick brows and large eyes, and wore a green robe with a gold belt at the waist and a jade-green buckle on the belt.
He held a fire-starter and smiled at Zhao Fusheng. “Did I startle you?”
“...” Zhao Fusheng hesitated, then smiled too. “No.”
She turned and looked around the carriage.
Across from the door, left and right, were two benches about ten feet long, almost entirely occupied now by people, men and women, old and young, a dozen at least squeezed in.
“So many people?”
Earlier, from far away, Zhao Fusheng had heard laughter and chatter from inside and guessed there were people, but hadn’t expected so many.
“Yes.”
Her words seemed to suddenly reactivate the congealed atmosphere in the carriage.
A woman seated diagonally across from her blinked, and her expression came alive. “Better to come at the right time than early. We were just talking.”
“What were you talking about?”
Zhao Fusheng asked curiously.
She’d already guessed something was wrong with this carriage.
But the sense was hazy. She hadn’t sensed any ghost aura, and most importantly, if she were in danger, the malignant ghost she controlled should have shown signs of reviving.
After all, she and her ghost had already made two deals, and if she used its power once more, it would reap her life. There was no reason it would let this duck at its mouth fly away and let her die at another ghost’s hands.
Having reasoned this through, Zhao Fusheng felt somewhat reassured.
“We were discussing Squire Liu’s birthday2,” said another person next to the woman.
Zhao Fusheng’s gaze fell on him. He looked about forty, wearing a blue short jacket and gray patched hemp trousers, rolled up above the ankles, bare muddy feet.
At this point she found it strange again.
Zhao Fusheng’s gaze swept over the dozen people in the carriage one by one, and she noticed that they dressed differently.
The big man who’d invited her in was in a green robe. The light in the carriage wasn’t bright, so she couldn’t judge the quality of the cloth, but his clothes weren’t patched, and the gold-threaded belt at his waist was clearly no ordinary thing.
The jade pendant in its middle was especially valuable.
Besides him, a man obviously from a wealthy or noble background, the carriage also held barefoot men in ragged clothes, peasant women in shabby cloth, and a delicately dressed girl.
Her gaze fell on one girl, young, wearing a thick fur-trimmed cloak.
A slender jade-white hand stuck out from the cloak’s edge, half-holding the fur trim to cover her face.
As if sensing Zhao Fusheng’s gaze, she shyly hid a pair of pearl-studded shoes inside her wide cloak.
“How strange,” Zhao Fusheng shook her head.
“What’s strange?”
The big man holding the fire-starter asked with a smile.
As he spoke, he said to the person next to the bench, “Move over a bit.”
At his words the person looked frightened and hurriedly tried to squeeze to the other side.
The carriage had two rows of seats, all full. Where could there be any room?
When he squeezed in to sit, the others had to shift for him, and as each shifted, one person would have to stand.
Zhao Fusheng watched coldly. Not one of them complained, and everyone slid forward a space. Before long the carriage door opened with a bang.
Night wind blew in.
The flame of the fire-starter in the green-robed man’s hand was suppressed by the wind.
The carriage dimmed, but a moment later the door closed again and the wind blowing in vanished.
The fire rekindled, and when Zhao Fusheng looked at the opposite bench again, she saw that the people had indeed made a space for the big man and let him sit smoothly.
What surprised her was that after all this shuffling, no one in the carriage was standing.
Before, everyone had sat crowded together with just the right amount of room.
Now with one more person seated, everyone was still crowded, with exactly the right number of places, neither more nor less.
“...”
She grew even surer that she’d really run into something bad, something formidable.
But there were still living people in the carriage, so it was probably not simply a ghost case. Perhaps Wan’an County had another ghost-controller besides Paperman Zhang and herself.
The first person she thought of was Deputy Commander Zheng of Baozhi County, and she mused darkly: could it be that the news of her repeatedly burying ghosts in Baozhi County and digging out malevolent objects had spread and really been too bullying, so Deputy Commander Zheng, unable to bear it any longer, had decided to teach her a lesson?
Unfortunately she hadn’t asked Fan Bisi and the others earlier what ghost Deputy Commander Zheng controlled and what its rule was. Knowing yourself and your enemy brings victory in every battle.3
She was regretting this when the big man, having sat, asked her with a smile, fire-starter in hand, “By the way, you haven’t answered. What’s strange?”
Since she was here, she might as well accept it.
She had boarded the carriage whether she wanted to or not, and Zhao Fusheng pressed down her doubts, and her curiosity rose.
“I see you’re all of different standing, dressed differently too,” she said bluntly. “You don’t look like you’re traveling together, so how did you end up in one carriage?”
Among these people were peddlers and porters, merchants and gentry daughters, and also a green-robed big man with an imposing air who seemed to be the leader. It made Zhao Fusheng wonder what this carriage’s origin was that it had gathered such a mix of people.
No driver, a gold bell hanging in front, and a horse that looked both magnificent and uncanny...
A carriage traveling at midnight, gathering people of all kinds. Zhao Fusheng drew a breath and thought Wan’an County’s waters were deep indeed.
“Sharing a carriage is a fate,” said the green-robed man with a smile.
“Fate?” Zhao Fusheng raised an eyebrow and smiled too. “Then it seems this carriage of yours came here specifically for me.”
The man nodded. “It did come to fetch you.”
He hadn’t concealed his intention at all, and her heart sank. “Did Deputy Commander Zheng send you?”
“Deputy Commander Zheng?” For the first time a look of puzzlement appeared on the green-robed man’s face, and he turned to an old man beside him. “Who is that?”
The old man he asked looked about seventy, with sparse hair, a sweat cloth wrapped around his dark, shining forehead.
Asked by the green-robed man, he looked bewildered too and scratched his head. “I don’t know either...”
“Not sent by Deputy Commander Zheng? Then who are you?” Seeing they didn’t look like they were lying, Zhao Fusheng grew suspicious again.
“I’m, I’m from Zhoukou Village, surnamed Yu...”
Zhao Fusheng’s gaze fell on the old woman next to him, who answered cheerfully too. “I’m from Xinghua Town, my husband’s family is Lin.”
She and the old man sat side by side, yet they weren’t from the same village and didn’t seem acquainted. It was really odd.
