Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Seeing that the sun was about to set, I did as my dad had taught me: changed into the burial clothes and began preparing for lying in yin.

I’d only seen my dad do this kind of work a few times when I was little.

For one thing, I didn’t really believe in it. I always felt like he was putting on a mystical act to scam people, and deep down, I thought it was embarrassing.

For another, onlookers weren’t allowed to say a single word. The whole process was dull and boring, and with my mischievous nature, I could never sit still for it.

But he had drawn every step in a book and forced me to read it every week. By now, I knew it all by heart, forward and backward.

Enter the grave at the hour of Hai. First, scatter a ring of glutinous rice mixed with incense ash around the grave pit. My dad said even a raised hand won’t strike a smiling face-this was a meeting gift for the seniors below, the same idea as offering someone a cigarette.

Light the incense at the hour of Zi.

When the moon rose directly overhead, I was to stick the rhinoceros horn incense into the four corners of the grave pit. Once lit, the incense burned with a bluish-gray glow, and its smoke gathered into thin threads that did not disperse, rising straight upward.

Only after the incense was lit did the true lying in yin begin.

Inside the rectangular pit, as deep as a person’s height, seven layers of yellow paper had been laid at the bottom. I took off my shoes, jumped down, and lay flat at the bottom of the pit.

It was so cold.

It was late February, when the lingering chill of early spring still bit to the bone. And this place was at the bottom of a lakebed. Water seeped faintly up from underground, and before long, it had soaked through those thin sheets of yellow joss paper.

The flimsy hemp clothes did almost nothing. I felt like I was lying on a sponge drenched in ice water, the cold pouring in through every pore.

My teeth chattered as I stared up at the night sky, cut into a small rectangle above me, and my nose stung despite myself.

I used to envy my dad.

I always thought his work was easy. Lie in a dirt pit, sleep for three days, and he could make ten or twenty thousand yuan-more than a college graduate earned in over a month.

He was always telling me to study hard, but I thought studying was useless. What kind of studying could earn as much as he did?

He joked that I should inherit his trade, but I refused.

I said it was all a fake spiritual act to trick people, and I wouldn’t do that kind of thing.

Only now did I realize that he hadn’t been tricking anyone. And doing this work was nowhere near as easy as I’d imagined.

My dad must have suffered a lot. Now he had ended up neither human nor ghost, covered in corpse spots, and I didn’t even know if he would survive.

A sour ache filled my chest, and before I knew it, I began to sob softly.

After two sobs, I quickly clapped a hand over my mouth.

Master Mo was still watching from up above. He probably thought I was scared, didn’t he?

I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t disgrace my dad.

I pressed my lips together, took deep breaths, and did my best to calm myself down.

But the crying did not stop. Instead, it grew louder and louder.

“Wuwu-wuwu-”

The voice was thin and high-pitched. It sounded like a little girl’s.

I wasn’t crying. So who was making that sound?