Chapter 252
Chapter 252
When I read that the Thunder Ancestor Temple had been destroyed, an inexplicable sadness welled up inside me.
Whether the story about the temple protecting the local people during the war was true or not, it had at least suppressed the wronged spirits of Luo Mansion and kept the area safe.
The local people had once treated the Thunder Ancestor Temple with the utmost respect.
Yet their descendants dismissed Thunder Ancestor as superstition. Not only did they demolish his temple, they even smashed his statue.
The spirits had already been suppressed for several decades. Another twenty or thirty years, and they would have returned to the Underworld.
But now the Thunder Ancestor Temple was gone. There was no way those spirits could remain suppressed.
“How could they be so stupid? They just smashed it because they felt like it.”
I sighed. “If they didn’t want to worship him, they could simply have stopped. Why did they have to destroy the place?”
Seventh Master shook his head. “No one could stand against the tide of that era. If the people who demolished the Thunder Ancestor Temple hadn’t done it, they probably wouldn’t have had an easy time of things themselves.”
The file said that for many years after the Thunder Ancestor Temple was demolished, nothing strange happened in the area.
That puzzled me. I asked Seventh Master, “Why didn’t anything strange happen after the temple was destroyed?”
Seventh Master said, “For one thing, the temple had already suppressed those wronged spirits for several decades. Even after it collapsed, they wouldn’t immediately be able to emerge and cause trouble. For another, it was because of that ‘tide of the era.’ The people back then were united, and their convictions were strong.”
“When one person has conviction, it can be broken. When a group of people share that conviction, it can still be broken. But when everyone believes, even Evil Spirits are powerless against them.”
“You weren’t born in that era, so you probably can’t understand how united those people were. But once society settled down, that unity faded.”
The file went on to say that nothing happened in the area for many years after the temple was demolished. Over the last decade or so, however, strange incidents had finally begun to occur around the former site of the Thunder Ancestor Temple, which was also the original site of Luo Mansion.
That area was precisely the plot of land where Boss Lin had begun construction.
At first, the incidents were not especially obvious. Local residents would occasionally suffer sudden bouts of hysteria. Western medicine had little effect, while traditional Chinese medicine could treat the symptoms effectively.
At first, the hysteria affected individuals. Later, it began striking groups, with different symptoms from person to person.
As the problem worsened, the area also began producing an unusually high number of people with mental illness or depression. Every one of those patients was male.
Eventually, an old practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine noticed something unusual. He felt that their ailments were not so simple and suspected the patients were being influenced by some kind of field. When he consulted his books and realized what sort of field it was, he was terrified.
He did not dare say it openly, since that would be condemned as promoting feudal superstition. All he could do was advise the patients’ families to invite an expert to examine the local Feng Shui.
Ironically, the very people who had smashed the statue of Thunder Ancestor eventually followed the old doctor’s advice and invited an expert.
That expert happened to be traveling through the area. He had not been the villagers’ first choice. In fact, they had already invited several others, but none of them had been capable of solving the villagers’ problem. Only then had those men recommended the traveling expert.
His name was Song Qingshan. The moment he arrived, he saw that countless wronged spirits had gathered there, far more than in the past. After asking around, he learned what had happened at Luo Mansion and that the Thunder Ancestor Temple had been destroyed.
When Daoist Song learned the truth, he was helpless as well. He knew perfectly well that the villagers had brought this upon themselves by tearing down their own guardian deity.
But he could not bear to let the villagers suffer at the hands of the wronged spirits, so he came up with another solution for them.
Daoist Song was a true expert in his own right. He established an Array in the village using two perfectly ordinary objects: a pair of mirrors.
But these two mirrors differed from ordinary ones. Their shape resembled Bagua Mirrors, yet they were not. The back of a Bagua Mirror bore the eight trigrams. The backs of the mirrors Daoist Song used for his Array each bore only one: the Qian Hexagram on one mirror and Kun on the other.
With the two mirrors facing each other as Qian and Kun, one hung at the head of the village and the other at its far end, while the villagers lived between them, forming the Three Powers of Heaven, Humanity, and Earth.
The Array was called the Three Powers Formation. Ordinarily, it would have been enough to suppress wronged spirits, but it could not suppress so many. The Array alone was still not enough to solve the villagers’ problem.
So what could they do?
Daoist Song told the villagers that they had shown disrespect to Thunder Ancestor by demolishing his temple and smashing his statue. They had offended a deity, but a deity would hardly stoop to quarreling with mortals.
Rebuilding the Thunder Ancestor Temple was obviously impractical. He advised the villagers to hang an image of Thunder Ancestor over each home’s front door, or simply post one inside the house, then offer three sticks of incense to it every day and pray for Thunder Ancestor to once again send a portion of his divine presence to suppress the wronged spirits.
As long as their hearts were sincere, Thunder Ancestor would surely continue to protect them.
And so, in an even greater twist of irony, the very people who had once smashed Thunder Ancestor’s statue began worshipping him again.
They followed Daoist Song’s instructions because they had no choice but to believe him.
From that day on, no one suffered another bout of hysteria. Peace returned to the area and lasted until this year.
This year, a developer set his sights on the land for some sort of project and began negotiating relocation compensation with the local residents.
The residents were actually desperate to move away. As long as the price was right, they would have had no objections.
But the two sides failed to reach an agreement over compensation. If the payout was not enough for these people to buy new homes in the city, why would they agree to move?
The developer carried on the tradition of his predecessors and resorted to forced demolitions and harassment.
Some residents would be sleeping soundly in the middle of the night when someone splashed excrement over their doors, smashed those doors, or broke their windows.
Everyone panicked. Most of the residents had hung images of Thunder Ancestor over their doors, and spiritually potent objects could not be allowed to come into contact with filth. Once the developer started doing this, they were terrified.
Fortunately, Boss Lin heard what was happening. He used his connections to have the project halted, then spent money to take it over himself.
For one thing, tourism in the area was genuinely expanding, and a resort was bound to turn a good profit in the future. For another, Boss Lin was kindhearted by nature. He planned to compensate every resident fairly and in full. He could always earn the money back later, while the residents could make new homes in the city. Everyone would win. What reason was there not to do it?
But human nature can be more treacherous than any mountain or river. Boss Lin saved these residents from forced demolition and paid them fair compensation. And what did they do? Afraid that he would abandon the development if he learned the land’s history, not a single one of them told him what had happened there.
One act of kindness was all it took for Boss Lin to find himself holding this white-hot burden.