Chapter 106

Chapter 106

Clop-clop-clop! Clop-clop-clop!

The paper horses raced along the road in the dead of night. Although their hooves were made of paper, each impact with the ground produced a crisp, solid sound.

I could not stop marveling at them.

Before long, Old Cao and I arrived outside the gate to Li Miao’s courtyard.

We dismounted.

“Woof! Woof! Woof!”

A dog barked inside the courtyard.

I immediately leaned over the gate and called with a smile, “Heizi, it’s me. Calm down.”

A moment later, a massive dog’s head appeared behind the gate.

Heizi recognized me. Its fierce expression turned adorably foolish, and its tail began wagging furiously.

Creak.

The door opened, and Li Miao emerged.

I waved at once. “Brother Li, Old Cao and I need to speak with you about something urgent.”

Li Miao called, “Heizi, open the gate.”

Like a person, the large black dog pushed the wooden bar with one paw, and the gate swung open.

I had witnessed Heizi’s intelligence before, but Old Cao clicked his tongue in amazement.

“Little Brother Li, that big black dog of yours is clever.”

Li Miao came over and waved modestly. “You flatter it, Coffin-Bearer Cao. What urgent matter brings you here so late?”

Old Cao recounted the story I had heard from the Fubei County Gazetteer.

Li Miao was also deeply shocked. He agreed that we should visit Xiaowan Village immediately and warn the Xiao family.

Xiao Mao, his wife, and their relatives were unlikely to discuss Xiao Sheng or tell him that he was dead, but we still needed to take precautions. We could not treat the danger lightly.

“But Xiaowan Village is so far away. How do we get there at this hour?”

Li Miao had also recognized the transportation problem.

Old Cao and I exchanged a smile, then pointed outside the courtyard.

Li Miao stuck his head out to look.

Two paper horses stood perfectly still beyond the gate, their cinnabar-painted eyes gleaming red in the darkness.

Understanding dawned on him immediately.

“A funerary-paper artisan’s paper-crafting art? Objects made from spirit paper can gain miraculous abilities.”

Li Miao sighed admiringly. “I’ve long heard that in addition to mastering coffin bearing, Coffin-Bearer Cao possesses hidden spirit-paper arts of extraordinary power. Today I finally get to see them.”

Naturally, Old Cao was delighted by the praise. He smiled. “Then let’s go. Xiao Wu and I will share one horse. Little Brother Li, you can take the other.”

Although I had developed earlier than other boys my age, I was still young. Old Cao was sturdy but elderly. Li Miao, meanwhile, was in his prime, and corpse retrieval demanded the same strong physique as coffin bearing.

One look at Li Miao’s heavily muscled body was enough to know that he was not light. He needed a paper horse to himself.

“Woof! Woof, woof!”

Heizi barked as it pawed at my trouser leg and rubbed its head against me.

I was touched.

Rubbing its head, I said, “Heizi, you don’t want me to leave? Your master and I have important business. I’ll play with you when I have time.”

Li Miao laughed and explained, “Young Brother Wu, I think you’ve misunderstood. This foolish dog doesn’t miss you. It remembers the promise you made last time.”

A promise?

What promise?

I was baffled.

Li Miao said, “Didn’t you tell Heizi that the next time you visited, you’d bring all kinds of delicious meat for it? This foolish dog has an excellent memory and hasn’t forgotten. Now that you’re here, it’s asking you for its meat.”

I was speechless.

Good grief!

I had completely forgotten.

If I had come specifically to visit Li Miao or play with Heizi, I might have remembered. But this was an unexpected emergency in the middle of the night.

It had truly slipped my mind.

And even if I had remembered, where could I buy meat for Heizi at this hour?

I could only apologize awkwardly.

“Heizi, I’m terribly sorry. I really did forget this time because we left in such a hurry. Next time. I promise I’ll remember next time!”

“Woof… woof, woof.”

Heizi barked twice in disappointment and flicked its tail. It seemed to accept my excuse with great reluctance.

But its bright eyes remained fixed on me as if to say: You had better remember next time!

Old Cao, Li Miao, and I mounted the paper horses. Old Cao and I shared one, while Li Miao rode the other.

Old Cao activated his art again, and the two horses raced toward Xiaowan Village with a rapid clatter of hooves…

When we reached the Xiao family home, Xiao Mao and his wife were naturally asleep.

Just as naturally, we woke them.

We gravely told them that if anyone exposed a living corpse as already dead, it would instantly go berserk and transform into a terrifying corpse-fiend.

It would no longer recognize even its closest kin and would kill any living thing it saw!
Neither the couple nor any other member of the Xiao family could ever mention it. Better yet, none of them should visit Xiao Sheng at all.

The warning was difficult for Xiao Mao and his wife to accept, but they nodded and promised to remember it.

Xiao Mao in particular said that no relative other than himself would be allowed to visit anymore.

At the end, he said sadly that he knew his child was already dead. He merely hoped Xiao Sheng’s soul could leave the mortal world whole, enter the Netherworld, and reincarnate.

That was our hope as well. It was why we had left Xiao Sheng intact instead of destroying him.

As for Zhou Mu from the Fubei County Gazetteer, his fate had been far more tragic. His soul had probably scattered into nothingness.

Honestly, once someone died and their body became a corpse-fiend, no one but their family had any obligation to go to tremendous lengths to help them.

Xiao Mao and his wife had paid a large sum, and we also pitied Xiao Sheng because he was a child, so we chose to help.

In Zhou Mu’s situation, who could spare the effort to preserve his soul, much less endure countless hardships to send it whole into the Netherworld?

Coroner Huang’s actions in the Fubei County Gazetteer were therefore perfectly understandable and deserved no condemnation.

Zhou Mu had simply been unlucky, while Xiao Sheng was fortunate…

After warning Xiao Mao and his wife, we reinforced the formation sealing Xiao Sheng in the cellar.

Only then did we feel our work was nearly complete.

Li Miao asked, “Young Brother Wu, since your classmate has access to the Fubei County Gazetteer, could he bring it out for us to read?”

Old Cao agreed. “Little Brother Li makes a good point. That gazetteer might contain other similar records or important information. We really should examine it carefully ourselves.”

I shook my head.

“Definitely not! It belongs to the county archives. Secretly borrowing it for private use would be far too risky. But we could find a way to make a photocopy. If we got copies, each of us could even have one and read it whenever we liked.”

Photocopiers were rare in those days.

Old Cao and Li Miao had never heard of them. I knew only because the teachers’ office at school had one.

After I explained, the two men marveled at modern science and technology and how convenient they made so many things.

“But I’ll still have to ask my classmate about the details. Even to photocopy the Fubei County Gazetteer, someone at the archives has to retrieve the original.”

“Wait!”

I suddenly slapped my forehead as something occurred to me.

“Why ask a middle school student to handle this? Old Cao, Brother Li, you’ve worked with the dead around Lianghe Town for years. Surely some important people owe you favors. Isn’t it time for them to repay one?”

Li Miao smiled.

“Young Brother Wu has a point. People may dislike those in our profession most of the time, but the moment trouble strikes, they come begging us for help. Plenty of people owe me favors. The question is whether they’ll honor them.”

If Li Miao held a long ledger of favors, Old Cao could only have more.

The only question was whom we should ask to repay one this time.

Li Miao and I both looked at Old Cao.

After thinking, he said, “We’ll ask Boss Duan. We helped him only recently, so his gratitude should still be fresh. Besides, his daughter’s situation was extremely serious. Without our help, the consequences might have been disastrous.”

That made sense!

I nodded.

Everyone in our line of work belonged to the same general circle, so Li Miao had heard something about the Duan family’s earlier trouble. When we gave him the details, he exclaimed repeatedly.

“Fortunately, Coffin-Bearer Cao’s methods were formidable and Young Brother Wu remained calm. Otherwise, once Miss Duan developed a taste for killing, she might truly have transformed into a corpse fiend on the spot. A mother-and-child fiend–how powerful would that have been? I don’t dare imagine it.”

During his years of corpse retrieval along the Chuan River near Lianghe Town, Li Miao had recovered several pregnant women’s bodies.

Most caused little trouble. At worst, some lingering resentment remained. He had never truly encountered a case in which both mother and child transformed into fiends.

If he ever did, he would certainly be finished on his own…

After handling everything at the Xiao home, we mounted Old Cao’s paper horses once more and galloped all the way back to Lianghe Town.

We dropped Li Miao off at home, then returned to the coffin shop. By then, it was already one thirty in the morning.

I had to admit, people in our line of work truly had an affinity with the night.

Without sleep cultivation, a student like me who still had to rise early for school would probably die from exhaustion within days!

Wang Hu had long since escorted Wang Dachun home and returned to the shop.

When he saw Old Cao and me, he hurried eagerly to welcome us.

“Boss, Young Mr. Wu, you’re back? I made a late-night meal for you. Would you like some?”
“Oh?”

I was surprised. “Uncle Hu, you can cook?”

Wang Hu looked slightly embarrassed. “I saw a few duck eggs, a piece of cured pork, and some dried noodles in the kitchen, so I made duck-egg and cured-pork noodles. I raised my daughter alone, so naturally I had to know how to cook.”

His expression dimmed as he spoke.

His daughter would forever remain the great pain and longing in his heart.

Afraid he would grow upset, I quickly changed the subject with a grin.

“I love duck eggs, cured pork, and noodles. Put all three together, and they’re perfect! Come on, Old Cao. Let’s try Uncle Hu’s cooking.”

“Sounds good! If you’re a good cook, perhaps I’ll have to give you a raise.”

Old Cao smiled and nodded, adding a joke of his own.

At the same time, he raised the index and middle fingers of his left hand and formed a seal. Then he gently patted each paper horse’s back with his right palm.

The horses clattered up the stairs on their own, presumably returning to the empty corridor beside my room.

Wang Hu entered the kitchen and emerged carrying two bowls of noodles.

An ordinary person would have seen two bowls floating through the air on their own and probably been terrified.

Old Cao and I truly were hungry, so we began devouring the noodles.

The cured meat came from a free-range pig, the kind slowly raised in a rural pen. The meat was rich with glistening fat, firm and pleasantly springy, and possessed a distinctive fragrance that pork from an urban commercial farm could never match.

The eggs also came from free-range ducks that had grown up eating snails and duckweed in the rice paddies. They had a distinctive aroma of their own and tasted even better than meat!

Combined with the smooth, pleasantly chewy noodles, the flavors left Old Cao and me too busy eating to speak.

Slurp! Slurp!

We demolished both enormous bowls of duck-egg and cured-pork noodles like a whirlwind.

Old Cao set down his bowl, wiped his mouth, and looked at Wang Hu with shining eyes.

“I never expected you to be such a good cook!”

I nodded as I wiped my own mouth. “Exactly! This was nearly as good as what many restaurants serve. Only a tiny bit worse than my mother’s cooking.”

Wang Hu smiled awkwardly and scratched his head. “Boss Cao and Young Mr. Wu are exaggerating. It wasn’t that good. My daughter used to complain about my cooking all the time and always wanted restaurant food.”

The man could hardly speak three sentences without mentioning his daughter.

Old Cao thought for a moment, then said, “All right, Little Wang. From now on, you’ll be responsible for the coffin shop’s meals every day.”

“No problem, Boss!”

Old Cao laughed. “Don’t answer so quickly. I wasn’t finished.”

Wang Hu immediately looked embarrassed.

“We never discussed this before, so cooking counts as extra work. Each day, I’ll light a stick of incense for you and infuse it with a wisp of my qi. You can consume the smoke. It won’t be much, but absorbing it over time will stabilize your spirit body and gradually free you from your connection to the local ley lines, allowing you to travel farther.”

Delight immediately spread across Wang Hu’s pale face.

He repeatedly bowed to Old Cao in gratitude.

“Thank you, Boss. Thank you… I’ll cook well and work hard.”

It was a mutually beneficial arrangement.

I knew Old Cao had not made it simply to satisfy his appetite. Wang Hu had spent several days in the shop, and after observing and testing him, Old Cao and I had confirmed that he truly was a good ghost.

In that case, there was no harm in helping him a little.

I had never witnessed anyone help a ghost cultivate. Observing a spirit’s growth at close range would also deepen my own understanding.

After eating the duck-egg and cured-pork noodles Wang Hu prepared, Old Cao and I went to sleep.

I attended school normally the next morning.

Old Cao planned to rise around noon and visit Boss Duan at the Duan Family Manor north of town. He would ask Boss Duan to use his connections to arrange for the Fubei County Gazetteer to be photocopied at the county archives…

As the richest man in Lianghe Town, Boss Duan should have no trouble finding the right connections.

Today was our final day of classes before the National Day holiday. The students had little enthusiasm, and even the teachers were less serious than usual.

Most of them spent a little over half the class reviewing our monthly exam papers, then let us study on our own.

Wang Dachun was bursting with excitement and kept trying to discuss how Wang Hu escorted him home the night before. But with Yao Nan around, he never found a convenient chance.

Finally, on a trip to the restroom, he hurried up beside me.

“Brother Wu, last night was incredible! You actually sent a ghost to escort me home. You’re amazing!”

“Pay attention to where you’re peeing and quit babbling!”