Chapter 125

Chapter 125

Xia Jianguo was old and shrewd.

He saw my concern at once. After I finished persuading Xia Degui, he spoke as a respected village elder.

“Degui, Sanjin went to great trouble to bring a genuinely capable expert like Young Mr. Wu here. You must help him and never cause trouble, understand?

“Otherwise, you’ll become a sinner against the entire village, and your name will live in disgrace.

“Fifth Xia has already been frightened to death. We can’t insist your family is responsible, of course, but I don’t want anyone else in the village to die. Do you understand?”

“Fifth Xia” was the Fifth Elder Xia who had been frightened to death near the commune office at the far end of the village two nights earlier.

Xia Degui had been the last person to see him alive.

Xia Sanjin was the village Party secretary, but since a respected elder and I had already spoken, he didn’t belabor the point. He merely clapped Xia Degui firmly on the shoulder and gave him an encouraging look.

“All right.” I rose from my chair. “Secretary Xia, if we’re finished here, we can continue. First, I want to examine Fifth Elder Xia’s body. Then we’ll go to the place where Xia Mi was buried.”

“All right, Young Mr. Wu. I’ll take you there.”

Xia Sanjin and Xia Degui led me toward the far end of the village.

Xia Jianguo was elderly. After walking here, witnessing the evil energy around Xia Dong, and watching me employ talisman arts, he was exhausted in both body and mind, so he went home to rest.

“Fifth Uncle Xia had no wife or children, so his burial customs aren’t complicated,” Xia Sanjin explained as we walked. “The weather is cooler now, so we weren’t worried about decay. We planned to keep him in an abandoned house at the village edge for several days, then use village funds to hire coffin bearers and lay him to rest.”

He seemed to be a competent Party secretary.

Xia Family Hamlet had few residents, but its area was larger than Wujia Village. It occupied a broad, level clearing surrounded by mountains.

The villagers therefore built large homes far apart.

Wujia Village, by contrast, sat in a long, narrow mountain valley, and its houses formed a strip.

At the village edge, I spotted a dilapidated wooden hut beside the water, surrounded by weeds.

This was clearly where Fifth Elder Xia’s body had been placed temporarily.

Before entering, I saw black corpse aura pouring from the doorway.

The nearby weeds had begun to wither and rot.

Corpse aura differed from ordinary yin energy.

Pure yin energy could nourish certain plants, making them grow abnormally tall and lush.

Corpse aura was far more corrosive.

“It seems poor Fifth Uncle Xia wasn’t simply frightened to death. There’s more to this than anyone realized.”

I murmured softly.

Xia Sanjin heard me but couldn’t make out the words. “Young Mr. Wu, what did you say?”

I smiled. “Secretary Xia, it’s fortunate you contacted my Master when you did. Otherwise, you might soon have faced not one vicious ghost, but two.”

Xia Sanjin froze. “What do you mean?”

I didn’t explain yet. I walked straight toward the ruined hut.
He and Xia Degui exchanged puzzled looks, then followed without asking further questions.

As we neared the doorway, both men covered their noses.

“Why does it stink so badly? It’s October, and the weather has cooled down. The body is indoors and out of the sun. It shouldn’t smell like this after only a day or two,” Xia Sanjin said in surprise.

“Follow me inside and you’ll understand,” I replied gravely.

The corpse aura was even denser inside, all of it pouring from the coffin in the center of the hut.

The coffin had not yet been closed.

I approached and saw an old man’s body lying inside, both hands resting over his abdomen.

His fingernails had grown more than two inches long. His face was twisted, and the body had already decayed severely–far beyond anything natural.

Fighting their nausea, Xia Sanjin and Xia Degui covered their noses and approached the coffin. Both men’s expressions changed.

“What happened?” Xia Sanjin blurted. “Why is Fifth Uncle Xia’s body already rotting?”

Xia Degui stared at the hands and asked in a trembling voice, “Why are his fingernails still growing? How did they become so long and sharp? Is he turning into a jiangshi?”

The word made Xia Sanjin shudder.

I sneered. “A jiangshi isn’t that easy to encounter. If this really were one, both of you would die here–and so would I. More likely, I wouldn’t have dared come at all.”

In the esoteric world, jiangshi was a precise term.

Only a corpse buried in a place of extreme yin, absorbing the drifting baleful yin energy between heaven and earth and transforming over a long period, could ultimately become such a powerful, sinister monster.

A jiangshi’s body possessed unimaginable hardness. Ordinary blades and other sharp weapons could barely harm it. Even bullets struggled to penetrate its flesh.

A true jiangshi could easily slaughter an entire village.

It was vastly more powerful than a vicious corpse among corpse-fiends, comparable to a corpse fiend–and perhaps even more destructive.

However, it lacked the corpse fiend’s many unnatural transformations and wicked arts, as well as its cunning intelligence.

Once a corpse-fiend transformed fully into a corpse fiend, it developed intelligence again–extremely crafty intelligence–while losing every emotion it had possessed in life.

For example, years ago, Master and I had taken Wang Fei’s body, after he became a drowned revenant, to the Hundred-Bone Pagoda. Wang Fei bargained with the Hundred-Bone Pagoda Corpse King, trying to persuade it not to use the pagoda’s power to suppress him because it had nothing to gain.

Fortunately, Master made the Corpse King a promise, preventing the corpse fiend Wang Fei’s scheme from succeeding.

But that was beside the point.

After I ruled out the possibility that Fifth Uncle Xia’s body was becoming a jiangshi, Xia Sanjin asked what was actually happening.

“It appears he was poisoned by a ghost,” I said. “The vicious entity intended from the beginning to create a servant. Fifth Uncle Xia’s true cause of death was ghost poison.”

Ghost poison?

What was that?

Xia Sanjin and Xia Degui both looked confused.