Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Water goblins stealing a corpse?

The name told me more or less what was happening.

These sinister water goblins had crawled from the mud and sand at the bottom of the Chuan River to carry off Wang Fei’s body now that it had become a revenant!

“Damn that Wang Fei. When he was alive, just hearing the adults tell stories about water goblins scared him. Now that he’s dead, he can command an entire pack of them.”

The irony left even me at a loss for words.

In that split second, the first water goblin to land on the coffin began tearing and clawing at the lid with its sharp teeth and talons.

Aunt Qin raised the Lu Ban ruler and swung hard.

Thud!

It struck the creature across the waist and sent it flying sideways. Bones cracked and splintered in midair before it splashed into the river.

“Behind you, Aunt Qin!”

Three water goblins had boarded at the bow and were pouncing at her back at once.

Their sharp black claws glinted coldly beneath the moon…

But Aunt Qin seemed not to hear me. Instead of turning around, she hurled the Lu Ban ruler in my direction. It skimmed past my face and struck with a muffled thump.

The ruler pinned a water goblin that had climbed aboard at the stern firmly to the hull. It had pierced straight through the creature’s neck, drawing blood as clear as water.

Aunt Qin had been saving me!

At the final instant, she ducked and avoided the attack.

But that allowed all three water goblins to land on the coffin lid, where they frantically bit and clawed at it. One of them was even clever enough to attack the spirit-suppressing nail in a corner!

“Little Wu, pull out the Lu Ban ruler and pass it to me.”

A trace of urgency had entered Aunt Qin’s voice.

More water goblins were continually emerging from the river, keeping her too occupied to deal with the three damaging the coffin lid.

I understood how serious the situation was and quickly seized the Lu Ban ruler, pulling with all my might!

But I was not yet ten years old, and I was rather skinny. My strength was limited. Even after several attempts, I could not pull it free.

“Aunt Qin is so strong! She threw this ruler hard enough to kill a water goblin and pin it to the boat, and now I can’t even get it out.”

In the end, I planted both feet against the gunwale and added my body weight. With a wet pop, the ruler finally came loose.

The momentum sent me flying backward. My back slammed into the coffin, and I grimaced in pain.

“Here, Aunt Qin!”

Ignoring the pain, I tossed the Lu Ban ruler around the side of the coffin.

Aunt Qin caught it, twisted her wrist, and sliced the head from the rooster whose comb had been bled earlier.

Strangely enough, blood sprayed from the rooster!

She swept the Lu Ban ruler in a circle, scattering the spray of rooster blood through the air and across the water goblins. They shrieked in agony as curls of blue smoke rose from their bodies.

Splash! Splash!

They leaped back into the river and fled.

Huff… huff…

Aunt Qin panted heavily. She was clearly tired as well.

“You did very well, Little Wu.”

She even took the time to praise me.

Creak… creak…

A shrill sound came from the coffin. One corner of the lid had begun lifting!

Aunt Qin’s expression changed. “Not good. The spirit-suppressing nail is broken.”

She had explained earlier that spirit-suppressing nails were carved from cypress wood at least thirty years old. They were soaked in black dog blood and rooster blood for three days and nights, coated with poison from a toad’s back, then polished repeatedly with cinnabar.

They were complicated to make, but highly effective.

An ordinary corpse could be suppressed with ease. Even a ferocious drowned revenant like Wang Fei would be unable to cause much trouble.

Their only weakness was that the nails were still made of wood. In fact, all the treatments left them even more brittle than the original cypress. They worked well against corpses, but other things could destroy them rather easily!

That was why the water goblins had swarmed the coffin with no concern for their own lives. They wanted to destroy the spirit-suppressing nails at its four corners!

“Little Wu, smear some black dog blood on your hands, then lie on top of the coffin and hold that corner down.”

I was still terrified.

No one had told me outright, but from the villagers’ whispers, I had already guessed that Wang Fei had killed both his parents after becoming a ghost!

I had been his playmate while he was alive, but if I faced him now, I was sure to die.

Even so, I had to obey Aunt Qin.

Gritting my teeth, I gathered my courage and climbed onto the coffin. I pressed both hands against its sides and leaned all my weight onto that corner.

Strangely enough, I truly forced the rising lid back down!

Was I somehow stronger than the transformed Wang Fei?

“A drowned revenant is a being of extreme yin. Your light bazi becomes extremely heavy once your hands are coated in black dog blood. That lets you suppress him while he has recovered less than a tenth of his mobility.”

Oh, so that was it…

And here I had thought I was strong!

It seemed I would have to remain sprawled over the coffin lid for the final few li of our journey.

The mountain bearing the Hundred-Bone Pagoda was already close at hand!
Then, unexpectedly, something else went wrong.

The boat stopped moving!

I could clearly feel the little wooden boat sitting perfectly still. The Chuan River rushed past on every side, yet the boat remained eerily fixed in place.

Even without Aunt Qin’s magic, the current alone should have carried us downstream at a good speed!

“Aunt Qin, what’s going on?” I asked anxiously.

Still lying on the coffin lid with both hands pressed to its side panels, I had a very limited field of view. I could barely see my surroundings.

“Just keep the lid down, Little Wu. Don’t worry about anything else.”

Aunt Qin’s voice remained calm, but I was sensitive enough to hear a trace of urgency.

Something bad must have happened again!

I was almost impressed with myself.

Any ordinary nine-year-old would probably have wet his pants by now, wouldn’t he?

Not only had I kept my pants dry, I was lying on a coffin, suppressing a corpse that had transformed into a drowned revenant!

Though for some reason, when the night wind blew, my crotch still felt a little chilly…

The position had become so uncomfortable that I cautiously turned my head to the right, keeping my cheek against the coffin lid. That was when I saw the river.

My crotch felt even chillier.

Floating corpses.

A dense mass of floating corpses!

At least twenty of them drifted on the surface, surrounding our little wooden boat.

Packed tightly together, they had wedged the boat in place so it could not move forward.

“So the river-logs in the Chuan River are blocking our boat!”

My scalp prickled and goose bumps rose all over me.

Seeing one river-log was frightening enough. Being surrounded by dozens of them was a whole different kind of thrill.

No wonder Aunt Qin had told me not to look. She was afraid I would wet myself!

But I was a brave little man. How could someone as bold as me possibly wet his pants?

Aside from that chill below my waist, everything was fine.

“Aunt Qin, I already saw them. There are river-logs everywhere. What do we do?”

She stood with her back to me and said nothing.

For some reason, I sensed that she was hesitating… before finally making up her mind.

She suddenly produced a strange hissing sound.

It inexplicably reminded me of a snake!

Then Aunt Qin jumped straight over the bow and into the river. She hit the water with a loud splash.

I panicked!

But then I remembered how powerful she was, even more powerful than the legendary folk Taoist masters the adults talked about. She must have had a plan when she jumped into the river.

Everything around me fell silent.

From my position, I could see only a tiny patch of water beside the hull out of the corner of my eye. Everything else was hidden. I did not dare get up, so I remained where I was, every second feeling like a year!

Less than half a minute later, the boat suddenly pitched violently, as though something had rammed it several times from below.

The floating corpses surrounding us began drifting apart.

My restricted view kept me from seeing how far they went, but they must have sunk beneath the river again…

Aunt Qin had told me that river-logs left unrecovered for too long became old corpses–powerful evil entities. They could move freely through the river and even kill people in their search for replacements.

Other than Red-Boat Oarsmen and their heirs, ordinary corpse retrievers had no hope of finding them!

Even if they did, corpse retrieval would be impossible. The more likely outcome was that the corpse retrievers themselves would die in the attempt.

Once the dozen or so floating corpses scattered, the swift current alone was enough to carry the boat forward.

But Aunt Qin still had not come back up.

I grew anxious. Forgetting her warning never to shout while traveling on the river at night, I began calling at the top of my lungs.

“Aunt Qin, where are you? Come back!”

“Aunt Qin! You wouldn’t leave me here, would you?”

“Aunt Qin…”

By the end, my voice had begun to break with sobs.

I truly was afraid!

If she had disappeared, was I supposed to drift down the Chuan River alone, lying on a coffin to hold down a drowned revenant?

Splash!

Water churned, and something landed on the boat with a thud.

“Don’t be afraid, Little Wu. I’m back.”

It was Aunt Qin’s voice!

Keeping my body pressed to the coffin lid, I lifted my chin as high as I could. She was standing at the head of the coffin.

“Don’t worry. We’re almost there.”

She gently stroked my head and told me I could come down and rest for a while.

I quickly slid off the coffin lid and stood in the boat.

Aunt Qin pressed one hand over the spot where the spirit-suppressing nail had broken and looked at me with a smile. Her long, disheveled hair always hung to her waist and hid her face, and no one in the village had ever seen what she looked like.

Yet I simply knew she was smiling.

She was now soaked from head to toe, water still dripping from her clothes. Her voice also carried a deep weariness.

Worried, I asked, “Aunt Qin, you jumped into the river to drive those river-logs away. Were you hurt?”
“Heh-heh…”

Aunt Qin laughed with deliberate ease. “They were only a dozen or so floaters, and not one had been dead for more than ten years. That’s hardly enough to trouble me. As long as the thing in this coffin can’t get out, nothing else is a serious problem.”

After that relentless chain of dangers, I could feel my courage growing at the speed of a pig fattened on feed!

At last, we reached our destination.

Aunt Qin told me to put more black dog blood on my hands and lie across the coffin lid again to hold it down.

She picked up the punting pole and guided the boat toward shore.

A few minutes later, we stopped before a broad, level riverbank.

By moonlight, I saw an enormous beach lying in an inward-curving hollow between two tall mountains. At the far end rose the highest peak along this stretch of the river.

From the beach to halfway up the mountainside, small earthen mounds stretched without end.

Graves!

There had to be several hundred at a glance.

I could not help shuddering.

There were even more graves than in the mass burial grounds the adults spoke of in the mountains.

At the center of that sea of earthen graves stood a six-story stone tower, its outline hazy beneath the moon.

“Don’t be afraid, Little Wu. This is a Yishan Burial Ground. Everyone buried here was personally recovered by Red-Boat Oarsmen and received rites from a folk Taoist master. Any resentment they once carried dispersed long ago. Otherwise, they could never have been buried here.”

As Aunt Qin explained, she began preparing to unload the coffin.

She said a place like this was actually exceptionally peaceful, safer even than some Buddhist or Taoist temples.

That was precisely why we had brought Wang Fei’s body here. The pure, placid yin energy of the Yishan Burial Ground, free of all resentment, could seal and suppress the vicious water revenant!

Only then did something occur to me.

“Aunt Qin, this coffin is so heavy. How can the two of us get it halfway up the mountain to the Hundred-Bone Pagoda?”

She bent down and rapped at several places inside the dark red hull. One spot returned a hollow sound.

The boat had a hidden compartment!

Aunt Qin looked relieved. “The red boat may have been abandoned for years, but the equipment is still here! Otherwise, we’d have to open the coffin, find another way to suppress the revenant, and carry the body up on our backs.”

In the dead of night, carrying a corpse into a tower!

The very thought was thrilling.

Besides, I more or less understood by then that opening the coffin would make Wang Fei rise. We would face tremendous danger all over again.

I watched curiously as Aunt Qin removed a large collection of pieces from the hidden compartment. They looked a bit like toy building blocks.

Each piece was fairly large, however. Once assembled, they would probably make something substantial.

“These were treasured tools of the old Red-Boat Oarsmen! Only the highest-ranking river oarsmen possessed them. Come help Aunt Qin put them together, Little Wu. With both of us working, it won’t take long.”

I asked no unnecessary questions and hurried to help.

A few minutes later, two wooden oxen stood before us.

They were not large, only about the size of calves, and their strange, ungainly shapes looked almost comical.

I could not resist asking, “What are these wooden oxen for?”

Aunt Qin said, “Little Wu, have you read Romance of the Three Kingdoms?”

I shook my head. “I only just finished third grade. I haven’t even learned all my characters, so a book like that is still too hard. But Dad and Second Uncle often tell stories from it.”

“Then you must have heard of Zhuge Liang’s wooden oxen and gliding horses. These are the wooden oxen. Long ago, Marquis Zhuge ordered old carpenters under his command who practiced cursecraft to build these wondrous devices. They could transport grain without human labor, and each could bear four hundred jin. Two will be more than enough to carry this coffin.”

Aunt Qin patted one of the wooden oxen.

What?!

Did self-moving wooden oxen and gliding horses truly exist?

“The lineage of carpenters has always been closely tied to river oarsmen. In ancient times, when bodies had to be carried into Yishan Burial Grounds, each Red-Boat Oarsman hired a carpenter he knew to make wooden oxen with cursecraft. The devices could be disassembled and stored aboard red boats. The river oarsman and the government each paid half the cost.”

Aunt Qin was very patient. She had no need to explain all of this in such detail, yet she did anyway.

Then she slapped each wooden ox several times in a particular spot.

Under my astonished gaze, the wooden oxen truly began moving on their own!

Their joints clacked as they walked steadily to the coffin and crouched. A wooden shovel-like implement sprang from each body and slid beneath the coffin.

Then they stood, lifting the massive coffin between them!

“Off we go! By the Martial Marquis’s protection, the wooden ox bears its load. Peace beneath heaven!”

Chanting in a strange cadence, Aunt Qin guided the wooden oxen and their coffin toward the Hundred-Bone Pagoda…