Chapter 16

Chapter 16

I shook off Wu Si, grabbed the urn, and dug that pitch-black disk out of Wu Da’s ashes.

The disk looked as if it had been burned. The patterns on its surface had blurred badly, and after staring at it for a long time, I could only just make out the shape of several chrysanthemums tangled together.

“What are you doing? Let go of my brother!”

Wu Si lunged at me again, trying to snatch the urn and the disk away. I shoved him back.

Holding up Wu Da’s urn, I said to Wu Si, “I’m giving you one last chance. What exactly did you do?”

“If you hide even a single word from me, I’ll scatter your brother’s ashes. From now on, you two brothers can stay in this wasteland as a pair of lonely ghosts!”

By then, Wu Si had lost every last bit of nerve. Sobbing, he dropped to his knees and confessed everything he’d done.

He had found that disk in Wu Da’s pocket when he examined the body.

He thought it belonged to Wu Da, so he kept it. Later, he placed it inside his brother’s urn.

But after Wu Da was buried, Wu Si began having nightmares, one after another.

In those dreams, he always returned to the road that had taken his brother’s life.

Amid the heavy falling snow, he heard his brother telling him over and over that we all deserved to die.

That night, everyone on that road should have gone with him.

And Wu Si had always hated Uncle Cheng and me to the bone.

But he was too much of a coward. For more than ten years, he never dared lay a hand on anyone.

Then, over the past two years, the nightmares grew more and more frequent, tormenting him until he could hardly go on living.

He dug up his brother’s urn and, following the instructions from his dreams, mixed a little of the ashes into a bottle of liquor.

His first target was Uncle Cheng.

Because Uncle Cheng was the kindest and easiest to talk to. If a child he had saved years ago came to visit him, he would definitely drink that cup of liquor.

But because Big Black was there, the moment Wu Si approached, Big Black would bare its fury and bark like mad.

Wu Si never dared step through the Cheng family’s door. Not until Big Black died.

“You son of a bitch!” I grabbed Wu Si and gave him one last, vicious punch.

That disk absolutely did not belong to Wu Da.

It was most likely something buried here in Wild Ditch.

Maybe what Wu Si dreamed of wasn’t Wu Da at all. He had been used by that evil ghost.

I sent a photo of the disk to Tang Ling and asked her to help me look into what it was.

Tang Ling replied very quickly: the Nine Chrysanthemum Shrine, an evil organization from the island nation.

This was probably something left behind from the war years.

Back then, Wild Ditch had been occupied by the enemy. They built a lot of strange prefab barracks here and filled the surrounding area with a foul stench.

Later, after they were driven out, the higher-ups sent many people over. The buildings were torn down, the ground was dug three feet deep, and the area was burned for a long time.

This disk must have been one of the things that didn’t burn clean back then.

I stopped paying Wu Si any attention. I returned Wu Da’s urn to him and took the disk back to the road.

From the car, I took out an iron basin and some gasoline, then tossed the disk inside.