JOS Chapter 145

Haunting

 

Huang Yu said, “What’s there to decode? Why don’t we just go directly to Liu Menghong’s brother and ask him to clarify everything?”

 

“He told us to come here, which clearly shows he doesn’t want to speak with us directly,” Junior Brother said.

 

“These people really know how to play games. Why are they always being so secretive?”

 

“Aren’t they afraid of ghosts?” Huang Yu nudged Chu Xuanliang with her elbow. “Come on, Chu Xuanliang, have your paper figures carry this stone tablet to his house and bury it in their backyard too.”

 

Chu Xuanliang said helplessly, “Do you want to scare them to death?”

 

“Oh…” Huang Yu then remembered that the other party was already quite elderly.

 

Jiang Feng said, “Let’s go down and take a look first.”

 

The group returned to Liu Menghong’s house and found that the door had been locked.

 

All the doors – front yard, backyard, and side entrance – were completely locked. Chu Xuanliang pressed against the wooden door and found it somewhat amusing.

 

Rural wooden doors weren’t sturdy, and with their age, an adult man could probably kick hard enough to scatter the hinges, basically designed to keep out gentlemen but not petty thieves. Plus, rural people always watched out for each other among neighbors, so if there was any disturbance nearby, they could directly call the police.

 

There was quite a wide gap under the wooden door. Chu Xuanliang slipped a small paper figure through it, and the door was quickly opened.

 

This door corresponded to the dining room of the old house. The old man was sitting at the wooden dining table, fanning himself and looking toward them.

 

He didn’t show much surprise at this, nor did he display any terror – he had an expression as if he had already transcended worldly concerns.

 

Huang Yu said, “I’m turning on the lights.”

 

The curtains had been drawn, making the interior quite dim. Only when the incandescent bulb lit up did it illuminate the old man’s wrinkled face.

 

Jiang Feng sat directly across from him and asked, “He came to your village and helped you solve the men’s problem. What happened after that?”

 

The old man shook his head.

 

Jiang Feng asked, “Don’t you know, or don’t you want to say?”

 

The old man said, “I truly don’t know. I’m just an ordinary person. This was gods fighting among themselves – I don’t know what they were planning to do. I was just watching; I didn’t participate.”

 

Jiang Feng said, “Then you just need to tell us what you do know.”

 

The old man remained silent.

 

Junior Brother was simply speechless. “What kind of people are these?”

 

“Since you experienced that period, you should know that after people die, they have souls. If departed souls miss the guidance of the underworld messengers, they might continuously linger in the mortal realm,” Jiang Feng said. “You can choose not to speak, but we can wait. At your age, you only have a few years left living, but the afterlife stretches endlessly. You have a chance to choose now – I hope you won’t regret it later.”

 

There was an electric fan in his room. Junior Brother was really hot, so he went over and pressed the switch.

 

The fan blades whirred as they spun, the oscillating fan making old mechanical friction sounds, getting stuck in the middle before successfully turning past.

 

“He…”

 

The Mountain God, in order to resolve the situation here, began to stay in the village for extended periods.

 

This was a long process. Before sending those female infants to the underworld, what he could do was ensure that the villagers were no longer possessed by the vengeful spirits of the female infants. However, the already feminized bodies couldn’t be reversed, and Liu Village remained that place everyone spoke of with dread.

 

Although the trend of young men becoming feminized had somewhat slowed, they still tended toward frailty when they reached puberty, with movements and voices slightly feminine, sparse body hair, and delayed appearance of Adam’s apples. So within two or three years, the situation hadn’t changed much. Combined with the psychological effects on everyone, the villagers felt he was accomplishing nothing.

 

They had waited many years, been deceived many times, and suffered countless hardships. When truly facing redemption, they had lost patience and remained skeptical of the Mountain God’s claims.

 

Moreover, the Mountain God required them to stop killing female infants.

 

But then, who would raise the children in the family? If they didn’t kill female infants, should they kill male infants instead? Wasn’t letting them starve to death an even more cruel act? Wasn’t the idea of having the whole family starve together even more foolish?

 

The monk who had originally led everyone in building the temple had freeloaded in the village for several years, embezzled a sum of money, and then secretly fled. The villagers transferred their anger onto the Mountain God, and the masses exploded.

 

They didn’t dare to directly confront him, but they would deliberately maintain distance and isolate him.

 

The Mountain God didn’t care. He continued taking Zong Ce around the village for strolls and even opened an outdoor literacy class, teaching basic reading and writing to some children who couldn’t even attend elementary school.

 

At that time, the person in the village with the best relationship with them was Liu Menghong’s grandfather.

 

He had studied painting in the city, took on various odd jobs here and there, and had met many people, so his thinking was more open and tolerant than ordinary villagers. He felt the Mountain God was learned, capable, and had a benevolent heart – neither radical nor conservative, exactly the kind of cultured person the new society needed most.

 

He didn’t quite understand the villagers’ thinking and couldn’t agree with their rejection.

 

Fortunately, as time passed, the villagers gradually accepted the Mountain God’s presence.

 

Three years later, or maybe four years later – the old man couldn’t remember clearly.

 

Just when the control of feminization was beginning to show results, new supernatural incidents appeared in the village.

 

A woman returned from visiting relatives in another province. She had started walking in the morning and reached Liu Village just as evening fell.

 

The sun had just half-sunk below the horizon, fertilizer had just been applied to the fields, giving off an annoying stench. She was carrying a large basket and truly couldn’t walk any further, so she temporarily sat on a long stone slab placed by the roadside to rest.

 

As she set down her basket, a streetlight suddenly lit up with a “pop.”

 

She looked down and discovered a group of moving black dots at her feet. She initially thought they were swarms of mosquitoes, but then realized something was wrong.

 

On flat muddy ground, how could ordinary mosquitoes have such clear shadows?

 

She quietly watched the shadows on the ground. Those moving black dots approached the shadow of her legs and burrowed into it. At that moment she felt her whole body go numb, goosebumps rising all over. She instinctively touched her own calf.

 

Her already aching calf developed some itching, and the sensation under her hand felt strangely eerie.

 

She quickly rolled up her pant leg and discovered an unknown blood clot crawling upward on her calf, as if insects were flying around inside her body.

 

Her mind jolted violently. She wanted to scream but couldn’t make a sound, her chest seeming blocked by something. She immediately dropped her things and ran frantically.

 

After running some distance, she looked back and saw the black dots on the ground quickly following her.

 

The terror in her heart exploded as her breathing intensified, her vision spinning.

 

She finally gathered momentum to rush past this wretched little path, but didn’t see the houses that should have appeared ahead – the scene before her eyes was clearly the starting point of this same road.

 

She kept running and running until she lost consciousness.

 

Early-rising villagers found the woman collapsed on the ground and helped carry her home.

 

This time the person was badly frightened. Her husband told her mother-in-law that she had encountered something supernatural, and they hurriedly took her to the Mountain God.

 

“She…” the Mountain God said after examining her, “hasn’t encountered ghosts, and there’s no yin energy on her body.”

 

“But she was scared like this!”

 

“Perhaps it was a hallucination, or maybe a dream…”

 

The villagers immediately became furious. Without waiting for him to finish, they pointed and cursed, “What kind of person are you! This wasn’t a dream – if she was dreaming, could she be scared like this? If you don’t have any real ability, don’t mislead people here!”

 

The Mountain God said, “She might have been targeted by someone. If possible, you could let her stay with me and see who it is.”

 

“Bullshit! You’re a grown man saying such things – aren’t you ashamed?”

 

A group of people left angrily, refusing to negotiate with him.

 

……

 

“This…” Huang Yu said quietly, “These people are sick?”

 

The old man said, “When people’s thinking becomes stubborn, it’s very difficult to reason with them.”

 

……

 

Soon after, a second incident occurred.

 

A young man went out at night to dump his foot-washing water. After leaving his room, he didn’t return after more than ten minutes.

 

His parents found this strange and went out to look for him, but there was no trace of him.

 

When he went out, he was wearing slippers and pajamas, so logically he shouldn’t have gone far. When they asked nearby people, they all said they hadn’t heard any sounds.

 

The next day the person appeared back in the house on his own, but he had gone mad. He became afraid of strangers and couldn’t explain what had happened that night no matter how they asked.

 

The third time, someone finally died.

 

A person fell headfirst into a field by the shore, drowning in the wet mud of the rice paddy without any sign of struggle.

 

From this point on, Liu Village became extremely wrong.

 

Someone knitting at night saw black ghostly shadows flash past the window, but when they opened it, nothing was there.

 

Someone eating lunch chewed something hard-shelled in their mouth, but after spitting it out, there was nothing there.

 

Someone just lying in bed sleeping heard countless insects flying around their ears. When they opened their eyes, the sound disappeared.

 

Someone hung caught fish in their yard, but the next morning it was covered with countless holes.

 

Others were clearly sitting in their own homes but suddenly appeared elsewhere in the blink of an eye, being caught and beaten as thieves…

 

Once this atmosphere took hold, any minor inconvenience was attributed to supernatural events. Even things that were truly just coincidences, or even getting diarrhea from eating spoiled food left too long in cupboards, could be blamed on ghostly interference. Some petty theft and disgraceful behavior also got crowned with such righteous justifications as excuses.

 

The Mountain God could only say, “…ghosts really aren’t that idle.”

 

But indeed, some people had experienced unusual events.

 

The village was in a state of panic, yet the Mountain God insisted there were no ghostly hauntings in the city, thus angering many people.

 

The Mountain God was also anxious. He went to every suspicious location to investigate and questioned many people, but couldn’t find the source. Combined with various instances of muddying the waters and confusing statements, this added difficulty to his deductions.

 

At this time, a person wandering around the village late at night was caught by villagers on night patrol – it was the monk who had previously been driven from the village when the Mountain God arrived.