Soul Urn

"All right, I'm tired. I need some rest. Where am I sleeping tonight?" I said, beckoning to the little vicious ghost.

She was still happily drinking from a can of orange soda. When she saw I was going to bed, her nose wrinkled and she bared her fangs. A chill ran through me. This was a tiger, after all.

Driving out ghosts with another ghost was no different from setting a tiger on a wolf. Raise one badly, and it could turn on you.

I had always been reserved, though. No matter how frightened I was, I kept my face blank. When she didn't come over, I even frowned.

Seeing that I was displeased, the little vicious ghost settled down. Hugging her soda can, she drifted slowly toward me, three inches above the floor. It was terrifying to watch, especially with her red clothes, black pupils, and the veins that bulged on her neck and forehead when she got angry. The sight was more than human senses were meant to bear.

Only after she obediently wrapped her arms around my neck did I turn to Zhao Qian. She stood frozen in place, clutching her chest and breathing hard, unable to get a word out. If I hadn't been there, she probably would have run for her life.

"The room... over there... I'll get it ready for you..." Zhao Qian rose stiffly. Once she had passed the little vicious ghost, she practically ran into a room on the first floor.

I followed her inside.

The place was luxuriously furnished, with a computer and television as standard fixtures. There were plenty of books on the shelves, too. I glanced over them: all sorts of subjects, though many were Daoist or Confucian and almost none were Buddhist.

"Is this your study?" I asked.

"Yes. I had the upstairs custom-built with just one bedroom and a guest room. Xiaoxue has the guest room, and the rest is my little ritual space. So downstairs, apart from the large living room, there's only the study. I'm sorry you have to make do with it. If you don't like it, I can sleep here, and you... you can take my bedroom," Zhao Qian said, embarrassed.

Her study was spacious, dozens of square meters, with even a large bed for naps. It was practically a multipurpose bedroom, and considerably nicer than the guest room.

"It's fine. I won't take your bedroom. This will do. Can I use the computer?" I asked without ceremony. With a computer, I could check the latest news and look things up. Information was essential.

"Of course. Just please don't delete my photos or any of my work files," Zhao Qian said cautiously.

"No problem. I'm not interested in those. I'll just use a search engine now and then," I explained.

As I looked around, Zhao Qian bent over to make the bed. She had changed upstairs into casual clothes: a loose white blouse and a blue pleated skirt. It was a striking look.

On closer inspection, she really did have an impressive figure, including a generously rounded backside. No wonder she had nearly failed to escape today; if her brother hadn't grabbed her around the waist and carried her, she might not have made it out. The longer I looked, the drier my mouth became.

I liked women, but I wasn't some beast or lecher. I immediately stopped staring. Besides, I was a little afraid my wife would get jealous. If she flew into a rage, I could forget about sleeping tonight. Several times before, when I had tried to get close to other women, she had made things miserable for me. They had ended up saying I was gloomy and creepy.

There wasn't much to straighten up in the study. The bedding was a little messy, but that was easily fixed.

"That's done. It's getting late, so please get some sleep. We'll leave first thing tomorrow morning." Zhao Qian's natural, unhurried movements had the quiet grace of a well-bred young woman. She was about my age, too—enough to stir any man's heart.

"You should get to bed early too. Don't oversleep tomorrow," I said, teasing her.

Zhao Qian shot me an exasperated look, then smiled. "All right. You too."

I watched her leave, locked the door, and opened Grandma's leather suitcase.

There wasn't much inside. Some brand-new lengths of fabric people had given Grandma were wrapped around a book whose cover bore the traditional-character title Elementary School Exercise Book. There were also several empty urns, densely carved with incantations. They looked far more sophisticated than the little vicious ghost's Soul Urn. I couldn't help thinking Grandma might have used them herself.

The little vicious ghost stood beside me. When I took out a Soul Urn with a small hole in it, she reached out, cradled the empty urn, and stroked it over and over. She looked sad.

I thought the ghost who had once lived in that empty Soul Urn must have been very important to her. Otherwise, she wouldn't have looked like that.

In another wrapping, I found a cracked Soul Urn. Its carvings even included seal script, but the damage was worse. It could barely hold its shape.

The little vicious ghost began to sob when she saw it. I had figured it out: this was the suitcase Grandma had taken from Little Yi Village to settle scores. The Soul Urns inside must have housed the truly formidable vicious ghosts she kept at her side for battle.

Farther down were Soul Urn fragments wrapped in bright red cloth. They had been shattered so thoroughly they looked as though someone had smashed them against the ground. Their original shapes were gone.

I could imagine how brutal the battle had been. I could almost see Grandma commanding a host of vicious spirits with a sweep of her hand, a hundred ghosts marching in daylight. I pulled the little vicious ghost's simple Soul Urn from my pocket and compared them, my thoughts in turmoil.

In craftsmanship, her Soul Urn was nowhere near the shattered ones. Hers held a lesser ghost; the others might even have held ghost kings.

Grandma had taken only her powerful vicious ghosts. She hadn't been willing to bring the little one. Perhaps she had known all along that she wouldn't return.

A cold wind suddenly stirred behind me. I knew the Ninth Princess was angry too.

The little vicious ghost's pale fingers kept brushing over the fragments. Her lips pressed together as tears fell like beads, her grief almost soundless. Each ruined Soul Urn had clearly been through a savage battle, one that had destroyed the ghost inside and cracked the urn itself.

And those vicious ghosts might have been more than friends to her. They might have been her teachers, or even her family.

I reached out and gently gathered her into my arms. "We'll avenge them. We'll pay them back for what they did. Together, we'll send them all to hell!"

She clung to me and burst into tears. Perhaps this was the first time she and I had truly opened our hearts to each other.

After comforting her, I picked up Grandma's yellowed exercise book. A few pages in, I realized it was a record of her life, entry after entry recounting things she had experienced.

It began when Grandma inherited her tradition and continued all the way to her return to Little Yi Village on the final page.

Judging by her age, the early years were covered in great detail; everything before she turned thirty took up more than half the book. I skimmed that part and focused on the later entries, since I had been involved in some of them. Both the handwriting and the accounts grew rougher and briefer.

The passage about the Ninth Princess near the end, for instance, read: "Dao Sect inheritance. Ninth daughter of heaven. Her soul returned to this world; she went to her death to save those in peril. Clothed in the blood of ten thousand people, both divine and ghostly. After countless pleas, she agreed to marry my grandson. What extraordinary fortune."

Grandma's delight showed through, but the entry offered little more than hints. Near the beginning, when she was in her twenties, she had written another passage: "Dao Sect inheritance. Ninth daughter of heaven. Since receiving her, I have made a hundred requests without a single answer. I cannot understand why. Alas, how tragic."

Apparently, the Ninth Princess was proud and hard to please. She had been passed down through the ghost-raising tradition since the Dao Sect's time. Both divine and ghostly, she was apparently immortal and powerful. Yet there was almost no record of her deeds across the generations. She must have been exceptionally hard to summon. Grandma had tried when she was young and failed.

Then, in the end, the Ninth Princess had agreed to marry me and become the bride promised to me since childhood. Grandma probably couldn't make sense of that either.

The diary also recorded how, after Grandma began practicing, she traveled to places steeped in dark energy and resentment, enduring countless hardships to subdue and raise vicious ghosts. There were stories, too, of her wearing a ghost mask as she went about righting wrongs.

That reminded me of the mask, and I found it in the suitcase. It covered most of the face, leaving part of the right side exposed where it appeared to have been cracked in a fight. Grandma probably wore it when she faced other practitioners or didn't want her identity known. It looked sinister, like something a villain would wear. No wonder people had called her "Old Demon Zhou." With it on, they probably couldn't even tell whether she was a man or a woman.

The patterns painted on the mask were simple, clear, and ferocious. I guessed it dated back to the pre-Qin era. It had plenty of irregular scratches, too, so it was probably an antique. Wear it nowadays and people would think you were an idiot, but it might fetch a decent price at an antique market.

I put it back in the suitcase. I wasn't going to sell it, but I had no plans to wear it either. Then I kept searching the exercise book for clues about the little vicious ghost.

At last, I stopped at a passage Grandma had written in middle age: "Yinfeng Town, where a phoenix once came. A lonely lotus lay hidden there and stirred my pity. For the rest of my life, I had company in my solitude."

The little vicious ghost smiled through her tears, as though she knew the passage was about her.

Yinfeng Town... Where was that? It wasn't on any map, was it?

Given Grandma's age at the time, I thought Yinfeng Town might be Dead Town. Did that mean the little vicious ghost came from there?

"Are you from Yinfeng Town? From Dead Town?" I asked.

She nodded, then shook her head.

"A phoenix once came... So you weren't from Yinfeng Town, but you died there? Then Grandma found you and brought you home?" I asked. If so, Grandma had raised the little vicious ghost decades ago, not for battle but for companionship in her later years. She must have been lonely then, just as she was preparing to settle in Little Yi Village.

This time the little vicious ghost nodded vigorously, confirming what I had said.

That set me wondering about her origins. Of course, I probably wouldn't get the answers I wanted until I learned the language of ghosts. Learning it was the most important step in the secret art of raising ghosts.

After Grandma returned from Yinfeng Town, the diary entries became noticeably fewer and farther apart. Most concerned people who had heard of her and gone to great lengths to find her after she discovered the abandoned Little Yi Village. For reasons of their own, some then chose to stay there.