"Don't listen, don't look. Hurry up and go!" Jiang Yue barked.
"Second Brother, he's calling my name! He's calling me San Gou!" San Gou was famous for his wild nature and guts, but even his voice sounded uneasy now.
He grabbed Jiang Yue and refused to let him take another step.
"Second Brother, it's Tangtou! Tangtou's calling me!" San Gou grew even more uneasy.
"Who's Tangtou?"
"Village Chief Tang Youqing's son. A few years ago, Black Bear carried him off and ate half his head."
San Gou's reminder brought the story back to Jiang Yue.
He rarely came back to the village, but he'd heard about the gruesome incident. According to the villagers who'd searched for the body, the child had died horribly. When they buried him, half his head was missing.
At the thought, a chill ran through Jiang Yue from head to toe.
Without another word, Jiang Yue hoisted San Gou onto his shoulder and started to leave. But San Gou fought him, flailing wildly, clapping his hands over his ears and kicking as he shouted himself hoarse.
"I didn't see your head! I didn't see it, I swear! Tangtou, Black Bear ate your head!"
San Gou was at an age where, once he'd made up his mind to fight, Jiang Yue could barely manage to carry him. He had no choice but to set him down. The yellow paper had already burned to ash, but thankfully he still had half a pack of cigarettes in his pocket.
He took out three cigarettes and struggled to light them, then bowed three times to the empty air.
"Debts of vengeance have their rightful owners. Don't seek out the innocent. The living and the dead belong to separate realms. Each should follow their own path..."
When something like this happened to San Gou, either spirits had strayed onto the Living Path, or the living had wandered onto the Spirit Path.
Before the cigarettes had burned halfway down, San Gou gradually calmed. There was still fear in his eyes, but it was no longer beyond the normal range.
Following San Gou's still-shaken gaze, Jiang Yue used his hoe to push aside the grass. There was a mass grave.
Something was rooting around in front of a small mound. When Jiang Yue went closer, he saw it was a Yellow Weasel. A tilted earthen stele stood beside the mound, and he could just make out the character Tang.
"Was Tangtou buried here?" Jiang Yue asked.
San Gou shook his head, uncertain. "He was my age, and we used to play together all the time. He was only seven when he was carried off. I was staying with my aunt in town when they buried him, so I don't know where they put him."
That Yellow Weasel was unusually strange. Instead of fleeing when it saw them, it turned around and stared at the two brothers with round, glittering eyes. It even seemed to nod at them, as if greeting them.
"Let's go." Jiang Yue felt that everything today was bizarre. He didn't want to stay another second.
For the rest of the way down the mountain, San Gou was no longer his usual chatterbox. He walked in silence.
Only after they reached the foot of the mountain did San Gou mutter, "Second Brother, do you believe me? That really was Tangtou calling me. He was waving at me with half his head, asking if I'd seen the other half!"
Jiang Yue wanted to scold him, but after searching for the right words for a long time, he still felt they sounded feeble.
"San Gou, at the end of Qingming, Wandering Ghosts have no home to return to. Maybe Tangtou was just lonely. No one came to pay respects to him during the Qingming Festival, so he was saying hello."
As soon as Jiang Yue finished speaking, he wanted to slap himself. What kind of comfort was that to offer a child?
Unexpectedly, San Gou's face lit up. "Second Brother, you're the only one who believes me. If I told Auntie or Big Sis, they'd slap me across the face!"
Good grief!
This kid's mind didn't work like a normal child's. He hardly seemed like someone who needed comforting. Those empty words of consolation probably wouldn't work on him anyway.
The brothers' banter soon eased the oppressive atmosphere.
Jiang Yue was about to speak when he suddenly yanked San Gou back.
Just as San Gou stumbled forward, a Large White Cat shot out of the grass where he'd been standing. Even in broad daylight, its two glowing green eyes were eerie enough to make one's blood run cold.
Fortunately, the Large White Cat's sudden pounce wasn't aimed at them.
At the other end of the grass, a huge snake was coiled up. Its triangular head was raised high, and it kept flicking its tongue at the Large White Cat. It was clearly ready to fight.
It was a Fer-de-lance Viper, known locally as a tortoise shell flower. It was extremely venomous and highly aggressive!
In front of Nine Li Pavilion, a white cat fought a viper.
Another bizarre scene that made their hearts pound.
From a purely biological perspective, a cat fighting a snake wasn't all that unusual.
But this was Nine Li Pavilion, a place already steeped in superstition. A Large White Cat and a green viper? In the eyes of the yin-yang masters, it would be an earthshaking omen.
What was that saying again?
When the White Tiger fights the Azure Dragon, a huge hole is punched in the heavens and earth!
San Gou feared neither heaven nor earth. Although Tangtou had startled him earlier, he was quick to forget. Now he watched the battle between the tiger and dragon with keen interest.
This time, Jiang Yue didn't indulge him. He dragged San Gou away.
Seeing how frighteningly grim his second brother looked, San Gou seemed to sense something was wrong. He stopped arguing and followed Jiang Yue back, though reluctantly.
He still kept turning around to look. He was so eager to watch the spectacle, you'd never have guessed he'd just been scared out of his wits.
"Second Brother! Wait!"
After they'd walked a hundred meters or so, San Gou started acting up again.
"What's gotten into you this time? This isn't Mount Dajin. Don't go pulling any more stunts."
San Gou's mouth hung open as he stared at Nine Li Pavilion behind them.
"Second Brother, look. Is the main beam of Nine Li Pavilion broken?" For once, the usually carefree San Gou wasn't grinning at all.
Nine Li Pavilion had a winged structure, high in the middle and low on either side. The main beam in the center was like a person's backbone, and the rafters braced against it were like ribs.
If the main beam broke, it meant the building's backbone had snapped.
Jiang Yue looked over. Nine Li Pavilion, modeled after a Vermilion Bird spreading its wings to take flight, seemed to have sagged at the top. Its soaring wings no longer looked as expansive as before. It looked more like a sickly Vermilion Bird.
In the distance, a mass of blue-black qi seemed to hover above Nine Li Pavilion, appearing and disappearing like a lid shrouding the structure.
If he were to stretch the comparison, just a little, that mass of blue-black qi looked like a heavy hammer hanging over Nine Li Pavilion!
"What's going on? Weird things happen every year, but are there really this many today?"
Nine Li Pavilion had weathered countless storms over the years and had always stood firm.
How had its main beam suddenly broken?
Jiang Yue didn't fully believe in the theories of yin-yang and feng shui, but his family's teachings had instilled in him a genuine reverence for nature's will and the forces of heaven and earth.
One strange incident after another had occurred, with no end in sight.
Something was clearly wrong!
His birth mother had appeared in a dream, the photo frame had fallen, he'd seen the shadow of a woman in a flowery skirt, Spirit Money had caught fire easily, Tangtou had gone looking for his head, a tiger and dragon had fought, and the Vermilion Bird's spine had broken...
Any one of those things would have been horrifying under ordinary circumstances.
Qingming was certainly a special time, but all this had happened in just a few hours, like a TV series with one episode after another and not even a single commercial break.
There was no way it could all be coincidence.
Seeing his second brother lost in thought along the way, San Gou seemed to understand, more or less.
"Second Brother, are you worried about Tangtou? The elders used to say that if you came across something unclean, you just had to burn paper, light incense, and bow three times to show respect. Tangtou and I were friends when he was alive. He wouldn't haunt me now that he's dead."
San Gou's thinking was simple. He didn't understand what the battle between the tiger and dragon or the Vermilion Bird's broken spine meant.
He thought Tangtou's appearance had been a chance occurrence.
What mountain villager hadn't run into a few strange things in their life? Besides, the local rhyme said, "At the end of Qingming, Wandering Ghosts have no home to return to." It had been passed down for generations, and San Gou had heard it growing up. He'd long since been prepared for something like this.
So although it was strange, San Gou regarded it as an isolated incident and didn't think much of it. Besides, he was too young to think that deeply.
In other words, San Gou could recognize the individual signs, but he didn't know how to analyze the larger pattern.
If the earlier incidents were just separate "forms," isolated events in their own right, then the battle between the tiger and dragon and the Vermilion Bird's broken spine seemed to point toward an underlying force.
Of course, this was only an instinctive premonition based on Jiang Yue's family teachings.
A premonition was one thing, but when it came to the grand forces of heaven and earth, an individual was as insignificant as a grain of sand in the sea. He probably couldn't do much about it.
When his second brother didn't answer, San Gou didn't mind. He continued chattering. "Second Brother, was that snake a Green Tortoise Shell Flower? Did it weigh over ten jin? If we caught it and stewed it in the big kitchen, it'd taste amazing."
San Gou was a country boy, with a mountain villager's boldness in his bones.
Traditional mountain villagers had only two ways of surviving: either they conquered nature or nature conquered them.
Catching a snake and stewing it was just a simple, everyday part of life in the mountains.
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