The Jinx

Just as Zhang Xuan and Monk were each lost in their own thoughts, faint voices drifted in from outside...

"Have they gone?" a hoarse voice asked in a hushed whisper.

"They've gone. I watched those monsters leave through the crack in the door." Another voice trembled with the relief of surviving a disaster.

"Good. Good thing they're gone."

Gradually, those hushed voices grew louder, like insects emerging from underground, their rustling chirps spreading outward.

Before long, several bolder villagers approached cautiously and craned their necks to peer inside. Following the trail of dried blood leading out across the ground, their gazes landed straight on the corpse that no longer resembled a human being, and they screamed in terror.

Some of the more timid ones collapsed on the spot, dark wet patches spreading across their crotches.

The villagers outside tried to squeeze in out of curiosity, while those who had seen the carnage scrambled for the door on all fours, vomiting as they fled.

For a moment, voices roared both inside and outside the house.

"Erniu! What happened?" Old Zhao had only just arrived and had yet to catch his breath, crushed pumpkin leaves still clinging to his soles. He grabbed Zhao Erniu, who was trying to burrow into a dung heap. The scrawny, monkey-like man clutched his throat and dry-heaved, yellow liquid dripping steadily from his crotch.

The frail man called Erniu forced down the sour bile in his throat and pointed shakily at the open doorway behind him. "Blood. Blood everywhere..."

"Gutless coward!" Zhao Wu's palm, broad as a palm-leaf fan, whipped through the air and slapped Erniu senseless.

The old village chief seized his shirt, its patches layered upon patches, and shook him. "Open those damned eyes and look properly! What exactly happened—in that house?"

Only then did the dazed Erniu regain his senses. Suddenly, he shrieked, "Chief, Widow Li... she's dead! The Demon Ghost ate her and scattered her everywhere!"

Zhao Wu froze, then let out a long breath. "Good. That's good!" There was something hard to pin down in his tone. Almost... relief?

The locust tree in the courtyard suddenly rustled. At those words, Zhang Xuan's foot stopped just as he was about to cross the threshold...

Not only Zhao Wu, but the surrounding villagers, too, broke into involuntary smiles upon hearing the news.

The shadow of the old locust tree slanted across Zhao Wu's face. He narrowed his eyes and took a pull on his tobacco pipe, its glowing ember flickering against his deeply furrowed old face.

Little did the villagers know that whenever this old bastard squatted on the ancestral hall's threshold picking his teeth, his eyes kept straying toward Widow Li's thatched cottage at the edge of the village—the floral bellyband hanging beneath its eaves was far more interesting than the clay bodhisattva enshrined in the hall.

"No wonder they say old ginger has the strongest bite." Zhao Wu stared at the chicken blood staining the toe of his shoe, left from when he had deliberately splashed it outside Widow Li's fence in the middle of the previous night. He spat out a gob of thick phlegm and tapped his pipe against the millstone with a clang. "Keeping outsiders as sacrificial lambs is better than letting our Zhao family's incense line die out."

The scourge of Demon Ghosts had ravaged Great Zhou for several years. The horror of Demon Ghosts devouring people was neither a first for this impoverished little village nor would it be the last. But each time the Demon Ghosts ate someone, they would settle down for a while—up to a year, or half a year at the shortest.

Since someone always had to die, someone always had to be eaten by those monsters, wasn't it better to keep this mother and son with their outsider surname around to die instead?

While he was basking in his own cleverness, a scream suddenly erupted from the crowd.

Widow Li's brat was brandishing half a bloodstained wooden stick, like a wolf cub driven into a corner, chasing seven or eight burly men all over the place.

Zhao Wu's eyelid twitched. He saw his second son clutching his face and howling, blood seeping between his fingers and staining the front of his shirt red.

Seeing his second son wounded, Zhao Wu grabbed his pipe and charged into the crowd, its copper bowl gleaming coldly in the sunlight.

"You little bastard! Think you can turn the heavens upside down? Our Zhao Family Hamlet took in you and your widowed mother for years, and instead of being grateful, you throw a fit and hurt people! Master Zhao will teach you a proper lesson in place of your short-lived father and that whore of a mother!"

The boy was forced into a corner, his back pressed against a moss-covered earthen wall. Blood and mud smeared his face, yet his eyes shone with a frightening brightness. "You old beast! You think nobody knows you keep pouring chicken and duck blood around our house every few days? You wanted those monsters to follow the smell of blood to our door when they entered the village, so we'd take the calamity for you Zhaos!"

The pipe whistled down and struck with a dull thud, startling the crows pecking through the pile of thatch into flight.

Blood streamed down the boy's forehead, washing a red furrow through his scar-covered neck. Zhao Wu suddenly remembered that rainy night a year ago, when his second son had worked up some drunken courage and gone to propose to Widow Li. The look in her eyes as she held a pair of scissors against his second son's crotch had been exactly like this little bastard's now.

"Beat him! Beat this little bastard to death!"

When the surrounding villagers failed to act immediately, instead looking hesitant, with several even pleading for the little bastard, Zhao Wu did not grow angry. Instead, he gave a sinister smile. "A pack of fools. The Demon Ghost came to his door and ate his mother. Why didn't it eat him?"

"They... they were full?" a red-faced farmer replied.

Zhao Wu spat at him. "Stupid wretch. They didn't eat him because this bastard was born a jinx. He cursed his parents to death, and even the Demon Ghost won't eat him. If you don't kill him, are you waiting for him to curse you all to death too?"

A shudder ran through the crowd. Thinking back, that family truly had suffered one misfortune after another. They had fled here to escape famine, only for his father to disappear while hunting in the mountains several years ago. Now his mother had been targeted by a Demon Ghost and eaten clean. This child... really was a jinx!

At that thought, the pity in the villagers' eyes changed in an instant...

"Kill... kill him!"

"That's right. We can't leave a jinx in the village."

"A thing that cursed his own parents to death deserves killing. Kill him!"

The first to act was Zhao Wu's second son, Zhao Daqing. The brat had bitten a chunk of skin from his left cheek, and the pain still pierced him to the heart. He brought a stick as thick as an arm down toward the scrawny figure's head.

"Die!"

Just then, a muscular hand suddenly reached out from behind the door reeking of blood and firmly caught Zhao Daqing's descending stick. It stopped dead in midair, as though clamped in iron pincers, unable to budge.

"Amitabha!"

With that deep invocation of the Buddha's name, two men emerged from the doorway, one behind the other.

In front was a towering, burly Monk, his knotted muscles like mountain peaks. Each step seemed to make the ground tremble faintly. His features were sharp as blades, his gaze blazing like a torch, and a suffocating pressure radiated from him, as though a wrathful vajra guardian had descended into the mortal world.

Zhao Daqing, standing closest, felt his breath catch, and the wooden stick in his hand began to tremble involuntarily. Tilting his head back, he watched helplessly as the monk approached and stumbled backward. Only after retreating behind Zhao Wu did he barely steady himself, as though he had found someone to shelter him.

Behind the Monk, another man walked slowly out.

He wore an Azure Dragon Crown adorned with a coiling azure dragon and fitted black robes patterned with clouds, a jade belt cinching his waist. His figure stood straight as a pine. A falcon perched on his shoulder; though its neck was tucked in, its gaze was sharp as a blade, as if ready to swoop down and kill its prey at any moment. His blood-red cloak stirred lightly in the breeze, lending him an imposing air of nobility edged with a fierce killing intent.

Zhang Xuan glanced over the crowd, a cold smile curling his lips. His blade-like gaze settled behind Zhao Wu, and he said evenly, "Do you think you're very clever?"

Thinking the question was directed at him, Zhao Wu asked blankly, "Wh... what?"

Zhang Xuan's gaze turned abruptly cold, his voice biting like ice. "Kill!"