Chapter 9

Night had fallen completely. The two explored by candlelight, and the more Baozhu saw, the more she regretted staying here.

The faint candlelight flickered in the night breeze, and every shadow seemed to harbor a ghost. Moss wound over the steps, the floorboards creaked beneath their feet, and the walls were mottled with mold and rot, spattered with stains of unknown origin.

Yet these were far from the most frightening things.

The man beside her moved as lightly as a specter, his breathing almost inaudible. Clad in blue, he always stood in the shadows away from the light, too indistinct to make out clearly. Often he was no more than a hazy outline, vanishing from sight as soon as she turned, as though he did not exist at all. Had he not still cast a human shadow, Baozhu might have suspected that she was the only living person in this mansion.

Only now did Baozhu remember that she seemed never to have seen Wei Xun late at night.

By day, the little thief always wore an infuriatingly sly smile, laughing off her scoldings without anything seeming amiss. But as night fell, something in his bearing changed. He seemed to become a dangerous creature, hiding in the shadows with the breath of death upon him, filling her with a fear she could not suppress.

Wei Xun followed neither too close nor too far behind her, staying downwind out of long habit. The most important part of concealing one's movements was eliminating every sound and trace that might give one away. At the highest level of mastery, even the presence of one's breath had to be concealed. These things had become instincts sunk deep into his marrow; without deliberate effort, he naturally kept to the shadows.

Suddenly, a gentle night breeze brushed past, blowing toward him from her position upwind. That rare, delicate fragrance, mingled with the fresh, tender warmth of a young girl's scent, drifted over him like an invisible, shapeless gauze net, slowly seeping into the darkest, most obscure corner of the silent mansion.

Standing in that corner, Wei Xun froze.

He remembered the precious flowers and trees planted in the imperial palace's forbidden gardens. Jade blossoms, orchids, snowball flowers-all richly fragrant and so delicate that fires had to be lit in underground flues to warm them in winter, while mesh canopies shaded them from the blazing summer sun. Even if he took a fancy to digging up a couple to try growing himself, no matter how carefully he tended them, they always withered soon after their soil was changed.

He had stolen her from the inner gardens, roots and all. Could she truly survive in the barren, impoverished soil outside?

While he pondered this, Baozhu could no longer bear the illusion that she was alone and spoke up:

"Could you make some noise and come where I can see you?"

The first half of her sentence was still a command, but the second was almost a plea.

Hearing the fear in her voice, Wei Xun obediently took a step forward into the moonlight. Like a cold, still pool, his pale face was veiled in a faint bluish cast beneath the dim moon, making one wonder whether his skin and internal organs held any warmth at all.

Baozhu involuntarily retreated half a step and murmured, "I really shouldn't have sent Thirteenth Son to New Abundance."

Just then, something white flashed at the edge of her vision. Baozhu hastily raised the candle and saw a bare white head atop the courtyard's screen wall. But of course it was not the little novice monk she knew. It was a skull, staring at her through a pair of black, hollow eye sockets.

Before Baozhu's scream could leave her throat, a blue shadow flew silently from behind her, pounced on the skull with matchless speed, and swept it out of sight behind the screen wall.

Baozhu dropped the candle, seized her bow, and nocked an arrow, aiming in alarm and uncertainty at the spot where the skull had vanished. But Wei Xun had already emerged from behind the wall, smiling. "Some mischievous devil put this thing on the wall." He held a skull, hefting it in his hand to show her.

Horrified and disgusted, Baozhu cried, "Throw it away! How can you touch that dreadful thing?"

"Everyone has one. What's so frightening about it? If someone didn't, and had a limp sack of flesh with facial features painted on it sitting atop their neck instead, now that would be frightening." Wei Xun played with the skull, moving its lower jaw up and down to make it look as though it were laughing heartily, then casually set it on the veranda.

Baozhu imagined what he had described and immediately shuddered with revulsion.

After that, they found three or four more skulls, along with a skeleton sprawled across a window. It wore a garment soaked in blood, its posture suggesting that it had tried to flee danger, only to be killed from behind while climbing through the window and left there ever since. The sight was pitiful and terrifying, exactly what one might expect after soldiers swept through and slaughtered an entire household.

Baozhu drew in a sharp breath. Wei Xun went over to examine it and said, "Very interesting."

Baozhu snapped, "Have you no heart? What's interesting about such a horrible death?"

Wei Xun said, "This skeleton fell dead here, and its flesh has rotted away completely. Exposed to wind and sun, its clothes should long since have disintegrated into shreds."

"But there are so many bloodstains on its clothes!" Baozhu exclaimed. "It certainly didn't die peacefully of old age. Don't you dare touch it!"

Wei Xun gave up and returned to her side.

They continued exploring until they reached the deepest part of the compound, where a tall storehouse stood. It was nearly twenty feet high and thirty paces wide. Wealthy households generally kept their valuables in such storehouses, which differed from living quarters in having windows set very high in all four walls. Its doors were locked, and the lock was thick with dust.

Wei Xun tried pushing one door. The rusty hinges gave a teeth-grating creak, but it opened only two finger-widths before the lock stopped it. He quickly glanced inside, hooked his fingers around the edge, and pulled it shut again.

Baozhu asked in surprise, "Aren't we going inside to look?"

Wei Xun spread his hands and shrugged. "Look at that enormous lock on the door. I can't open it."

Baozhu was suspicious. Quite apart from the fact that the old door looked as though it could not withstand a single kick, judging by his earlier curiosity, he would never let a locked building go unexplored.

She asked, "You're a thief. Don't you know how to pick locks?"

Wei Xun was untroubled. "Every craft has its specialists; different trades are separated by mountains. We've looked through almost the whole mansion, and there's nothing particularly strange. It's late, and the dew is heavy. We might as well get some rest."

In truth, the constant traveling had already left Baozhu exhausted. She had forced herself to stay awake this long and had yawned several times. A dilapidated storehouse reeking of mildew really did have little worth seeing, she thought. So she turned and left.

Of all the rooms they had inspected, the main hall containing the coffin proved to be the cleanest. It was partly open, with only pillars supporting the eaves on the southern side. Without a wall, it was naturally well ventilated and free of mildew.

Baozhu was afraid of ghosts. Even if it meant sharing a room alone with a man, she could no longer spare a thought for embarrassment or shyness. Wei Xun spread the straw he had found along one side to make her a bed.

A wealthy household would have used a screen to ensure privacy, but this place had been abandoned for so long that no usable furniture remained. He simply led the donkey inside and tethered it in the middle of the hall as a barrier between them. After feeding it some bean cakes, he vaulted into the empty coffin and lay down fully clothed.

Seeing him lie in the coffin, Baozhu gaped in astonishment. "You're really going to sleep like that?!"

Wei Xun lifted his head from the coffin and said, "My late master, Chen Shigu, always slept in a coffin. I grew up seeing it, and in this line of work, I've never felt there was anything taboo about funeral goods. If we went out on a job together and found a clean coffin like this, we'd even have to observe seniority and offer it to a senior brother."

Only then did Baozhu realize that his suggestion she sleep in the coffin had not been a deliberate attempt to tease her. If anything, he had meant to be considerate.

She muttered softly, "Your master really was a strange man."

Wei Xun smiled. "Indeed he was. But everyone must die, and most die in their sleep. If you die in a coffin, they can haul you straight off to be buried. It even saves the trouble of laying you in one."

Baozhu thought that although this made sense, for some reason it carried a faint yearning for death. Then she wondered why the name Chen Shigu sounded familiar, as though she had heard it somewhere before. But bandits who used martial force to flout the law never entered the imperial court; it was probably just a coincidence of names.

Wei Xun lay back down in the coffin. Suppressing her discomfort, Baozhu also lay down on the straw, using her bundle as a pillow.

The mansion was utterly silent, as though time had frozen at that moment. Only a faint breeze stirred in the courtyard, brushing over the stone steps and passing through the covered walkways.

Afraid of fleas and lice in the straw, and of ghosts roaming the mansion, she could hardly fall asleep quickly. She asked softly, "Apart from me, have you ever seen anyone else who was buried alive?"

After a brief silence, Wei Xun's muffled voice came from the coffin. "A few times. But by the time I opened their coffins, it was too late."

"Did they... die horribly?"

Horribly hardly begins to describe it, Wei Xun thought. The coffins had been filled with bloody scratch marks, with fingernails embedded in their lids. Suffocation had left the corpses' faces contorted and their limbs twisted. Even when they had almost entirely rotted away, the terror of their final moments remained etched into their faces, never to be erased, no matter how many years passed.

Baozhu had survived by sheer luck, only because the underground tomb had not been sealed for long and some fresh air remained. Had he had time enough to wait patiently for a few months before robbing it, all he would have found was her corpse. Whatever delicate fragrance she had possessed in life would have become nothing but the stench of decay.

He did not want to explain all those horrors in detail and said quietly, "You're better off not knowing. Go to sleep."

The battered coffin once again sank into its rightful silence.

Baozhu had thought the abandoned Green Micro Temple was the worst lodging she had ever experienced, but there was no bottom to how far one's circumstances could sink. Spending the night in a haunted mansion, chatting from her bed with a man sleeping in a coffin-even if she told her elder and younger brothers about it someday, they might not believe her.

She could only console herself that at least this was the main hall of a wealthy household, more spacious and airy than the inn's nauseating communal sleeping platform.

The bean-sized candle flame bobbed up and down, making restful sleep impossible.

One moment, Baozhu felt the night breeze brush the grass on the eaves and imagined some demon crawling there. The next, she heard a rotten window creak and thought a ghost was peering inside. The flickering candlelight looked like ghostly shadows leaping about. Every stir of wind or grass sent her imagination racing and made her hair stand on end.

"Hey, are you asleep?" she asked in a tiny voice.

There was not a sound from the coffin. Baozhu secretly got up and peered inside. Seeing Wei Xun curled on his side, utterly motionless, she felt a little reassured.

After the first watch, the candle burned out. The thin donkey slowly chewed its bean cakes in the darkness, the only sound of a living creature she could hear.

Even travelers who stay the night never live to see dawn...

Though these had only been a villager's words, they echoed over and over in her mind. Half asleep and half awake, she could not help recalling the palace tales of discarded consorts in the cold palace whose living souls went out to harm others. In the darkness, shadowy, uncanny scenes came one after another like images in a revolving lantern, and she could not tell whether they were hallucinations or dreams.

After lying there for an unknown length of time, Baozhu suddenly heard an exceedingly faint voice release a soft, mournful sigh: "Ah..."

She thought her strained nerves had made her mishear, or that she had brought something from a dream into reality. She pricked up her ears and listened intently. Another sigh came from deep within the courtyard. The overgrown grass swayed beneath the moonlight, whether stirred by the wind or something else, she could not tell.

Every hair on Baozhu's body stood on end. Wrapping her arms around her knees, she curled up in the straw and dared not move.

The courtyard weeds rustled. Something seemed to be lurking in the darkness.

Whatever was sighing seemed to be gradually approaching the main hall. Baozhu felt as though she had plunged into icy water, her heart pounding. Suddenly, a shrill cat's cry came from the beam overhead. Nearly frightened into tears, she burrowed harder into the straw, its stalks painfully pricking the skin of her face.

There were spare candles in her luggage, but nothing could have made her crawl out to fetch them.

After the cry from the beam, the sounds in the courtyard subsided for a moment.

Baozhu held her breath. She wanted to call out and wake Wei Xun, but feared the ghost would hear her voice. Tears filled her eyes in desperation. While she hesitated, the thing in the grass moved again.

"Such hatred... I hate so much..."

As the voice slowly moved, the thing drew closer to the main hall, seemingly about to climb onto the surrounding veranda and enter. The thing on the beam gave another fierce, threatening cry, like a lynx about to pounce on its prey and tear into it.

The two indistinct things confronted each other in the darkness, one above and one below. Baozhu's scalp prickled with terror, and she trembled all over. Yet for some reason, Wei Xun remained deeply asleep, without the slightest reaction.

The two ghostly things carried on for a while. Hovering on the brink of collapse, she shed a stream of tears. One moment she wanted to run barefoot out of the mansion and sleep in the wilderness; the next, she wanted to give Wei Xun a vicious whipping for dragging her into this situation.

At last she could bear no more, and terror turned to fury. The girl sprang up, snatched the horn bow beside her with her left hand, and drew a handful of feathered arrows with her right. Drawing and nocking, she first loosed three arrows in rapid succession at the beam overhead, then fired three more toward the sounds in the courtyard.

"Get out! All of you, get out!"

After that furious shout, choked with tears, and all six arrows had flown, the entire courtyard fell silent. Not a soul made another sound.