Ding Ling

"Title: Performing for ghosts and gods.

"On the second day of the second month, when the dragon raised its head, Daliang Village invited an opera troupe called the Lampstand Opera Troupe to perform for three days. Unexpectedly, while the troupe was preparing its operas, strange things happened one after another, and everyone in Daliang Village came down with Soul-Separation Sickness.

"Chang Dafeng, the troupe leader, had spent many years traveling the jianghu. Seeing this, he knew they had run into ghosts.

"So he gathered all the troupe's disciples to put on a play about gods and ghosts, hoping to intimidate the evil ghosts and allow everyone to escape with their lives.

"Not long before this, Ding Ling, who prepared the troupe's daily meals, had caught a chill and been ill for several days. At this critical moment, Chang Dafeng began to consider sacrificing Ding Ling's life to save the others."

The story on the page came to an abrupt stop there.

It was still unfinished, to be continued.

After reading it, Zhou Yang still did not know what sort of illness the Daliang Village residents' "Soul-Separation Sickness" was, or whether the Lampstand Opera Troupe had managed to complete its play about gods and ghosts, or whether it had worked.

And what became of Ding Ling, who had caught a chill? Did she live or die?

Zhou Yang had bought the Knife Credit Ledger that recorded this story at a secondhand bookstall in the university district near his rented apartment, before he transmigrated.

The bookstall had been holding a sale, selling books by weight. Tempted by the low price of five yuan per jin, Zhou Yang had spent thirty yuan on six jin of used books. The stubbly stall owner in a greasy down jacket had thrown in another jin for free.

The Knife Credit Ledger had been among the extra jin of small books.

The six jin of used books were full of typos, missing pages, and cases where the beginning and end of a book had been taken from two different books.

The Knife Credit Ledger was the worst of the lot. Its cover was in tatters, with only the three characters for "Knife Credit Ledger" barely visible, and the pages inside were completely blank, without a single character.

Furious, Zhou Yang had torn the lousy book apart and stuffed it into his coal stove as kindling.

He had never expected something even more outrageous to happen that night.

He had gone to sleep in bed as usual, only to wake up in Guan Village, with the Knife Credit Ledger, which should have burned to ashes, on him.

He had become the owner of the Knife Credit Ledger and acquired his present identity as a Blade-Credit Merchant.

But who was he supposed to sell a blade to on credit?

And who owed him payment on a blade bought on credit?

With his other hand, Zhou Yang pinched the piece of metal he had ground into a blade and looked down at the story that had appeared on the second page. As he stood there bewildered, the words on the page turned back into blobs of ink.

The blobs squirmed and rearranged themselves into several lines of writing:

"Once a blade is sold on credit and entered in the ledger, karmic retribution shall take form.

"You will sell a blade to Ding Ling on credit to resolve the life-or-death predicament she is in.

"Ding Ling will become your Karmic Retribution Body.

"Sell the blade on credit?"

Did this mean he could lend money to and invest in this person called Ding Ling?

And the first return on his investment would be Ding Ling becoming his Karmic Retribution Body?

Zhou Yang immediately understood what was on the page and translated it from Chinese into Chinese, into terms he could better understand.

His heart pounding, he looked around the smithy like a thief with a guilty conscience.

A moment later, Zhou Yang took a deep breath, but closed the Knife Credit Ledger, rolled it up with the iron blade, and tucked it into the back of his waistband.

This was not the best time to sell a blade on credit.

He did not know what would happen if Ding Ling became his Karmic Retribution Body.

If something unusual showed on him then and A Fu saw it, he would be in serious trouble.

So he had to hold back and study this transaction in the Knife Credit Ledger more closely after work, when he returned home to sleep.

Before long, A Fu returned.

His face was like an inflated pig's bladder, shiny as though it had been coated in lard.

A Fu was beaming, his smile very friendly. He seemed like a completely different person from the one he had been that morning.

Zhou Yang was used to it.

As far as the Guan Village residents Zhou Yang had met were concerned, most were like this. Each had a different personality in the morning, at noon, and in the evening, as though several ghosts took turns possessing them.

"Cao Qing hasn't come. It's been several incense sticks' worth of time." A Fu spoke with a smile, a look of regret and recollection on his face. He repeated what he had said that morning, seemingly without the slightest memory of his earlier words.

He went on, "We don't have much work this afternoon. Melt down all the scrap ironware in the storeroom and make it into ingots. We'll use them to make sickles tomorrow.

"Little Yang, tomorrow you'll have to start learning to swing the sledgehammer. Once you've learned, I'll give you a raise."

"I'll be sure to learn properly," Zhou Yang said seriously, bowing slightly.

He meant it from the bottom of his heart.

Now that the Knife Credit Ledger had given him a lead, he might have to rely on it to escape Guan Village. And the first thing he needed to sell a blade on credit was a blade of his own.

If he learned smithing in Guan Village, he would not have to worry about being unable to forge a blade himself.

Although he still did not know whether the blades he sold on credit had to be forged with his own hands, he could not be sure.

But having a trade was a good thing in any case.

Zhou Yang followed A Fu to the storeroom and brought back a basket of scrap ironware.

Though the items in the basket were called scrap, most had only a layer of surface rust. A little polishing, or even none at all, would make them usable again.

A Fu really did not need to waste the effort of melting them down and remaking them.

No normal smith would work the way A Fu did.

But A Fu was not a normal person to begin with.

Every day, he did jobs that seemed utterly pointless and incomprehensible to Zhou Yang. It was common for him to throw ironware he had made the previous day back into the furnace to remake it.

Yet Zhou Yang could not point any of this out.

He had once received a dying person's last words.

The deceased had spoken out of turn several times to remind a villager that dead chickens did not need to have their beaks pried open and be fed every day, and had suffered a sudden, violent death as a result.

Zhou Yang owed his survival in Guan Village up to now entirely to the Last Words and Final Images Collection ability that came with his identity as a Blade-Credit Merchant.

He had survived until today by feeling his way across the river using the dead's last words and final images.

Guan Village had many rules, both open and hidden. Breaking any one of them, even slightly, could plant the seeds of disaster.

Of all these rules, the greatest was that one could not leave the village, could not even make the slightest move to escape, and could not so much as express a desire to leave the village to anyone!

Cao Qing had died because of it.

Of the more than twenty last words Zhou Yang had collected, over half belonged to people who had died because they broke this rule!

The ironware in the furnace soon glowed red-hot.

A Fu seized a pair of iron tongs, pulled out a red-hot shovel, and set it on the anvil. He then grabbed the hammer leaning against the block below and struck the shovel several times, hammering it out of shape.

Apparently feeling that holding the red-hot ironware with tongs made it hard to put force into his blows, he discarded the tongs and grabbed the glowing shovel directly with his hand.

Zhou Yang's pupils contracted at the sight!

The shovel glowed bright yellow and had to be over a thousand degrees!

A Fu's bare hand, which looked as though it had merely been rubbed with a little grease, grasped the scorching ironware. Apart from a little foul-smelling white smoke rising from his palm, it was not burned in the slightest!

If Zhou Yang reached out and touched iron that hot, his palm would probably melt on the spot!

Zhou Yang had seen this sort of thing many times.

Yet every time he saw it, he could not help feeling afraid.

What frightened him was that "people" like A Fu were everywhere in Guan Village.

Could an ordinary person like him really escape alive while surrounded by villagers like these?

The day's heavy work finally came to an end after the last piece of "scrap ironware" was hammered into an ingot.

Even though Zhou Yang had only assisted A Fu, he felt as though every bone in his body had come apart.

He was not in particularly good physical shape, and in Guan Village, where much of the food was "not to his taste," his condition had been growing worse by the day.

After saying goodbye to A Fu, Zhou Yang left the smithy.

When he emerged from the narrow, muddy road outside the smithy, he did not take the same route home that he had used that morning. Instead, he chose another road.

In Guan Village, even if one's destinations never changed from day to day, it was best to avoid taking the same route repeatedly.

Once someone had taken a particular route too many times, then decided on the spur of the moment to try another, the villagers might think that person wanted to escape Guan Village and was scouting a route in advance, leading to a sudden, violent death.

Zhou Yang had reached this conclusion based on a dead person's last words.

Conversely, as long as he changed his route regularly, the villagers would come to see him as "a kid who just likes running around" and think that "everything in the village is a novelty to Zhou Yang."

Once that persona was established, even if Zhou Yang occasionally took a wrong turn, it would not cause too much trouble.

Establishing a persona was a matter of the utmost importance in Guan Village.

Hiding behind that persona could at least keep him safe for a time.