Pursuing Him to His Grave to Make Him Stay

Jingle, jingle, jangle!!!

Amid the sound of the wind chimes, Boss Li stood frozen with one foot inside the door and the other outside.

Though he had seemed odd before, his behavior could still have been put down to poor sleep, excessive worry, and agitation.

Now, stimulated by the wind chimes, his expression grew increasingly abnormal. He craned his neck forward so hard that bluish veins showed beneath his skin.

His temples bulged and the skin on his forehead pulled taut. His eyes were bloodshot, his eyeballs protruded, and his jaw was stretched tight, pulling his lips back to reveal crimson gums.

As he thrust his head forward, his shoulders rose and his back hunched. His breathing grew heavier and heavier, like a broken bellows being worked.

"Class, class... study hard, imperial examinations..."

Boss Li's words grew increasingly slurred. His expression shifted between bewilderment and savagery for a long while before his cloudy, crimson eyes rolled toward Li Xu's retreating back.

"Unfilial son, the tutoring classes I signed you up for and the books I made you copy as punishment still weren't enough. Right, you should hang your hair from the rafters and stab your thigh with an awl, thorns and canes..."

Outside the door, both Mrs. Li and Teacher Qiao sensed that something was wrong.

"Honey, what's wrong?"

Mrs. Li had just started forward when Teacher Qiao grabbed her and pulled her farther back.

Li Xu's possession had been fake, but it looked as though his father had run into the real thing!

The wind chimes rang more urgently.

Chu Tianshu stared at Boss Li without looking away for an instant. Instead, pinpricks of light appeared deep in his pupils.

Chu Tianshu smiled. Somehow, his expression took on a hint of excitement, while his left hand quietly felt around the table for something.

"Hey, buddy, my wind-chime bagua made you show your true colors. Your cultivation isn't up to much, is it? You've possessed someone, and you can't even speak clearly."

"I'd say you must have been a failure when you were human, and you're an even bigger failure as a ghost."

He stepped to the right and moved past Li Xu, a small bunch of silver needles pinched in his right hand.

"Come on, run into my silver needles. Hurry up and reincarnate as a dung beetle-you'd have a brighter future than you do now!"

That was a filthy insult.

Boss Li's gaze wavered. Unable to help himself, he looked away from Li Xu and gave Chu Tianshu a low growl, making ready to pounce.

But before his feet left the ground, a sudden blaze of white filled his vision, leaving him unable to see anything.

Boss Li instinctively raised his hands to shield his face, then suddenly felt a pain in his chest.

With one long stride, Chu Tianshu reached him. His right hand darted forward, driving the silver needles straight into his chest.

Holding more than a dozen needles in one hand, he used his fingers to drive them into Boss Li one at a time, placing each of the dozen or so needles in a different acupoint.

Chu Tianshu had spent over half a year practicing that skill alone.

In the blink of an eye, silver needles bristled from Boss Li's chest, shoulders, and forearms.

He had been shielding his face with both hands, and now he could not make any other movement. His limbs felt numb, and his whole body was stiff.

Teacher Qiao had been watching anxiously from outside the door. Only now did he see that Chu Tianshu held a flashlight in his left hand.

After being possessed by something unclean, a person would seem as strong as an ox and tireless.

In fact, that was merely an illusion created when the unclean thing affected the body's senses.

For example, if an ordinary person scratched a wall or someone else's clothes, the slightest chip or tear in a fingernail would hurt enough to make them instinctively ease up.

A possessed person, on the other hand, felt no pain and feared no bruises or broken bones. They dared to charge and smash with all their might, which made them seem much stronger than a person in a normal state.

It was like turning a person into a wild beast.

But the weaknesses of a wild beast were magnified too.

For instance, people in this state often did not know how to use tools. And another example... they feared light!

The way Boss Li had looked just now was terrifying even from behind; from the front, he looked like a fiendish ghost.

But Chu Tianshu had drawn his attention with a few taunts, flashed the light, and stabbed him with needles. Just like that, Boss Li was subdued without causing any damage.

"Ah!!"

Boss Li suddenly screamed, and the clothes on his back split open along the line of his spine.

A gust of cold wind blew from his back for no apparent reason.

The thin mist outside churned violently in the gust.

Boss Li had a deep voice, and Mrs. Li was long accustomed to it. But that scream had distinctly sounded like a strange man with a very thin voice.

At a complete loss and afraid to go forward, she hurriedly called out, "Master, what happened to my husband?"

No sooner had she spoken than Mrs. Li involuntarily retched.

Beside her, Teacher Qiao covered his nose as well.

After that cold wind blew past, a foul smell seemed to fill the yard in front of the door.

It was the smell of cheap ink.

There were calligraphy classes in junior high, and the school shop sold students that kind of stinking ink.

But to make a smell this bad, it would probably take dozens of bottles of ink boiled hot.

Fortunately, the stink went as quickly as it came, fading rapidly within a few seconds.

Chu Tianshu smelled the stench too. Holding his breath, he went to the table and quickly took out a silver needle a full twenty centimeters long.

Gripping the needle at both ends, he plunged it into the crown of the still-immobile Boss Li's head, burying it all the way to the end. He twisted it slightly, then, after a while, drew part of it back out.

Seven or eight centimeters of the needle remained standing upright from Boss Li's head.

When the other silver needles were removed, Boss Li's hands immediately dropped. His eyes were vacant, and his face was blank, as though he were sleepwalking.

Teacher Qiao came over. "What happened?"

"The thing possessing him ran away."

"That thing hasn't amounted to much yet," Chu Tianshu said. "If it was able to possess him, he must have been in contact with it for a long time without realizing it."

"Once it's left his body, it won't be able to possess anyone else. It'll definitely return to the vicinity of its own remains."

"While it's still daytime, and getting on toward noon, I'm going straight after it."

Teacher Qiao was startled. "So soon?"

"When dealing with a ghost or evil spirit like this, you have to seize the best opportunity. Once you miss it, you'll only create a lot of extra trouble."

Chu Tianshu placed a hand on Boss Li's shoulder and turned him around. He used little force, and Boss Li turned outward and began walking on his own like a puppet.

"Madam Li, the needles in your son need to stay in for over half an hour. Stay here with him and don't wander around. I'll go deal with your husband's problem."

Mrs. Li had been looking at her husband and son, finding it a little hard to choose. When she heard that Chu Tianshu had arranged everything, she nodded at once. "All right, all right!"

This was a little trick: seize the initiative and take charge while the client was flustered, and everything would go more smoothly.

Business involving the exorcism of evil spirits was uncommon, but if he was confident enough to take a job, it could often give his account balance a substantial boost.

But Chu Tianshu disliked being repeatedly questioned by a client, having to explain himself at length and find a way to earn their trust before he could track down and exorcise the spirit.

By the time all that was done, he might have missed his chance and brought extra complications upon himself.

So whenever he encountered this kind of job, once he had made his assessment and entered work mode to make big money, he acted swiftly and decisively, finding a way to take the initiative.

"Let me say this upfront: my fees aren't cheap."

Chu Tianshu tossed out those words to raise the client's expectations of the price, then headed for the bridge. "Teacher Qiao, I remember you have a driver's license. Help me drive."

Teacher Qiao had liked hanging around Grandpa Chu in the past and had been his assistant for quite a while, riding along to earn his first pot of gold in his youth.

Today's scene gave him a familiar feeling. Without wasting words, he followed Chu Tianshu across the bridge.

Boss Li was stuffed into the front passenger seat.

The key had never been removed from the car. Teacher Qiao started it and asked, "Which way?"

"Some of that thing's evil Qi is still inside him. It'll serve as a link for tracking it."

Chu Tianshu sat in the middle of the back seat, where he could see the road ahead through the gap between the two front seats. His eyes sharp, he moved his lips, reciting an incantation as he pointed two fingers at the back of the passenger seat.

"Teacher Qiao, just watch the needle on his head."

The seven or eight centimeters of silver needle atop Boss Li's head trembled slightly, seeming to take on a faint dark bluish tint, and slowly bent toward the front right.

Teacher Qiao drove along the concrete road, up the high slope east of the village, then turned onto the main road.

The end of the needle atop Boss Li's head acted like a special compass, constantly adjusting its direction as they traveled.

Using it, Chu Tianshu determined whether they should go straight, turn, or backtrack to an earlier intersection, alerting Teacher Qiao in good time.

In just over half an hour, Teacher Qiao drove them to the outskirts of the city.

There were areas here where the government had returned farmland to forest, as well as quite a few factories.

Beside the road where the car stopped stood a grove of southern magnolias. South of the grove, they could see a large factory building with the classic white walls and blue roof, its roof made of blue corrugated stainless steel.

The needle atop Boss Li's head pointed to a spot between the factory and the grove.

There was a large open space there, serving as the factory's back entrance. Piles of alloy scrap lay there, along with worn-out plastic buckets and mops and brooms worn down to stubs.

What stood out most was a stone stele covered in moss.

To an ordinary person, it was nothing more than an old stone stele.

Chu Tianshu stared at it for a while, however, and could see wisps of inky smoke curling and swaying over it.

This Aperture Opening did not, of course, mean actually opening a particular aperture. It referred to a state in which the senses of the seven apertures were elevated as a whole.

It was as though the seven apertures had once been covered in dust, leaving every color and sight dim and indistinct. Then, once the apertures opened, heaven and earth seemed washed clean, extraordinarily vivid and richly colored.

Only when a martial artist opened their apertures could they hear the movements of their own internal organs and begin to master the meticulous tempering of flesh and bone.

Only when a spirit medium opened their apertures could they purify their mind through various methods, such as chanting incantations or drawing talismans according to their school, and see those inhuman ghosts and wandering spirits, as well as sinister, evil Sha Qi.

The depth of a spirit medium's cultivation was often judged by how long they could maintain the Aperture Opening state in a single day.

With the cultivation Chu Tianshu had achieved so far, he could keep his apertures open for more than five hours a day.

In terms of cultivation alone, he could be called a minor expert across the Jianghuai region.

It was only because he suffered from a deep-rooted illness, had learned only unorthodox arts, and possessed few formidable magical artifacts that he was not well known.

After staring for a while, Chu Tianshu could tell that the ghost's remains were probably buried beneath the stele, less than two meters deep.

Chu Tianshu did not hurry out of the car. First, he said, "Call Madam Li and ask if this factory belongs to her family."

Teacher Qiao dialed the number, and she picked up quickly.

Sure enough, the factory belonged to Boss Li.

Madam Li also knew about the stele behind the factory.

It was an old stele that had stood there before they chose the site. No one maintained it, and it was said to date from the late Qing dynasty. It had little value as a cultural relic and could originally have been knocked down without concern.

But Boss Li had made out what seemed to be an account of a child prodigy on it and thought that keeping the stele would be a good omen.

Over the past two years, while Li Xu was in high school, Boss Li had even placed an incense burner in front of the prodigy's stele. He often went there to offer incense, praying that Li Xu would get into a good university.

"The characters on the stele are so weathered they're practically illegible. He could only make out a few lines in all. Don't tell me the only words he recognized were 'child prodigy'?"

Chu Tianshu shook his head and chuckled. "Offering incense to something of unknown origin like that-Boss Li's pretty brave."

Teacher Qiao said, "I doubt he really believed in that sort of thing, and naturally he didn't know what taboos to avoid. He just swung his pole whether there were jujubes or not, and ended up knocking down a rotten one."

Teacher Qiao paused, then said, "Now that we've found the place, why don't we just call an excavator, knock down the stele, and dig up the remains to expose them to the sun? We handled one case that way when I was with your grandpa. That was the easiest one of all."

After passing the prime of his life, Grandpa Chu had come to believe that the best way to exorcise evil spirits was to avoid meeting them face-to-face at all.

Once they met face-to-face, there would be some risk.

"This case is different. The one possessing Boss Li still has some ability to think. If you try to dig up his grave without hitting him hard a few times first, you'll only deepen his resentment and set it off. If something happens to the excavator operator, it'll be hard to settle."

After that brief explanation, Chu Tianshu rose and got out of the car.

"Teacher Qiao, stay here. I'll go take a look."

He crossed the grove and headed toward the open space.

Although plenty of rubbish was piled up in the clearing, the two or three meters around the stele had clearly been swept on purpose. Several sheets of iron had been laid around its base, creating a relatively tidy area.

A gold-colored ornamental incense burner the size of a clay pot stood in front of the stele, with plenty of ash and incense sticks accumulated inside.

Chu Tianshu half-crouched and pinched up some incense ash, examining its color. He rummaged through the burner with his fingers a couple of times; nearly all the ash on the surface was fresh.

Incense had been offered so frequently that it was like a person making an earnest appeal to a ghost. No wonder that thing, despite its limited abilities, could possess Boss Li and travel around even in broad daylight.

Looking again at the inscription, he found most of it weathered and illegible. The stele had clearly been erected only in the late Qing dynasty, yet the erosion was already quite severe.

Only the first few passages were relatively easy to make out.

As a child he mastered the classics; at seven he could compose poetry. The village praised him as a prodigy. Upon reaching adulthood, he sat the examinations...

Boss Li had probably used that to conclude this was an inscription praising a child prodigy.

After all, apart from praise, people generally would not erect a stele for other matters concerning a child prodigy.

Unfortunately, Boss Li had run into an exception.

Chu Tianshu pressed his fingers against the stele and examined the inscription from a spirit medium's perspective.

On the mottled, blue-gray stone, he analyzed the traces of the characters that had once been there.

Reading the whole text, he could see that a scholarly family in the late Qing dynasty had fallen on hard times and pinned its hopes on the family's child prodigy. Yet the prodigy had tried again and again without even managing to pass the exam for the lowest scholarly degree.

His family would not let him be distracted by other pursuits and still demanded only that he study hard. By his forties, he had achieved nothing in his studies or in anything else. Reduced to skin and bones, he died in melancholy.

"...Yet for twenty years he struggled in the examination halls, never gaining even the scholar's blue collar. Thy father watched and admonished thee day and night, subjecting thee to the rod and ceaselessly berating thee, in hopes that thou wouldst apply thyself and become a man of worth..."

"Who could have foreseen that thou wouldst grow ever more stubborn and benighted, squander thy youth, and at last die suddenly of a derangement..."

"Unable to enter officialdom and repay the Great Qing's imperial grace, he was disloyal; unable to provide his parents and close kin with a life of silk and comfort, he was unfilial; unable to have his name inscribed in the county annals and bring glory to his hometown, he was unrighteous..."

"Such a disloyal, unfilial, unrighteous, and undutiful wretch sought to escape it all through death. I now carve this inscription in stone as a warning to those who come after..."

A full seventy percent of the inscription was devoted to berating the useless scholar buried beneath it.

The man who erected the stele was none other than the scholar's father. He had berated the scholar all his life and still would not stop, continuing even after the man's death.

He had actually used a stele covered in abuse as his son's gravestone.

"No wonder your resentment runs so deep."

Chu Tianshu stood up. "Boss Li's high expectations for his son and his high-pressure education must have reminded you of your father."

"You were a pitiful man too."

"But after possessing Boss Li, you didn't do it to punish the father. You set your sights on Li Xu instead!"

Chu Tianshu lowered his gaze to the ground.

"Rather than punish a father like your own, you urged him to make things even worse for his son."

"You don't even dare pick the right target for revenge. You're still this weak after becoming a ghost, so haven't you... become a ghost for nothing?!"

As soon as the words left his mouth, the surroundings seemed to fall silent for a moment.

The chirping of insects in the grove suddenly vanished. Those little creatures were always especially sensitive in certain respects.

A moment later, a bubbling sound came from underground, like water coming to a boil.

Black smoke surged upward along the stone stele, growing from wispy strands into clumps like cotton fluff.

Ghosts with some thoughts left really are easy to hook.

Chu Tianshu wore a shirt and trousers today, with a denim jacket thrown over them. His gaze unchanged, he slipped a hand into his jacket pocket.

You left your bones of your own accord and came up to the surface. In this state, I'll hit you with a few more nasty ones, then call an excavator over, and that'll take care of it.

Whoosh!!!

A cold wind blew, black smoke curled around the stele, and white mist rose from the ground.

A layer of white mist drifted up from the soil of the surrounding woods, as though a curtain were being lifted.

Chu Tianshu's expression changed slightly, and he looked up.

The stele had originally stood little more than ten meters from the factory building.

Now he could no longer see the factory building, only a layer of white mist as thick as silk.

Without looking back, he knew that the woods and the car behind him had likewise been cut off from sight.

The sky, too, was a solid mass of white, as though great swathes of white cloth had been used to enclose this patch of open ground.

Only the various things in the clearing remained reasonably clear.

"Is this... an Overflow Zone?!"

The pinpricks of light in Chu Tianshu's eyes seemed to widen by a fraction. He stared fixedly at the stele ahead, his body slightly bent, poised to strike.

"Whoa! I really did run into something like this!"