We followed the sound into the woods. After a while, I signaled for the other two to stop. There was movement up ahead. In a clearing stood a stone table. A man sat on a stone bench, chuckling as he rubbed a few pebbles on the table. As he rubbed them, he chatted with the air. “There you go—you picked the East Wind card just now. You win.”
“Hang on, don’t you dare welch on me. I’m going all in this time.”
A man deep in the woods in the middle of the night, “playing cards” and muttering to himself. If someone filmed this and showed it to him later, he’d probably be scared out of his mind.
Old Khương whispered, “He’s been possessed!”
I noticed a stack of paper spirit money beside the man’s hand. He must have “won” it.
Paper spirit money!? So the ghost had changed its method of harming people, but the nature of it was the same.
“Everyone, get ready to rescue the hostage!” I said, reaching into the pouch on my belt and taking out a handful of realgar powder.
I had two pouches on my belt: one filled with sticky rice to sprinkle on jiangshi, and one filled with realgar powder to sprinkle on evil spirits.
Old Khương pulled out his ghost-catching net, woven from ink-soaked cord. The cord symbolized “righteousness” and was often used in folk practices to ward off evil. It was very effective. As for Sài Thìa’s weapon, it was rather special... It was Sài Thìa himself!
“Go!” I charged forward and scattered a handful of realgar powder. I faintly heard a woman scream in agony.
A hazy figure moved through the cloud of swirling powder. Sài Thìa roared, and Old Khương immediately cast the net, catching the ghost. You might be wondering about Sài Thìa, a halfwit who could catch a ghost with nothing but a roar.
As the saying goes, “Ghosts fear the wicked.” Before entering this line of work, Sài Thìa had been a hired thug, wicked through and through. He was also a middle-aged virgin, with powerful yang energy. One roar was enough to throw a ghost into a panic; otherwise, Old Khương wouldn’t have been able to catch it.
Old Khương’s net bulged and floated in midair, with something transparent inside struggling nonstop. It would be hard to squeeze it into a jar, but it looked like we didn’t need to intervene.
Meanwhile, the card player had been startled by us. Half awake and half asleep, he looked around in confusion. “Huh? Where’d they go?”
“He’s still out of it. Sài Thìa, slap him!” I said.
That was Sài Thìa’s favorite thing to do. He grabbed the man and slapped him repeatedly, making his head rock from side to side. By the time he stopped, the man’s face was swollen like a pig’s, and his voice had gone hoarse. “Who are you people? Why are you hitting me?”
“Hitting you? What were you doing just now?” I asked.
“I was playing cards with a few women. Where’d you take me? Where’s my house? I won a few thousand...”
“Take a look. Is this the money you won?” I pushed his head down toward the table so he could see the pile of “money.”
When he realized he’d been bewitched, he screamed and passed out.
Back in the village, Sài Thìa lowered the man from his shoulder and set him on the ground. Old Khương carried the jar containing the evil spirit to the village chief’s house. Seeing that the jar’s mouth was sealed only with a paper talisman, the chief asked in surprise, “There’s a ghost in this jar?”
“If you don’t believe me, open it and see.”
“I believe you, I believe you!”
Old Khương explained that this method of harming people was called “ghost money stuffing.”
The ghost tried every way it could to stuff paper spirit money into someone’s hands. If it got as far as the forty-ninth bill, the person would lose their mind—and in severe cases, die.
The next day at noon, we dealt with the ghost. Villagers of all ages came to watch.
The process was simple enough: set up a formation around the jar, recite the spell, and that was it.
There were two kinds of spells: a rebirth spell to deliver the dead, and a life-cutting spell to destroy them.
Since this ghost had deliberately harmed people, we decided to destroy it.
The three of us sat around the formation and recited the life-cutting spell. The jar began to shake on its own, harder and harder. After the third round of chanting, Old Khương lit a fire and threw the jar into it. A jar that had once held a ghost couldn’t be used again.
After collecting our fee, we took our leave. With no vehicle, we had to walk to town to catch a train. We walked all afternoon. At sunset, a village suddenly appeared up ahead. It looked familiar.
The villagers at the entrance stared at us in surprise.
Old Khương laughed. “This is ridiculous! We’ve been trapped by a ghost’s wall, and in broad daylight, no less.”
“Old Khương, what do you think?”
“I think the job isn’t done. There’s another powerful ghost! It’s put an obstacle in our way. That’s practically a challenge. Fine, we accept!”
The villagers were surprised to see us return. Old Khương proceeded to “work on” the village chief again, explaining how serious the situation was, then finally said this would count as after-sales service, so there’d be no extra charge.
The chief nodded repeatedly and hurried to arrange a place for us to stay.
There wasn’t much to do at night in a mountain village. Sài Thìa and I played cards, while Old Khương disappeared. When we found him, he was surrounded by a group of women, spitting as he told them stories about catching ghosts. He nearly declared himself the modern-day Zhong Kui.
I dragged him back. He grumbled that I was stopping him from making friends. “Can’t you behave yourself? Don’t you already have someone you’re supposed to marry?”
“It’s not official yet!” he said.
As we were nearing our lodgings, we saw a figure in the window pulling a noose tight, about to put it around their neck.
I thought, This is bad! and rushed inside.
When we broke down the door, Sài Thìa had just hanged himself, his body still swinging in midair.
I lifted him by the legs, while Old Khương frantically searched for something to cut the rope. By the time we got Sài Thìa down, he was barely breathing.
I pressed on his chest and pinched his philtrum. Only then did he wake up. The burly man threw his arms around me and sobbed.
“It’s okay, it’s okay!” I patted his back.
Old Khương’s face darkened. “A hanging ghost looking for a substitute! Damn it, it’s going after us now!”
According to folk belief, hanging ghosts are the most vicious. Since they died by suicide, they can’t be reincarnated; they have to find someone to take their place before they can move on. Hanging ghosts often secretly leave a noose on the threshold when someone is alone, then slip into the house and trick or bewitch them into hanging themselves.
The weaker ones take on the appearance of someone familiar, like a neighbor, and come over to say, “Your husband gambled away everything, lost it all. His creditors chased him with knives, and now he’s run off.”
If the wife believes them, she’ll kill herself.
The ghost doesn’t just “talk her into it”; it even thoughtfully ties the noose in advance.
The stronger ones don’t need to say a word. Someone in the house will suddenly fall into a daze and hang themselves. The ghost Sài Thìa ran into was clearly an evil spirit!
Old Khương checked the threshold and, sure enough, found a stinking rope.
He paid no attention to the villagers crowded outside the door, watching the “gangster con men” being tormented by a ghost.
Unconcerned about his reputation, Old Khương shut the door, burned some charcoal, and incinerated the substitute rope. Then he discussed it with me.
Clearly, another evil spirit was lurking in the village. The question was, how could we find it?
“It’s going after us now!”Old Khương fumed. “I swear on my honor, I’ll destroy it.”
“You have honor? We’d be better off asking the village chief.”
“That old man couldn’t get a word out of him with a rolling pin. What’s the point of asking?”
“I wonder if this has anything to do with the ghost we destroyed. Did you ask who the grave belonged to?”
“I did. It was an abandoned grave. Nobody knew.”
I thought it over. “There might be a way. The first victim is still lying there, isn’t he? We can ask him. He’s the main witness, after all.”
“Right!”
The victim was Lý Hưởng, son of the village’s quack doctor—a foolish, timid fellow, exactly the kind of person ghosts liked best.
When we went to see him, Lý Hưởng was still lying in bed, kept alive by an IV drip. His parents, honest and simple people, watched as we laid him on the ground and anxiously asked, “Can you save our son?”
“We can save him…”
Old Khương didn’t finish. If we told them what we were about to do, it would scare them. We planned to use him to communicate with the dead.
Lý Hưởng still carried traces of the previous ghost’s breath. If the current evil spirit was connected to the one we’d destroyed, he would be the best medium for summoning it. We laid him flat, and Old Khương sprinkled incense ash around him, outlining a human figure. We burned paper, chanted the spirit-summoning incantation, and waited in silence… Suddenly, a gust of cold wind blew the window open and swept into the house.
What happened next terrified everyone there. Lý Hưởng abruptly stood bolt upright, as if an invisible pillar were propping up his back. Then he opened his eyes and looked around. He held himself like a woman, with a shy gaze; his hands even formed orchid fingers, tugging as if he were holding an invisible sleeve.
“Who are you!” Old Khương barked. You had to be stern when interrogating a ghost, or it wouldn’t confess.
“She” suddenly burst out laughing, then began to cry. The mad behavior made everyone take a step back.
She didn’t answer Old Khương. She just looked around with a sinister gaze, making everyone she looked at shudder.
Suddenly, she lunged at the nearest person—me. I stumbled in confusion, but Sài Thìa caught me in time and even gave her two slaps, probably an old occupational habit.
“Don’t hit my son!” Lý Hưởng’s father cried anxiously.
“He’s not your son right now!” Old Khương replied.