Yin Shou Shu

Chapter 214: The corpse chaser

Ran Qing's tone was calm, yet it revealed an undeniable firmness.

They wouldn't leave until they caught the female ghost...

Hearing Ran Qing say this, the old man sighed and said, "Yao, don't be so stubborn. You must leave before midnight, or you will really die."

"And what's the story behind your mission to capture that female ghost?"

The old woman looked at the three of them in confusion and said, "You said that Xiao Sanyong was controlled by it... What happened?"

After confirming her grandson's safety, the old woman realized that Ran Qing's words had a deeper meaning.

Ran Qing briefly recounted what had happened by the well to the old man, including how Xiao Sanyong led the way, how the three of them were trapped by the town's ghosts, and how the ghosts mysteriously disappeared after returning to the street...

After Ran Qing finished speaking, the old man stared wide-eyed in surprise, his face showing a look of astonishment.

"That female ghost is so fierce?"

Ran Qing asked again, "Grandpa, is Longchang Street like this after nightfall? Right now, everyone in the town is completely still, like they've been frozen in place in a movie. Will they only return to normal at dawn?"

Ran Qing's words surprised the old man even more: "Everyone on the street is motionless?"

It hurriedly stood up and staggered towards the door.

At the dark entrance of the grocery store, the old man stepped over the small ditch between himself and his neighbor, and called out twice into the darkened space with his flashlight.

"Xiao Wuping! Are you home?"

The old man's voice was not loud, but it drifted in the night wind and was inexplicably eerie and chilling.

The neighbor's house next door was a fairly tall wooden house with tiled roofs. As expected of a resident of the street, even though it was a wooden house with tiled roofs, it was much more impressive than the wooden houses with tiled roofs in the village.

There were some potholes in the loess courtyard that had not been paved with cement.

The old man stood at the door of the tiled house and looked inside twice, his expression one of surprise, as if he had seen something terrifying.

Ran Qing and the other two followed behind, knowing that the old man had seen the living people inside the tiled house stiff and motionless.

Having confirmed that what Ran Qing said was true, the strange old woman became anxious and uneasy.

It turned to look at Ran Qing and the other two and asked, "You said all the ghosts have gone back to the streets, but have you seen where my little grandson went?"

Ran Qing shook her head: "I didn't see it."

After saying that, he added, "At least it didn't go in the direction of the school at the end of the street."

Longchang Street has only one main street, and behind the residential buildings is a desolate and deserted asphalt road.

Once you exit from the school in the middle of the main street, you can only choose to go left or right; there are only two directions to choose from.

Upon hearing Ran Qing's words, the old man immediately turned on his flashlight and walked towards the road.

"I'm going to find my grandson," the old man said, glancing back at Ran Qing and the other two. "Hey, the female ghost you're looking for might be in the house that sells cold noodles on the street."

"Let's hurry up and catch the ghost and leave. The Red Gate might open very early tonight, probably before midnight."

The old woman hurriedly walked towards the side of the road. In the dark shadows, Ran Qing and the other two saw her walk between two cement bungalows.

It was pitch black there, and they couldn't see anything. But Ran Qing and the other two remembered that it was the location of a red door.

Seeing the old woman stumble and fall into the shadows, Long Zongshu's expression changed: "It's gone into the Red Gate!"

Behind that red door, aren't there terrifying evil spirits?
Mo Li stared intently at the old woman's departing figure and said, "This old woman is indeed not simple..." She had been pretending to be sickly and harmless all along, and even described the Red Gate as so dangerous and terrifying.

But as soon as she heard about the strange occurrences on the street and that her grandson might be in danger, the old woman immediately ran inside the red gate.

It clearly knows a great deal about the anomalies in Longchang Street! It's nothing like the clueless person it had acted before.

Ran Qing glanced deeply in the direction the old woman had left and said, "But at least it meant us no harm..."

Following the old woman's directions, Ran Qing headed straight for the family selling cold noodles on the street.

Ran Qing happened to visit the family selling cold noodles on Longchang Street during the day while she was shopping. Mo Li insisted on eating two servings of potatoes there, and the two of them sat there for quite a while.

Although it was dark, Ran Qing walked along the bumpy road with a clear purpose, relying on her memory of the day.

Mo Li looked at Ran Qing in surprise and said, "How can you be so sure it doesn't mean any harm? What if it's actually conspiring with that female ghost to harm us..."

Mo Li was surprised by Ran Qing's confident judgment.

Xiao Sanyong had tricked the three of them before, and now it's possible that Xiao Sanyong's grandmother is just making things up to deceive people.

Ran Qing shook his head and said, "I remember a kind of unorthodox practice mentioned in 'Witchcraft and Ghostly Arts.' Aunt Shen encountered it when she was young. This kind of unorthodox practice is the same as that of the spirit medium and happens to be a specialty of Zangke."

“Xiao Sanyong’s grandmother is very similar to the situation described in ‘Witchcraft and Spiritual Arts’.”

Corpse-driving women are a unique unorthodox practice in Zangke.

It sounds similar to the corpse-driving people in western Hunan, but the corpse-driving women don't help others drive corpses; they only drive their own.

Although their names contain the character "婆" (po), every corpse-driving woman must be a middle-aged man who has lost his wife or is without a wife; in the Zangke language, they are called "老寡公" (lao gua gong).

These widows' guilds spend three years searching for suitable female corpses, then bury them in inauspicious burial sites that most people would avoid at all costs, using the earth's malevolent energy to nourish the corpses for five years. During these five years, the widows' guilds ingest potent, slow-acting poisons that harm their bodies but nourish their souls.

After the female corpse has matured, it is dug out of the ground and a special secret technique is used to discard the body that has been taking medicine for five years. The female corpse, which has been nurtured for five years by the evil energy of the ominous cave, is reborn.

This evil art of resurrecting a corpse is extremely dangerous. During the five years of raising the corpse or taking poison, the slightest carelessness could lead to the complete failure of the entire effort.

However, once the corpse-raising ritual is successfully completed, the corpse-raising woman can live for at least a hundred years and develop some extremely evil supernatural powers.

This evil practice is equivalent to using the souls of the living to drive corpses around.

The corpse-driving woman also has amazing makeup skills. Even though she is a corpse, she can disguise herself as a living person and continue to walk in towns and countryside without being noticed by others.

As Ran Qing walked, she recounted the monstrous nature of the corpse-driving woman.

Long Zongshu stared wide-eyed: "Is it really that weird...?"

Mo Li was also extremely surprised, as he had never heard of the story of the corpse-driving woman.

Ran Qing said, "Corpse-driving women are very rare. It is said that they were invented by the Zangke people in the past to fight against evil spirits and ghosts in the mountains."

“In the past, each tribe of the Zangke chieftains had a corpse-driving woman. But since the chieftain tribes disintegrated and disappeared, the number of corpse-driving women has become increasingly small.”

"The threshold for this industry is too high, and the process of getting started is extremely long. If you make a mistake along the way, all your previous efforts will be wasted."

"In this day and age, there is no longer any place for corpse-driving women to survive."

“Without the support of the tribal chiefs, it would be completely not worth it to turn ourselves into something neither human nor ghost.”

(End of this chapter)