Chapter 4

Parsed with an automated reader. The content accuracy is not guranteed.

Prince Zhuang was a chronic invalid and went to sleep early. If Xi Ping went to the prince’s manor now, he would have to get him out of bed again. Xi Ping didn’t want to interrupt his san-ge’s sleep two days in a row, and he supposed that the Marquis’s anger would have dissipated by now, so he went back home.

Just as he turned into the south end of Dangui Lane, he met a carriage. Xi Ping saw the character “Dong” written on the carriage lantern hanging from it and knew it belonged to the house of Lord Dong, an official in the Office of Protocol.

The Dongs were a family of scholars and looked down on their good neighbor the “sycophantic” Marquis of Yongning, so while the two families both lived in Dangui Lane, there was ordinarily little communication between them. Xi Ping didn’t feel it was worth his while to go over and make himself annoying. When he ran into them on his way, he gave a perfunctory greeting and let them pass. He hurriedly walked on without looking back.

He passed by like the wind. The person in the carriage must not have heard him clearly and wanted to ask who it was; he tapped lightly on the carriage door.

The old driver looked up and saw that Xi Ping had already hurried down a narrow lane and entered the Marquis manor by a side door, then unhurriedly answered, “Young Master, the one who just went by was…”

Before he could finish, he heard a roar fly out of the shut-up Marquis Manor’s rear court—as soon as Xi Ping slipped in through the side door, his father’s powerful shouts hit him right in the face: “Shut the gates! Hold him! Don’t let him run!”

In response, a dozen burly fellows leapt up from either side. Some rushed at Xi Ping with ropes and some locked the gate, all of them surrounding and cutting him off.

Xi Ping had a wealth of experience. He dodged left and right, spotted an opening, and forced his way out of the encirclement, just like a vigorous weasel.

As he ran toward the inner courtyard, he cried out for show: “Lord Marquis, spare me! Spare me! I’m sorry!”

The Marquis of Yongning, having taken the upper hand, slipped up and let himself be taken in. “What are you sorry for?”

Xi Ping seized the subject and dumped the evil onto his dad’s head: “If I had known that you were a fan of Miss Qingke, no matter what, I’d never have gone on stage myself to help Jiangli compete against you!”

The Marquis had just spent half of last night kneeling in penitence to his wife for having gone to Overflowing Splendor, nearly bringing on an attack of rheumatism. Having this dirt splashed on him, his vision went dark—the wretched child had gone too far!

“Throw that unfilial son in the stables and break him to pieces!”

In the lane on the other side of the wall, the Dong manor’s carriage rumbled by. The old driver, hearing the domestic squabble in the Marquis Manor, said, “Ha, do you hear that? It’s the Marquis of Yongning’s house.”

But the “young master” in the carriage made no response. He kept tapping on the carriage door over and over.

The sound of the tapping was even and mechanical. Against the slightly damp wood, it made an eerie muffled sound.

Tap—tap-tap—

“Young master?”

Tap—tap-tap—

The driver realized that something was wrong and stopped the carriage. “Do you have any other instructions, young master? We’re nearly home.”

Tap!

The sound of tapping on the door came to an abrupt halt. There was silence all around, apart from the faint clamor still coming from the Yongning Marquis Manor nearby.

The driver turned slowly, seemed to hesitate for a moment, then put his hand on the carriage door. But before he could open it, the carriage door was pushed open from inside.

The driver’s seat had been unsteady. He fell down. Next, a big heap of white paper money flew out of the carriage door. Like a ghost come to demand a life, it threw itself at the first living being it came upon, coming right toward the driver and sticking all over his body.

The paper money was covered in bloody writing. The writing was a horoscope.

A powerful smell of blood rose to the sky. A hoarse mourning wail came from the carriage: “Raise the casket, hang two mats—”

The strange paper money bored continuously into the old driver’s flesh. Whatever place it touched began to fester.

It was as if the driver had developed a white rash all over his body. He rolled on the ground, screaming, but only got more paper money on himself as he rolled. Soon, one dark red flower after another bloomed on his festering flesh. The old driver began to leak like a rotten peach!

The quiet night of Dangui Lane was split by mournful cries. The decorative lanterns at the south end of the street lit up all in a row. The white steam took on a bloody tinge.

Xi Ping was just about to go over the wall into the inner courtyard when he heard the noise. Straddling the wall, he automatically turned to look.

At first, he didn’t realize what the ball of white rolling around in the street was, only saw the paper money continuously flying out from the carriage, moving without a wind, nearly filling the whole street. He was bewildered: where had so many moths come from? It was a sickening sight.

Then he saw the white paper money assemble into a human shape with a head and legs. It stepped forward on its “legs,” “walking” toward a place where there was a door.

The “paper money man” reached the door and slapped it lightly. As it tapped, the paper money fell from it with a rustle, silently sticking to the door and in the cracks between the door and the frame.

Tap—tap-tap—

More than one home had been startled by the scream in the night. The porter watching the side door soon opened it a crack and looked out in a way he thought was covert.

But even a crack the width of the pupil of an eye would have been enough to let the paper money slip in.

The first porter to open the door a crack saw the whiteness outside and thought that this was smoke spat out by an exploding streetlamp. He was about to call for help when a piece of paper money fell in through the crack of the opened door.

The porter looked down and got a clear look at what this was, then cursed “unlucky” and planned to kick it away. But the paper money flew up from the ground and came toward his face at lightning speed!

As if he had been splashed in the face with boiling oil, the porter yelled and fell backward. The door was opened at once from the outside, and more paper money rushed in to swallow the porter whole!

Xi Ping, who had watched the whole process of the paper money tricking a person into opening the door and then “eating” him, was stunned.

Just then, the paper money in the carriage at last ran out. The dim halo around the carriage lantern with the character “Dong” written on it lit the half open carriage door.

By that light, Xi Ping glanced inside, and all the bad words he had ever heard in his life instantly surged up in his mind.

He saw a man…a male corpse sitting inside the carriage, the rot and livor mortis stuck to his features like a mask. It was hard to tell at first who he was. And this blotchy face was at this moment turned toward Xi Ping!

The corpse seemed to sense his gaze. The dead eyes turned toward him. The corpse seemed to want to smile at him. The corners of the mouth trembled upward, and another piece of skin fell from the face. The corpse sang, wildly off key: “Shelter it…fully seven days. The Great Way touches Heaven and sends you back home…do not linger…a lifetime’s…joys and sorrows are like illusions…go to the West…go to the West…”

This scene categorically had nothing to do with this world. Xi Ping’s brain ground to a standstill.

But just then, there was a knock at the side door of the Marquis Manor, too!

He saw the paper money like flying moths standing three chi high at his house’s door, slavering over the fresh meat and living people inside. It was tapping at their door!

“Don’t open the door! Outside there’s…shit!” Xi Ping had cried out in his urgency, forgetting that he was still on top of the wall, and fell down headfirst.

“Young master!”

When he recovered, he was surrounded by a big crowd of people. The Marquis, who had just wanted to “break him to pieces,” was stroking his back, asking over and over, “Did you lose your balance? Where did you hit yourself? Did you hit your head? What did you see… Dad is here, don’t be scared, don’t be scared. Letai, get someone to see what’s happened outside. Who is that making noise in the middle of the night and even knocking on the door?”

The butler Wu Letai had just given an affirmative when Xi Ping shook his head, dizzy from the fall, and jumped up.

He spared no time for explanations. He pushed the Marquis aside. One of his legs was still a little lame, so he limpingly climbed the wall. “Everyone…all of you…move aside, don’t stand near the door! Don’t look outside! Is there fire? Give it to me!”

As he spoke, he rolled up his sleeves and prepared to do battle with the forces of evil. “I’ll burn you all down!”

“What are you doing? Didn’t that fall knock any sense into you? Come down…” The Marquis was all at sea. He was about to order his wretched son to get down when he heard bells urgently ringing.

The Marquis of Yongning looked in the direction of the sound, surprised.

The sound of the bells came from Heaven's Design Pavilion’s Azure Dragon Horn Tower!

Of the seven Azure Dragon Towers, the Horn Tower was the one in Dangui Lane.

Dangui Lane was near the foot of the imperial city. To avoid “shocking the higher-ups,” none of the buildings here surpassed three stories, making the six-story tower at the north-east corner look unusually lofty. At night, when the residents of Dangui Lane looked up from their yards and saw which floor of the tower the moon had reached, they could make a rough estimate of the time.

The outer eaves of the Horn Tower were hung full of bronze bells 9.6 cun long, but these were different from ordinary bells to scare off birds. These bronze bells had no clappers. The bells were always moving without ringing.

The Marquis had lived in Dangui Lane for over twenty years, and this was his first time hearing the tongueless bells ring!

There were high and low bells, mixed together, like the murmur of conversation. Next, the top of the Horn Tower let out a dazzling white light, even brighter than Maze Station’s beacon. It pierced the mist in the air and fell precisely on the spot where the screams were coming from.

The Horn Tower’s response was even faster than the Heart Tower’s last night at the pleasure boat ferry crossing.

No sooner had the bronze bells under the tower’s eaves moved than three blue-clothed figures flew out following the white light. In a few hops they reached the south end of the street.

Right now, the south end of Dangui Lane was in chaos. There was hardly any place to stand. Several houses' side doors and back doors had already been pushed open by the paper money. The servants and guards were running like sheep driven by a hungry wolf. Some screamed, some chanted prayers, some threw lamp oil and torches directly onto the ground…Ominous flames soared. Four or five people had already fallen to the ground, entirely wrapped in paper money, their condition unknown.

A few blue-clothed people landed on surrounding courtyard walls and tall lampposts. Their leader’s attire was a little different from the others’—he also wore a silver belt embroidered with a subtle crane design.

Because the Horn Tower was near the imperial city, it was an important place in the capital. Those who kept guard at the tower were all major figures within Heaven's Design Pavilion.

The person on duty at the Horn Tower tonight was Heaven's Design Pavilion’s Assistant Commander Pang Jian, who oversaw matters in the capital.

Lord Pang was broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, with thick eyebrows and big eyes. His face was weathered bronze. Even the sedate sapphire blue robe couldn’t suppress the sense of wildness about him.

He didn’t look like a cultivation sect’s half-immortal. He looked more like a wandering chivalrous swordsman down on his luck.

After glancing at the ground covered in paper money, Pang Jian took out a whistle. The whistle was tiny, but the sound it made was deeper than a bugle’s. It rumbled like thunder. Before the whistling had dispersed, another team of blue-clothed people came from the Horn Tower in response.

In the blink of an eye, six walkers in the mortal world had gathered in a small alley on the south side of Dangui Lane—it was said that at each Azure Dragon Tower, only seven people in all stood watch at night.

Xi Ping, ready to crawl along the inner courtyard wall to go burn paper, was astonished. He watched avidly as the blue-clothed people fell into formation, his eyes unable to follow the walkers in the mortal world, who were nearly blurs.

Pang Jian took out a flag around two chi long and threw it at the ground.

Crack. He must have been very strong. The wooden flagpole passed through the stone floor tile as if cutting through tofu and stood firm.

With that flag as the center and the six of them arrayed around it, an enormous “cyclone” rose from the ground and all at once swept in all the paper money around them.

As soon as the paper money was swept into the array, it caught fire. The papers flew away as if fighting for their lives, but after a long struggle, they were sucked up by the “cyclone” one after another. For a time, the sky was full of flying fiery butterflies. They danced wildly, then at last burned to ash and fell. The cyclone, which had started out colorless and formless, was enveloped in endless ash and dust and became a smokestack reaching to the sky, making the atmosphere in Dangui Lane as foul as in the factory district to the south of the city.

In only one ke, all the paper money scattered in the street was burned away, and the great wind came to a stop. The wailing corpse in the carriage had at some point shut its mouth.

Thump. The corpse fell out and landed facedown in the dust and ashes covering the street.

This was a genuine article “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

The south street was completely silent. It was as if they had collectively been sucked into a grotesque nightmare. Apart from the Viscount squatting on the wall of the Marquis Manor, no one dared to show their heads, no one dared to make a sound.

There were only the extravagant decorative lanterns of Dangui Lane, bright as daylight, silvering the edges of the messy heaps of dismembered and rotting corpses on the ground.

Tonight the pleasure boats were silent. Jinping was still. From the opposite bank of the Lingyang River came the distant and muffled sound of a night watchman’s clapper.

The second watch of the night.

Pang Jian shot Xi Ping a glance and shoved him off the wall with a flick of his sleeve. “Whose dim-witted child is that, watching the fun?”

He was the first to jump down from above. He retrieved the array flag with a pinch—the little pale yellow flag had turned as black as coal, and there was one whole piece of paper money stuck to the flag.

Like a wary lion, Pang Jian drew close and sniffed the paper money. Then he snapped his fingers at it, and the last trembling piece of paper money also burned to ashes and fell from the flag.

Pang Jian put on a pair of gloves as thin as cicada’s wings and turned over each of the people fallen on the ground one by one to inspect them. After a moment, he shook his head.

Never mind survivors, there were hardly any people on the ground with their organs intact. A faint touch and loose parts came off them.

“Call some people from the imperial guard to come help out, then go to the Heart Tower and have Zhao Yu come over here,” Pang Jian ordered as he stepped over the rotting flesh toward the corpse that had fallen out of the carriage. He turned the corpse over. “Male, around twenty… He’s wearing a private seal, the carving on it says… ‘Dong Zhang.’ Who’s that? Does anyone know him?”

“He’s the eldest son of the Office of Protocol’s Lord Dong by his wife, and nephew of the Virtuous Consort at the palace,” a walker in the mortal world came up to say quietly. “The Dong manor is one street over.”

“He’s very young. A pity.” Pang Jian nodded, then added, “Come, someone go to the manor to break the news… Be a little careful, don’t startle the family.”

Then he stood and pointed to the two remaining blue-clothesers. “You two, visit all the houses around here and notify them. Tell them the rebellious evildoers have been expelled. Give your condolences to those whose family members have been killed, but say that they can’t touch the remains yet. We’ll handle them. Ask while you’re at it whether anyone noticed anything unusual.”

The imperials guardsmen came quickly and tightly surrounded the south half of Dangui Lane. Under Pang Jian’s direction, they efficiently cleared the scene, removed the bodies, and exorcised the evil.

In hardly any time, Zhao Yu of the Azure Dragon Heart Tower also arrived.

“Commander, I heard that another person has been caught in an underworld marriage? That’s…” Zhao Yu was startled by the ground covered in corpses. “How many dead?”

“Only this one died from being stolen for an underworld marriage.” Pang Jian pointed to Dong Zhang’s corpse. “Apart from him, the carriage was also full of paper money soaked in corpse poison that flew at people as soon as it saw them and rotted their flesh where it touched. Fortunately, it’s night, and there are few people in Dangui Lane. If this had been broad daylight in the east bank city center, I don’t know how much trouble it would have caused.”

As he spoke, the imperial guards carefully disassembled the Dong manor’s carriage. On the roof of the carriage was something drawn in fresh blood. It was unclear what it was. Staring too long at the lines that twisted like vipers caused dizziness and nausea.

“A bitter fleabane curse.” Pang Jian clasped his hands behind his back and looked at the still fresh blood. “My guess is it happened like this—the paper money was set off by the deceased…Dong Zhang before his death.”

Zhao Yu’s expression was apprehensive. “But mortals can’t draw curses.”

“Naturally,” Pang Jian said. “He was forced to draw it by the evil cultivator who performed the underworld marriage.”

“But, commander, making a person sing a song before dying can’t be compared to forcing him to draw a curse and murder people.”

“True.” Pang Jian nodded thoughtfully. “From this it seems that the evil cultivator who performed the underworld marriage must at least been in the established foundation stage. And the corpse used for writing the ‘netherworld marriage contract’ can’t be freshly dead, either. At the very least it has to be refined with secret arts for fifty years and more… How strange. Too much expense went into killing this man.”

Even fifty-year-old aged wine was hard to come by, never mind a corpse steeped for fifty years. Young Master Dong’s father probably wasn’t even fifty years old—who would pay such a high price to kill a frail young lordling?

With Dong Zhang’s physique, wouldn’t stabbing him once have killed him?

Could all this trouble really have been for the purpose of having him be his own mourner before dying and taking along a few drivers and servants?

“Commander.” Just then, one of the blue-clothesers who had gone to make inquiries returned and reported, “Imperial Duke Li’s manor went to bed early. The duke is elderly and couldn’t stand this in the middle of the night. The manor’s servants didn’t dare to alarm him. There were casualties at the manors of both Vice-President Sun of the Board of Rites and Lord Lu of the Imperial Court of Justice. I put together cleansing arrays for them and left behind calming talismans. The Yongning Marquis Manor didn’t open their door at the time, but their Viscount had just come home. He met the Dong manor’s carriage and just happened to witness the paper money killing people…”

Pang Jian and Zhao Yu spoke almost at the same time.

“That idiot straddling the wall just now?” said Pang Jian.

“From the Marquis of Yongning’s family?” said Zhao Yu.

Pang Jian looked at him. Zhao Yu hesitated for a moment, then thought that this business wasn’t hard to look into. It was no good covering it up. So he said, “The one at the pleasure boat ferry crossing last night, the last person he met before his death was also the Viscount of Yongning. I went to see him just this morning.”

“Go, notify them at the Marquis Manor,” Pang Jian said. “There’s serious business at hand. Ask the Viscount to come out and let us have a look.”