Volume 10: Days of Cultivating in the Republic of China
Memories
Rich Merchant Hu
Of course, Shen Maomao didn’t know a thing.
But anyone can blow a cow’s cunt1, and whether she knew or not was just a matter of her upper and lower lips meeting2, wasn’t it?
The two sisters were young when they died, and living this long hadn’t taught them much. They didn’t understand the cruelty and hypocrisy of the adult world in the slightest. It looked like today, Teacher Shen was going to teach them how to be a person.3
She hooked the corner of her lips into a small smile at the older sister. She looked as if she had bamboo in her chest4, completely clear on the situation, as if she really did just want to see their sincerity.
The older sister hesitated for a moment, pointed at the floor, and said to her, “Then sit down and we’ll talk.”
Not minding that the floor was cold, Shen Maomao plopped right down in the spot she had pointed to. She wrapped her arms around her knees, rested her chin on them, and then asked, “Is this okay? Talk.”
The older sister sat down in front of her and began, “Hu Qinghuai isn’t human at all.”
Shen Maomao had suspected this for a while, so she wasn’t particularly shocked to hear it. She nodded and said, “What else?”
The older sister took a deep breath and said, “If you’re asking what happened over twenty years ago, I only know one and understand a half5 myself. But water has memories… I have a way to let you see the past. How much you can learn will depend on you…”
“What do I have to do?” Shen Maomao asked. “And how do I know you won’t try to harm me?”
The older sister was exasperated. “We’re waiting for you to help us!”
Shen Maomao retorted, “Why me? Couldn’t someone else do it?”
The older sister shook her head. “Other people get scared the moment they see us, so how could they possibly deal with Hu Qinghuai? In all these years, you’re the only fearless human we’ve ever met.”
Shen Maomao was too embarrassed to say that she simply wasn’t afraid of little ghosts—not even the most ferocious ones—but she was afraid of big ghosts. Terrified, even. The kind that could make her cry from fear.
She thought for a moment. She felt she could agree, but she was afraid the little girls would ambush her while she was lost in the memories. So, she secretly used an item to put up a layer of defense for herself before saying, “Alright, I’ll go take a look in the memories.”
“You have to remember…” At her words, the older sister raised a hand and summoned a small water ball. Then she said, “No matter what you see in the memories, you cannot make a sound, or you will be lost in them forever…” After speaking, she pointed at Shen Maomao, and the water ball obediently flew toward her.
Shen Maomao fought the urge to dodge, letting the bubble burst in her face and splash her with water vapor.
Her vision instantly blurred, and a violent ringing filled her ears. The surrounding walls, the candlelight, and the little girl in front of her all seemed to be shrouded in a layer of dusty yellow fog. Then, within the fog, they slowly began to twist and warp before disappearing completely.
When her vision cleared, what appeared before her was the yellowed flower garden of a little Western-style house.
A downpour of rain had battered leaves and petals all over the ground. A woman’s heart-tearing, lung-ripping6 screams came from the second floor of the house. The main hall was brightly lit, where a man in a long gown7 and a hat paced back and forth nervously. From time to time, he would clasp his hands together and gaze out at the curtain of rain, though it was unclear what he was praying for.
Shen Maomao found this a little novel.
Her movements weren’t restricted, so she crossed the garden in a few strides and walked into the main hall as if she knew the place, just in time to hear the man’s muttering.
He was saying, “I beg the great Hebo to bless me! Grant this Hu a son! As long as this Hu obtains a son, I will immediately donate a golden statue8 in Your Lordship’s honor!”
This must be the father of the twins and Kang Yuanhuai. She just didn’t know if this point in time was the sisters’ birth or Kang Yuanhuai’s.
She stood beside him for a few seconds, then followed the sounds upstairs, taking in her surroundings as she went.
The little Western-style house of several decades later wasn’t much different from the one now, though the layout had changed slightly. But that didn’t affect her at all.
She walked all the way to the door of the delivery room and waited outside very politely. Before long, the cries of two infants suddenly erupted from within. Clearly, the babies had been born.
It seemed this was the time of the sisters’ birth.
Rich Merchant Hu rushed up from downstairs, panting as he asked, “Boy or girl?!”
The midwife, wrapping the newborns in a large blanket, came out of the room trembling and held the babies up to him. “Mr. Hu, this… this…”
Rich Merchant Hu looked down, and his pupils contracted abruptly. Then, a look of curiosity appeared in his eyes.
All people are curious, and Rich Merchant Hu’s curiosity seemed particularly strong. Upon seeing the conjoined sisters, he was somewhat shocked, but more than that, he was intrigued by the novelty.
Shen Maomao squatted to one side, idly watching Rich Merchant Hu arrange the subsequent affairs. If I have to watch like this, she thought, won’t I be stuck in this memory for five years? Can’t this thing fast-forward?
The moment she had that thought, her vision suddenly blurred. Countless scenes flashed before her eyes like old photographs, one after another, like viewing lanterns from horseback9, stuffing a massive amount of information into her head.
She saw Rich Merchant Hu order people to lock the two sisters in the backyard. He assigned tight-lipped servants to care for them and even hired a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine to manage the sisters’ health. They were never short on food or drink. Occasionally, when he remembered them, he would come for a look, play with the sisters as if teasing puppies, and then leave with a flick of his sleeve.
Time flew by. In the blink of an eye, the sisters were five years old. Their existence was discovered by other townspeople, and the news grew wings. It spread from one to ten, and from ten to a hundred. With so many mouths melting gold10, the story twisted and turned until it became that Rich Merchant Hu was secretly feeding a monster at home, plotting against the proper path.11
The rich merchant became the subject of intense gossip. When people learned that this “monster” was his two daughters, even more flowing words and flying speech12 were heaped upon his head. In an instant, his mentality shifted from “raising them for fun” to “regretting it but being unable to catch up.”13 Afterward, the sisters’ food was cut off, and the servants who cared for them were dismissed one by one.
The two five-year-old children were starving to the point of death, but one night, Rich Merchant Hu had a dream.
Shen Maomao didn’t know what he dreamed, but she squatted by the merchant’s bedside and watched him startle awake. He immediately ran to the small courtyard where the sisters were kept and ordered someone to feed them just enough to keep them alive. He had the sisters carried to the Hebo Temple14, sent people to spread the word everywhere, and even invited the town’s most respected elders to serve as witnesses.
At that time, it seemed there was only one Hebo Temple, and the townspeople seemed to worship only one Hebo. The day was cold and the wind was strong. In the temple, human heads gathered and moved15, and it was extraordinarily lively.
In front of everyone, Rich Merchant Hu gave a speech, saying that he had raised the two sisters specifically to offer them to the Hebo as a sacrifice. The Hebo had come to him in a dream last night, he claimed, and ordered him to deliver the offering quickly, so he was now preparing to act.
Shen Maomao, like a ghost, stood at the back of the crowd, watching him perform his one-man show up front.
A pair of scissors forcibly cut the place where the sisters were joined. Their piercing cries nearly shattered people’s eardrums. Rich Merchant Hu’s hands were covered in blood, yet the people around them clapped their hands and called it satisfying16, looking even more like demons than the two sisters.
Shen Maomao bit her lower lip and turned her head away, unable to watch. She sped up the progression of the scene again.
The sisters’ cries gradually weakened until they became kitten-like whimpers. Then they were placed in a small wooden basin and pushed into the river.
The river water churned, overturning the basin in an instant. The conjoined sisters, only a few years old, were completely submerged, leaving only a few “glug glug” bubbles to burst on the river’s surface.
Two years later, Rich Merchant Hu’s wife bore him a son, who was named Hu Qinghuai.
On the day the child was born, the two sisters who had been offered to the Hebo crawled out of the water and began their frenzied revenge against Rich Merchant Hu.
Five members of the Hu family met with misfortune one after another. Rich Merchant Hu hired a master to exorcise the ghosts, but that master was scared by the two sisters until he fled with piss flowing and farts rolling17. With no other options, Rich Merchant Hu could only send his newborn child to his own father’s home.
The sisters did not give up on Hu Qinghuai because of this, but Hu Qinghuai seemed to have a power about him that one could not speak clearly of nor explain plainly, which was constantly protecting him, forcing the sisters to only watch from a distance, never daring to approach.
What happened next was what she already knew: Hu Qinghuai was sent abroad by the Hu family at age seven, returned to the country twelve years later to attend university in the capital, the number of Hebo Temples in Huai Town grew from one to five, and the townspeople’s memories had become somewhat muddled.
Over thirty years of time had been condensed into a few dozen minutes, and mixed in was some information she hadn’t known.
For example, Dahai had actually died long ago; he had been torn to pieces by a fishing net at the bottom of the river on the second day of the game, but he himself didn’t know it. And for another, Kang Yuanhuai had been trying to find a way to make the five Hebos’ hands dirty with human lives, for some unknown purpose. The people here were the sacrifices he had lured in to achieve his goal.
Then she saw herself: she was kneeling before the Hebo Temple, the two sisters collapsed on either side of her, their life status unknown. A massive black shadow loomed over her, slowly extending its claws…
The scene before her eyes abruptly froze, then shattered like glass. Shen Maomao’s scalp went numb. She snapped her eyes open with a whoosh and thrust a hand out to stab behind her.
The dagger didn’t hit anything solid; it was like stabbing at air. A chill ran down Shen Maomao’s hand, and she immediately dove forward. A gust of wind swept past where she had been, messing up her short hair, and then a massive force slammed into her back, sending her crashing into the base of the idol.
The defensive item she had used on herself was instantly depleted. Not daring to delay, Shen Maomao scrambled to her feet and stared warily at the black shadow.
The shadow was immense, barely recognizable as a humanoid figure. Its head brushed against the ceiling, and its entire body was a mass of constantly churning black energy that made the floorboards hiss as it corroded them.
Shen Maomao didn’t know who it was, but she could more or less guess that it was related to Kang Yuanhuai.
The space inside the temple was limited; being caught was only a matter of time. She threw out a handful of explosive pellets, forcing the black shadow to retreat slightly. Taking advantage of the smoke and ash kicked up by the explosion, she lowered her body and slipped through an opening to the doorway, pushed the main doors open, and ran outside.
The moment the doors were opened, all the townspeople came back to life, continuing along their trajectories from before they were frozen. Shen Maomao wove through the crowd, glancing back as she ran, only to find that the instant the doors had opened, the humanoid black shadow had dissipated, like mist evaporated by the sun, leaving not a single trace behind.
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