Chapter 10: 9. Awakening the Spirit

9. Awakening the Spirit

"Zhou Chang!"

In the withered, silent darkness, a sudden cry rang out—its gender impossible to tell, its tone strange.

Following that cry, many clamorous sounds began to roll at Zhou Chang's ears, and these clamorous noises finally all turned into an old man's sorrowful, broken weeping.

"Yangyang… Shuangyang…"

Zhou Chang's childhood name was Shuangyang. Hearing the old man's weeping, his heart began to ache faintly.

"Don't go, Yangyang…"

"How will Grandpa live on after this!"

"A'Chang! Yangyang!"

The clamour of gongs and drums, suona horns, human voices, and firecrackers churned up once again, drowning out the old man's grief-stricken cries. The deep-pool darkness, as if a few large stones had been thrown into it, rippled with chaotic waves. Within those layered ripples, Zhou Chang saw many blurred images.

Many, many people in colourful clothes, wearing Nuo god masks of varied expressions, surrounded that grave-mound draped in red threads—Yinsheng Laomu—leaping and dancing, beating gongs and drums.

Their movements were stiff, their joints seemingly unable to bend, as if strings hung behind them, manipulating every one of their actions.

These many people in colourful clothes and Nuo masks clustered around a black-lacquered coffin before Yinsheng Laomu's grave.

Several people propped up the four corners of a black cloth bedsheet with bamboo poles, holding it above the coffin whose lid had not yet been nailed shut, so the dead within would not be in direct contact with the light of day;

Six figures dressed all in black shouldered wooden carrying poles, lifting the coffin off the long bench.

It is usually those closest and most trusted by the deceased in life who may carry the coffin and support the spirit.

Yet those six slender, pitch-black figures, like tall poplar trees—Zhou Chang did not recognise a single one of them.

With their backs to Zhou Chang, they shouldered the coffin.

From the bustling crowd came an old man shouting at the top of his lungs: "Seal the coffin—"

The moment the call ended, someone raised a wooden mallet, coffin nails in hand, approaching the coffin's edge; someone else lifted the coffin lid, slowly closing it over the casket.

The people in their gaudy masks pushed a panicked old man toward the coffin, their mouths coaxing, calling: "Old Master Zhou, take one last look at A'Chang…"

"Take one last look…"

"The dead must depart—don't cry anymore, don't let him worry…"

"Go on, A'Chang, go in peace…"

That old man, shoved by the crowd, swaying unsteadily as he neared the coffin's side, was like a lone little boat in a vast ocean, liable to capsize at any moment.

Zhou Chang looked at that old man's back, and his heart suddenly ached terribly.

He was a man of thin emotions. Having lived for over twenty years without a single true friend, no wonder he found none of those six who had come to carry his coffin familiar—the pallbearers had been thrown together on the spur of the moment; how could he possibly know them? He had never had a close friend to begin with.

Even toward his own parents and closest kin, Zhou Chang seemed to feel little.

He often drifted outside all things, living like an outsider.

But only now, seeing that old man who had once been tall and imposing with his spine collapsed and his hair trembling in the wind like wild grass, he suddenly felt a real, piercing pain!

"Grandpa…"

He called softly in his heart.

Even the dangers he had just gone through—being hunted by Li Xiamei—had not moved him as deeply as seeing his grandfather's hunched back now.

He wanted to go home.

He had a hometown now.

A hometown is a place already gone, a place one can never return to.

Because it cannot be reclaimed, one cherishes its memory with all one's might.

Grandpa chased after that black coffin; some tried to pull him back, some blocked his way ahead.

The crowd fell into chaos.

The coffin, about to close, was pushed and jostled by the people, and the lid that had been coming together was pried open again.

Some scrambled to push the lid, some reached out to steady the coffin's side.

The black coffin too became a lone leaf-boat adrift in the human current.

"A'Chang!"

"Don't leave Grandpa behind!"

"Yangyang, Yangyang, ay!"

Zhou Chang paid no heed to the crowd's uproar and chaos. He watched his grandfather's hunched back, listened to his grandfather's heartbroken cries, and in his heart repeated over and over: "Grandpa, Grandpa, Grandpa—"

No one could hear his words.

Under the crowd's many flailing hands, the pried-open lid finally slid off completely.

Some busied themselves hauling the fallen lid, some steadied the tottering coffin body.

Those six men assigned to support Zhou Chang's spirit stood in the human tide like six pillars; the coffin they carried, no longer shielded by its lid, revealed its interior fully to Zhou Chang's eyes.

Inside the coffin, the darkness was thick as pitch.

Beyond that pure darkness, there seemed to be nothing else within.

No corpse of Zhou Chang's as he had imagined, no other dead at all.

The moment Zhou Chang's eyes fell upon that pitch-black interior, the chaotic crowd suddenly fell silent.

Those people in their gaudy clothes and Nuo god masks abruptly turned their heads in perfect unison, looking toward where Zhou Chang was!

Those six pitch-black figures, who had kept their backs to Zhou Chang all along, now twisted their heads one hundred and eighty degrees—six blank faces 'gazing' toward Zhou Chang!

Hmm!

A 'wall' that had stood between Zhou Chang and the people at the funeral was broken through at that moment!

The gazes of those 'people' at the funeral pierced through the shattered 'wall' and fixed unblinkingly upon Zhou Chang!

On the featureless faces of those six pitch-black figures, Zhou Chang's own countenance slowly emerged!

Zhou Chang felt as if his scalp were about to explode!

He stared wide-eyed at the only person at this funeral who had not turned to look back at him — his grandfather, now surrounded by that throng of eerie figures at the center, completely unaware, still chasing after his coffin and calling out in grief: "Yangyang, Yangyang…"

Icy terror and raging fury simultaneously drowned Zhou Chang's thoughts!

"Let me go back!" he howled in fury.

"Let me go back!" he begged desperately.

"Let me go back!"

……

At his cries, the people who had turned their gazes toward him from every direction all grinned.

Amid the laughter, vast as an ocean tide, a strange voice tore at its throat and wailed: "Rise — the spirit —"

Everything in Zhou Chang's vision gradually sank into darkness along with that strange voice.

The six figures clustered around the coffin, the people in colored garments wearing Nuo masks — all stood like pillars driven into this iron-like darkness, standing like trees, like so many tombstones before the grave of 'Yinsheng Laomu.'

In this heavy, condensed darkness, only Yinsheng Laomu's grave mound stood in lonely majesty.

Around the grave mound, in a daze, rows of coffins appeared — some of gold, some of wood, of differing materials.

Every tombstone before each coffin let out a call, as if calling Zhou Chang, yet the one they truly called seemed only to share a similar name: "Zhou Zhang!"

"Zhou Chang!"

"Zhou Chang!"

"Zhou Chang!"

"Zhou Dangyang!"

"Zhou Shuangyang!"

Countless names similar to Zhou Chang's were shouted aloud by the tombstones before those coffins.

All those calls gathered into a strange tone, rolling back and forth at Zhou Chang's ear — until at a certain moment, Zhou Chang could no longer even see the scene before Yinsheng Laomu's grave, and the sound rolling at his ear suddenly sharpened: "A-Chang!"

"A-Chang!"

Zhou Sanji's call exploded at Zhou Chang's ear.

He suddenly opened his eyes —

Shallow moonlight passed through the papered window, spilling beside his pillow.

The furnishings in the room were bathed in this yellowish-white light, hazy and indistinct, seeming both real and illusory.

Zhou Chang lay rigid on a single bamboo bed, his hands locked tight around his own neck, a strange smile on his pallid face.

This body that originally belonged to Zhou Chang had clearly only seized 'Zhou Chang's' neck, yet it gave Zhou Chang an intense feeling of suffocation; he felt his very consciousness seized in that instant, his mind beginning to blur!

A kerosene lamp stood above his face.

In the lamplight, Zhou Sanji called out as he reached with all his might to pry apart the two hands locked around Zhou Chang's neck.

The flickering firelight illuminated Zhou Sanji's panicked, helpless face.

Zhou Chang gazed at Zhou Sanji's face, now bright, now dim — two faint, translucent threads slithered out from between his brows, winding round and round the two wrists that gripped his neck —

He exerted his will; a needle-like pain stabbed through his brain, and the two threads that had slithered out from between his brows drew taut, pulling those two arms slowly away from his neck.

"Let me go back! Let me go back!"

At this moment, a look of furious resentment appeared on his pallid face, and he let out a great, hoarse scream!

The violent scream shook the rafters, sending dust shivering down!

Hearing that sound, Zhou Chang's very spirit wavered.

Those were not words he had spoken — they were the cries of Zhou Chang's body itself.

Did this body want to lie back down in that field of scattered graves, becoming the 'ghost secret treasure' guarded by 'Old Feng's family'?

"Where are you going?

My youngest grandson, this is our home, this is your home!

Where do you think you're going?!" Zhou Sanji looked at the youngest grandson's face full of fury and unwillingness; his eyes were shaken with horror, his hand gripping Zhou Chang's wrist tightly as he tried helplessly to reason with him.

Strand after strand of translucent threads kept emerging from between Zhou Chang's brows, winding coil upon coil around Zhou Chang's two arms.

The struggling strength of Zhou Chang's corpse-body grew weaker and weaker, until it fell completely still.

Zhou Chang opened his eyes and met the bewildered gaze of Zhou Sanji: "Those words just now weren't spoken by me. They were words spoken by this body itself."

These few sentences of his came out especially awkward; an ordinary person hearing them would not be able to understand.

Zhou Sanji was stunned for a moment upon hearing this, then let out an "ah"; his gaze at Zhou Chang grew complicated, tinged with strangeness and distance: "Ah-Chang's corpse… body has already begun to develop 'thoughts' so quickly.

It's not Ah-Chang…

If it were Ah-Chang, this would be Ah-Chang's home — he wouldn't want to go anywhere else…"

After the old man had spoken, the two of them, in the swaying lamplight of the room, fell silent.