Guai Dao Hu Zong Ren

  That noon's meal was unexpectedly delicious, I think it's because Cai Jie helped. While eating, Fu Yunni looked at each of us with expectant eyes. Hu Zongren seemed to be someone who had suffered hardships, holding his rice bowl and wolfing down the food without a word. After tasting the dishes made by Fu Yunni, he found them much better than I imagined, so he also started eating voraciously.

  After dinner, two giggling girls went to wash dishes, and I called the village chief back. I said we would take on this task, as for how much the reward was, it's up to you, Village Chief. For a client like this who even makes me feel embarrassed to mention money, I can only leave the decision to him. Then I told Cai Jie and Fu Yunni that Hu Zongren and I were going to Qijiang for a few days, if we hurry it would be 2 days, but if not, then it's hard to say. I asked Cai Jie to go home a bit later in the afternoon, or she could stay at Fu Yunni's house if she didn't want to go back. These two women have been chattering non-stop every time we meet since becoming friends. So I asked Hu Zongren to pack his things and followed me back to my house, bringing some essentials with us, and started driving towards the village location that the Village Chief told me.

  The journey from Chongqing to Qijiang is not far, and it only takes a few dozen minutes to arrive. However, finding the village from Qijiang County took me quite some time, and the road was particularly difficult to walk on. Fortunately, after spring began, the scenery along the mountain villages was still pretty good. Qijiang is located at the intersection of Chongqing and Guizhou, and the stunning beauty of Guizhou's mountains occasionally appears in these small villages. On the way, I saw some fruit farmers picking loquats, and when I was indulging in this atmosphere, a loud snore came from my right side. Turning my head to look, Hu Zongren was sleeping with an extremely ugly posture.

  So I quietly pulled over, took Ashley Simpson's CD out of the package and inserted it into the CD player, turned off the volume first, then fast-forwarded to around the chorus part, and then covered my ears and suddenly turned up the volume to the maximum.

  After witnessing a bizarre carp jumping out of water, I drove exceptionally happily for the rest of the trip.

  After walking on the mountain road for almost an hour, we finally arrived at that village. After asking the villagers about the location of the village committee, we drove there directly and called the village head on the way. He was already waiting for us at the entrance of the village committee. When he saw us, he found that our ages were not very old, and he was a little surprised at first, but soon he didn't say anything else. Instead, he moved out two benches from the house, and we sat in the courtyard to chat.

  The village head, surnamed Wu, told us that on the way to the village, we should have seen a large pond in the mountain ditch, which is as big as a school football field. The accident happened at that pond. Village Head Wu said that he himself grew up in the village since childhood and heard from the elderly in the village that this place originally had no such pond. It was the Japanese devils who bombed the road to destroy the Nationalist army's transportation of troops from Guizhou to Sichuan, scattering bombs over an area of several hundred square kilometers around here, creating a large pit. I was surprised when I heard it, wondering how powerful the bomb could be to create such a big place. Village Head Wu said that the elderly said that the pit was not so big at first, but after the mountain slope was damaged and landslides occurred, several rains accumulated water, and later on, no one knew why, the water kept increasing, and the area became larger and larger.

  The village chief continued, "When we were young, many children went to play by the water's edge because the water was very clear. But in the 1960s, it once dried up almost to the bottom. However, a strange thing happened at that time - overnight, the water suddenly refilled the pond. The elderly people in the village told the children that there was an old turtle living at the bottom of the pond, and to prevent the water from overflowing and forming a mountain flood, the old turtle used its shell to block the underground water outlet beneath the pond. When it was dry, the turtle would turn over and let the water refill the pool again. And when children went to play in the water, the elderly people always warned them that the turtle would bite people, and only when thunder struck would it release its grip. But for so many years, everything had been very peaceful. Until two years ago, a child from the village secretly went swimming and drowned. The villagers organized a search but couldn't find the body until one night there was a heavy rainstorm, and the next day the villagers found the child's body floating on the water's surface. And so the legend of that year was revived again."

  Hu Zongren interrupted Wu Cunzhang, "Village chief, wait a minute, didn't you say on the phone that it was a water ghost? How did it become about turtles now?" Hu Zongren glanced at me and said, "This kind of spirit thing, we really can't do anything about it!"

  Wu Cunzhang furrowed his brow and said to Hu Zongren, "Please listen to me. After the child drowned back then, the village brought up the legend from that year, with the intention of reminding other children in the village not to swim on their own again. However, people who are a bit older and have some common sense all know that it's just a made-up story. The real problem is that last summer, a group of teenagers went swimming in the pond and one of them drowned. When the village police station investigated, the children who were on the shore said that the child who drowned was their classmate and was very good at swimming. They were playing a game in the water, looking for a strange-shaped stone, and then one of them threw it into the deep water to see who could dive down and find it first. One of the children dove down but never came back up. The villagers searched for him that day but found nothing. That night, during a thunderstorm, they were still searching with flashlights in the rain when the child's body floated to the surface.

  Wu Village Chief said that it was precisely because of this that someone brought up the old legend again, and as they spoke, these people gradually began to believe in the story. Due to the village's traditional and relatively closed nature, rumors such as "Dragon King invites son-in-law" spread. Wu Village Chief sighed and said that after that, despite the villagers' repeated warnings, there were still those who ignored them and secretly went into the water, resulting in drownings every now and then over the past year or so.

  Hu Zongren asked, "Were all the drowned people going swimming?" "Were their bodies only found after the thunderstorm?" Wu Cunzhang said, "Not entirely. The time when most people drown is concentrated at the beginning of hot weather, which is also when most people like to cool off in the water. Summer itself has a lot of thunderstorms, so it's hard to say if it's just a coincidence. But some people who drowned weren't swimming at all. For example, some were fetching water from the pond, and others were washing clothes by the pond. It's really strange."

  I asked Village Chief Wu, you've said so much, apart from those rumors, do you have any eyewitnesses or the like? Because you told me on the phone that someone saw a dark figure on the water's surface. Village Chief Wu said, there are human witnesses, and also people who directly experienced this matter, but didn't die. Isn't it because of what she said after being rescued that the village thought it was a Water Ghost disturbance?

  I said to Village Chief Wu, "Then tell me about that person's matter in detail." Village Chief Wu said, "That is the eldest daughter-in-law of the Wang family. She lives not far from here. Follow me and I'll take you directly to ask her." After finishing speaking, Village Chief Wu patted out the dry tobacco in his hand behind his back and led us towards a earthen house not far up the slope.

  The wife of the Wang family, a woman in her 40s, also surnamed Wu, listened to our explanation and quickly put down her work. She rubbed her hands together as she began to tell us the story in vivid detail. She said that on that evening, she had gone to visit someone else's home and was walking back when she passed by the large pond. She heard a child shouting for help from the direction of the water. During those days, people often drowned in the village, so everyone avoided that pond. After hearing the cry for help, Wu, being a kind-hearted person, quickly grabbed her flashlight and shone it onto the water's surface. Although she didn't see anyone, she saw water splashing as if someone was struggling on the usually calm surface. She became anxious, shouting loudly while searching for help, and called the village men to come and rescue the person. However, just as she approached the lake, something suddenly pulled her with great force, dragging her into the water.

  Sister Wu said that the people in the village all knew about this water tank, from the shore to the center, there was a gentle slope, so at a distance of ten meters or more from the shore, women of her build could still wade through. Originally, after falling into the water, she instinctively touched the stones on the ground and stood up, but before she came back to her senses, her left foot seemed to be tightly grasped by something, and was being pulled towards the center of the water tank with force. Sister Wu said that at the time, she didn't know where the courage came from, and she didn't struggle in the opposite direction, but instead turned around and dove into the water, picked up the flashlight in her hand, and shone it at the thing grasping her foot. She told us that everything she did at the time was just instinct, and she hadn't even thought about what kind of creature had grabbed her foot.

  Sister Wu said with great excitement, which made me think of many middle-aged women I've seen in the news who can't stop talking when asked about themselves. Sister Wu continued to say that after struggling for a while, the thing holding her foot suddenly let go, and because the flashlight hadn't been turned off, she saw something in the water during the struggle. However, at the time, there was no chance to think carefully, so she quickly swam to the shore, and when she was a few meters away from the shore, taking advantage of the fact that the flashlight hadn't short-circuited yet, she shone it again in the direction she had come from, only to discover a dark, round thing like a head facing Sister Wu before slowly sinking down.

  Here is the translation:

  This time, Wu Da Jie was really scared. She remembered what she saw when she was flailing around underwater - it was something like a small child, with black skin but not entirely black, and also had some earthy color to it. Its claws were very long, its fingers were pointed, there was some hair on its head but not much, sparse and scattered, its eyes were round, without eyelids, its mouth was huge, inside the mouth were things that looked like teeth, but many more than a normal person's. When she thought of this, she became extremely frightened, so she turned around and ran back along the road, crying out to heaven and earth.

  Wu said that on her way, she met villagers who came to rescue people and told them what happened, so the news spread throughout the village.

  I stared at Hu Zongren, then I asked Wu Dajie a sentence, "Are you sure what you saw that night wasn't some kind of hallucination?" Wu Dajie said with a bit of anger, "Of course it wasn't a hallucination!" That night when everyone found me, everyone saw the scratch on my left ankle.

  Wu Cunzhang said, it was like that, he also saw it that night, just like being pinched to death by a few long and thin fingers. After Da Wu's sister had an accident, the village asked a shaman from a neighboring village to perform rituals, but it didn't work, and two more people died afterwards, though no one knew why these two people went to the riverbank.

  Hu Zongren suddenly asked Wu Village Chief, were the two people who died after Wu Dajie villagers? Wu Village Chief said yes, honest and kind-hearted farmers. Hu Zongren asked, did these two people have children or elderly at home? Wu Village Chief said yes, the two deceased, one male and one female, both had a child under 10 years old at home.

  Hu Zongren looked at me and then told Village Chief Wu and Auntie Wu, "This can't be wrong, it must be a water ghost." Village Chief Wu asked Hu Zongren if someone in their village had done something evil and was being punished. Hu Zongren said it had nothing to do with that, but where there's a water ghost, people will keep dying one after another; he just hadn't expected it to happen so soon. Village Chief Wu asked why people would keep dying.

  I took over Hu Zongren's words and told the village chief, because the water ghost was looking for a substitute.