"Brother, do you think this will work?" Zhang Dabiao asked for the fifth time, his face etched with doubt.
"How will we know if we don't try? Hurry and get more straw stalks, this isn't enough..." To stop Zhang Dabiao from nagging me, I had to send him on an errand.
From an elder in the village, I learned that the lake north of Xiaoliu Village had indeed seen deaths, and more than one.
It happened over twenty years ago. Due to a surplus of males and a preference for sons, many families only wanted boys and not girls. This led to a shortage of women, making marriage a significant problem.
However, this couldn't deter the villagers' desire to continue their lineage. Furthermore, Xiaoliu Village was located on the border, separated from Korea by a river, and some people set their sights on Korea.
For three thousand yuan, one could buy a beautiful Korean girl as a wife, and she was guaranteed to be a virgin. Although three thousand yuan was a substantial sum back then, compared to continuing the family line, lineage was more important. The woman who died in the lake was a Korean girl.
She married into a family surnamed Huang. No one knew her name. She was taken into the bridal chamber on the day she was bought. The sooner she conceived, the less they would fear being reported. The only thing they could do was register the woman.
Nine months passed. One day, the woman accidentally fell at home, leading to premature labor. This greatly alarmed the old Huang family. At that time, due to the limitations of medical conditions and the fact that the woman had escaped from Korea, they dared not go to the hospital to give birth. They could only deliver at home.
As a result, because the woman was young, malnourished, and weak, and the baby was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck, the midwife asked whether to save the mother or the child. The entire Huang family, ignoring the woman's pained cries, unanimously chose to save the child.
The result was that the baby was born safely, and the woman closed her eyes forever. However, when the family saw that the child born to the woman was a girl, they all showed disappointment. Huang's parents even cursed the woman as a jinx for not giving birth to a boy.
By rights, a person who died should be buried properly, after all, she had left offspring for the Huang family. But the old Huang couple considered the woman a financial burden. They had spent three thousand yuan to buy a girl, and she died after giving birth. They believed this would affect the luck of their Huang family.
Under the insistence of both of them, they had young Huang wrap the woman in a quilt, load her onto a牛车 (niu che - ox cart), and take her to North Mountain, burying her wherever they could find a spot.
Young Huang was also a scoundrel. Coupled with the fact that his wife gave birth to a girl, which cut off the Huang family's lineage, he didn't find a place to bury her on North Mountain. Instead, he tied stones to the quilt and threw her directly into the reservoir, ending it all.
They say there is a god three feet above your head. If a person does evil, heaven will naturally collect them one day. But as it turned out, the old Huang family, by some stroke of luck, unearthed a thumb-sized gold nugget in their field the day after the wife died.
This delighted the entire family. Although the wife had died, having the gold nugget meant it didn't matter if a few more wives died. They could just buy more with the money...
At that time, some people advised them to be more restrained, reminding them of the divine presence above, lest they face misfortune. But the entire family drove them away with curses and beatings.
Furthermore, less than three days after the new bride died, another woman was bought by their family. On the very day she entered the house, the entire family, along with the newly bought wife, all threw themselves into the waters of North Mountain Lake. Only that little girl was left in the house.
If only one person had died, it would have been easier to conceal. But with an entire family dying at once, it was impossible to hide, even if they wanted to. Moreover, the death of the old Huang family was peculiar, and even if they wanted to suppress it, they couldn't. Especially with a child left to be dealt with, they could only report the matter to higher authorities.
The higher authorities also took the matter very seriously and sent many people to investigate. However, the conclusion was that the family committed suicide, with no suspicion of foul play. Since the entire Huang family had perished, the little girl was naturally adopted by the state.
From then on, fewer people went to North Mountain. Coupled with the fact that sometimes crying sounds of women could be heard from North Mountain, over time, no one dared to go there anymore. As for whether North Mountain was a good place or a good resting place, it was completely out of consideration. After all, life was more important than a resting place.
Knowing the whole story, I felt great sympathy for the woman who gave birth. But sympathy aside, she had, after all, killed her in-laws' family of three and the newly bought woman, a total of four people.
Although karma and retribution are inescapable, that is a matter of heavenly law and cannot be an excuse for her to kill. Since I encountered this, I generally have to intervene. If she had only killed the old Huang family, it would have been fine. But what about the new woman? How innocent was she?
The best way to deal with a water ghost is to force her out of the water. A water ghost's strength is greatly reduced outside of water. Otherwise, even with two of us, Zhang Dabiao and I, we might not be her match in the water. Moreover, after she harmed people and thirty years of immersion, who knows how fierce she has become.
The only way to force her out of the lake is through maternal affection. She killed the old Huang family, but she left her daughter behind. As a mother, whether alive or dead, her only concern would be her child.
What I needed to do was to use this method to force her out of the lake, creating an effigy of her daughter using yellow paper and straw stalks. This task should have been done by a paper craftsman, but this village was even more impoverished than ours. After searching everywhere, I couldn't find anyone who could make paper figures, so I had to do it myself.
Making paper figures seemed simple, but when I started doing it, I found it incredibly complicated. Either the head was crooked, an arm fell off, or the body looked twisted. After making five or six, I finally managed to create a paper figure that was relatively satisfactory.
After coloring the paper figure, I looked at my masterpiece with 'satisfaction' and asked Zhang Dabiao, "What do you think? My craftsmanship isn't bad, right?"
Zhang Dabiao pouted and said, "Fortunately, you don't rely on this craft for a living, otherwise, you'd starve to death. They're all crooked and don't look like people at all!"
I blushed with annoyance and retorted, "You're talking about me? You've made more than me, and none of them look like people. Good enough is good enough."
Zhang Dabiao let out a cackling laugh to ease his embarrassment.
"The paper figure is ready, but how can we make that female ghost believe it's her daughter?"
"That's easy. We just need to write her daughter's birth date and time on the paper figure and inject some yang energy. As long as she looks like her daughter from a distance, it'll be fine. So many years have passed, and she hasn't seen her daughter, so she won't be able to tell it's a fake. Once we lure her out of the lake, it'll be easier."
After hearing this, Zhang Dabiao gave me a thumbs-up. After all, he had no good ideas on how to lure the female ghost out of the lake. Although my method seemed a bit ridiculous, there was no other way to force her ashore.
With everything prepared, Zhang Dabiao and I went out. Before leaving, Zhang Dabiao, worried, asked me to set up a trap with yang blood thread in case of any unforeseen circumstances. I agreed.
By the time we reached North Mountain, it was almost eleven o'clock. We didn't go directly to the lake but stopped about two li away. We found a relatively flat spot and placed the paper figure there.
"This should be about right!"
"Mm!"
After a short rest, I began to set up the array to capture the water ghost. All things in heaven and earth have their counterparts. No matter what kind of life the water ghost had in her previous life, she was a water element in death. Therefore, the best way to deal with her was to suppress her with a yang array.
After hammering in the last peach wood nail and hanging the yang blood thread, a Six-Line Yang Xuan Array was completed.
The yang blood thread was only half a foot above the ground, forming a hexagram shape, with the paper figure placed in the center. With everything ready, I opened the paper figure's eyes with cinnabar, wrote the birth date and time on the back, and finally had Zhang Dabiao inject yang energy.
After completing all this, we immediately ran to the side and hid under a tree, each with a Zhenyang Talisman pasted on our foreheads to prevent the strong yang energy from exposing our whereabouts.
As soon as we hid, a howling sound came from the north, mixed with the crying of a woman, her tone cold and unnatural.
"My child... are you here to see your mother?"