Agarwood Like Crumbs (Immortal Samsara)

Chapter 14: A Dead End

In the afternoon, Master Shen came to the courtyard, asking cautiously, "Childe Tang, were there any findings?" Tang Zhou looked at him and pondered, "There is progress, but..."

Master Shen immediately asked seriously, "But what?"

Tang Zhou felt like he already found a small clue, but was being pulled away. He couldn't always observe in the dark, and no matter how detailed a guess is, it's still a guess. "I felt like there was the most resentment in the southeast area of the courtyard, so I followed it. Buried under the haystack, there was a corpse. It was buried very shallowly and it seemed like it wasn't buried for a while." He saw Master Shen's expression slowly turning a chalk gray color and his lips twitching.

Tang Zhou smiled, "Of course, I'm only a celestial hunter, not a sheriff, so I don't want to look for more clues anymore. You wouldn't want to be surrounded by resentful energy, do you?"

Master Shen's face turned white and moments passed before he finally spoke again, "This matter, it starts with my wife. My wife is one of the Yi people and according to customs, their people are traditionally buried here."

Tang Zhou listened to his words, but they went into one ear and out through the other. Master Shen was talking about irrelevant things, but he kept his patience. YanDan had already walked back to the guest bedroom and back in boredom. But Master Shen kept on talking, "The Zhuojing people enjoyed a certain status in the Yi clan, and most of them knew the art of witchcraft. But when my wife first married into my family, she told me that she was the only one in her family that didn't know any witchcraft. That was why her elders didn't oppose me marrying her."

"But after Zhuojing married me, I got homesick, so I came back to where the Yi clan resided. There, I witnessed their funeral ceremony. Their patriarch had just died and his descendants directly took the corpse, buried it in a very shallow newly-dug pit, and boiling water was poured over it every day. It was the first time I saw something like that, and I was shocked since the people in the Central Plains have always put them into sturdy wood coffins, before burying them."

The more Tang Zhou listened, the weirder it got, and he could only say, "The Han and Yi customs are very different indeed."

"They kept on pouring boiling water on it day after day, and after two to three months later, the corpse had already rotted. The bones and flesh were separated and then the Yi took out the bones and put them into a jar for burial. It is said that the bones left by the Yi people have Gu** worms and this method of burial prevents the worms from escaping." Master Shen sighed, "These types of things, the moment you see them, they're imprinted into your mind forever. After Zhuojing passed away, I brought my little daughter to Qingshi Town. Yijun had always been sensible and soon started tracking care of things in the household. When I felt that she was capable enough, I left for business abroad."

YanDan suddenly asked, "How many years has it been since you moved here?"

"It has been maybe seven to eight years, and Yijun and Xiang Jun are already twenty-four years old, even though they still haven't found anyone to marry yet." He paused for a while but then continued, "Once, I went to Nandu for business, but when I came back, something was off. I found that Yijun was a little different. The two of you have seen her smile today, it looked kind of weird. I felt uneasy and didn't sleep well at night, so I went to the accounting room, hoping that I could finish reading the account books left over. As I walked into the courtyard, I saw Yijun burying something there with a flower hoe. I thought about it a bit longer, but I felt more and more uneasy, so I went and took a look." Master Shen suddenly covered his face with his hands, as if in great pain, "I saw a corpse. It was the most hideous thing I've ever seen. The flesh and blood on the body had dried up as if it was sucked from the body. The face was purple, the eyes were wide open, and the flesh was sticking to the bone...I understand now that Zhoujing lied to me when she said she couldn't perform witchcraft. There's no other reason Yijun would have ended up like this!"