Chapter 6

The case is very old, so let’s review it first.

First, there was a strange fire in an empty building in Beijing. I won’t go into the details, but the building was empty and there was only one guard who escaped after the fire. After the firemen put out the fire, it was reasonable to believe that there wouldn’t be any victims. But as it turned out, fourteen bodies were found while cleaning up the ruins.

With the exception of one on the rooftop—a charred female corpse—the other thirteen bodies were all drowned.

And these thirteen bodies were all arranged on the building’s middle floors in the shape of a fish. No one knew how they got into the building.

The identities of these bodies were unknown, but they didn’t appear to be locals at first glance. Moreover, all thirteen people had varying degrees of eye diseases.

This was the first strange point. The second point was that the female corpse on the rooftop was burned to death while standing up. The temperature on her body was so high that all of the asphalt on the roof melted. After looking at the footprints on the asphalt, Black Glasses came to a conclusion—this female corpse weighed a lot. If the woman wasn’t a sumo wrestler, then she must’ve been carrying another person or carrying something equal to a person’s weight.

But there weren’t any additional remains or other burnt things at the scene.

This was the second doubtful point.

Black Glasses’ first step in the investigation was to find a place in the building where people could drown. Based on all of the trace evidence, these people entered the building alive, so they must have drowned in the building.

But there was no place in the building where people could drown. Moreover, the water in the building had been shut off since no one was living there.

After conducting a relentless search, Black Glasses eventually tore up the concrete in the building’s parking garage and found an ancient well that appeared to be bottomless.

The wellhead was sealed with quick-drying cement. The traces of cement were hard to notice after the fire, but it was obvious that these people had drowned in the ancient well under the garage. When the bottom of the well was salvaged, a fifteenth corpse was found. But this corpse was the strangest one yet.

It was an ancient female corpse whose head was pointed towards the bottom of the well. The bones inside had all melted away, making it look more like a skin bag. A mirror had been inserted into the female corpse’s collarbone, making it so that she could only see herself in the mirror when she bowed her head to look at her toes.

I won’t describe the specific details, but this ancient corpse must have been dumped after going through some kind of ritual.

With the ancient female corpse at the bottom of the garage, thirteen bodies drowned in the middle floors, and the burnt corpse on the rooftop, the whole case was extremely complicated. Logically speaking, it seemed to form an extremely complex ritual, which was much more complicated than Taoist rituals. In fact, it seemed to lean more towards the so-called “feng shui” arrays, which could be extremely difficult to set up.

To be more specific, there wasn’t a record of Taoist orthodoxy. The “sorcery” discovered during the development and formation of primitive Taoism absorbed a lot of things from ethnic minorities and local sorcery, which weren’t incorporated into ancient books. Some were considered lost because they were too obscure and cruel, but there were still many things passed down to modern times via word of mouth or excerpts from scattered records that were written by feng shui masters.

Later, Granny Huo discovered that these thirteen people were loggers from Liaobian. They found the female corpse in a swamp when they were logging. After stealing the gold and silver ornaments from the corpse, they all developed eye diseases. They went to the hospital to get treatment, but there was no cure. As a result, they had no choice but to turn to a local sorceress for help.

The sorceress took them to this building in Beijing and asked them to put the female corpse into the deep well below. It was the only way they could be healed.

But they all died in the end, and their deaths were very strange.

I’d like to mention here that Black Glasses has a very detailed understanding of folk customs. He first realized that most of the so-called abilities of the Northeastern sorceresses came from the so-called “Bao Jiaxian” (1), which usually referred to animal spirits or ghosts. When the sorceress died, Bao Jiaxian would go to the descendants of the deceased and continue to protect them. No one knew whether this was true or not, but like the Taoist system, Bao Jiaxian and ghosts all fed on fireworks.

The main feature of those skilled in the old ways of the business is that a cigarette never leaves their hands. They’ll keep smoking one right after another, because there are too many “things” around them that need to be fed. And when you asked the old Northeastern women about the cigarettes, they’d show you that the cigarettes burned out quickly, as if there were ghosts smoking them.

I always thought it was a ruse, but now I didn’t know what to believe.

The sorceress’s daughter was studying in the Northeast, so Black Glasses went to see her. He knew that there had been an accident in this strange feng shui array, which led to a large number of deaths. There must’ve been “something” at work there, and the only thing that knew the truth and could still talk was the so-called “Bao Jiaxian”.

Black Glasses went to the northeast and met with the sorceress’s daughter. When he first saw the young girl, he immediately noticed that there was an imperceptible thing behind her. Moreover, that thing knew that he could see it.

But his eyesight was different from normal people, so this was more of a feeling. He couldn’t describe the world he saw, so he couldn’t really describe this “different” feeling either.

The young girl promised Black Glasses to ask Bao Jiaxian about the situation at that time. They would hold the ceremony at her school when she was done with classes. But at that time, Black Glasses found that the daughter seemed very hesitant as she spoke.

He didn’t know what secrets she was hiding.

<Chapter 5><Table of Contents><Chapter 7>

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TN Notes:

(1) Per Tiffany: The Chinese characters of Bao Jiaxian can be interpreted as “the immortal that protects the family”. Of course, the idea of this is that the immortals are animal spirits or ghosts.