Chapter 7

The following content may be a hoax or false information.

The ceremony was done in the classroom after school. No one else was around and the school was very empty after everyone had left. The classroom lights were gradually turned off as people left for the day, and the whole school building was dark. Only this one classroom was still lit. They were on a tight schedule, because someone would come by on patrol after a period of time and drive them away.

The sorceress’s daughter was in the classroom, setting up the Chuma array.

These details all come from a chumaxian’s narrative (1). As a matter of fact, the information provided by a chumaxian was only accepted as court testimony once. Any other information was only valid among the masses, since there had never been any science to back it up.

In the Northeast, chumaxian were generally considered to be strange life forms that were formed from animals and couldn’t be seen by human eyes. Some Taoists said that they were the souls of certain things.

As ordinary people, it’s difficult to understand how these supernatural forces exist and communicate in ways that we can’t see.

In the Beijing fifteen corpse case, this chumaxian was a powerful being that accompanied the sorceress. Through the sorceress’s daughter, the chumaxian disclosed some details about the scene of death at that time. It was hard to believe that this thing could communicate in such detail.

Chumaxian couldn’t actively communicate with you, so you had to provide questions that were carefully worded.

Black Glasses’ first question was, “Did someone commit a crime or was there a ghost?”

The chumaxian’s answer was very strange, “It’s not anything you would think of.”

“And what would that be?” Black Glasses asked.

The Chumaxian replied, “I don’t know. It’s not good. It doesn’t talk.”

“Can it be seen?”

“You all can’t see it.”

In other words, only the chumaxian could see that thing that had killed people. Black Glasses was about to ask another question, when the chumaxian suddenly said, “You might be able see it.”

The chumaxian said that neither a person or ghost committed the crime. In other words, it wasn’t something that belonged to the Chuma system. There were very few things that chumaxian didn’t recognize, so Black Glasses found it very interesting.

“What was its purpose?” Black Glasses asked. “What was the ritual for?”

“To go back,” the chumaxian said. “It wants to go back.”

“Where does it want to go back to?”

Here, the chumaxian paused for a while before saying, “It wants to go back below.”

Black Glasses asked for clarification several times, but the chumaxian didn’t answer.

The young girl told him that the chumaxian probably didn’t answer because it didn’t know.

But Black Glasses didn’t give up and asked several more questions, changing the wording each time. Eventually, the chumaxian said, “Below is the original one. It needs to revert back to the original one.”

It made even less sense now.

“Then why kill people?” Black Glasses asked.

The young girl’s eyes suddenly started flicking back and forth and her eyelids seemed to droop down.

Black Glasses found that the movement of the girl’s eyes was very different from that of human beings. It almost seemed to mimic an animal’s way of looking at people.

Her eyes seemed to be half-hidden behind her eyelids, flicking back and forth as she looked at him. He didn’t know if it was some kind of technique she had learned since childhood to scare people.

Then, the chumaxian said, “It doesn’t want people to know that it’s been here.”

“Is it gone now?” Black Glasses asked.

The chumaxian shook its head.

“There was a sixteenth person,” the chumaxian suddenly said. “It didn’t finish killing. There was one person it didn’t kill.”

“There were only fifteen bodies at the scene.”

“It’s in the water. It was transported to the well from a distance, so it could have gone back. But there was one person who didn’t die.”

“The sorceress took them to Beijing to set up this array. Did you teach her?”

“Yes.”

“So, you designed this array to send it back, but it failed. And that thing didn’t go back because there was one person at the scene who didn’t die. It caused the array to fail, right?”

“Yes.”

“If it was going to kill everyone, did you warn the sorceress?” Black Glasses asked.

The chumaxian stopped talking, but Black Glasses continued asking questions, “Do you have to listen to it?”

“It comes from below.”

The chumaxian didn’t answer directly, its eyes constantly moving back and forth as if it was trying to look at Black Glasses. Whatever happened at that time prevented the chumaxian from saving his divine companion.

“Did it tell you how to set up the array?” Black Glasses asked.

“The array is a bridge.” The chumaxian seemed to be a little unstable at this time. “It wants to go back to the bridge below. When it thunders, it can go back.”

“That thing… since it hasn’t gone back, where is it now?” Black Glasses asked.

“The sixteenth person isn’t dead,” the chumaxian said. “It’s on their neck.”

Black Glasses looked at the young girl. At this time, the girl’s movements were so exaggerated that she looked completely like an animal. In Chuma, people’s body movements generally didn’t change so much, but the young girl was practically crawling onto the table and her whole body was distorted.

“You don’t have to be like this,” Black Glasses said after looking at the monster-like body.

The chumaxian stared at Black Glasses before saying, “Be careful.”

“Are you saying that thing will come after me?”

“Be careful. If you see a white house and children playing with red balls near you, don’t go into that house. Especially if it’s a white house with a dome.”

Black Glasses narrowed his eyes and saw that the young girl’s eyes had started to bleed as they flicked back and forth.

“That’s enough!” He said in a deep voice.

This was Black Glasses’ first time asking a chumaxian for information, and it ended shortly after that. It took a lot of physical strength to summon a chumaxian, and the young girl couldn’t bear it anymore.

After coming back to her senses, the young girl explained a few things to Black Glasses.

The chumaxian’s explanation was much clearer than usual, but the dialogues between the two worlds were very different, so the little girl suggested that Black Glasses choose to listen to what he believed in. Chumaxian’s eyes were different from those of humans, so the things they saw might not be clear or might only be one side of the story.

The information Black Glasses had gained from those questions was so obscure that he didn’t even know whether it should be used or not. But the chumaxian did mention that another person had been at the scene and didn’t die. It was just extremely difficult to investigate because there hadn’t been any surveillance equipment around the building.

But if he was being honest with himself, he knew that there was evidence of the sorceress’s footprints at the scene showing that she may have been carrying a person.

But wouldn’t that person have been covered in flames when he left?

If there really was another person who had made it out alive, then they could have only flown away.

In addition, the young girl carefully reminded Black Glasses of the chumaxian’s warning towards the end.

“It’s because the chumaxian became very interested in you after seeing your past. You should listen to it and try to avoid that kind of house.”

When Black Glasses got ready to leave, he thought about whether he had seen that kind of house before. He hadn’t. White houses were something you would see in the Middle East, and he wasn’t planning on going there any time soon.

He wasn’t going to worry about it, but the young girl told him that it might not actually be a house, so he had to be careful and keep an eye out for anything similar. If he did see something, he had to be sure to avoid it.

As Black Glasses was saying goodbye to her, he suddenly asked, “Can chumaxian lie?”

The young girl stared at him, not knowing what he meant. When Black Glasses smiled, the young girl shook her head, “A chumaxian can’t lie. It will only remain silent. “

<Chapter 6><Table of Contents><Chapter 8>  

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TN Notes:

(1) Chumaxian is basically the practice of shamanism in Northeastern China. They worship animals like foxes, snakes, weasels, etc. Chumaxian (出马仙), which means “the gods who take action” or more literally “riding for the immortals”, is a definition which implies that the gods and their disciples act as an organic whole rather than mere channels of communication. Northeastern Chinese shamans are predominantly women. More info here. Per Tiffany: Chumaxian can be seen as both a verb and a noun in Chinese. The word can mean someone who “chuma” (is being possessed by spirits). “Xian” means “immortal”, which might be a respectful way to call the spirits that appear in the ritual. In some cases, it might refer to someone who performs the ritual.