Chapter 26 Traveling Notes

That night, I went into the living room. It was very dark in the countryside, and no one liked to use bright lights so the light in the living room was very dim. A black-and-white photo of Yun Cai was hanging on one of the walls. This was a common custom to show that she was once a part of the family.

There were no candles or electronic candles on the shrine, but there was a strange little box. After picking it up and looking at it, I found that it was an automatic chanting device. Such things were usually placed behind the tombstone in the cemetery to play Buddhist scriptures on loop. They would stop playing when the battery died, so they were usually only good for a one-time use.

In order to increase the playback time, some people installed sensors on them. This way, as long as someone passed by, the device would start playing automatically. One time, a child picked one of these things up and threw it down the community center’s garage stairs, which caused people to think that the place was haunted. The story even made it on the news.

I turned on my cell phone’s flashlight and looked at the shrine—that idol statue was making me feel particularly uncomfortable.

On the way back, I used my cell phone to do a search for information on the scaled Buddha, but I couldn’t find anything. This was apparently a cult with no history and strange practices.

I looked carefully at the Buddha statue and saw that there were a lot of yellow papers pressed under the base, which were very old. These papers had Vietnamese characters written on them that were all handwritten. I couldn’t understand what the words meant, but it was obvious that they had also been bought from Vietnam.

I moved a chair over, sat down in front of the statue, and called Xiao Hua to chat for a while.

Black Glasses had done a lot of research on this matter. He told me that some cults had no foundation at all and were purely made up. But because rituals were a filter of cultural knowledge and the things made up by ordinary people weren’t, many cults still retained their origins. These rituals were mixed together, and sometimes produced unexpected results that caused many unexplained problems.

There was no real easy way to explain cults because they weren’t part of some larger system. The ancients just went off their own personal experiences. For example, when children cried at night, a notice would be posted telling people to read Yekulang poems.⁽¹⁾

This was something the ancients turned to from experience, but no one knew the actual reason why it worked. Xiao Hua told me that it was actually similar to advertising that “something in my house is disturbing the children”. Gods were present in people’s hearts, so the more people who passed by and saw these poems, the more they would unconsciously meditate on them and the gods in their hearts would learn about the matter.

There were many gods in the human body. If someone used their own body as a temple for an immortal deity who was powerful enough, they could do a chivalrous deed and drive the problem away.

Although I didn’t know whether this explanation was true or not, it was still considered an explanation. Cults, however, didn’t have an explanation.

In many cases, even the founders of cults didn’t know what they had come up with.

After I hung up the phone, I looked at the Buddha statue and tried to remember where I had felt such an uncomfortable feeling before. It was that same feeling I got when I was in a tomb and felt that something was about to rise up, but this time, the feeling was very strong.

Not only this Buddha statue, but the whole house was making me feel uncomfortable.

Poker-Face had been touching the walls here, so maybe he also felt it and was looking for the source of this feeling.

As soon as I thought of this, I made a move that I would never do before: I went up to the idol statue, turned my back to it, and sat down with my back completely flush to the shrine.

In an instant, all my hair stood on end. With that idol statue right by the back of my head, I turned on my cell phone and put the camera on selfie mode.

Because the surrounding light wasn’t bright enough and the contrast was very high, the details of the Buddha statue couldn’t be seen clearly. The only thing that could be seen on the fuzzy screen was the statue’s outline.

If this were a horror movie, having your back turned to the evil object would definitely be grounds for the first scary scene, but in fact, I wanted to see if something strange would happen when my back was turned to it.

But when I turned the camera, I didn’t even have time to see if the Buddha statue behind me was really haunted before I noticed that something wasn’t quite right with the living room ceiling.

An unremarkable mirror had been taped to the ceiling. The mirror was so small that it would hardly be noticeable during the day.

When I walked over and looked up at the small mirror, I could see that the strange Buddha statue’s face was reflected in it.

In terms of optical logic, this also meant that the Buddha statue could see the tops of everyone’s heads through this small mirror.

Just as I was standing there pondering over my new discovery, Poker-Face came down and asked me to go back upstairs—he had also found something.

When we reached the stairs leading from the third floor to the fourth-floor attic, I immediately noticed a lot of shoes sitting on the steps.

They were all girls’ shoes ranging from ethnic minority styles to modern styles, and all were covered in dust. Moreover, all the toes were facing outward, which meant that these shoes weren’t stored here but could be worn right away if someone came down from the attic.

There was no light on up here, so I turned on my cell phone’s flashlight and found that the attic door was open—Poker-Face must have pushed it open earlier. Seeing that he had already entered, I glanced at him and saw him motion for me to go in. This meant that there shouldn’t be any great danger.

When I walked in, I found that the attic was very simple—usually, attics were the last part of the house to be decorated—and the ceiling was covered in tiles. Various objects had been stored here, but they were all just household furniture that wasn’t used frequently.

As soon as I entered the attic of Agui’s house, however, I found that it wasn’t a storage space but a very small living space, with a bed, table, and moldy bedding. Moreover, there was also a shrine here, with another Buddha statue just like the one downstairs.

There didn’t appear to be anyone living here, and no one had been here for a long time considering how everything was covered in dust.

“Did he rent this room out?” Feeling a little confused, I walked over to the bed. The attic’s ceiling was high in the middle and low on both sides. The bed was pushed up against one of the walls, so I had to bend over to get a better look at it.

The sheets were covered in ink marks. They were common old plaid sheets with a little lace around the edges, but now they were covered in ink marks.

I went to look at the walls again, and found that all the blank spots in the room had been painted with ink. These patterns, which were on the walls, the floor, the upper beams, and the tiles, were covered in dust, which obviously meant that they had been painted a long time ago.

This wasn’t Yun Cai’s room; the house didn’t exist when she died. But this room in the attic of Agui’s house was obviously for girls, so who exactly had lived in it?

<Chapter 25><Table of Contents><Chapter 27>

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TN Notes:

(1) According to this, Yekulang refers to a child who loves to cry at night, and also refers to hearing strange cries outside at night. There’s an old folklore that says if people recite the Yekulang poem three times, the child will sleep peacefully until dawn. Apparently the poem can be found posted on notes and telephone poles around town.

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Pic added 12/18/2022 (I’m not translating sfx).