Should we save them?
The little hidden room carved out of a load-bearing wall was small and sealed; no light from outside could creep in. Only a faint yellow glow near the entrance stretched into the gloom, leaving the space half-drowned in shadow.
Against the far wall, four eyes—two pairs—picked up that weak light and glinted back like two starving beasts, fixed on whatever prey had been brought within reach.
“…Is that them?” I couldn't see clearly in the dark, so I formed a ghost-sealing mudra in my hand, ready in case the two corpses—already rotting and reeking—suddenly lunged at us.
“Grr… grr…” Hearing my voice, the two figures stirred, but whatever bound them here was stubborn; they didn't move free because of the outer talismans being ripped up.
“Yeah. Looks like Gu Fancheng’s housekeeper,” Si Jiangchen squinted and made out their clothes.
“So… should we save them?” I asked, switching my phone flashlight on.
The sudden bluish beam sliced through the gloom and laid the two figures on the wall bare. The hair on my arms rose all at once.
Lit by the phone, every horrible detail was crisp: a man and a woman. The man wore a black suit; the woman wore the exact dark-blue uniform I’d seen on the female ghost in Lu Xiyu’s room. Their features had rotted away—skin sagging like old wax—but what froze me wasn’t the decay. It was the instruments embedded in their bodies.
No wonder they couldn't move. A foot-long square iron spike had been driven through both their chests, pinning them to the wall. Wooden wedges, black as pitch, were hammered into their wrists and ankles. They were like two lizards nailed to a wall, twitching uselessly when we disturbed them, making ghastly sounds from rotted vocal cords.
“Gu Nian! Housekeeper Tong!” Gu Fancheng, who had been following us, saw his two loyal old servants in that state and instantly tried to rush forward.
“Stop.” Si Jiangchen’s voice cut him off. “Don’t come in—there’s a trap.”
At the same moment I noticed something odd. The wall behind the nailed pair was covered with strange patterns. I’d thought they were damp stains, but as Si said “trap,” the patterns—under my phone’s light—began to crawl like insects.
Before Gu Fancheng could react, the markings peeled from the plaster and slithered toward us.
“Xiao He, get back!” Si Jiangchen said, hauling me behind him.
I glanced back. The entrance light had vanished; Gu Fancheng, the baby, and the others were swallowed by pitch-blackness.
“I… can’t get out!” I’d been planning to stay put near Si anyway; finding the exit sealed gave me a weird sense of relief—now he couldn’t force me out.
Only my phone’s halo still cut the dark. The sigils shimmered in its beam—talismanic script of all sorts, Daoist seals, Tibetan characters, and other unknown glyphs. They writhed and twisted before my eyes like a thousand ghostly hands reaching for my throat, clawing at my arms.
The kaleidoscope of sigils made my chest tight. I spat a mouthful of blood.
“Xiao He, close your eyes!” Si Jiangchen, who didn’t seem to be seeing the dancing patterns, covered my face with his hand.
After the blood came up, my vertigo eased. I wiped my mouth with a hand and muttered, “Sheng Shixun must have done this.”
If Sheng Shixun could take advantage of renovations to quietly have someone’s housekeeper nailed up here, it made sense those wall talismans were his work—set to keep Gu Nian and Tong Yunfang from escaping or being found by Gu Fancheng. The whole wall was a lattice of spells meant to bind possessed corpses and restless spirits. We’d just blundered into it.
“Sheng Shixun’s ambitions are huge,” Si said. “Xiao He, shut your eyes. Your third eye is open. You can’t handle these ritual spirits.”
Both of us practiced Daoist arts—he was far stronger than I—and yet he couldn’t see the spirit-world apparitions. That’s usually a liability for a practitioner: how can you hunt and free ghosts if you can’t see them? But beneath the sigils’ pressure, that blindness had become an advantage. While I was being pressed by every spirit-sentence scribbled on the wall, Si Jiangchen could walk straight through.
He stepped toward the two bodies as if strolling into a courtyard and began to intone, his voice steady: “Heaven and Earth, dark and bright; bind the restless, bring their souls to landing. Six Ding spirits and all the gods—grant absolution to the four quarters.”
He was chanting a release—a spell to free the souls.
I would never have used such a thing. As geomancers and Daoists, we usually sought to capture or pacify, to enclose wayward spirits and guide them to rest—not to set them free. Yet here, in this cold, sealed room, Si intended to pull the spirits out of those rotten corpses.
“What if they don’t leave the bodies quietly?” I thought. If the souls left, Si wouldn’t be able to see them anymore.
“Wait—” I couldn’t help it; I opened my eyes.
It was already happening.
The middle-aged man Gu Nian had a smear of my blood on his chest. His rotted face twisted into something like a smile and a cry simultaneously. Under Si’s words, he suddenly tore his right hand from the wooden wedge. He was dead; nothing should have been able to move. The wedge came away with a hunk of blackened flesh clinging to it. Gu Nian gripped the egg-thick coffin-nail buried in his chest and ripped. Another slab of decayed meat came away with the spike.
A low, electric hum ran through the air—like the remaining power in the righteous talismans sensing the zombie’s desperate move. My skull felt as if ten thousand needles were being pressed against it. Blood poured from my nose and mouth again.
Si Jiangchen grunted, his incantation growing louder.
Gu Nian knew the moment had come. Though his body was ravaged, with a speed that made my head swim, he freed his companion Tong Yunfang as well.
The two—more dreadful even than the reanimated dead—slumped to their knees before us with a sickening, wet sound.
“Grr… grr… Th—thank you… thank you both!” Tong Yunfang’s voice sounded human. I hadn’t expected her to be able to speak.