GM Chapter 5

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When Fang Guo woke up, it was around one o'clock in the afternoon.

The sunlight streamed through the window, hitting his skin. After a while, it felt scorching.

Fang Guo tried to get up, but the soreness in his waist made him lie back down. He rested for a long time before he could barely adapt to the searing pain that felt like his waist was about to snap. He got up, his limbs stiff, numb, and sore, especially around his tailbone. The area around his private parts, where he had been penetrated, burned fiercely.

He opened the door and stepped out of the house. Fang Guo's face instantly turned pale.

Right in front of the house stood a tombstone and a grave.

The house was directly facing a grave! A grave where a dead person was buried!

Fang Guo still retained some memories of last night—those entangled scenes, the feeling of being tightly held, oppressed, and forcibly taken, reaching a peak of pleasure. The shameful crying and pleading, and the uncontrollable moans.

Moreover, when he fully woke up, his body's memory confirmed that what he thought was a dream had actually happened.

Ghost marriage, or "yin-hun": When a deceased son has no wife, a family might seek the bones of a deceased woman to be buried with him.

It was supposed to be a marriage between two deceased people, which still required a matchmaker, offerings of livestock, six traditional gifts, and an eight-bearer sedan chair. But he was a living person, cruelly deceived into marrying a man, and inexplicably entering the bridal chamber.

This was something Fang Guo found hard to accept, and his anger surpassed his fear.

He walked over to the tombstone. On it was a photograph of the man, and his name: Wei Ran.

Wei Wei's older brother, a man Fang Guo had never met, was now his ghost husband.

Thinking of this, a wave of shame and indignation, but mostly fury, surged within Fang Guo.

In front of the tombstone were offerings like spirit money and incense. In a fit of rage, Fang Guo kicked them all away. He even wanted to dig up the grave and pull down the tombstone, letting the bones in the coffin be exposed to the wilderness, ideally to vanish into thin air.

Unfortunately, he was a clean-cut university student, working only a year as a clerk. In ancient terms, he was a scholar with no strength to bind a chicken. Furthermore, given his current physical state, even kicking the spirit money and incense with slightly larger movements brought on a cramp-like pain.

Fang Guo sighed helplessly. He turned back and saw the big red and white "囍" (double happiness) characters still plastered in the main hall, feeling a surge of sarcasm.

A ghost marriage was a ceremony with a dead person, considered both a happy and a mournful event. So the decorations in the main hall were half white and half red, appearing particularly bizarre. And the whole house was silent, with only him inside, so quiet it instilled panic.

Fang Guo returned to his room, desperately trying to ignore the messy bed. He found his luggage, pulled it out, and found nothing missing. He then grabbed his luggage to leave. As he passed a table with several bowls of dried fruits, there was also a spirit tablet on it.

On it, Wei Ran's name was etched in gold characters. That was Wei Ran's spirit tablet.

He had married this spirit tablet last night.

Fang Guo snapped back to reality, ignored the tablet, and hurried away with his luggage.

It wasn't that he was too cowardly to confront the villagers; rather, he was more rational than angry. This was a remote mountain village, and the village had its own rules and laws. The mere fact that they could force a grown man into a ghost marriage and cause harm showed him that there were few good people in this village.

At least, anyone who dared challenge the village's laws or harm its interests would surely be attacked by the whole community.

Although Fang Guo often let things slide and was somewhat naive in certain aspects, it didn't mean he hadn't seen the darker side of the world. The darkness in this world often emerged in backward, remote, and ignorant places.

Fang Guo's deceased grandmother was a spirit medium who usually helped people by divining marriages, communicating with spirits, or foretelling fortunes. Occasionally, she was invited to the house of a wealthy landlord in a neighboring village, who claimed his house was cursed and inexplicable misfortunes were occurring.

His grandmother went, then visited the landlord's ancestral grave. Upon returning, she simply said she was powerless and told the landlord to find a feng shui master.

Specifically asking for a feng shui master implied a problem with feng shui. Generally, inexplicable misfortunes in a household meant issues with either the house's feng shui or the ancestral grave's feng shui.

Upon returning, his grandmother repeatedly muttered the words "evil deed." She then, on a whim, explained the reason to him.

She said the landlord's ancestral grave was in a rare "dragonfly dipping into water" (蜻蜓點水穴) formation. The ancestor's burial allowed for water from both ends, which should have brought prosperity to descendants and made everything smooth. But white lime had been scattered on the grave mound.

White lime absorbs water and prevents decay, and in fact, many gravesides have white lime scattered around them. However, it was unsuitable for a "dragonfly dipping into water" formation because if the white lime absorbed the water, how could the "dipping into water" happen?

The grave thus became a cursed spot, bringing disaster to descendants.

Originally, it should have only led to business failure and eventually financial losses, not endangering lives.

But the real problem was that black dog blood had been spilled on the tombstone.

As the saying goes, "black dog blood on the grave, a three-inch nail behind it"—this was about destroying a person's feng shui and harming their life, a technique understood by feng shui masters.

That's why his grandmother told the landlord to find a feng shui master.

Now, thinking back, when Wei Wei was buried yesterday, weren't they spilling black dog blood and scattering white lime?

Although he didn't fully understand what was going on, Fang Guo felt something was fishy.

He didn't think a feng shui master would deliberately harm Wei family village; it must have been some other method.

After all, yesterday's burial spot was a good feng shui spot, but not a "dragonfly dipping into water" formation. However, black dog blood and white lime were not good omens. Black dog blood suppresses evil spirits, and while white lime is scattered around graves to prevent decay and insects, scattering it directly on the grave mound suggested an intent to nourish a corpse.

Both nourishing a corpse and suppressing it seemed 詭異 (bizarre/unsettling).

Fang Guo no longer wanted to stay in Wei family village. He just wanted to leave as soon as possible and never return.

Stepping out of the house, he realized this dwelling was situated halfway up a mountain, surrounded by eerie trees. It was silent, desolate, and devoid of any human presence.

Fang Guo hurried his pace, and whether it was an intuition or something else, he looked back at the house. He was shocked to discover that it was a house made of paper, and he had spent a night inside without realizing it.

Only after walking out did he sense the strangeness.

Terrified, Fang Guo ran and walked away. When he reached the foot of the mountain and looked back, he saw the house engulfed in flames, having spontaneously combusted. He gasped for breath. From the foot of the mountain, with a clear and open view, he could even see a man standing at the entrance of the house.

A man?

Fang Guo recoiled in fright, no longer daring to linger, and hurried away.

The path he took didn't lead to the village but was a small shortcut, bypassing the village directly. He coincidentally ran into the driver who had driven him there and quickly got into the car to leave.

The driver dropped him off at the bus station. After collecting the money, he hesitated and said, "Young man, when you go home, find someone to have a look, to get rid of any evil spirits."

Fang Guo gripped the handle of his suitcase tightly and calmly asked, "Master, do you know something?"

The driver looked somewhat reticent. He said, "I'm not driving that road to Wei family village anymore. Do you remember the road we took together that day, and the other three people in the car?"

Fang Guo nodded. "Didn't they continue their journey in your car the next day?"

The driver slapped the steering wheel. "That's the eerie part! They left that day, and we stopped by a mountain. They said they wanted to get off, and I thought it was strange—the middle of nowhere, how could they just get off? I didn't think too much of it; they were customers. Who knew that after they got off and walked up the mountain path, I was just looking at the money I'd collected, and suddenly it all turned into yellow paper, joss paper! In a rage, I looked up, and all three customers had turned into paper figures! Do you know what that means? Paper figures burned for the dead. I was so scared I quickly turned around and ran. Later, I found out that mountain is where the ancestral spirits of Wei family village are buried. Tell me, in a place full of graves for the dead, paper figures turning into living people and going there, what could they be doing?"

Fang Guo, who had probably just come from that mountain, calmly asked, "Doing... doing what?"

Driver: "Ghost marriage!"

Fang Guo was shocked. "What?"

Driver: "Didn't you see what those three were carrying at the time? Half white, half red—white and red for happy and mournful events. Besides funerals, it could only be a ghost marriage."

The driver shook his head and clucked. "Ghost marriage... a morally bankrupt thing. Who knows if the girl is willing. A blind marriage, a mute marriage. If they didn't get along well in life, they could divorce. After death, aren't they bound together?"

Fang Guo forced a smile and left.

He got on the bus, found a seat, and immediately called his class president. Strangely, the phone that hadn't worked before suddenly connected. Before the other person could speak, Fang Guo complained, "Class president, we agreed to attend Wei Wei's funeral together, why did you break your promise first?"

The class president on the other end was stunned, then strangely said, "What are you talking about? Are you Fang Guo? Hey, Fang Guo, after years of no contact, you call me just to throw a tantrum? Did you take the wrong medicine?"

Fang Guo was stunned. He hastily asked, "You didn't send me an invitation to Wei Wei's funeral? You didn't ask me to go to Wei Wei's funeral together?"

Class president: "No... who's Wei Wei?"

Fang Guo's mouth hung open. "Our high school classmate!"

Class president: "Are you crazy? For three years of high school, I can recite all my classmates' birthdays. You just made up a Wei Wei out of thin air, are you messing with me?"

Fang Guo was completely dumbfounded. He wondered if he had made a mistake somewhere.

"Hello? Fang Guo, are you there? Hey, say something."

Fang Guo snapped back to reality and hurriedly said, "Nothing, I have something going on. I'm hanging up now."

With that, he hung up the phone. Then, as the bus took him home, he understood everything. Whether his memory was wrong or the class president's was, and regardless of who Wei Wei and Wei Ran really were, he was determined to forget them.

Just forget it, pretend it was a dream.

Fang Guo comforted himself this way, but when he opened his suitcase, all his mental preparation collapsed.

Inside the suitcase was a black wooden tablet, with a name carved in gold characters.

Wei Ran.

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