Chapter Twenty-One: The Soul-Summoning Art

This was the first time I had ever seen Lei Ren’s craft.

After the old man took up his stance, the slyness he usually wore vanished at once, and his expression turned solemn. His brows lifted slightly; without anger, he carried an air of authority. Then, like the occult fraudster from before, he began to pace the ritual steps, treading the seven stars with his feet as he murmured an incantation before my old squad leader’s spirit altar.

He performed with such practiced solemnity, speaking in clipped phrases, sometimes in Cantonese, sometimes in a rough standard vernacular, as he intoned, “Wandering souls, do not forget the cause of your grievance. If you have wrongs, hasten to speak them...”

To be honest, at that moment I could hardly tell whether he was a cook or a Taoist priest, because the way he paced the stars seemed extremely professional.

I had, in fact, heard of this ritual before.

The so-called star-pacing step was the formal name for a movement Taoist practitioners often used when performing curse-breaking and baneful rites. I had probably seen it on television before. It had been recorded since the late Han Dynasty, and the Taoists liked to praise its powers to the skies: summoning gods, sending away ghosts, praying for blessings, countering misfortune, all of it could make use of this step. Before any such rite, they would always go through this whole routine.

I did not understand the intricacies of the seven-star footwork, but I had heard it came in many forms, many schools. Though there were only seven points, different sects stamped them out in different ways. And there was nothing especially difficult about it. Whether one truly had spiritual skill or was merely putting on airs, one had to know this basic practice.

To put it bluntly, before I turned eighteen and was still farming in the countryside, even the widow Wang who performed spirit dances next door knew a few steps. Otherwise, no one would have believed her.

So when Lei Ren and the exorcist performed it, I was not the least bit surprised.

After all, I came from peasant stock too, and I had seen such things before.

To be honest, using the Five-Person Carrying-Mountain Rite for my squad leader was itself a helpless measure. Things had come to this point, and my doubts about his suicide only deepened. Especially after Xian Hongye told me that the exorcist harbored murderous intent, I kept feeling that these people who had come to mourn were each hiding unspeakable secrets, all with designs on the Zhao family and on me.

Some were after the kitchen knife; others I could not begin to fathom.

In short, the truth of my squad leader’s suicide became ever more elusive because of these arrivals.

I was his only disciple. If I would not investigate, who would? More than that, I truly wanted to solve this problem for him. I wanted him to die in peace.

So I chose a makeshift solution, because I felt I had been pushed to the edge.

Under my anxious gaze, Old Man Lei slowly finished reciting all the spells, then wiped the sweat from his forehead and turned to ask Lei Wangcai for a stick of Tibetan incense.

After Lei Wangcai respectfully handed over the incense, Lei Ren swiftly broke it into three segments, lit each one, and inserted them into the top of the offering mound, letting them burn on their own.

Then he stood motionless, watching the glowing tips.

I suddenly realized that his ritual was complete, and now all that remained was to wait for the soul to appear, so he could enter trance and cast the divination.

But what was a soul? I did not know. I wanted to ask, but in that uncanny silence I could not bring myself to speak.

In a wait that felt like being turned to stone, we endured every passing second, watching the three short sticks burn down at a snail’s pace.

Until they reached the end of the rice offering.

At last, the incense went out. Yet nothing happened.

“Nothing?” Hongye muttered softly. “Your Five-Organ Temple magic is no good!”

“Keep quiet! Have some faith in the organization. Our ancestors would not lie,” I said helplessly, cutting her off.

Truth be told, even as I said that, it felt as if I were lying to myself.

But whether it worked or not, I still had to see how Lei Ren would carry this through, and how he would get down from the stage.

After the incense died, we waited another half an hour. Lei Ren still did not move. The three bowls of eight-treasure rice had already gone cold, and yet, frustratingly... nothing had still happened.

At that point I could hardly bear it anymore. So I nudged Lei Wangcai beside me and said, “Is your uncle any good? The rice is already cold. In this heat, if you don’t eat it, it’ll go sour.”

Lei Wangcai seemed not to know how capable his uncle really was. Faced with my teasing, he awkwardly wiped the sweat from his head and said, “Wait a bit longer. Just a bit longer!”

Helpless, we stood there in the blazing sun for another five or six minutes.

Just as everyone was beginning to lose patience, something finally changed in Lei Ren’s offering arrangement.

At that moment, a large white cloud drifted across the sky. The instant it shaded the noonday sun, a small whirlwind suddenly rose. That whirlwind eerily snuffed out the candles before my squad leader’s coffin.

Then we heard, from inside the coffin, a faint rustling sound, like someone scratching at the coffin boards.

It was as though my squad leader, inside the coffin... had turned over.

At that moment, all of us were stunned.

Could it be that Lei Wangcai’s so-called Five-Person Carrying-Mountain Rite had really caused my squad leader to return from the dead?

In our shock, we were all at once delighted and afraid, and no one dared so much as peek into the coffin.

So everyone turned their eyes to Lei Ren, the man directing all of this, waiting for his reaction.

In contrast to our astonishment, Lei Ren remained remarkably calm. He made no improper move, simply standing where he was, motionless, waiting for the sound from the coffin to grow clearer and clearer.

When the noise finally ceased, a grayish thing crawled out of my squad leader’s coffin.

It was a rat, a gray-skinned rat with red eyes, no bigger than a thumb.

I had never seen such a rat before, and what puzzled me even more was how it had crawled out of my squad leader’s coffin. Could it really be, as Lei Ren had said, that this rat, like the one who had earlier eaten the offerings on the altar, was also a transformation of my squad leader’s soul?

I did not know. I was astonished. But what happened next astonished me even more, and made me believe even more firmly in the efficacy of Lei Ren’s spell.

For just as that rat was about to emerge from my squad leader’s coffin, I suddenly realized it was not one rat, but five.

These five rats were most peculiar. Each one had bitten the tail of the one before it, all of them thumb-sized, with gray fur and white noses. They came out in a neat line, like a string of candied hawthorns, slipping smoothly from the coffin.

The wondrous sight of it made all of us brighten at once.

It seemed everyone, without a word spoken, thought the same thing: these bizarre five rats must be the manifested soul of my squad leader.

At that moment, I immediately understood what the “five” in the Five-Person Carrying-Mountain Rite meant.

The five persons referred to five rats. In ancient times, the rat was used to denote the hour of midnight, the first of the day’s twelve divisions, carrying the special meaning of the alternation of yin and yang, and the transformation between the living and the dead. Moreover, the ancients believed rats could communicate with spirits. Since they lived deep underground, they were like little scouts of the underworld. If one cultivated good relations with them, one could gain many benefits through them, and even have them carry messages to relatives and friends in the nether realms.

That, perhaps, was the origin of the Five-Person Carrying-Mountain Rite.

As we had expected, the five rats, each biting the tail of the one ahead, crawled out of my squad leader’s coffin and began their “mountain carrying” at once.

At this point, Lei Ren smiled faintly, looking at the rats circling the eight-treasure rice around the Three-Mountain Offering Bowl, and said in a low, pleased voice, “The true cause of Zhao Haipeng’s death will soon be revealed by these five rats.”