Records of the Halls of Ten Thousand Affairs: Chapter 17: The Invisible Friend (Part 9)

Records of the Halls of Ten Thousand Affairs: Chapter 17: The Invisible Friend (Part 9)

“Jiang Hao! I’m sorry!”

Nobody had expected it the most timid child of the group was the first to step forward. Every eye in the room turned to Lin Xiao Fei. His whole body began to shake without him being able to stop it. He looked in the direction Su Xiaoyu had pointed, tears and snot streaming down his face. “If I had been braver if I hadn’t been so scared I should have just run out and called for help. But I lied, and I went along with everyone else. You weren’t found until so late because of us. I’m sorry…”

Jiang Hao stood there without moving, watching him with an expression too tangled to name.

Sun Yang struggled to his feet, trembling. Another boy steadied him as they moved closer to where Jiang Hao stood. Sun Yang stared into the empty air for a moment, then said, his voice weak: “I’m sorry, Jiang Hao. I didn’t know you would die. I thought if you coughed out the water you’d be fine. I’m sorry… I know now what it felt like. I felt it in the dreams. I’m truly sorry…”

He stumbled forward, pushed away the other boy’s supporting hand, and dropped to his knees, bowing his head to the ground again and again.

That other boy knelt immediately beside him. He was the one who had fallen into the water first the one Jiang Hao had pulled to safety. In every meaningful sense, Jiang Hao had given him his life. And yet he had never once found the courage to tell the truth. He knew, in the deepest part of himself, that he was the one who deserved it most.

He pressed his forehead to the ground, and the remorse that flooded through him was the kind that would never fully leave the kind that would follow him through the rest of a life in which no true atonement was possible.

“That’s enough!” the woman cried, her voice breaking. “What good is bowing now? Who are you performing for?”

The man said nothing. He held his wife and looked silently at his son’s memorial photo, his expression hollow, his thoughts unreadable.

Lin Xiao Fei was gasping so hard he was nearly hyperventilating. “Auntie, I’m sorry I’m so sorry…”

Jiang Hao looked quietly at the friends he had once known so well, and felt genuinely lost. He was small too only ten years old and he didn’t know what he was supposed to feel, standing here facing the people whose choices had led to his death. They were familiar to him, and then in the space between one moment and the next, they seemed like strangers.

Was this the innocence of evil something that had slipped through the cracks of childhood?

Had his own goodness, and their foolishness and selfishness, conspired together to kill him?

He looked at Su Xiaoyu, then at Chen Jiu. Of everyone present, he had the sense that this older girl was the one most capable of handling things.

“Should I forgive them?” Jiang Hao asked.

“Listen to your own heart,” Chen Jiu said. “Whether you forgive them or not, you still have to go.”

Jiang Hao hesitated, visibly torn. After a long moment, he said: “I don’t plan to forgive them. But I don’t want to watch them suffer like this either. Xiaoyu just tell them for me. Tell them I don’t hold it against them anymore. Saving people I don’t regret it. If it happened again, I’d still jump in.”

That was simply how he had been raised: you don’t save someone expecting something in return. What he couldn’t understand was why his friends had done nothing. He didn’t forgive that. But he wasn’t going to keep pursuing it either. He had somewhere he needed to go somewhere he belonged and after this, he and they would never meet again, not in this life or any other.

Su Xiaoyu nodded.

Jiang Hao added: “Xiaoyu when you have time, will you come and visit my parents for me? I don’t want them to be too sad.”

“I will. I promise.”

Su Xiaoyu stepped forward, wanting to hug him.

Jiang Hao gave a helpless little smile and watched as their bodies passed through each other.

“Goodbye, best friend,” he said. “Let’s be best friends again in our next life, okay?”

Su Xiaoyu’s eyes had gone red around the edges, like a small rabbit’s. She wiped them with the back of her hand and promised him, her voice catching in her throat.

The rhinoceros-horn incense burned down to nothing. Chen Jiu scattered the last of the water from the bowl, rang the bell one final time, and called out clearly:

“May the good deeds of this life accumulate virtue may the next life bring its reward”

As he began to fade, Jiang Hao felt a wave of dizziness wash over him. In the span of a single breath, a torrent of images flashed through his mind his parents, his teachers, his classmates, everyone he had ever known and finally, the voices of his friends arguing and pushing back and forth — and then there was nothing more.

Su Xiaoyu picked up her school bag and walked out in a daze, murmuring as she went: “He forgave you.”

The financial returns on this particular case had been considerable. Given the number of people involved, the costs of materials and labor had been spread across all the families, and these households were comfortably well-off. Even if Chen Jiu didn’t take on another case for the next half year, she would eat and drink just fine.

Cause and effect, action and consequence. After Jiang Hao’s death, his parents had quickly understood that the legal system offered them nothing there was no surveillance footage, only an unsupervised riverbank, and a group of children too young to be held criminally liable. Consumed by the need for revenge, they had been swiftly taken in by the rogue practitioner and drawn into worshipping Kong Xiang.

On the surface, they had appeared not to seek any reckoning at all they had gone through the funeral with hollow, numb expressions, accepting condolences without resistance. In reality, it had all been a cover. On the day they invited family and friends to attend the memorial, they had quietly collected strands of hair and birth information from each of the children involved. That was one component of the curse. After the ceremony, Jiang Hao’s grave had been left empty his actual body remained hidden in the chest freezer at home.

But the method of worship was profoundly destructive to the practitioners themselves, consuming their own blood and vital energy. In barely two weeks, the couple had aged what looked like a decade.

As dark as the method was, the results had been swift. News quickly reached them that the children were falling ill, their health deteriorating day by day the curse was clearly working. That confirmation only drove the couple to worship the demon with greater devotion.

In other words, they had been only a few steps away from accumulating the deaths of several people onto their own hands. Measured honestly, the karmic debt they were accruing far outweighed anything those children had done.

It was only because Sun Bo had brought his son to seek help in time that Chen Jiu had been able to break the ritual before it reached its end. Had she not, the couple would have gone down with the children multiple unnatural deaths at once. That was not a small accumulation of karmic consequence.

On the day Jiang Hao’s body was officially cremated, the couple had told very few people. But somehow the children all heard about it, and they came anyway.

The husband and wife had no strong emotional reaction to their presence. They were hardly in a position to they had themselves come within one step of sending all those children to their deaths. They couldn’t bring themselves to forgive, but they couldn’t pursue anything either. Even the hatred had no solid bottom to it.

These were children they had watched grow up for years. How does one find peace with something like that?

After the ashes were interred, the parents came. Ms. Xu came. Everyone brought flowers, burned paper offerings, and paid their respects.

Su Xiaoyu didn’t stay for the whole ceremony the sun was a little strong. She came down the hill early with Chen Jiu.

In the days that followed, Chen Jiu noticed that Su Xiaoyu had gone unusually quiet. She no longer chattered away about whatever strange or peculiar things she’d spotted on her way over.

Chen Jiu waved a hand in front of her face. “Xiaoyu your yin-yang sight. Did it go away?”

“No.” Su Xiaoyu propped her chin in her hand, staring blankly ahead. “I’ve been seeing more than ever these past few days, actually. Boss I think they’re all so pitiful. Some of them are missing arms or legs. Some don’t even have heads… but there are so many of them. Sometimes I’m too tired to even describe what I see. I don’t really know how to explain it. It just feels heavy in my chest.”

Chen Jiu was genuinely taken aback. Her master had always said that spiritual enlightenment sometimes comes in a single instant that powerful spirit-sight was a rare and precious gift, and that the courage to face dark and malevolent things without fear was the mark of a strong practitioner. The two together produced a talent for this work that came along perhaps once in ten thousand.

“Xiaoyu,” she said, taking the girl by the shoulders and crouching down to look her in the eyes, “would you like to enter the path? Would you like to do what I do help these poor wandering souls?” She was entirely serious. “If you want to learn, I’ll take you to meet a master.”

Su Xiaoyu looked more startled than she had about anything else that day. “B-Boss I still have school.”

“It won’t interfere!” Chen Jiu said. “You already spend your evenings playing with Chen Xiaoxuan after you finish your homework. You’d only need to carve out a little time each day. You have the gift it would be a waste not to.”

The sect had been dwindling for years. Before sending each disciple down the mountain, their master had assigned them all a recruitment quota. Chen Jiu had fully intended to coast along and ignore hers until she had stumbled across an uncut gem, and now she had no choice but to recruit a child.

Su Xiaoyu was young, but years of her parents being away had made her unusually perceptive for her age. She thought it over carefully, then said she’d need to go home and talk to her grandmother first if her grandmother agreed, she was willing.

Chen Jiu considered. “All right when the time comes, just tell your grandmother you’re taking on an apprenticeship here. You’ll receive a monthly wage. Let’s say… a thousand yuan a month. But we can’t tell anyone else, or someone will report me for employing child labor.”

At most one or two hours of learning a day a thousand yuan was more than generous. And that included meals. Occasionally help with homework. Plus access to the cat. Any way you looked at it, it was an excellent deal.

Su Xiaoyu froze. Why hadn’t the wage been mentioned before? What elementary school student had ever received a salary? A thousand yuan that was nearly as much as her grandmother’s pension.

She grabbed her bag in a hurry and made for the door. “Boss, I’m heading home now!”

Chen Xiaoxuan leaped up onto Chen Jiu’s shoulder, and together they watched the girl’s retreating figure disappear down the street.

“Not bad at all,” Chen Jiu said with satisfaction. “I’ll have a little junior disciple before long.”

She took out her phone and glanced at the sect group chat. Second Senior Sister had sent her a private message.

It turned out the black-and-red bagua image was the emblem of a rogue sect that had only emerged this year. The three-headed, six-armed demon idol was its object of worship. Second Senior Sister had asked around among contacts at nearby Taoist shrines and Buddhist temples none of them had any idea when this sect had appeared or where it had come from. Its members were strange and reclusive, and refused to interact with the outside world.

The best comparison, she wrote, was like the shadowy hermits of the fengshui and occult world deeply insular, deeply odd.

Rogue and deviant practitioners had always existed throughout history, of course. But a sect this brazen, this openly active that hadn’t been seen since before the founding of the country. No one had expected to see this kind of thing resurface now.

Second Senior Sister: This rogue sect is deeply sinister, and by the look of it, deeply vindictive. Since Kong Xiang has already crossed paths with you, there’s a real chance it’ll pick up your scent and come back looking for revenge at some point. Watch yourself.

Chen Jiu: Understood. Thank you, Senior Sister.

It seemed she hadn’t seen the last of Kong Xiang. But Chen Jiu had never been the type to sit and wait for trouble to find her. After all the best defense is a good offense.