Dao Baozhai led them down the hill in a hurry. Her knees nearly gave out twice, and Liu Ying had to support her by the arm the remainder of the way to the old shack with a thatched roof and walls that looked like they had been repaired over and over again until they were given up on. There was a wrangled garden out to the side with several tools leaning against a makeshift fence, mostly too old to properly do their jobs.

When they reached the door, Duan Baozhai shook her arm out of Liu Ying’s grasp to throw it open and rush towards the center of the room, where a huddled figure sat by candlelight. The dim, orange light cast a strange shadow over Yao Bo’s face. His thin lips were drawn in a straight line but the rest of his face was slack and his gaze was vacant. He didn’t stir at all when his wife placed her hands on his shoulders and gave him a small shake.

“I brought the nice fellow that helped us with the carps earlier,” she said, nearly breathless, “He’s going to help us sort this out, okay?”

I didn’t agree to sort anything out, Liu Ying thought begrudgingly.

Yao Bo made no indication that he’d heard a word Duan Baozhai said and continued to stare blankly at a corner of the room.

The old woman waved Liu Ying over and he obliged, taking a few short strides before kneeling to the floor beside Yao Bo. Upon closer inspection, he noticed that his pupils were blown wide, almost startlingly so. Terror was the only thing he could think of to describe the look in his eyes.

“What happened before he started acting this way?” Liu Ying asked.

“He went over to the neighbor’s house to go pick up the ax he had loaned them yesterday morning. Then he came back empty-handed and just kneeled on the floor like this and hasn’t moved an inch since then!”

“Did you hear anything when he was there? Or have you gone out there yourself?”

Duan Baozhai put a trembling hand to her mouth before smoothing down the bandana covering her gray hair. “No, no. I didn’t hear a thing. I didn’t go out there either – I’m too frightened…”

I’m going to assume that’s why she brought me over here in the first place… She wants me to go check out what sent her husband into a state of catatonia but won’t say it outright…

“Can you tell me about your neighbors so I know what to expect when I go down there?”

She released a tight breath and nodded. “A married couple with a daughter about seventeen years old. Brutish, all of them, but the husband is the worst. Sometimes he and his wife will scream at each other for hours into the night. I fear going over to ask them to trade crops most days, but when I do, they're always grumbling. The girl is quiet, and for her sake, I hope everything is okay.”

All of them were brutish, yet a moment later the girl was quiet? What did that mean?

Liu Ying decided not to push further regarding her sudden turn of words. She was visibly tense and nervous, and often gave her husband a shake or two between her sentences, as though she wanted him to say something.

“Will you help me with getting him into bed?” Duan Baozhai suddenly asked, motioning to the bedroll spread out on the floor by the window, “He might feel better after some rest.”

Lifting the elderly man with only some difficulty since this mortal form was smaller and slighter than Liu Ying normally was, he managed to settle him into bed. Duan Baozhai pulled a blanket over him and tucked the corners around his shoulders before leaning down to rest her forehead against his chest, murmuring a prayer.

Liu Ying looked around while she did so. The layout and interior of the home were exceedingly simple, but something caught his eye when he looked over his shoulder at a family crest formed in the Duan name nestled between two small wooden boxes on a shelf. He made a mental note of it before moving to stand, but his sleeve was quickly grabbed by a wrinkled hand.

“Whatever you find…” Duan Baozhai began, “Return as quickly as you can. My husband is a mild man but I know he wouldn’t be put in such a state over just anything. I don’t want anything similar happening to you.”

Liu Ying agreed and bowed his head at her before taking his leave. The night had darkened even further, but there was thankfully a single lantern hung by the door of the neighbor’s house to guide him past the thickets and trees.

About three steps away from reaching the home, two things happened simultaneously. The first was that his eyes caught that the front door was open halfway and a streak of dark liquid could be seen on the floor. The second was the back of his shoulder began to prickle and burn slightly beneath his robes. His hand reached over his shoulder to absentmindedly touch it as he began to slowly approach the door.

He wasn’t surprised. The demon’s mark on his back was meant to be a symbol of humiliation and subjugation – and it was, for a long time. It still was, sometimes, when Liu Ying disrobed, looked into the mirror and could see nothing but the inky marks curved like a whirlwind against his skin. It was on a small part of him but felt like it consumed his entire body, and not even shapeshifting could cast it away. It sealed away a part of demonic qi inside of him, waiting patiently for whenever his spiritual energy was completely empty in order to take over his body and cause a qi deviation he wouldn’t be able to control. Whenever it burned, he could recall initially being branded by it, like a violent memory that demanded to be felt each time. But after he was free, he had realized that the mark could also serve another purpose – a more useful one, at that. When there were demons or demonic activity in the vicinity, the mark would alert him to it right away. A blessing and a curse, he supposed, all things considered.

The sensation continued to flare as he quietly stepped through the door and kept it open to allow the lantern light from outside to illuminate the scene before him.

Bodies were strewn across the floor like ragdolls, limbs spread wide and clothes in a bloody disarray. Blood was smeared across almost every surface – the walls, the floor, and the tea table in the center of the room. Only one of those bodies was unlike the others. A man was strung up with a piece of rope tied to the wooden beam in the ceiling that connected to another stretch of rope curled around a pillar, and a small wooden stool kicked over beside it.

Liu Ying’s eyes took in the broad details as he pressed a hand over his nose and mouth. The stench of death was as violating as it was intense. For a moment, he could see why Yao Bo came back in such a state of despair. Mortals viewed and feared death above all things. They regarded it as highly as the gods they worshiped but like a father they feared would whip them. The scene was horrific enough to batter even the bravest.

A middle-aged woman was lying on her back by the window with a wound so deep in her side that she looked nearly severed in half. By the tea table, an adolescent girl was missing an arm, which Liu Ying located beneath a fallen mantelpiece. She was lying face down, hair covering her face and caked in dried blood. Liu Ying combed the small area for the weapon and found it under the tea table that was cracked down the middle, inches from the girl’s extended intact arm.

When he picked the ax up, he discovered that, like the other tools he’d seen in Yao Bo’s garden, it was old and dull, yet splattered in blood.

To wield this old thing and cause these injuries… a lot of strength and stamina had to be involved.

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The girl’s arm was severed at the elbow sloppily enough that Liu Ying was convinced that indeed, the ax had been used to commit these murders, but… He sized up the man hanging from the ceiling. He was slender in build and not very tall, either. Where could such an average mortal have summoned the strength to slaughter his family and then proceed to hang himself? It was true that strong emotion could bring out unexpected physical responses from people, this was beyond what could be considered reasonable.

Liu Ying reached over to touch the demon’s mark on his shoulder blade again. The burning was dull but consistent. He had no doubt that demonic activity had been involved in some way, but when demons normally came up to consume mortal souls and wreck other havoc, they would do so unabashedly and with wild abandon. They certainly didn’t need the help of a dull, decrepit ax to do the job for them.

The thought had Liu Ying immediately dropping the ax to observe the man further. He lifted the little stool to its upright position by his swinging feet – it was too short by several inches for the man to have been standing on it at the time that it had been kicked over. Eyes snapping over to the ropes holding him up, Liu Ying was able to confirm something. The man hadn’t hung himself. The ropes were on a pulley system, attached to both the wooden beam and the pillar beside him to make it easy to hoist his body up where it was. His robe was coated in blood, seemingly belonging to his dead family members when he murdered them, but what if…? Liu Ying loosened the sash around the man’s waist but didn’t need to look beneath his robes for very long, as he found the source of his death quickly. There was a roughly patched-up vertical wound in the middle of his chest, sewn shut with a fishing line.

Liu Ying was startled out of his deep observation by a voice shouting outside.

“Young man! Young man… !”

He stepped over the dead bodies and made his way over to the door, closing it behind him as he stepped out into the lantern light outside.

Duan Baozhai was standing in front of the house but several feet away, as though she deeply feared it. Her hands were wrung together under her chin and she released a gasp when she saw Liu Ying emerge from the door.

“Young man, what’s going on? I told you to come back right away, yet you’ve been gone for so long that I had to come see if you’d hadn’t suffered something similar to my husband! I feel responsible for you now, you know!”

Liu Ying was silent for a moment and watched the old woman wrangle with her anxiety.

She took a step forward, the silence concerning her more than any words could. “What is it? What happened in there? You aren’t speaking… it’s driving me mad with worry!”

“A bloodbath,” Liu Ying replied simply.

Duan Baozhai put a hand to her mouth and mumbled something in a muffled tone to herself before lowering it again. “Oh, my… Heavens above. How can you stand on your two feet after seeing something like that, young man? Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. I didn’t mean to worry you,” Liu Ying said, then added, “You already have so much to worry about.”

The old woman averted her gaze almost sadly. “I do. I always do. Now, with this happening… I’m not even sure when my husband will recover.”

“Whenever you will him to.”

“Ah… I’ll try whatever I can that’s within my means. I’m unable to take him to see a healer until I can find someone with a wagon going to town –”

“You misunderstand me.”

Duan Baozhai stilled her anxiety-induced movements – the shuffling of her weight between each leg, the wringing of her hands, the shaking of her head. She looked at him fully now, eyes confused and prying.

“I seem to, child. What is it you mean to say?”

“What I mean to say is that the family in the house behind me was murdered, but not by the hand of the man.”

“What?” she said, taking a step back in surprise, “You don’t think a man that cruelly yells at and beats his wife and daughter isn’t capable of killing them? What makes you think so? Don’t tell me you were poking and prodding at dead bodies, child – that is absolutely –”

“Capable, yes. That doesn’t mean he did it. I have reason to believe the girl was the culprit.”

“The girl?”

“You don’t seem to agree.”

Duan Baozhai pulled the collar of her robes closer to her neck and folded her other arm around herself. Her eyes were wide and her head shook back and forth. “I just don’t see how a young girl could hurt her parents – a grown woman and man.”

“Especially when she’s missing an arm, hm? That would make things more difficult.”

She visibly swallowed hard. “Young man, stop this talk. How crass of you. I asked you to see what had happened, not to desecrate corpses! You’d be lucky if they don’t return as ghosts and follow you back to wherever you came from! Here I thought you came to Ludong looking for scraps and coins. Turns out we have a sick individual on our hands.”

“You’d be right if I had been the one to swing a dull ax on them,” Liu Ying said, unbothered by her words, “But if we lean on what you said earlier, you could be onto something. A young girl kills both her mother and father… with a dull ax, at that. There must be an outside force in all of this, like a demon. Have you ever witnessed a demon possession, Duan Baozhai?”

Duan Baozhai’s face blanched white as she listened to his words.

“I have not.”

“Are you sure?”

“I… have not witnessed a demon possession.”

“They’re not very common,” Liu Ying said, leaning against one of the wooden pillars by the lantern, “At least, not anymore. Over a century ago, in this very region, there was a spike in demonic possession cases because there was a demonic cultivation sect living in the woods up north and that was one of the things they were able to master. They created a talisman with evil qi that facilitated the possession after they’d successfully summoned a fledgling to do their bidding. Not much is known about this sect, as they disbanded after the God of Preservation came down and forced them to scatter after he destroyed their home. Ah, come to think of it… I might have read somewhere that a few siblings from the Duan clan had joined the sect at the time. Of course, the members of this sect would have delayed aging, so they should still be alive… Would you know anything about that, ma’am?”

“And you know how to read, mutt?!” Duan Baozhai suddenly exclaimed, her entire body shaking with anger, “I thought all you did was eat scraps off the ground.”

“Would I be correct in assuming that the girl came to you to pick up the ax that her parents needed, and you placed the talisman on her? Then you summoned a fledgling to possess her while it ate and killed as much as its heart desired, and then you sent Yao Bo to remedy the scene afterwards. Made it look like a run-of-the-mill familial annihilation case. A brutish man kills his wife and child – what could be more commonplace than that? No reason to examine the body – just burn it! I’m only still hazy on two important aspects. Is your husband willingly involved or is he under the control of a talisman? Also, what was your reason for doing it?”

Duan Baozhai had begun laughing and sobbing all at once, her wails echoing in the darkness. It was truly a manic thing to witness – tears squeezed past the woman’s eyes and eased past a lopsided, eerie grin.

Once she settled down, she wiped her face with the back of her hand and said, “I don’t know who you are, but I hope you live in interesting times.”

Liu Ying only offered her a sour little smile in response despite the curse.

“The little bitch rejected my son’s marriage proposal. He was so humiliated that he left Ludong altogether. She robbed me of my son…”

“If that’s truly your reasoning for having an entire family murdered, you’re deranged,” Liu Ying said, descending down the front steps to the house and turning towards the village, “I’ll go see what your village elders have to say about this.”

Duan Baozhai sniffed, “Do you think they’ll take the word of a drifter they’ve never seen before against mine, who’s lived here for –”

The door to the house behind them slammed open with a force that made both of them halt. Liu Ying’s demon mark began to burn more intensely beneath his robes, as though a fire was consuming his skin. He and Duan Baozhai both wheeled around with wide eyes, only to see a figure standing at the doorway, hair halfway covering the sickly gray and veiny skin underneath it. The girl’s robes were bloodied and torn, especially where her left arm should have been.

“Jielong,” Duan Baozhai said under her breath, shuddering.

“That’s not a fledgling… You didn’t seal the demon afterwards?!” Liu Ying demanded, staring at the old woman, who was already retreating.

She didn’t offer an explanation, and instead turned and took off running as fast and as far as her aging knees could get her. Liu Ying looked back at Jielong, frozen for a moment, but immediately regained his movement when he saw her begin to approach. He took off after Duan Baozhai into the dark thickets. He could barely see her tiny figure moving past trees and scurrying in between bushes as a speed he wasn’t expecting from her.

Why the fuck is this old lady faster than me?