I also knew that there would be no point in speculating any further, so I simply stopped talking about this topic and escorted the Guan siblings all the way towards the mountain village.
It was not until dawn that we saw a barren mountain full of graves. There was no decent vegetation on the whole mountain except for the wild grass more than a foot high. Under the wild grass were graves without tombstones. At first glance, it looked like an abandoned mass grave.
Logically speaking, there should be no houses near the mass grave, but there are still a few families living at the foot of the mountain.
I pointed to a house in the distance and asked Guan Qingyan, "Is that your Guan family's old house?"
"That should be it!" Guan Qingyan took out the map and looked at it. "According to my grandfather, that should be the Guan family."
"Let's go and have a look..." I was about to walk into the village when I saw a group of people coming from the village entrance. The one leading them was the matchmaker I saw last night. The old lady was arranging for someone to put down the coffin while shouting at the top of her voice, "Go back and keep your mouth shut. If the police catch us doing what we did, we'll lose our heads."
The matchmaker shouted hoarsely, "Go back and keep the whole story of pushing the cart down the mountain to yourself. Even if the police come and grab your hands and neck, you have to say that you wanted to save them but failed. Got it? Disperse, disperse, all disperse."
After the matchmaker sent the wedding guests away, she walked towards the village mumbling, "What bad luck! It's so damn bad luck! Not only did I fail to complete a good deal, but I also encountered a ghost who was thinking about love. What the hell..."
While the old lady was mumbling and cursing, I walked over from the path behind the village, put my hands on my chest, and blocked the road with my horse and sword.
When the old matchmaker saw me, she screamed in fear, fell to her knees and kowtowed desperately: "Great Immortal! Don't look for me! It's not that I want to push you down, it's..."
After the old lady kowtowed several times, she suddenly stopped and stared at my feet with her eyes fixed on them: "You are not dead! How dare you play tricks on me... Men, come out, someone is looking for trouble!"
More than ten people suddenly appeared from the village, but judging from their appearance, the youngest one must be over fifty years old. What else can these people do except give courage
I smiled at the old lady and said, "It's no use calling for help. No matter how many people you have, can you be more powerful than the police? See, there are only a few of us left in the car. Tell me, if I call the police, will you be taken to the execution ground and have your head shot?"
"You..." The matchmaker was a person who had experienced many ups and downs. After a moment of panic, she reacted and said, "Little brother, what do you want to do? Are you short of money or a job? Just ask. As long as it can be done, I, Old Liu, will never hesitate."
The matchmaker knew that I was just threatening her. If she really called the police, I would not come out to talk to her. She simply acted like a bachelor and negotiated the conditions with me.
"Great!" I raised my thumb. "We didn't come here to ask for money or to cause trouble. We came here to find a grave."
I told the old lady the purpose of my visit. She was stunned for a moment. After a long while, she asked cautiously, "Little brother, who are you?"
"Mr. Dongbei." As soon as I finished speaking, the old lady immediately stood up in awe: "Little brother, no, sir, let's go inside and talk."
The old lady led us into a room, poured us some tea, and then said, "Sir, the reason why our families can have ghost marriages is because of a gentleman who passed by in the past!"
"What we are asking is..."
"Monk, wait a moment and let the lady finish speaking." Monk Shi was about to speak when I waved my hand to stop him.
The old lady continued, "In the past, this place suffered from wars, bandits, and plague, and almost all the people died. Some kind people nearby hastily collected the bodies and turned them into the current Ten Mile Tomb."
"This cemetery is divided into the south cemetery and the north cemetery. There is a mass grave on the south side of the river, and there is also a cemetery on the north side of the mountain. All the original people here died, and the current people are all moved here later."
The old lady pointed to the hillside outside and said, "But look, this is not a place for people to live!"
The so-called mass graves are places where bodies are hastily buried when there is a large number of deaths in war or plague and there is no time to deal with them. The dead either have no descendants or their descendants have died out in the disaster.
The graves of the dead are not taken care of, and no one burns paper to worship them during festivals. Ghosts in the underworld are short of food and clothing, so they must ask the living for offerings. Therefore, there is definitely unrest near mass graves, and no one is willing to live there.
The old lady said that it is a problem for the people who moved here to survive.
The old lady continued, "About forty or fifty years ago, a passerby came and we, the families there, begged him to help us get rid of our misfortunes and resolve our karma."
"The gentleman went around the North and South Tombs for a long time before he said that this matter was not easy to handle! If we want to solve the problem once and for all, we have to find a great monk to come and hold a grand ceremony to liberate the souls of the dead."
The old lady sighed, "In those days, let alone finding a great monk, even if we did, who could afford him? I cried at the time and held on to the monk, begging him to save us. We had finally found a place to stay and didn't want to leave anymore."
The gentleman looked at me for a long time before saying, "There is another way. It depends on whether we are willing to do it. I said at the time that I was willing to do anything."
"The gentleman said he would give it a try that night. He went up the mountain that night and came back the next morning. He told me that he had negotiated with the ghosts on the mountain and wanted me to be a matchmaker, specializing in ghost marriages for the dead."
"The gentleman said: It won't be long before someone out there will be thinking about ghost marriages, and that's what you'll do from now on. The cemetery on your mountain is ready, so you can just promise to get the ghosts out of the mountain. One ghost marriage will be enough for you to eat and drink for half a year. If someone's family has a ghost marriage, you should ask them to pay a gift. This gift is not for the living, but for the dead. The wild ghosts in the cemetery will not look for you after they get the gift. Those ghosts who are eager to curry favor with the married girls are too busy to bother you, so how can they bother you?"
Burning paper money doesn't cost much, just getting a pile of yellow paper, so it's reasonable to ask a living person to pay a gift.
But I always feel that there is something sinister about that gentleman's method, and it is not something a gentleman from Northeast China should do.
The old lady seemed to have guessed what I was thinking: "At first, I also thought that the gentleman was fooling me, but he told me to wait for a few days. If it didn't come true after a few days, I wouldn't have to pay attention to him. If it did come true, I would have to promise him something. I thought, since it's already like this, I might as well believe him this time!"
"The gentleman left after saying that. A few days later, he really came back with the person who wanted to have a ghost marriage. He also taught me how to do my first business. The business I made was enough to feed the whole village for a year!"
"I was very grateful to that gentleman, but he stayed in the village for seven days and then left. During those seven days, he taught me how to arrange ghost marriages for people. The lives of our village were saved by him."
The old lady stopped to drink some water, but I asked, "There are graves all over the mountains. How do you know if the ghost is a man or a woman, and how do you match their birth dates?"
The old lady smiled and took out a large coin: "The gentleman left this for me before he left. If someone wants to arrange a ghost marriage, I will put the large coin out and go to the mountain to look for it the next morning. I will open the grave where the large coin landed."
"If the big coin is facing up, it means there is a male ghost in the village, who can be a live-in son-in-law; if the big coin is facing down, it means there is a female ghost, who can be married and become a daughter-in-law. As for the birth date, hehe..."
The old lady obviously didn't want to say more. Every profession has its own secrets, and ghost marriage is no exception. In ancient times, marriage was really exhausting, from matching horoscopes to marriage, the whole process was enough to make people dizzy, and ghost marriage was the same, and even more complicated.
Generally, for ghost marriages, one has to find a family that one knows well. Before getting married, one has to do the same as if they were a living person, and inquire about the character of the family, interview the reputation of the younger generation, and also find out how old the person was when he died, why he passed away, whether he violated any taboos, whether he caused any trouble to his family... In short, with all these things to go through, it will take at least a month to complete.
The old lady was able to find ghosts from a mass grave and arrange ghost marriages, which was definitely not as simple as she said. In addition to being good at speaking, she also had to have real skills. However, that skill was her livelihood, so she couldn't just ask about it, otherwise it would be a taboo in the art of magic.
When the old lady was about to collect the big coin with a smile, my eyes suddenly shrank - there was a ghost eye painted on the big coin. If the big coin was not made of a different material, wouldn't it be exactly the same as the ghost coin passed down from my grandfather
I said calmly, "That gentleman seems to be a great man! I wonder who his master is. Maybe we have some connection."
The old lady shook her head with regret and said, "The master not only said that he had no sect or school, but he didn't even tell us his name. Later, when we asked him urgently, he said his last name was Wu. Look, we even set up a longevity tablet for him."
After the old lady lifted the red cloth on the shrine, I saw the words "Mr. Wu" written on the tablet. Could that person be my grandfather
Monk Shi was quick to speak, and before I could say anything, he said, "Old Wu, that man's surname is Wu, can he be your father?"
The old lady smiled and said, "According to his age, he is definitely not this gentleman's grandfather."
I glared at Monk Shi and said, "There are so many people with the surname Wu, and they are all related to me? Auntie, please continue."
The old lady continued, "Mr. Wu came back again almost 20 years after he left."
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Thank you all for your support, and stay tuned for the next episode!
Thanks to: Hanyudanbo, Winterreise, Doudou for the reward! (To be continued)