Ding Ling

“Title: Playing Ghosts and Gods. “On the second day of the second month, when the dragon lifts its head, Daliang Village invited an opera troupe called the Dengtai Liyuan Troupe to perform three days of grand opera in the village. But while the troupe was preparing its numbers, strange things began to happen one after another, and the whole of Daliang Village came down with soul-detachment sickness. “Chang Dafeng, the troupe's leader, had roamed the roads with his players for many years, and at the sight of this he knew they had run straight into a ghost. “So he gathered all the troupe's disciples, meaning to stage a ghost-and-god play, hoping to overawe the evil thing and let the rest of them escape alive. “Not long before this, Ding Ling, who handled the troupe's daily meals, had caught a chill and been laid up with it for days, and at this critical moment Chang Dafeng began to think of giving up Ding Ling's life to make sure the others got through.” The story on the page broke off there. It was still marked to be continued. Reading it through, Zhou Yang knew neither what kind of sickness this “soul-detachment sickness” of Daliang Village was, nor whether the troupe's ghost-and-god play was ever performed, or whether it worked. Nor whether that “Ding Ling,” laid low by a chill, lived or died. The Knife-Credit Ledger, which recorded this story, was something Zhou Yang had bought before he transmigrated, from a secondhand bookstall in the university district near his rented room. The stall had been running a sale at the time, selling books by weight. Zhou Yang, greedy for a bargain, had paid thirty yuan for six jin of old books at five yuan a jin, and the stall owner—a stubble-faced man in a greasy down jacket—had thrown in an extra jin for him. The Knife-Credit Ledger was among that extra jin of thin volumes. All six jin of old books were full of typos, missing pages, and passages where the front and back came from two entirely different books. The Knife-Credit Ledger was the worst of the lot. Its cover was a ruin, with the title faintly legible on it, and inside it was utterly empty—not one word anywhere. Zhou Yang had been furious. He had torn the ruined thing apart and stuffed it into the coal stove for kindling. He hadn't expected what came that same night to be worse. —He had been sleeping peacefully in his bed, and when he woke he was in Guancun, with this Knife-Credit Ledger on him, the one that should have been burned to ash. He had become the ledger's master, and with that came his present identity as “knife-credit man.” But who was he supposed to give a knife on credit to? And who owed him on the knife-credit ledger? In his other hand, Zhou Yang held the iron blade he had ground to an edge, and looked down at the story surfacing on the second page. He was still at a loss when the words on the page turned back into blobs of ink. The blobs squirmed and reassembled into several lines: “The knife is credited, the account is posted; retribution takes effect at once. “You will extend a knife to ‘Ding Ling,’ to break him out of his ‘life hanging by a thread.’ “Ding Ling will become your retribution body. “Extend the knife?” Was this telling him he could make a loan to this person called Ding Ling—an investment? And the first return on that investment would be Ding Ling becoming his “retribution body”? Zhou Yang read the page in an instant and put it through a Chinese-to-Chinese translation into information he could make sense of. His heart pounded. Like a thief with a guilty conscience, he scanned the blacksmith shop around him. A moment later, Zhou Yang drew a deep breath and instead closed the Knife-Credit Ledger, rolling it up together with the iron blade and tucking both into the back of his waistband. This was not the best time to extend the credit. If that Ding Ling became his retribution body, there was no telling what reaction it would set off. If something abnormal showed on him and Afu saw it, things would go very badly. So he held back, saving a careful study of this knife-credit for after the shift, when he was home and ready for bed. Before long, Afu came back. His face looked like an inflated pig's bladder, so shiny it seemed brushed with a layer of lard. Afu was all smiles, his grin warm and easy, a different man from the one he had been that morning. Zhou Yang was used to it. From the Guancun villagers he had met, most of them were like this: each one a different personality in the morning, at noon, and at night, as though several ghosts took turns riding their bodies. “Cao Qing hasn't come. It's been several incense-sticks now.” Afu said it smiling, with something like regret and relish in his expression. He repeated what he had said that morning, with no sign of remembering having said it at all. Then he went on: “We haven't got much work this afternoon. Melt down all that scrap iron in the storeroom and cast it into ingots, and we'll forge sickles with it tomorrow. “Little Yang, tomorrow you'll start learning to swing the sledgehammer. Learn it and I'll raise your wages.” “I'll work hard at it,” Zhou Yang said, bowing slightly, in earnest. The words came from the heart. Now that the knife-credit ledger had a lead, he might well have to rely on it to get out of Guancun, and the first thing knife-credit required was a knife in his own hand. In Guancun, if he learned to work iron, he need never worry about failing to forge a knife. Though it was still unclear whether a knife he extended on credit had to be forged by his own hand. Still, having a trade in hand was always a good thing. Zhou Yang followed Afu to the storeroom and carried a basket of scrap iron back on a shoulder pole. Everything in the basket was called scrap, but most of it had only a thin film of surface rust. A quick polish—sometimes not even that—and it could go straight back into use. Afu had no need to waste his strength melting and recasting any of it. No ordinary blacksmith would work the way Afu did. But Afu had never been an ordinary man. Every day he did work that seemed to Zhou Yang meaningless and bizarre. Even ironware finished one day would often be thrown back into the furnace and remade the next. And Zhou Yang could not offer the slightest reminder about it. —He had once come by a man's last words. The dead man had died a sudden, violent death because he had repeatedly, too freely, reminded a villager that dead chickens don't need their beaks pried open and fed every day. In Guancun, Zhou Yang had survived this long entirely thanks to the “death last words and death afterimage collection” ability that came with the identity of “knife-credit man.” He had been feeling his way across the river by the dead's last words and afterimages. That was how he had lived to today. Guancun was full of rules, in the open and hidden, and brushing even one of them could plant the seed of disaster. And the greatest of all those rules was this: no leaving the village. Not the slightest move toward escaping it—not even any outward statement of wanting to leave! Cao Qing had died for it. Of the twenty-odd death last words Zhou Yang had collected, more than half belonged to people who died for breaking that rule! The iron in the furnace was soon burning red. Afu took up a pair of tongs, drew a red-hot shovel from the fire, and laid it on the anvil. Then he snatched the hammer leaning against the stump below and struck the shovel a few blows, deforming it. He seemed to find that holding red-hot iron in tongs left him unable to put his strength into it, so he dropped the tongs and gripped the glowing shovel with his bare palm. Watching this, Zhou Yang's pupils contracted! That shovel, burning bright yellow, had to be over a thousand degrees! Afu's hand—flesh that looked merely smeared with a little grease—gripped iron at such heat, and aside from a little foul-smelling white smoke curling up from his palm, he was not burned in the slightest! If Zhou Yang reached out to touch iron like that, his hand would melt on the spot. Zhou Yang had seen this many times. Yet every time, dread still rose in him. What frightened him was that “people” like Afu were everywhere in Guancun. Was he, an ordinary man, really capable of escaping alive from being ringed by such villagers? … A day of heavy labor ended at last, when the final piece of “scrap iron” was hammered into an ingot. Even though Zhou Yang had only assisted Afu, he now felt as if every bone in his body had come apart at the joints. His constitution was nothing to boast of, and in a place like Guancun, where so much of the food “didn't agree with him,” his health only declined further. After saying goodbye to Afu, Zhou Yang left the blacksmith shop. Stepping onto the muddy narrow road in front of the shop, he did not take the way home he had walked that morning, but chose another road. In Guancun, even when the destination of a daily round trip never changed, one should try not to repeat the same road. Because once a certain road was walked too many times, and then one day, on a whim, a different path was taken, the villagers might take it for wanting to escape Guancun—scouting the way out ahead of time—and he would die suddenly for it. Zhou Yang had come to this judgment from a dead person's last words. By contrast, as long as he frequently varied his route, the villagers formed the impression that “Zhou Yang is just a kid who likes running all over the place,” that “everything in the village is new to Zhou Yang.” Once that persona was set, even if Zhou Yang occasionally took a wrong turn, it wouldn't stir up much of a storm. Setting up a persona was the most important thing of all in Guancun. Hiding behind it, at least, bought him safety for a while.