Chapter 1 All Members Are Villains

Boys around eight or nine years old can be a real headache, even for dogs.

Chen Shi was already eleven and past that annoying age, but his mischief had made him the village bully of Huangpo Village. Where he went, chaos followed, and even ducks laid an egg from stress as they waddled past him. You could say he was despised by both humans and dogs.

That morning, after gobbling down his breakfast, Chen Shi threw down his chopsticks and bolted outside, shouting, "Grandpa, I'm off to play!"

Grandpa, a towering figure clad in a black robe embroidered with large peonies, stood in front of the ancestral shrine in the main hall, nodding his head gravely as he replied, "Don't go too far, stay away from the river, and come back early in the afternoon..."

"Got it!"

Chen Shi didn't wait for Grandpa to finish speaking; he dashed off and disappeared in a flash.

At the shrine, Grandpa continued to face the table, chewing slowly and deliberately. After a long while, he laboriously swallowed, then took the candle he'd been gnawing on, bit off a chunk, and chewed it methodically.

On the shrine table were two candlesticks and an incense burner. One candlestick's wax was nibbled down to the base, leaving only teardrops of wax, while the incense in the burner was sending up curls of smoke, near its end.

Grandpa put down the half-eaten candle, took a few sticks of incense, lit them, and placed them in the burner. He inhaled deeply, basking in the smoke, an expression of pure bliss on his face.

Behind the incense burner stood a black spirit tablet.

Carved on the spirit tablet was Grandpa's own name.

"In memory of the virtues of our ancestor, the spirit tablet of Chen Yindou of the Chen Family."

"Eating enough so as not to eat people."

Chen Shi beat Yu Zhu's grandmother's dog so furiously that it howled in pain. After making the big black dog submit, he rounded up three or four dogs from the village and fought a fierce battle against dogs from a neighboring village. Returning victorious, he then climbed a tree to raid a nest, nearly falling after being pecked by the angry mother bird.

Soon after, the boy strutted around with a dead snake, startling the girls on the east side of the village into tears. Not long after that, he sneaked into Old Lady Wu Zhu's melon field to steal melons, only to be chased for three miles by the infuriated Wu Zhu before finally shaking her off.

That was Chen Shi's plain and uneventful morning.

Come noontime, Chen Shi reached the Jade Ribbon River outside the village. Despite sweating up a storm, he resisted the urge to jump into the water.

Laughter and splashing echoed from the center of the river, where three boys about his age were happily having a water fight.

They were water ghosts, drowned the year before last, which is why Chen Shi dared not join them in the water.

The last time he'd jumped in to play, those three had dragged him to the deeps—one grabbing his legs, another his waist, and the third choking his neck—nearly drowning him.

Grandpa had leaped into the river and given the three water ghosts a sound thrashing to save him.

"Chen Shi, come play with us!" one of the boys called out to him.

The other two sported innocent smiles, beckoning to him as well, "Come on! It's more fun with four people in a water fight!"

An older child laughed and said, "Don't be afraid; it's not deep at all, just up to our waists!"

"Come on, get in! What fun is it to play alone?"

...

Chen Shi ignored them and turned to walk under an old willow tree at Huang Gang Slope.

The three children remained standing in the middle of the river but were now silent, their smiles gone, as they slowly sank into the water.

"That damn brat from the Chen family, one day you'll drown and serve as a ghost replacement!" one of the children cursed resentfully.

The river water gradually covered their lips, noses, eyes, and finally their heads, as the three kids vanished from sight.

Above Chen Shi, a pair of feet dangled down from the willow tree, swaying in front of his face.

A scholar, who had hanged himself from the willow, saw Chen Shi looking up and stuck out his crimson tongue, a foot long.

Chen Shi paid him no mind; the scholar had died long ago, his body had rotted away, leaving only his soul hanging there.

He approached the back of the tree and placed a slice of watermelon in front of a Stele at the roots, bowing his head and saying, "Godmother, I've come to see you again. I brought you a watermelon; it's really, really sweet."

The Stele was his godmother. When Chen Shi was young, Grandpa had said that the boy was good at everything except that his fate was too weak, and he'd needed a durable godmother to survive. So, they came to this crooked-neck willow and he prayed to the Stele to be his godmother.

Every festival, Chen Shi needed to offer tribute and incense to worship his godmother.

Such were the customs of the village.

Country folks would worship a godmother, which might be an ancient tree, a stone of unknown origin, temple gates in the hills, or even a crumbled, unnamed statue on a hillside—all to seek safety and ward off malevolent spirits.

Grandpa had said that this Stele was ancient and supernatural, capable of protecting Chen Shi, which is why he made him worship it as his godmother.

But in recent years, as Chen Shi knelt before his godmother, he hadn't felt any supernatural presence.

The Stele was old, bearing indentations of characters that faintly read "Ancestor" and "Only."

Other inscriptions, buried in the soil and entwined by the tree's roots, couldn't be excavated.

After bowing to his godmother, Chen Shi mumbled, "Godmother, Grandpa's getting weirder by the day, always turning his back to me. It's been days since I've seen his face properly. He eats things behind my back; I don't know what it is... Yesterday morning, several of our chickens died, not from weasels, as they wouldn't dare come to our house to steal chickens..."

The Stele gave no response.

But perhaps it was an illusion; Chen Shi thought he saw the characters on the Stele briefly glow, then they faded away.