Later? Later, my father, Li Erwa, ran like a dog that had lost its soul, fleeing madly down that mountain path until he crashed headlong into a man.
That man was young, slender yet standing straight as a rod. A heavy, faded yellow cloth bundle hung at his waist.
His eyes burned with an unnerving intensity in the darkness—this was my Master, Wang Yan, in his youth.
Father told me this story years later, coughing violently, curled up on the earthen kang bed after the New Year.
He said the moment he collided with my Master, his bones turned to water. He shook like a leaf in a storm. Pointing back the way he'd come, teeth chattering, words tumbling out incoherently, he could only repeat: "Over there... over there... all gone! The whole village is gone! That thing... that..." Before he could finish, he collapsed.
My young Master's face had already turned ashen. He didn't immediately ask about the village or Wang the Limper.
He hauled my father up, his eyes locked on the direction of the village, nostrils flaring as if testing the wind for the stench of decay. His knuckles cracked as he clenched his fists; the contents of the yellow bundle seemed to hum.
After a long moment, he ground out the words through gritted teeth: "Go! Now! This place is cursed! Stay another moment, we die!"
He practically dragged my father.
By the time they finally staggered out of the death-choked mountain pass, the faintest grey light touched the eastern horizon.
Stopping to rest in a desolate, empty hollow, Father, in fits and starts, recounted the hellish slaughter of the previous night and how Wang the Limper had spent his last breath to save him. Father said Master listened in complete silence, his young face set like stone.
When Father described the final moment—how Limping Uncle Wang had dragged him out—Master suddenly stood up, facing the direction of the mountain village. His shoulders trembled. Lightly, but incessantly.
He didn't cry out. Not a single tear fell. Instead, he dropped to his knees and kowtowed with bone-jarring force towards the village that had nurtured his uncle for most of his life, and ultimately consumed him—Thud! Thud! Thud!
Three times! His forehead slammed hard against the cold mountain rock. He didn't flinch as blood welled up and dust smeared his brow.
Then, he straightened up, his voice hoarse: "Second Brother... Uncle... is gone."
"'Corpse Abomination'... it gained its power.Last night's blood sacrifice made it ten times more vicious. Forget my meager skills—even if Uncle himself rose right now, he couldn't stop it."
He shouldered the heavy yellow bundle and helped my exhausted father to his feet.
"Uncle used his last breath to get you out, and sent word for me to meet you... He was ready to die. He never planned to turn back. Come. I'll get you out of these mountains... find you a place to settle. Let the evil fester in this mud... and wait for Heaven's judgment."
My father, Li Erwa, was the only soul from that village to survive the calamity. He followed Master Wang Yan, wandering far and wide until they finally settled in a quiet little town on the southwestern border.
The village was gone. His family was dead. Only he and I remained—his lone sapling. I'd been away at junior high school in the county town, boarding there. By sheer, cruel luck, I'd escaped the annihilation.
Almost two years later, Father... he just couldn't hold on. The cataclysm—his wife, children, elders, his entire clan and village wiped out overnight—and the bone-deep terror of that desperate flight... it was like countless small knives, flaying his spirit day and night.
He aged twenty years. Within months, his body gave out. On his deathbed, he clutched Master Wang Yan's wrist with desperate strength, fingers digging deep, eyes filled with entreaty: "Brother Wang... I... I'm done for... Ke'er..." He gasped painfully.
"Ke'er... I entrust... entrust him to you... Let him learn... learn your skills... learn your letters... Don't let him... end up like me... stuck in the hills... a nobody... Please... watch over him... help him grow..."
And so, on a cold, drizzly dawn, my father breathed his last. From that moment, Li Erwa of Li Family Hollow ceased to exist. And I, Li Ke, was suddenly an orphan, my fate irrevocably rewritten.
I bowed to Wang Yan as my Master. He didn't speak. Silently, he gathered my father's meager belongings and led me—this half-son, half-apprentice burden—back onto the wandering road.
For the first two years, we slept under the stars, enduring wind and rain, constantly moving. Master didn't immediately teach me the ghostly arts. First, he taught me characters.
With a charred stick on temple dirt floors, on the backs of discarded cigarette packs found by the roadside, he wrote "Heaven and Earth profound yellow, Universe vast primordial," and also "Heaven's justice is clear, Evil cannot hide."
He said a man must stand straight first.
He must have a scale within his heart, understand human bonds and Heaven's way, to measure whether the filthy things wandering the boundary between Yin and Yang had crossed the line.
He taught me bits and pieces: which mountain hollows faced the sun and blocked the wind, making them safer for night shelter; how to recognize a few herbs that could save a life or end one; pointing at clouds and stars, murmuring cryptic things like "malign energy gathering" or "stars shifting, plague may follow."
Sometimes, passing an abandoned village or a crumbling temple, he'd stop abruptly and make me sniff the wind—he said the scent of rust mixed with sickly sweetness, or the deep rot of decay rising from the earth, were ill omens. More often, he just walked in silence, carrying that old yellow bundle that never left his side, like a shadow. And I, Li Ke, followed behind, like a scavenger.
It wasn't until much, much later... on a night cold enough to freeze bone, huddled over dying embers, that he tapped out his old, tarnished brass pipe. The flickering light danced over his face, carved deep by hardship.
After a long silence, he spoke for the first time, in a slow, deliberate tone, recounting that night, deep in those mountains, the disaster known as The Corpse Abomination...
That was the first time I touched fear so vividly. It was also the first time I understood the weight my Master carried. And the final, tragic image of his uncle, Wang the Limper, along with the horrors that sunlight could never penetrate, took root deep within my life, never to be uprooted.