Poison City

“How’s it look?” After getting off the phone with Tae Kuo, the actual full time watcher of the Fuman Coffin Home, Sue went to Gloria’s side, who was examining the now almost completely charcoaled body of the middle aged man: “Sifu Kuo said to keep the bodies here and postpone all burials till he comes back. And he said he’ll be back at the latest tomorrow.”

“It doesn’t look good.” Gloria sighed, her frown was not gone and her body was trembling even now: “Sue, you should go to the Kshiti Temple and ask a clergyman for help. We lasted through the night, but there was no telling if there would be nothing left on us.”

“Thank you. Thank you.” Sue let out a sigh of relief, then picked up her purse again. She hesitated when she was at the door: “Gloria, are you gonna be okay? I mean - you were out here last night - I think it’s best if you come to the temple with me.”

“Don’t worry about me.” Gloria shook her head with a wry smile: “I need to stay here for a bit. I need to seal off the bodies for now, and I need to close the entire coffin home down before reporting to the local community collective chapter and the temples.” 

“I understand, thank you.” Sue sighed before heading out the door: “Let - let me know when you’re ready. I’ll ask the folks at the temple if I could bring you anything. Please be careful.”

“Thank you. And take care as well.” Gloria smiled and waved at Sue. But before Sue left, She had to run out and asked Sue for a lock of her hair. Sue was confused, but obliged.

Believe it or not, there were a few pages detailing how to deal with the aftermath of a spirit attack in the watcher’s notes. Only about eighty percent of the recommended action items were applicable to Gloria right now, for she was not officially trained or ordained as an official clergywoman.

The first thing she needed to do was to put a notice on the door, telling everyone that this coffin home was closed to all inquiries and operations, none of the bodies should be transported out, nor should any new body be coming in. It should be written with either red ink or on a piece of red paper, to warn the locals not to come close.

The next thing she needed to do, was to perform a kind of cleansing ritual using certain materials and supplies stocked in the coffin home. The ritual needed red threads soaked in rice wine and coated in cinnabar, the same kind that was used to weave the two red nets that helped her trap the angry spirit of the middle aged man, a lot of sticky rice, some rice wine, some paper coins, some copper coins, and lastly, optionally but preferably, some straw dolls.

From a hidden compartment under the main floor of the storage room at the back of the coffin home, Gloria found a large roll of the red threads she needed. They were old, covered in dust, the cinnabar rice wine soak had worn off by quite a bit. There were ways to mend them, which in theory would make them more effective. But she did not have the time right now.

After lightning up incense sticks in burners at their feet, Gloria double checked that the lids on all of the coffins in the main room were tightly closed. Then she wrapped the red threads around the coffins by several cycles like ribbons on a gift box.

There was not enough sticky rice, so she had to make do with what she had. A circle of sticky rice was made around the coffins of the burned young man and the middle aged man. The grains in the inner part of the circle had some rice wine splashed on them. Gloria then took out two cloth towels, soaked them in rice wine and placed them on the coffin lids.

All of this was just a preliminary measure to prevent the appearance of dangerous spirits. Before this, Gloria activated her Qi and examined each of the bodies in the main room, just to make sure there were no traces of the same kind of cold, grim and dark energy from the spirit of the middle aged man lingering on the other bodies. Lucky and unlucky for her, there were none on any of the bodies. So all she could do now was operate under the assumption that the new body and the body of the middle aged man were the only ones afflicted.

The red threads wrapped around all of the coffins were the first level of “defense” against any potential uprising of malicious spirits from these bodies like the middle aged man. If they were as effective as the watcher’s notes suggested, then the spirits should be trapped inside the coffins for a while, and give her time to react should they try to come out. The towels soaked in rice wine and the circle of sticky rice were the second layer of defense, as they would form a circle that would literally burn the spirits if they dare walk or fly out of it.

She then took out another incense burner of bigger size and visibly better quality from under the altar in the back room, along with three thicker and longer incense sticks and a batch of copper coins. These were traditional round paper coins with square holes in the middle. She placed three coins on top of the flattened earth and ash in the burner, then stuck three of those thicker and longer incense sticks through the square holes before lighting them up. 

This slightly bigger incense burner needed to be neatly placed on the altar, as a ritual of asking for aid from the Wuchangs, or the capturers of wandering spirits and guides that would lead them to travel to the nether world. This was the part about which Gloria felt the least comfortable, for the simple reason that she had never actually seen Wuchangs, while she had plenty of experience with spirits and ghosts.

With the Spirit Cat Style Mystical Martial Arts she practiced, she was much more sensitive to the presence of supernatural and paranormal energy in her surroundings. When she concentrated her Qi on her eyes and ears, she could see spirits that were normally invisible to other humans and hear them, like their voices or the noise they made when they bumped into or even got into fights with each other. But even with all these years of practice, last night was still the first time she had ever come into contact with a spirit this angry and dangerous.

After setting up barriers for the potential spirits per the watcher’s notes, the next thing she should do to protect herself, Sue and other innocent civilians close by, was to close the front and back doors of the main room and tie the remainder of the red threads around the door frames as well as the door knobs. But before this, she wanted to do something additional to protect her and Sue - there were not any straw dolls in this coffin home, but there was plenty of hay in the backyard, so she had to make do.

She tore off her two sleeves, pulled the thread out so that she could use them to make two straw dolls, with the lock of Sue’s hair in one and a lock of her own in the other. She then wrapped two short strands of the red threads she used on the coffins on around the necks of the two dolls made of hay. She then cut a small incision on the tip of her left index finger and drew a circle of blood on the ground, enclosing the two dolls. After three rounds of recitation of a simple spell documented in the notes, she brought the dolls onto the altar in the back room.

After all of this, she was finally able to lock down the coffin home. By the time she locked the front door, there were a few curious kids in the neighborhood gathered around the front door, reading the notice she stuck on both the door and the wall.

“Ooh, something bad happened?” A tall, slim boy asked.

“Yes. And we need to lock down because of it.” Gloria shook her head, then pointed at the boy and stared at all of the kids with a stern look and said with a cold voice: “You know what this means. Play elsewhere, or else I will have to tell your parents or beat you up. You understand me? I am not kidding, stay away. This place is dangerous now, until Sifu Kuo came back, no one should take even one step in.”

“Why?” Another short boy asked.

“Because it’s dangerous.”

“Why?”

“Because of unclean things, go ask your moms and dads if you don’t understand. ”

“Why?” Two boys asked with smirks on their faces.

“One more ‘why’ and I’ll give you one more lesson on your parents’ behalf.” Gloria raised her hand and acted like she was about to backhand some of the kids. The kids scattered, laughing and still chattering.

Gloria thought for a brief moment whether she should warn the parents of these kids so that they could be controlled. The pro would be that their parents would help her make sure that these local kids would stay away; but the con would be that right now she was relatively certain that there was still some kind of dark energy attached to her, if not directly physically, it would be looming over her. This kind of dark energy would definitely be infectious like a disease.

There were several temples around the Fuman Coffin Home, and the closest one, Kshiti Temple, would just be at maximum around half an hour away on foot. She decided to run there and ask the clergymen and clergywomen to perform a cleansing ritual on her first.