In ancient China, there was one of the most difficult things to do, which was called theft. In this industry, you can't take it openly, to say that you have to steal chickens and dogs, sneaky, this industry, the reputation is not good, there are people from the government staring at it, and it is on the cusp of the storm almost anytime and anywhere. But this line of work, with high returns, is just a high risk, and which string is miscalculated, it will be a small life.

The most well-known branch of this industry is tomb robbing. Tomb robbery is considered to be a little bit that the people in the streets and alleys will understand, dividing gold and setting acupoints, feng shui secret arts, very mysterious. But I'm not talking about this, but a similar "thief" called: Thief Mound!

What is the Demon Thief Mound, as the name suggests, is to go to the tomb of the thief demon. Speaking of which, I guess some people are going to laugh at me, saying that you guy is daydreaming, demons are just legends, where are there demons in this world? Indeed, many people, who can also believe in the existence of zombie zongzi in tomb robbery, are unwilling to believe that there are demons in this world.

In fact, the demon is real, it is a unique character in Chinese legends, often haunted in Taoism, and later the introduction of various foreign churches, slowly began to dilute the traditional perception of Chinese Taoism in people's hearts. If you go to the streets of the United States and ask what Satan is, they will tell you that it is a demon, and come to the streets of China and ask what a demon is, it may be a fox spirit or something, there is no complete definition, to make a simple analogy, the demon is a demon unique to China.

The meaning of demon in our line actually refers to the word monster, that is, monster and monster. The word monster first appeared in the Eastern Jin Dynasty literati Ganbao's "Sou Shen Ji", which wrote "The monster is also the one who covers the essence of the object." The qi is chaotic in the middle, the things change in the outside, the shape and spirit temperament, and the use of the inside and the outside. The meaning of this sentence is that the so-called yokai refers to those who are popular on the outside, even though they are animals, plants, or other food on the outside.

Demons generally live much longer than humans, but most demons have a time limit, so one day they will die. As we said before, demons are popular, so they will have the same characteristics as humans, pursuing physical incorruptibility and spiritual longevity, so like people, demons will also have their own destiny in the ground after death, called mounds. The definition of a mound and a tomb is similar, there are coffins, and there are all kinds of funerary goods, but unlike them, there may be all kinds of treasures beyond the material in the mound, and the legend hides the secret of immortality!

I'm a member of the Demon Tomb Thief industry, and the circle calls us Demon Thieves. This line of work is more complicated and dangerous than tomb robbing, so it is generally not many people willing to do it for a long time. However, I am different, I have been in this industry since I was fifteen years old, and I have been working for twenty years, during which I have never broken any illness, no matter how big or small, and I have dug thousands of graves. It's also incredible, the reason why I became a demon thief is when I was a child.

My childhood can be said to be unfortunate, my father died of illness when I was born, my mother also ran away with someone, and I and my grandmother were the only ones left in the house. My father had a child at the time, and my grandmother was not yet fifty years old when I was born, so I had not yet reached the twilight of my life, and I had a lot of strength, no worse than the young men in the village, so that I could do a lot of farm work to earn money to raise me. Since I was a child, my grandmother has never treated me badly, when I was a child, I had canned milk powder to drink when everyone drank rice cereal, and then when I grew up, I had all the fun things that the children in the village had, there were a lot of things, and sometimes my grandmother would go to the city to buy osmanthus cake candy cubes and bring them back to me to eat.

But many times I found that my grandmother didn't stay at home a lot of the day, and always came back in the evening, always dirty and dirty, and sometimes even some bloody wounds. I asked her curiously at the time, but she just covered her mouth and refused to reveal anything, just hoping that I would do some farm work and become a farmer in the future, marry a wife and have children.

As the old saying goes, when I was fifteen years old, it was the time when the crops in the fields were good for harvest, and the government suddenly ordered my family's only piece of land to be harvested, a full dozen acres of land! It's gone, and my grandmother is still counting on me to support myself on this land!

At that time, I already understood something, probably knowing that I had no money to marry a daughter-in-law, I cried a lot at noon that day, and my grandmother didn't know how to persuade me, so she sat aside and sighed. I cried until dark, and then I felt hungry and thirsty, so I stopped crying and ran to the kitchen pot to scrape some pot to eat. After eating, I came out again, feeling that I had the strength to cry again, and I was just about to open my mouth to scream, but my grandmother knocked my head with the cigarette gun in her hand.

"Little calf! Unpromising! I cried like a girl at this point. Grandma glared at me fiercely, lifted the cigarette gun and put it back in her mouth, smashed it, spat out a string of smoke rings, and then let out a long groan.

I didn't dare to speak, so I obediently watched my grandmother smoke all the tobacco in the gun to ashes. After smoking, the grandmother seemed to have become more energetic, knocked down the cigarette ash, put the cigarette gun back in her arms, lowered her head, exhaled from her two nostrils, and said to me slowly: "Xuan'er, you follow me tonight to the black forest behind the west of the village." ”

After I heard this, I was immediately frightened and my legs weakened, because the forest in the west of the village, before the founding of New China, was a torture ground before, and many heads had fallen in it, and it was very terrible, both day and night, it was a dense and dark patch, so the people in the village called it the black forest.

I didn't know what my grandmother was doing in that kind of place, so my head started to think about it. I shuddered. While raising his head and looking at his grandmother with a frightened face, he stammered and asked, "Grandma, you, what are you taking me to the black forest to do, isn't it, woo, can't you feed me, and plan to throw me away?" ”

I don't know where I got such a rich imagination at that time, and I cried as I spoke.

"What nonsense?" Grandma glared at me angrily, "I won't leave you, I'm going to take you to the Black Forest to do something, as for what's the matter, don't ask, I'll talk about it when the time comes." ”

When my grandmother explained this, I was relieved, but the crying still didn't stop, and I still cried and asked, "That, the black forest has killed a lot of people, I'm afraid." ”

Grandma glanced at me and scolded, "Why are you so daring? It's still a baby with a javelin, and the girl's family is bolder than you! ”

I couldn't cry when I was so counted, and I couldn't say anything, I just choked and wiped my face with my sleeve. Tears mixed with green snot wiped all over my face.

After waiting for about four or five minutes, and before I could finish wiping my snot and tears, my grandmother came out with a small bag wrapped in a blue cloth, and once again held her precious smoking gun in her hand, and the tobacco in the smoking gun was filled again, and the scarlet flames were bubbling and popping.

She poked me in the waist with her cigarette gun and glanced at me to signal that I was ready to go. Then she took the blue package into my hand and told me to hold it so as not to lose it. I looked at the worn-out package, bulging, and I didn't know what was inside.

Grandma went ahead, and I followed behind her. She smashed the cigarette holder by herself, and she didn't know how to hold my hand, so I could only pull at the corner of her clothes and look around timidly as I followed.

It wasn't too late before the sky was as black as the face of a charcoal-burning man. In fact, in our village, the dolls are very skinny, and I, a big man who is almost an adult, will also play with bare-chested little children, stealing fruits and beating sparrows, in the eyes of adults, we are a headache for them. So even if I'm so old, I'll still be beaten like a turtle by my grandmother.

At that time, it could be regarded as a black light, and the village was not connected to electricity at that time, and every family used kerosene lamps, and kerosene was not cheap, otherwise how could it be called foreign oil mile! Many households will turn off the fire early, and every day when the lights are lit is only about half an hour. At this time, the moon was still covered by thick clouds, and the whole village was dark, and it was an exaggeration to say that you couldn't see your fingers, but what is certain is that sometimes you can barely see where the road is, and along the way, even if I hold my grandmother away, I will inevitably stumble a few times. But what struck me as strange was that my grandmother seemed to walk at night a lot, without stumbling along the way, and her face was very calm, except for a few times when she smoked and smoked, her muscles would fold a few times, and there was no expression at all.

Soon we were in front of the black forest at the back of the village. The first time I saw the black forest in the dark of night, it was a subtle feeling, and you couldn't find the right word to describe it, if you had to say it, it was black. The blackness was not the darkness of the night, but the color of the trees themselves, and the hairy white moonlight reflected a pitch-black sheen, as if it had been coated with a thick layer of black paint, and like a slippery lard. I stood in front of the forest. Don't dare to speak or move. From time to time in the village, there were the cries of dolls and the scolding of adults, and the faint noise mixed together, which made me shiver a little.

Grandma still looked calm, lowered her head and said to me, "Xuan'er, unwrap the package." ”

I looked down at the blue package in my hand, the bandage on it was relatively loose, and I untied it with a light pull. Immediately after, I saw what was inside. In fact, I can't say all of them, there are many different styles of seven, seven, eight or eight, but some of them are still known, such as the yellow rune paper and the kind of sandalwood burned in the temple, these things are very familiar to me, and the village rituals and some people who dance the gods will use them on weekdays, and we children have secretly stuffed them into our pockets. What I remember most clearly is a statue of Taishang Laojun, why was it recognized by me at a glance, because when I was a child, I often read the comic books of Journey to the West, and the book was almost ruined by myself, and I like those magical things very much, and the appearance of the gods painted in it is almost all firmly remembered by me. Among them, Taishang Laojun is the immortal I remember the most, and I often hear the Taoist priest shouting in my life: "Taishang Laojun is as anxious as the law!" "In the comic book novel, he is described as a fairy with white hair fluttering, fairy wind bones, and powerful mana, a typical column is a play in Journey to the West, his mount Qingniu Jing went down to the mortal world, and Sun Monkey invited all kinds of immortals to borrow various magic weapons, but she was helpless and helpless, so I think she must be a great character.

Of course, there are a lot of strange guys in the package, I can't even tell how to describe it, and just about to ask, I was interrupted by my grandmother: "Take out the statue of the fairy and put it on the ground, with your back to the black tree." ”

I knew that the immortal in her mouth should be Taishang Laojun, so I held the stone statue in my hands and placed it carefully, and moved it in a direction according to my grandmother's request.

"Two sandalwood sticks, two yellow talismans, use sandalwood to pierce the rune paper, and one on the left and one on the left and one on both sides of the online image."

I continued to do as she asked. Grandma was very serious when she said this, as if she was doing something very serious. After everything was done, my grandmother told me to retreat a few steps, and then walked in front of me in small steps, the original hunched waist was stiffened at this time, and it seemed to be very pious, she bowed three times straight to the statue of Taishang Laojun, and then I saw her two hands constantly fiddling with something, like the hand knot seal described in the novel, at the same time, I heard the voice of my grandmother:

"Lao Jun's curse, Taishang Laojun, within the Three Realms, among the Liuhe, those who follow it are auspicious, and those who go against it are fierce, as soon as the fate arrives, the thunder will accompany the disciple in difficulty, fortunately you will be lucky, turn evil into auspiciousness, and be as urgent as the law! Borrow fire! “

Grandma's last two sentences are very heavy, and very loud, when her words just fell, I immediately heard a pop, turned my head to see, standing on both sides of the old gentleman sandalwood head actually rose a white mist, and then burned, and the speed of burning is very fast, is about seven or eight times the normal, the fire source quickly down, the incense on the top of the incense continues to turn white, into ashes and collapse. In about a few seconds, the incense burned onto the yellow paper that the sandalwood had pierced, and then with a bang, the yellow paper was also ignited.

The whole process was like reading a villain book, I was completely in a state of confusion and surprise, and my mouth was wide open, and I could stuff a fist. At that moment, my grandmother's impression in my mind began to become mysterious, even confusing.

Grandma looked at ease, she walked in front of the pile of sandalwood and yellow talismans that had turned into ashes, squatted down, put her hands in them and wiped them a few times, and then got up and walked up to me, and tapped her fingers in the middle of my head, and then on her own forehead.

"Grandma, what are you doing here?"

I gently pulled the corner of her dress. She glanced down at me, her face still calm, then she raised her head, packed the blue package, tied the knot, and stuffed it back into my hand, and then continued: "Xuan'er, do you know? The position I just clicked on is your Tianling Gai, Tianling Gai is the third eye of our people, called Tianyan, which is usually closed, just now I borrowed the heavenly fire from the immortals, and the gray yang qi burned out is extremely strong, which can help people open the Tianyan for a short time, and once the Tianyan is opened, you can see some things that ordinary people can't see. ”

"What the average person can't see? What's that? ”

Grandma paused, then walked straight towards the Black Grove.

"Demonic spirit."