Chapter 102: Spring Birth and Autumn Death

From then on, when the people of the village saw him, they threatened him with sticks or brooms, telling him to get out of the way. More than ten years later, when I returned home for the Chinese New Year, I heard from my grandfather that Hong Dagang had just entered a newly built mental hospital in the township, and now his spirit has improved a little, and he can recognize his acquaintances in the village.

After listening to the monk's instructions, my grandfather repeated the monk's words to me, and then asked me, "Based on these, can you guess where the second half of the ancient book is?" ”

I said, "It's so easy! If you had said that these seven words had something to do with the cave house, you wouldn't have waited until now to guess it. ”

Grandpa frowned and asked, "Did you guess it?" ”

If it weren't for the fact that I used to play with my playmates when I was a kid, I wouldn't have thought of that place in the first place. The game of playing house is a game in which several children imitate the life of adults together, and the most imitated is marriage. Several children are assigned roles together, some are grooms, some are brides, some are guests, and some are officiants, moving a few benches to make an auditorium, and draping a piece of red cloth to make the clothes of the newlyweds. A lot of people have played this game as kids.

Every time a few of us playmates play a wedding game, we always have to go to my backyard to do it. Because there are real "cave houses" in the backyard. It was a cave, a hole no taller than a man, no longer than two arms, dug in the back mountain. More than ten years ago, almost every family in the countryside planted sweet potatoes because the leaves of sweet potatoes could be fed to pigs.

But the sweet potato seeds are easy to mold and rot, so the farmers dig a hole in the steep place next to the mountain, which is a bit like the cave in Shaanxi, but the scale is much smaller than the cave, only enough to hold a few baskets of sweet potatoes.

After the sweet potato seeds are put into the cellar, the farmers plug the hole with adobe bricks to keep the sweet potatoes fresh and can be planted in the ground the next year.

When the sweet potato is just planted, the cellar hole is open, which just becomes a paradise for some children, and it is a good place to hide cats and cats.

When we were children, we used to play with the house, and we used the cave as a cave house for marriage.

Some people also joked about the older young people in the village who were not married, saying, "You have never entered the cave house."

If you want to enter, you will also enter the cellar hole. Such a joke on people.

So, when I heard my grandfather mention the "cave room", the first thing that came to mind was the cellar cave.

"Are you sure?" Grandpa asked.

I explained to my grandfather: "Grandpa's implicit meaning must be like this, just like Bao Gong thought, the person who can think of this couplet must be the person who enters the cave room." These seven words are riddles and at the same time riddles themselves. How to put it, when you guess the riddle, you yourself are already part of the riddle, then you yourself are the one who enters the cave room. "I don't know if I'm talking clearly.

Grandpa said, "Whether it's or not, just dig it up and take a look." ”

I immediately went to my grandfather's cellar to inspect it. Because my cellar is enough to hold sweet potato seeds for two families, my grandfather asks my father to leave him some sweet potato seeds by the way, and my own cellar is no longer commonly used. Grandpa burrowed into the cobweb-strewn hole and carefully dug the earth with a hoe.

Suddenly, there was a "cluck", and the hoe hit a hard object. Grandpa was overjoyed, and hurriedly bent down and gently picked up the loose soil around him with his hands. A copper box peeks out of the corner. Grandpa grabbed the corners of the box and pulled it out of the dirt.

Carefully open the box, and there is a book lying inside. Half a book, to be exact, is the second half of "Hundred Techniques", and the typography is the same as the first half of the book I have.

We hurriedly opened and read a few pages, then immediately closed the box and rushed to the cigarette temple happily. As soon as we stepped into the temple gate, we saw a man who was smearing gold dust on the monk's face. The monk's smile is set off by the gold dust, and there is a Buddha-like serene approach.

The gold-dusted man turned his head and told us: "The monk said that due to the direction of Kun's movement, the ghost prostitute will not come out for half a month. When this half a month has passed, when the moon becomes fullest on the night of the seventeenth, you must quickly deal with the ghost prostitute and do not give her another chance to harm others. ”

Grandpa didn't say a word, and withdrew with a gloomy expression.

Walking out of the cigarette temple with the copper box, the grandfather seemed to be talking to himself, and seemed to say to me: "I don't dare to say a word in front of him, for fear that he will come back to life against his will." "And I know that what Grandpa is afraid of is that the monk will not come back to life after speaking. Grandpa said this just to deceive himself. In my third year of college, my grandmother passed away. I was far away in the Northeast, and there was no way to get to my hometown in time to see her for the last time, and I remembered the scene of playing at her house when I was young, and how many times I cried in my dreams. However, when I returned home during the winter vacation, when I went to my grandfather's house again, I didn't have any sadness in my heart, knowing that my grandmother was gone, but I still felt that she was still alive. But, in any case, I didn't dare to shout out the word "grandma".

Grandpa's mood should be the same as mine.

As I left Cigarette Mountain, I looked back at the couplet on the temple gate: "Birth is in the degree, and entry into the world is in the people." "Sigh the life of the monk. His life should be more legendary than his grandfather's, but with the end of his life, is there still a trace of this legend in the world?

Time did not wait for me to sigh, but another strange thing was sent. In the half month of waiting for the ghost prostitute to appear again, my grandfather and I were not idle. I didn't tell my grandfather what the spores had told me because of a few strange things that happened during this period, but during that half month, the escaped chimney didn't come to harass us. Yueji didn't give me any other dreams.

My grandfather and I threw our hearts and souls into another thing.

It came to pass that a man from a neighboring county heard about his grandfather's ghost hunt and went to great lengths to find us and tell us about the strange things that had happened in their house. He said that he lived in what county or village, and now I don't remember. But I remember the strange things he said vividly. He said his daughter-in-law gave birth three times, all three times twins, and they were dragon and phoenix twins. However, the three dragon and phoenix fetuses all died.

My grandfather and I were dumbfounded. However, the strange is yet to come.

He said that every time his daughter-in-law gave birth in the spring when everything was growing, and the child died in the autumn when everything withered, as if his children were trees.

This spring, his daughter-in-law gave birth to another dragon and phoenix fetus, which should have been a fortunate thing, but this man was so anxious that the tragedy would repeat itself when autumn came.

He heard that his grandfather in the next county was an expert in ghost hunting, and he wanted to find his grandfather to see if it was a ghost. He struggled to find his grandfather's address.

When Grandpa heard this, he didn't hesitate at all, and immediately denied: "It's not a ghost." ”