"Hong Xia-" Xiao Xie shouted, ran a few steps forward, countless stones fell down, shining with a flashlight, bottomless, and there was no way to rescue him. Xiao Xie sat at the mouth of the cave and cried, trembling and walking back. But he was not familiar with this road at all, and he could not find a way back to the village after stumbling around, so he had been walking in the mountains for most of the night, and he was so afraid and tired that he could not walk at all, and collapsed in the grass. When it was almost dawn, I heard the shouts of Uncle Hong and his parents in the distance.

He screamed in response, and only then was he found. Uncle Hong and Hong Ban asked, "What about Hong Xia?" ”

Xiao Xie was about to cry, and said incoherently about last night. Uncle Hong, father and son didn't believe it, so they hurriedly ran to the cave to check, and sure enough, they saw traces of weeds being pressed and rolled on the ground.

Under the cliff is a cemetery on the west side of the village, where everyone found Hong Xia's body, which had fallen miserably. Hong Ban and Xiao Xie almost fainted from crying, Uncle Hong was also very sad, and Xiao Xie's parents asked their son what was going on. Xiao Xie hurriedly told the story of last night.

"Why did Hong Xia sleepwalk in the middle of the night, go to the cave, and hold a knife to kill you?" Xiao Xie's father asked. Helplessly, Xiao Xie said that he and Hong Xia made love in the cave that day.

Uncle Hong's eyes widened, he never expected this kind of thing to happen. Hong Ban was extremely angry, grabbed Xiao Xie's collar and beat him, and was pulled away by Uncle Hong. He sighed, "It's already happened, it's useless to do it......" He said to Hongban, asking him to find out if there was the dagger nearby.

Hearing that Hong Xia fell to her death from the cliff, the villagers were very sad and asked Uncle Hong what was going on. Of course, Uncle Hong couldn't tell the truth, so he had to say that she didn't recover from the fever two days ago, and she sleepwalked to the back mountain in the middle of the night and accidentally rolled down the cliff.

The villagers helped the Hong family to bury Hong Xia in a remote col behind the mountain, because she had practiced Miao witchcraft and was considered a sorcerer, so she could not be buried in the village cemetery. After the burial, Hong Ban found two thick branches according to the rules, arranged them into a fork shape, and then laid soil on them to form a tomb bag.

People can't be resurrected after death, although Uncle Hong and Hong Ban are very sad, and Hong Ban is even more angry with Xiao Xie, but he can only give up. Uncle Hong believed that Hong Xia did not have the destiny to be a witch, so although she was able to make a small success in witchcraft in more than a year, she still couldn't escape it.

The sad Xiao Xie followed his parents from Tengchong back to Xiantao, and after that, his sleepwalking syndrome was naturally cured, but he would dream of Hong Xia from time to time. Either I dreamed that the two of them were sitting by the river and chatting, or picking fruits in the mountains, and sometimes I dreamed that the two of them were making out and kissing in the cave, and then Hong Xia's face turned into a ghost, holding a knife to kill him.

He often woke up from his dreams, covered in cold sweat, and his parents were very scared, thinking that it was some kind of hysteria, but Xiao Xie knew very well that it was not a disease at all, it was his own heart disease. His youthful and frivolous actions killed Hong Xia.

Time can dilute everything, Xiao Xie graduated from high school, was admitted to university, joined the job after graduation, got married, had children, and Xiao Xie became a big Xie. He also had a son, and when his son went to college all the way, Da Xie became fatter and fatter, his hair became bald, and he became Lao Xie later.

Speaking of this, Lao Xie's tears couldn't stop flowing down, and Hong Ban, who was lying on the bed, also sat up and leaned his back against the wall. Lao Xie said: "Alas, if I hadn't been so impulsive at that time, Hong Xia might have gotten married and had children by now, and her son should be graduating from college soon!" ”

"No more mention." Hongban said calmly.

In order not to make the two of them too sad, I digressed the topic and asked, "That day in the cave, Hong Xia didn't have a hideous expression, but wore that mask, right?" ”

Hong Ban nodded: "Later, I found the witch knife and the Wu mask where Hong Xia fell off the cliff, and since then, Dad has hidden those two things and the witch book under the bricks in the house, and never used them again." When the villagers asked, he said he had lost it. ”

may have mentioned this topic, Lao Xie turned his head and asked Hong Ban: "Uncle, you never said anything about your wife and children, they ......"

The three of us all looked at Hong Ban, Lao Xie had said before, when he went to Tengchong to find Hong Ban, persuaded him to go out of the mountains to Thailand to be Azan, and asked where Hong Ban's wife and children were, Hong Ban only said the word "dead", and Lao Xie didn't ask much. Now he took the opportunity to bring up the question again, and seemed to be eager to know the answer.

Hong Ban's expression was still calm, and he said, "I was killed by a sorcerer." ”

Old Xie was shocked, Fang Gang and I were also shocked, Fang Gang asked, "What wizard will harm you?" You haven't had a vendetta, and you're not the only wizard in those villages? ”

"In those villages." Hong Ban replied. We all looked at him with urgent eyes, and Hong Ban turned his head to look out the window, still occasionally hearing the laughter of diners and players from restaurants and KTVs.

Here's what Hong Ban told us.

Because of the Fa cultivation, Hong Ban can't get married too early, otherwise his mana will be lost. It wasn't until Hung Ban was thirty years old that he got married. The wife was a woman from a neighboring village, and her husband died of illness a few years ago, and she never remarried. After marriage, the two soon had a lively and lovely daughter who looked like Hong Xia. Uncle Hong likes this granddaughter very much, and it is not enough to hold her in her arms every day, and the pain of Hong Xia's death is gradually fading out of the hearts of the Hong family. Two years later, Hongban's wife gave birth to another son, but unfortunately, he died of a high fever at the age of half a year. And Hong Ban's wife was unable to have children because of dystocia and hemorrhage during childbirth, and her uterus was damaged.

When Hong Ban's daughter was four years old, Uncle Hong was already in his sixties, and because he was looking for an Indian spider in the mountains to use to refine medicine, he accidentally fell off a cliff and ended his career as a witch doctor.

As early as a few years ago, Uncle Hong told Hong Ban that if he was not alive one day, the place of burial should be kept as secret as possible, even the villagers of the village could not tell him. Hong Ban was puzzled and asked why, but Uncle Hong said that he had heard that in Southeast Asia, some practitioners of Yin Dharma like to make the skulls of fellow practitioners into ritual vessels to assist in the effect of spell casting, which is called Yuye. A few years ago, someone came to Tengchong's village to ask if there were any Dharma cultivators, but it didn't look like they wanted to save people, and this is probably the reason. So in order to prevent it, let Hong Ban do it.

Unexpectedly, his father died so early, when Hong Ban was buried, he only asked the villagers to help carry the coffin into the mountain, he asked the villagers who helped to go back to the village, carried his father's body by himself, walked in the mountains for two hours, and finally buried in a very secret place, only he knows.

In order to commemorate Uncle Hong's contribution to the village, all the villagers decided that if Hong Ban was unwilling to teach his daughter witchcraft, the whole village planned to send her out of the mountain village to study in the county from the beginning of her junior high school, and receive a good education from junior high school to high school and university.

One afternoon about a few months later, Hong Ban made two of Hong Xia's favorite foods when she was a child, and went to the back mountain alone to pay respects at Hong Xia's grave.

This area is very remote and even more desolate than the village cemetery. There are family members of the villagers who go to the cemetery to pay respects, and people can often be seen. And this is in the small col of a barren mountain, and no one passes through it for months unless there are special circumstances. But when Hongban was about to reach the location of his sister's grave, he saw a woman standing in the grass, looking for something.

Seeing Hong Ban approaching, the woman smiled. Her skin is not white, but she is very good-looking, Hong Ban asked, "What are you doing here, are you lost?" Which village is it from? I haven't seen you. ”

"I'm Mandan, from the Mengyang area." The woman speaks Mandarin that she is not very proficient in.

Hongban asked Meng Yang what place it was, and the woman named Mandan smiled and said, "Meng Yang is not far south of Myitkyina. ”

Myitkyina is the easternmost city in Myanmar, near the border with Yunnan. Hongban thought it was strange, because although Tengchong was located on the border between Yunnan and Burma, the village where he lived was relatively remote and in the winding mountain road, and almost no Burmese people had ever been there. He asked, "What are you doing here?" ”

Mandan smiled and said, "I am a Shan and have been practicing ancient Burmese magic since I was a child. I heard that there are many powerful mages in Yunnan, China, so I wanted to ask if there were any wizards here and wanted to learn about them. I heard that there was a wizard surnamed Hong in this village, so I came to look for it, but I didn't expect to get lost. ”