I was born on August 20, 1986, which happened to be the 15th day of the seventh lunar month.

There are four ghost festivals in China, namely March 3, Qingming Festival, July 15, and October 1. Qingming Festival and the first day of October are all festivals for sweeping tombs to worship ancestors, expressing "respect for the time" to ancestors and relatives, sacrifices, and expressing mourning. March 3 is popular in the Jianghuai and Jiangnan areas, and it is said that ghosts will haunt this day. However, on the fifteenth day of July (July 14th in some places), the six roads go out, the ghost door opens, and the lonely souls and wild ghosts wander away, which is the day when the yin qi is at its peak.

Of course, this is all folklore, and you don't have to believe it. However, this day is not only a folk ghost festival, but also a Taoist midyear festival, or a Buddhist Bon festival, and there is still a certain truth in saying that it is special.

I was an early student, only sixteen years old after graduating from high school, one to two years younger than my average classmate. It's not that I'm precocious, it's because there are few students in primary schools in remote areas, and I don't care much about the age of entry. This also caused me to be ignorant when I arrived at the college entrance examination, but I failed the list and walked out of society early.

I came out in 2002 to work, people outside are like duckweed, wandering everywhere, in the past 7 years I have been to many places, Yiwu, Zhejiang, Foshan, Zhongshan, Dongguan, Zhuhai, Shenzhen I have been to stay, as a factory general worker, foreman, deputy supervisor, set up a stall to sell fruits, as a Western-style pizza shop cook, but also on the construction site for a period of time as a steel worker, insurance, sales clerk, sell furniture...... In 05, he was deceived by his fellow villagers into going to Hefei to do a pyramid scheme for a month.

When I was the poorest, I only ate two steamed buns in three days, and when I was the widest, I had two houses and a car in the urban area of Dongguan.

People who stay in one place and a small circle all year round have no story, only desire. But a person who has been wandering in a foreign land for a long time and has seen all kinds of life will have many stories. For example, the sexual encounters that the masses like to see, such as the dark side of society, such as all kinds of strange anecdotes, such as ...... Sex Capital Dongguan ("All the Way West" seems to be very popular now, but in fact, there are many things in it, which should have been collected by the screenwriter himself, and many places are very real. ）

There's a lot to tell in this story, but I'm going to start with a turning point in my life.

At the end of August '07, my grandmother became seriously ill.

I co-opened a jewelry store in Dongguan and went home immediately after receiving the news.

At that time I already had my own private car, a blue Passat. But because I wasn't familiar with the road conditions, I transferred to a long-distance sleeper that went directly to our county, but I didn't expect that I would take a completely different path in life than before.

My hometown is located in the southwest, an ethnic minority area, east of Xiangxi, and is the gateway to the 100,000 mountains.

When it comes to Xiangxi, some people will think of the Phoenix Ancient City of Mr. Shen Congwen's "Border City", some people will think of Huaihua, a transportation city that connects the north and the south, and of course, some people will think of Xiangxi's corpses, Gu poison and bandits.

In terms of region, we are actually part of the cultural and folk radiation circle of Xiangxi.

For example, bandits, comrades who have watched "The Story of Bandits in Xiangxi" may be able to imagine our place: poor mountains, bad waters, and people. Of course, the main reason is that the mountains are high and the roads are dangerous, the traffic is not smooth, and there are many people and few places, so it is too poor. Before the liberation, many of our mountain people there used hoes and sickles in the fields during the day to tend the land and livestock, and at night after sharpening their knives, they went to rob the roads.

They are usually peasants who dig in the soil and can't beat a fart with three sticks, and they are the little ghosts of the king of Yama when they rob the road.

It's a profession and a habit.

It's a profession and a habit.

Another example is Gu poison, some people say that this is feudal superstition, well, even if it is feudal superstition, because before I was twenty-two years old, I was a materialist, like many comrades who had been educated by the party and the state, and I did not think that there were ghosts, zombies, messy, and strange things in this world.

Although, there are many legends in our family, although, my grandmother is a Gu breeder.

In the ignorant old China, especially in remote areas, there were many people who were uneducated, and the masters and disseminators of knowledge were often religious figures, such as Taoism, Buddhism, shamanism, ...... and the primitive religions of many ethnic minorities, and these people are the propagators of religion - my grandmother is the goddess of Miao Village.

Miao Jiang witchcraft combines a lot of magic, traditional Chinese medicine, witch medicine content, there are desirable places, there are also incredible places, the most criticized is to drink Fu water - on a special yellow paper with chicken blood, cinnabar, rice soup and other things mixed ink scribble, the most after the most burned, with the rest of the ash flush water to drink.

The impression of my grandmother is a thin little old lady, unsmiling, with a nose like an eagle's hook, a toothless mouth, and a collapsed face. She is now over 80 years old, and has lived in Miao Village all her life, specializing in giving people incense (a kind of fortune telling), healing, exorcism and feng shui, and the neighbors and villagers still respect her very much.

My mother told me that my grandmother was suffering from cancer, which was an advanced stage of stomach cancer, and that there should be no cure.

It was already 7 o'clock in the evening when the sleeper bus arrived in the county seat, there were no buses in the remote county, and the buss that traveled between the town and the county town on weekdays were at 5:30 p.m. at the latest. I frantically found a battered taxi, haggled with the driver, and finally arrived in my town two hours later.

No one picked me up, so I went home by myself. The last time I went home was when I ran back from the MLM den in Hefei at the beginning of 05, and in a blink of an eye, two years have passed. And I also went from being an empty-handed kid at that time to becoming a little wealthy.

My mother took my luggage and told me that my grandmother was not here and went back to Dunzhai.

She said that she would die in Dunzhai, the land where she had lived for 86 years, where the well water was sweet, the rice was fragrant, and even the wind had the fragrance of rape flowers.

My mother has two younger sisters and a younger brother, and she is the eldest sister. My grandfather died early, and he went there when he broke the old four. My grandmother wasn't very good at housework, so my older mother was always tired. Later, the two aunts got married one after another, and my brother-in-law grew up, so my father and I moved to the town to start a small business.

A few years ago, my brother-in-law made a fortune and moved to the city.

My grandmother refused to leave, so she lived alone in the Miao village called Dunzhai. She has always been in good spirits, and she has people from the village to help take care of her, so she doesn't have to worry. I didn't expect to be sick at this time, and it was stomach cancer, which is a terminal disease.

The next morning, my mother and I went to Dunzhai.

It used to be a muddy road up the mountain, but when it was opened to traffic in '04, I chartered a van to go there. Needless to say, the road was bumpy, about half an hour, and we finally arrived at Dunzhai. Before I entered the village, I saw the huge old locust tree in the middle of the village, the drum tower, the threshing field, and the temple and temple at the end.

I carried some gifts and followed my mother into the village. The road was dirt, the weather was dry, dusty and smoky, and my mother was constantly greeted by people, and my mother responded with a sad face, and her heart was heavy.

I saw my grandmother again, and her life was at its worst.

There were many people gathered in the old house, except for my aunt who was far away in Karamay, Xinjiang, most of the relatives had returned, and I met my second aunt, my brother-in-law, several cousins, and others. My grandmother was lying in the bedroom with the sun on her back, and when I walked in, I smelled musty. My heart is sour, my grandmother is a person who loves cleanliness, but she is also an old man after all.

Mother said, "Mom, Lu Zuo has come to see you!" ”

There was an old lady in the yellowed quilt, her hair was snow-white, her skin was like the bark of an old pine, her face was black and yellow with old age spots, her eyes were blank, her mouth was crooked, and her consciousness was completely unclear. This is my grandmother, an old man who is close to death.

I held her hand like a chicken claw, and she didn't react at all, and after a while, she glanced at me and fell asleep again.

My mother said to me, "I don't recognize anyone anymore." She shook her head and sighed.

I stayed in Dunzhai for two days, and my grandmother was in a state of confusion and never woke up. Several relatives were discussing whether to send my grandmother to the city hospital for treatment, but they could not reach a unified opinion. My brother-in-law said that it is better to respect my grandmother's opinion and stop tossing back and forth - his family conditions are not good, and he has already spent a lot of money for his grandmother's illness before.

At this time, one of my cousins-in-law, who was taking care of my grandmother, came to the hall and said that my grandmother was awake and told us to come over.

"Are you Lu Zuo?" My grandmother was looking at me in bed with dizzy eyes. I nodded, and she asked, "When did you give birth?" My mother chimed in: "Ah Zuo is 86 years old, 21 years old. Grandma shook her head with difficulty and asked, "When did you give birth...... Month. ”

"August 20th, the fifteenth day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar." I say.

All of a sudden, my grandmother's eyes lit up, and then she coughed loudly, and there seemed to be phlegm in her chest, and I patted her on the back, and after a few minutes, she finally vomited a mouthful of thick black phlegm. Then she raised her head and said, "Master, you are finally here." ”

Grandma's spirit suddenly improved a lot, and she was able to get out of bed. She instructed her brother-in-law to dig up a small jar of clay in a clearing at the back of the house, and on top of the mouth of the jar was the thick oiled paper that had been used to make umbrellas earlier. Along with the jar was unearthed a wooden box containing a thick, yellowed thread-bound book.

The grandmother pushed away her daughter and trembled to the low coffee table with the clay jar. She muttered Miao words, her hands trembling and waving in her hands. After about ten minutes of this, she jerked open the oiled paper.

It was dark inside, and after a while, a golden silkworm chrysalis crawled out.

The silkworm chrysalis was fat, fleshy, almost the size of an adult's thumb, its eyes had degenerated into black spots, its fat body had dozens of pairs of feet, and two pairs of soft paper-like wings attached to it. I stared at the black spot on its head, and I didn't feel the cuteness of the fat at all, but felt the strange light on it.

Grandma was still reciting vague Miao dialect, gurgling, I hadn't learned it, so I couldn't understand it.

However, her hand suddenly pointed at me.

The silkworm chrysalis turned into a golden thread, and suddenly it burrowed into my mouth at the exclamation of the people next to me.

The inside of my throat was cold, and I felt something run down my throat and into my stomach.

Then a fishy smell rippled through my esophagus, and I suddenly felt that it became particularly difficult to breathe, as if the lobes of my lungs had been eaten away, and there seemed to be a missing piece in my heart and an extra organ in my body. With the churning of the fishy smell, the overwhelming nausea pulled all my thoughts away, and I inexplicably felt a numb scalp, and I passed out.

Grandma died, the day after she woke up.

She walked very peacefully, took my hand and told me a lot of things, she said that the thing I ate yesterday was called the Golden Silkworm Gu, it is the king of Gu, it can prolong life, it can also strengthen the body, and there are many uses, but because I stayed in the Gu box for too long, it is poisonous, and on the first and fifteenth days of each month, at twelve o'clock in the morning, the toxin is involved, and there will be a pain in the heart. If you want to detoxify, you can only find the hat grass of the dwarf mule to eat.

Grandma also told me that this Golden Silkworm Gu is alive, and if I can't subdue it within a year, I will definitely die—"If you don't enjoy the life of the Golden Silkworm Gu, come down and be my companion." "In addition to the Golden Silkworm Gu, my grandmother also left me a broken book called "The Twelve Methods of Suppressing the Mountains".