Chapter Fourteen: Empty Words

Old Guo hung his head and muttered, “What secret could I be hiding? I just think you’re no good, so I told you to get lost.”

I smiled and replied, “Fine, if you won’t tell the truth, then I’m not leaving. We’ll see who runs out of patience first—I want to see when you’ll finally be honest with me.”

I gagged Old Guo, laid him sideways on the kang bed, and nestled myself on the inner side to get a good night’s sleep.

When I woke, daylight was already streaming in. I was just about to check on Old Guo when I heard the village chief calling from outside, “Old Guo! Old Guo, are you home?”

Hurriedly, I hoisted Old Guo and stuffed him into the big box at the corner, then stepped outside to greet the chief. “Uncle, you’re here! Grandpa Guo’s gone up the mountain.”

The village chief didn’t suspect a thing. “Just came by to see how you’re getting on. Old Guo’s got a rough temper—he hasn’t been giving you trouble, has he?”

I seized the chance and said, “Grandpa Guo is a little odd. Last night in the middle of the night, he tried to kick me out. I begged him for ages before he let me stay. He left early this morning—maybe he’s mad at me?”

“That damn old man, always up to no good,” the village chief cursed. “Kid, don’t worry about it. If he tries anything again, tell him I said you could stay. This is a village house, not his. What right does he have to throw you out?”

I tested the waters, “Uncle, Grandpa Guo said it was for my own good. He said if I stay here, someone could end up dead.”

“Bah!” The chief spat on the ground. “Nonsense! If it’s so dangerous, how come he’s still alive? Always pretending there’s something spooky going on.”

I quickly tugged the chief’s sleeve, “Uncle, Grandpa Guo didn’t seem like he was lying. Tell me—has something really happened here?”

“Well, something did happen, but that was many years ago.” The chief, sounding weary, sat down on a stone outside, packed his pipe, took a long draw, and finally began to speak slowly. “There used to be a family here that lived off hunting and trapping, also surnamed Guo.”

“Hunting” is what we call it around here—in plain words, they were hunters.

Hunters had a rule: never wipe out an entire den.

No matter what you hunted, you could never kill every last one—you had to leave a couple of cubs or a pregnant animal, so the wild beasts could survive and multiply.

But the Guo family had a different rule: either don’t hunt at all, or drive every last one to extinction.

Plenty of people tried to talk the Guos out of it, warning them that sooner or later, retribution would come for those who wiped out entire dens.

But the Guos never cared. If you pushed them, they’d retort, “It’s a family rule—what business is it of yours?”

When the villagers saw the Guos wouldn’t listen, they stopped trying. Still, everyone believed the Guos would get what was coming to them.

Sure enough, a few years later, retribution arrived. The Guo family’s son, flush with money, married a beautiful wife—but she was unable to have children for years.

One night, in a drunken rage, the Guo son killed his wife with an axe. There was a death in the Guo family, but with their wealth and influence, they smoothed it over and nothing came of it.

After that, the Guos seemed to go mad. They spent money buying bride after bride. If a new wife didn’t get pregnant within a year, they’d drag her up the mountain and bury her alive.

After four or five wives had met this fate, one finally became pregnant. The Guos were overjoyed, even venturing into the deep mountains to gather herbs to nourish her.

No one expected that, after ten long months, the wife would give birth to a monstrously ugly baby girl.

The child had a human body, but her features sat on the sides of her face like a wild animal’s. Stranger still, each feature was beautiful on its own, but together, they were grotesque and terrifying.

In a fit of fury, the Guo patriarch killed his daughter-in-law, but they kept the baby and named her “Autumn Frost.”

From that point on, it was as if the Guo family was cursed. Their fortunes declined, their lives grew worse by the day, and both father and son developed strange illnesses—outwardly fine, but too weak to do anything.

They couldn’t even manage to farm, let alone hunt. They survived on what little they had left, drinking away their days in despair, while the girl, Autumn Frost, seemed unaffected—eating and drinking as she pleased, consuming enough for five people at every meal, never missing a single ounce, throwing tantrums if given any less.

The Guo men had to scrimp and save, going hungry themselves to keep her fed.

One day, Old Guo, drunk and bleary-eyed, looked closely at his granddaughter, and the more he stared, the more uneasy he felt. He called his son over and whispered, “Look at your daughter’s features—aren’t they just like the five wives that died?”

The son looked closely and broke out in a cold sweat. Each of his daughter’s features, taken alone, was the exact likeness of one of his five dead wives.

As the two men sat there, numb with fear, they suddenly saw five shadows appear on the table. The five figures sat together, shoveling food into their mouths just as the girl did.

The Guos understood at last—the girl was the vengeful return of the dead wives, come to claim what was owed. No wonder their fortunes had declined and their bodies grown weaker by the day.

That night, they plied the girl with wine, and once she was asleep, tied her up with ropes meant for trapping wild beasts, planning to burn her alive.

But the ropes that could hold the fiercest animals couldn’t restrain a girl barely in her teens. She broke free, and in a frenzy, bit both men to death.

When the villagers arrived, the Guo family was wiped out. The father and son looked as if wolves had torn them apart, their guts and entrails strewn everywhere.

The girl was nowhere to be found.

At first, the villagers thought she’d had her revenge and that was the end of it. But her vengeance was far from over.

Soon after her disappearance, young men in the village began to vanish mysteriously. When their bodies were found, they were mangled beyond recognition or gutted, their remains looking as if a wolf had dragged them off—except that human handprints and footprints were found nearby.

A few days later, young women started to go missing. Those who were found alive had their eyes gouged out, their ears and noses cut off.

All the survivors claimed it was the Guo girl who’d attacked them.

She was no longer human, but an avenging spirit returned to collect her debts.

At that, the entire village was thrown into panic.