Banpo Village was quiet at night. It was pitch black all around.
At the northernmost end of the village, there was a short, old house surrounded by a half-broken and rotten wooden screen. Because it was separated from other houses, the house looked lonely and deserted.
Suddenly, a dark shadow flashed and disappeared under the shadow inside the shoji.
The knocking sounds of "Knock! Knock!" on the door, with a hint of mystery, suddenly came clearly from the silent night, stirring up waves of hollow echoes in the valley.
The owner of this small house, Chen Dalong, has not been home for more than a year. His young and beautiful woman, Juzi, takes care of the family on his behalf, and their life is tight, but peaceful.
This spring, a fur trader from the provincial capital said he saw Chen Dalong, who was working outside the city, walking on the street with a beautiful young woman. He also said that Dalong had become a better man and looked very proud. But not long after, someone else heard from the fur trader that they saw wanted posters for Chen Dalong in various towns outside the mountains. It seemed that he had committed some crime and the police were looking for him everywhere!
These words were originally said behind Juzi's back, but after being passed around a few times, they finally reached Juzi's ears. She hid at home and cried for a while, was in a daze for two days, and then began this uncomfortable life of being on tenterhooks and waiting for the truth to come out.
Juzi didn't want to believe these legends from the bottom of her heart. She made up her mind that no matter what others said, she would wait for Dalong to come back and find out the truth in person.
But ever since these rumors began, she could no longer live a peaceful life.
At night, there were those shameless wild men who were bent on plotting against her. Some knocked on the door, some pried open the window, and some took advantage of the night to cover their faces and say some provocative dirty words to tease her in front of the window...
At this moment, Juzi had been tossing and turning for most of the night worrying about Dalong's troubles, and finally fell asleep. She dreamed that Dalong came back, wearing a brand new suit and carrying a big bag. She immediately thought of the contents inside, which must be new clothes and delicious food brought back for her.
In her entire life, Juzi has had only a few opportunities to go out of the mountains, and the farthest she has been is to the village market. However, the endless good things outside the mountains are dazzling and make her obsessed with them.
When Dalong left the village, Juzi cried all night like other women who saw their men off on a long journey, but she still happily sent Dalong off the next day. She subconsciously hoped that when he came back, he would earn her the things that a young woman dreams of.
Juzi dreamed that Dalong walked to the gate of the yard and shouted her name in his loud voice. She was so happy that she couldn't express it in words!
Just then, she heard a knock on the door.
Juzi subconsciously rolled up from the kang, half asleep and dazed, and went downstairs to open the door.
She felt for a shoe in the dark and just as she put it on her foot, she realized something was wrong.
She listened carefully outside the door again, and heard only careful knocking, but no voice of Dalong calling her. If Dalong had returned to her home, he would not have knocked on the door so hesitantly and furtively.
Was she dreaming? Maybe it was those wild men who wanted to plot against her in the middle of the night... Juzi stopped moving when she thought of this, and crawled back into the bed. She trembled and pulled the quilt over her face, leaving only a pair of eyes staring at the dark window.
The man outside seemed to have guessed Orange's fear, and the knocking soon shifted from the door to the window. This time the knocking was much more urgent, with a hint of impatience in the voice.
Orange's frightened eyes did not blink, but her black eyelashes trembled involuntarily in the dark with the muffled sounds.
She could hear her heart pounding, but she didn't even dare to breathe.
The sound lasted for more than ten minutes. Suddenly, there was a "bang" sound, as if a big rock flew from somewhere and hit the yard.
Then there was a series of "kick-tap" sounds of footsteps that gradually faded away. It was obvious that the person knocking on the door was scared away by the stone that fell from the sky.
Perhaps the neighbors were alarmed, or perhaps someone went to the toilet in the middle of the night. Juzi heard the door of the house next door open with a "creak". After a while, the door closed with another "creak".
All the sounds in the yard suddenly disappeared.
The sudden silence made Juzi shiver involuntarily, and tears silently slid down her cheeks drop by drop.
Juzi stared, unable to fall asleep. Dalong's time at home came to her mind one by one, his bad temper, his impatience, his restlessness, and his fiery tenderness towards her.
What Juzi couldn't understand was that Dalong had been working outside for more than a year, and he hadn't been seen since then, nor had he brought back a penny. Could it be that he really had another woman outside and abandoned her in the poor mountain valley?
Banpo Village was so poor that even rabbits wouldn't shit there. It wasn't a place where people could live in peace. At first, Juzi supported Dalong's leaving, but ever since Dalong left, the mysterious people and weird things in the village made Juzi feel that life as a single woman was increasingly difficult.
Especially that annoying Lao Ba, those two heart-pounding yellow eyes, whenever Juzi thinks of them, he feels a chill down his spine.
The sky outside the window gradually turned pale. Juzi half-closed her sore eyes, having hardly slept all night. At this moment, her brain was sticky, as if filled with paste.
She lazily got up, put on her clothes, and opened the door. She wanted to let out the chickens in the chicken coop.
It was still a little chilly in the early summer morning in the mountains. Juzi wrapped her clothes tightly and trotted towards the chicken coop, but a stone as big as a washbasin blocked her way.
Is this the stone that made that scary noise last night?
Juzi squatted down to take a look. It was a piece of bluestone that was temporarily taken down from someone's wall. The stone seemed very heavy and it made a shallow pit in the hard yard.
Who had the strength to throw such a big rock at her window? The person knocking at the door seemed to be scared away by the rock.
Juzi was stunned for a long while, unable to figure out the mystery here.
She hesitated, walked forward and opened the small door in front of the chicken coop. Several chicks that had been cooped up all night swarmed out and surrounded her, chirping and asking for food.
Juzi turned around and went to the eaves above the window to pick the corn cobs hanging on the wall.
As soon as she stretched out her hand, she froze there: there was a brown paper envelope on the windowsill. She subconsciously picked it up and weighed it. It was heavy.
Juzi took the paper bag into the house suspiciously, thought for a moment, and tore open the envelope. A stack of brand new 100-yuan bills slid out of it and scattered all over the floor.
Oh my god! I have never seen so much money in my life!
Who put this there? The person who knocked on the door last night actually brought her so much money?
As far as she knew, no family in Banpo Village had so much money. Unless it was Lao Ba...
An old man with an expressionless black face but a pair of yellow eyes that were rolling around suddenly appeared in front of Orange.
She couldn't help shivering.
Banpo Village is located on the edge of a primeval forest, halfway up a mountain with a radius of dozens of miles, surrounded by mountains from east to west, south to north. Along the valley, there are two roads leading out of the mountain, one to the north and the other to the south.
This is a village facing east and west, which means it violates the taboo in terms of "feng shui".
The first person who fled here from his hometown in Shandong was probably exhausted and could no longer walk. When he saw the mountain blocking his way, he gave up his original plan and settled down on the mountainside.
Some speculated that it was probably those days that were cloudy and rainy or cloudy without the sun, and by the time he realized that the direction he chose was contrary to common sense, it was too late.
In China, cities, villages, houses, and even tombs are all built facing south, which is a long-standing local culture. Therefore, there is a profession that has been prosperous from ancient times to the present, and that is Feng Shui masters who are popular in both troubled times and prosperous times. No matter where you go, all places with good Feng Shui strictly follow this rule. Otherwise, not only will the Feng Shui master shake his head, but the person involved will also be trembling with fear and anxiety.
Especially in the north, where the snow and ice are hard to melt for most of the year, sunlight is even more important. But in Banpo Village, villagers are lucky enough to enjoy the sunshine only when the sun sets in the west. Then comes the long, iron-faced darkness.
Banpo Village is one such village where a single misstep in site selection led to everlasting regret.
Perhaps it is because of this that strange and bizarre things have been happening in Banpo Village since the first family settled there.
It is said that it was before liberation when there was chaos and famine. The exact time cannot be verified. A man and a woman came from the Jiaodong Peninsula inland. The man was over 50 years old and had signs of aging, but the woman was in her prime. They fled to this hillside, reclaimed land, had children, and lived a peaceful and happy life for several years.
One day, several unknown people suddenly appeared on the mountain road. They were ragged, unkempt, and their true faces could not be seen. When they arrived at their doorstep, they collapsed on the ground and could no longer move.
Recalling the same plight they had experienced when they fled famine, the couple felt compassion and took out corn cobs they grew to entertain the visitor. They also vacated their own shack to let the visitor sleep for the night.
Who knew that the next day, when several people discussed it, they said:
"I'm not leaving. All crows are black, and we'll starve to death wherever we go. I see you're doing well, so why don't we stay here too..."
When the woman heard this, she was delighted and immediately said:
"That's great! Living in this place where there's no village or shop, if wolves come at night, adults and children will be scared! Now that you're staying here, you'll have a companion."
After hearing this, two children, a boy and a girl, couldn't help but come forward, staring with curious little eyes, and surrounded the men to ask them all kinds of questions.
They had grown up to six or seven years old, and had never been out of the ravine, and had never seen a stranger. The arrival of these men undoubtedly added a lot of inexplicable joy to their colorless and tasteless childhood.
Only the man in charge remained silent.
So these people stayed there.
Several wooden and thatched huts were soon built on the hillside facing east and west.
The mountains, which had been shrouded in the shadows of the dark pine forest all year round and seemed lifeless, suddenly became much more popular, and the sounds of chickens and dogs became lively.
But the peaceful days did not last long and trouble began to arise in the mountains.
First, someone started fighting over a trivial matter, and the fight ended in bloodshed. Then, one or two of the owner's chickens and ducks were missing from time to time, which made the male owner, who was already wary of these passers-by, yell at his wife and beat his children.
Later, she often heard the man calling the woman's name on the mountain in the middle of the night. The woman would come out from somewhere and return home to be brutally beaten.
Not long after, on a dark and windy night, the man was tied up by several people and thrown into a ravine in the west to be fed to the blind bear.
After daybreak, the two children went up the mountain to pick wild fruits. They were chattering and chasing each other, having fun, when they suddenly discovered their missing father : he had been eaten by all kinds of wild beasts, leaving only a basically intact head and two hands tied to a tree.
By the time the children, terrified and pale, ran back home, their mother was gone.
Several men in the shack next door told them angrily that the woman was a dishonest person and had eloped with a bastard among .
The children didn't know what "elopement" meant, they just thought it was not a good thing and cried loudly. But they were too young to do anything about this sudden change, so they had to let the adults control them and were adopted by two men each.
The children gradually learned about their origins from the adults. They were a group of escort bodyguards from a wealthy family. They met bandits on the way when they were transporting furs into the mountains. They lost their things and did not dare to go back to see their master, so they had to become "deserters" and ended up here.
The weirdness isn’t over yet.
Over the years, several "deserters" lost their lives while going into the mountains to pick mushrooms, hunt, and dig ginseng.
At that time, they didn’t know there was a “Valley of Confusion” in their area. Anyway, as each person left, one less person died, and in the end only two men with children were left.
When the girl was thirteen years old, the boy's father came to propose marriage. He said that he was old and could not work anymore, and he wanted the children to start a family as soon as possible. If the four of them could help each other, life might be better.
On the night of the proposal, there was a heavy rainstorm that lasted the entire night. At dawn, only the girl and her adoptive father were left on the mountain.
Both her brother and adoptive father were missing, but their only pair of shoes and a set of tattered clothes were still there. The girl found a pool of blood on the ground under the kang.
That night, the adoptive father showed his hideous face, pulled the girl into his bed, and took possession of her amid her heart-wrenching cries.
The man was chopping wood on the back hill when a little thing cried loudly in the ravine. He ran home with an axe in his hand, and saw that the child had a dense coat of yellow hair, just like a real wolf cub.
The man raised his axe and was about to kill the little monster that was neither human nor beast, when the woman spoke:
"He is your own flesh and blood."
The man was stunned. He couldn't understand why his seed could produce such a strange fruit. But he couldn't find the basis for governing the woman and the child.
When the woman was not paying attention, the man secretly threw the child into the mountains.
The woman carried the man on her back and went into the mountains to look for her child, and she did not return until night.
The man went into the mountains with torches to look for the woman, but he never returned.
A few years later, Shandong suffered a severe drought and the poor people who came to Northeast China flooded into the river.
A group of people wandered here and saw the dilapidated shacks and large tracts of reclaimed mountain land, knowing that someone had settled here before. So they put down their burdens, set up camp, picked up the abandoned land, and settled down without any effort.
Because this place is located halfway up a mountain, it was casually called "Banpo Village".
As for who told the sensational story of Banpo Village, it is now impossible to verify. However, the bad luck that shrouded Banpo Village has never stopped since then.
After liberation, Banpo Village was still remote and inconvenient to travel. It took two days and one night to walk from the mountain to the city. People from outside were unwilling to come in as cadres, and the villagers were unwilling to meddle in other people's affairs. In the 1980s, the village chief was still the production team leader who had been re-elected decades ago. His eyesight was dim and he was like a deaf man's ears - a decoration.
As long as the young people in Banpo Village had the opportunity to go out to study, they would take their parents out of the mountains and never look back. Families with a little bit of brains also gradually left Banpo Village to find other ways out.
The remaining ones are the farmers who have wandered here and are deeply afraid of leaving their hometown. They stay in the fields and indulge in the leisurely life of "one acre of land, two cows, a wife and children, and a warm bed", and they are quite happy.
The most terrible thing about Banpo Village is that there are no roads at all. Every step is to go in and out of the dark forest like a wild animal. Even the fur traders who travel in the deep mountains and old forests all year round and treat the mountains and dense forests as if they were walking on flat ground are gradually too lazy to come in. The villagers rely on the peddlers who come into the mountains once a month to buy oil, salt, sauce, vinegar, needles, thread and other daily necessities. It takes several months or even one or two years for a letter to be sent from Shandong hometown to here, so over time, people are too lazy to write or send letters.
Since no one wanted to marry into this hellhole, the men and women in the village had to make do with local resources and marry close relatives. Most of the children born were disabled. Missing limbs were a minor matter. The most worrying thing was the mentally handicapped and stupid children. I don't know how many parents were worried about them.
The depressed people of Banpo Village had no choice but to rely on feudal superstition to numb themselves.
Speaking of this, we cannot help but mention Lao Ba.
Lao Ba had been in Banpo Village for quite some time. As to who he was and why he had come to this place where no one wanted to stay, no one knew, and no one wanted to know.
Life is hard, who has the leisure time?
However, in Banpo Village, as long as Lao Ba says "east", no one will say "west".
He was a man of some medical knowledge, eloquent, and amiable. If anyone had a headache, a fever, a broken bone, or had a child, they would ask Lao Ba for help. If anyone had a minor illness, they would just take some black, fragrant ointment from him, dissolve it in water, and drink it, and it would relieve pain and inflammation.
Of course they didn't understand that it was actually Lao Ba who secretly grew poppies in the mountains and made opium paste.
Because Lao Ba could read and write, some knowledgeable families in the village gathered all the children and handed them over to Lao Ba to teach him to read and write.
I remember that when he first came, he still had thick yellow hair, unlike now, with a large bald spot on his forehead.
As soon as Lao Ba arrived in Banpo Village, he showed his difference from other men in Banpo Village. His smart and capable conversation and behavior immediately won the favor of some young women and their parents. Not long after, he moved from a small, broken straw hut to the two earth-and-wood structures of Lao Wang's family at the east end of the village and became Lao Wang's son-in-law.
The girl from the Wang family was a good-looking old lady. She was almost thirty years old that year, but because she didn't like the men in Banpo Village, she was still unmarried until this point.
After arriving in Banpo Village, Lao Ba quickly became close to Lao Wang, who had been collecting ginseng for his whole life, and then he naturally entered Lao Wang's house. After that, he began to follow his father-in-law to the mountains to collect ginseng.
In Banpo Village, Lao Wang was the only one who could safely enter and exit the hundreds of miles of mountains and forests around. In particular, there was a place called "Ghost Valley" behind the mountain, which was said to be a valley of bewilderment. No one could get out once they entered. Only Lao Wang knew it like a flat ground. But he kept this a secret, probably because he was afraid that others would get his secret and fight for his territory in the mountain.
You know, there are only a limited number of ginsengs on a mountain. If you pick one, there will be one less. In this sense, no ginseng picker is willing to share his spoils with others.
But Old Wang loved to drink, and when he drank too much, he would accidentally reveal some "secrets". Based on his rare indiscretions after drinking, people speculated and concluded that Old Wang not only entered the forbidden area of ​​"Ghost Valley", collected thousand-year-old ginseng, but also knew the way in and out.
As to whether this is true or not, there is no way to confirm it.
Because of this, the villagers have always regarded Old Wang as a mysterious person, which is very similar to their attitude towards Old Eight.
The good times didn’t last long. The second year after Lao Ba entered Lao Wang’s house, Lao Wang went into the mountains and never came back. As for whether he went in alone or with someone, the villagers didn’t pay attention. It was only after a long time that they didn’t see Lao Wang that they asked about it. Lao Ba said: He went into the mountains. When asked again, he still said “He went into the mountains”.
Later, people gradually realized that Old Wang was unlikely to come back.
Not long after Old Wang disappeared, Old Ba's wife also died suddenly of an acute illness.
For quite a long time, people kept their distance from Lao Ba, thinking that ever since he married into the Wang family, the Wang family had suffered a series of disasters, which always made people feel an inexplicable fear.
But as time went by, Lao Ba's status in the village returned to its original height. There was no other way, Banpo Village had only one capable man, and when adults sought medical treatment or medicine, when children sought education, when someone died or when someone got married, Lao Ba had to come forward to make arrangements. No matter how difficult the matter was, as long as Lao Ba showed up, people immediately felt that they had a backbone.
So, before long, Lao Ba's prestige in Banpo Village returned to its previous state.
At that time, Juzi had not yet married Dalong. For a while, when she walked on the street, she always felt like there was a pair of eyes staring at her back from behind, making her feel uncomfortable all over.
Later, she finally found an opportunity to look back and discovered that the person was Lao Ba.
Lao Ba had not received much education, but he was very intelligent and could come up with some new terms from time to time, which earned him great respect from both the young and old. He claimed that he had studied this "scripture" and that "scripture" and could also read faces and tell fortunes.
In short, Lao Ba is a "Godfather"-like figure in Banpo Village, known as the "little god".
As a result, although Lao Ba was an old widower in his early fifties, women of all ages would often come to his small house at the end of the village to seek medical advice, divination and fortune-telling. Among them, the mute woman, Dafeng, Shadiuer's mother, Lanzi, and a girl named Xiaoduo came the most frequently.
However, after these women came out from Lao Ba's place, their reactions varied. Some were jubilant and refreshed, while others looked pale and listless.
These days, Lao Ba has been out for more than a week and hasn't come back yet. Someone in the village is sick again, but they can't find medicine. They go to Lao Ba's house several times a day, but there is no result.
The children who were no longer under the supervision of Lao Ba, their "private school teacher", were running around the streets like sheep, making their parents upset.
It is said that at this time of year every year, Lao Ba would go to the mountains to dig medicinal herbs. He could collect all kinds of precious medicinal herbs, including wild ginseng, in some secret places that no one had ever been to.
What worries everyone is that recently four women in the village have suddenly disappeared while going up the mountain to pick wild vegetables or herbs.
Could it be that the tigers and bears, which have been rarely seen for many years, have come out again?
For a while, everyone in the village was in a panic, fearing that Lao Ba would never come back.
Others would not attract much attention if they went into the mountains and never came back, but Lao Ba was different. In such a big village, how many people would suffer from headaches, fevers, and injuries every day? In addition, the school outside the mountains was too far away, and there was no one to teach the children!
Without Lao Ba, life of the Banpo villagers was really in chaos.
According to old people who knew the situation, Lao Ba often went to the mountains, not only to collect ginseng, but he also opened up a piece of wasteland in the mountains and planted a lot of medicinal herbs.
So everyone guessed that Lao Ba must have gone into the mountains to take care of medicinal herbs.
But no one can tell exactly where that place is.