Chapter 14: Inviting the Mountain Lord to a Grand Feast

Ghost stories told in the countryside are somewhat different from those in the city.

City ghosts are often sentimental, focusing on things like the cycle of Karma and retribution, or repaying a drop of kindness with a fountain of gratitude, or turning into beauties to seduce scholars… Countryside ghosts are much simpler; they all follow the same format: “If you don’t behave/sleep/eat, XXX will take you away/eat you!”

Country folk don’t understand things like Karma or beauties and scholars. However, it’s very common for wild beasts to come down from the mountains, entering villages to steal chickens, dogs, and even snatch children.

If there were any other way, the old man wouldn’t have pinned his hopes on Li Qiuchen.

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However, Li Qiuchen didn’t thump his chest and take full responsibility.

He knew his own limits; he didn’t have that much confidence.

Instead, he was quite interested in the mysterious pearl the old man mentioned.

“If you sacrifice your life and those bandits still refuse to let the villagers go, what then?”

“Who knows? If we can’t get it, we can’t get it. We can’t exactly have the whole village jump into the river and drown themselves, can we?”

The old man’s face was full of sorrow as he sighed repeatedly.

The suspicion in Li Qiuchen’s heart hadn’t diminished in the slightest.

This old man wasn’t telling the whole truth.

With the precedent of his Great-Uncle, he was now highly wary of any old fellow who refused to die.

“When your ancestor fished up that mysterious pearl back then, didn’t he leave behind any experience or techniques?”

The old man lifted his eyelids to glance at Li Qiuchen. After a long silence, he lowered his voice and said, “There are some sayings, but we descendants are incompetent and lack the skills our ancestor had.”

“What kind of sayings?”

“…”

Seeing the old man hesitate, Li Qiuchen smiled and said, “It doesn’t matter if you tell me or not; someone else is bound to be more curious than me. When the time comes and you’re gone, what if those bandits take it out on your family…”

The old man quickly grabbed Li Qiuchen and smiled, “What’s there to keep secret at this point? I’ll tell you the truth. Back then, my great-grandfather also had a stroke of Opportunity. He ran into a Mountain Lord while hunting in the mountains.”

A Mountain Lord is a tiger.

“That Mountain Lord was heavily injured and collapsed by the water. Its blood flowed into the river, attracting countless fish and shrimp to fight over it. Among them was a Stone Clam that couldn’t handle the tiger blood it consumed. It became ‘drunk’ by the riverbank, and my great-grandfather took advantage of the situation… Tell me, how can one expect to run into such a stroke of luck whenever they want?”

So that was it.

Li Qiuchen nodded. While shoveling food into his mouth, he followed up, “Did Call Break Heaven say when he’d be back?”

“It should be in the next few days. I reckon it’s about time for him to show up.”

“Old man, since I’ve eaten your food and taken some of your things, I suppose I owe your family a favor. How about I help you figure something out?”

The old man had been waiting for those words. Upon hearing them, he immediately beamed and hurriedly grabbed the wine pot to pour a drink for Li Qiuchen. “Little brother, what’s your plan? Speak up! As long as you can save my family’s lives, you can take whatever you want from my house!”

“Don’t get excited just yet.”

Li Qiuchen pressed down on his wrist and smiled. “Tell me, where did your ancestor encounter that Mountain Lord?”

“At that water pond in the mountains to the north…”

“To the north… the one about four or five acres in size?”

“Yes, yes, yes!”

“Then listen to me. Tomorrow morning, have your family go there, build a fire, and cook a meal. Set out a banquet. I’ll help you pull some strings and go invite that Mountain Lord out to ask for a bowl of tiger blood. Perhaps that will lure out the Stone Clam from the lake.”

The old man was stunned. Little brother, is your approach really that wild? You can invite a Mountain Lord to dinner?

“Are you serious?”

“I’m just offering an idea. I can’t guarantee whether it’ll work or not. But even if I’m lying to you, it’s just a meal. What else could your family lose?”

Li Qiuchen shrugged. “There’s an old saying: treat a dead horse as if it were alive. If you don’t think it’s appropriate, just pretend I never said anything.”

“No, no, no! It’s appropriate! It must be appropriate!”

When Li Qiuchen put it that way, the old man became anxious instead.

“Tell me, how should the food and wine be prepared? Should we slice a few more pounds of meat and get some good wine?”

A few pounds of meat? That’s barely enough to get stuck in a Mountain Lord’s teeth.

Li Qiuchen pointed at the food on the table. “Just follow this standard. Make it a larger amount. Stew a big pot of hot food first, and bring two jars of wine.”

The old man looked in the direction Li Qiuchen was pointing.

Do Mountain Lords like stewed pork with vermicelli too?

“And one more thing, remember this: once the food is ready, leave immediately. Don’t let anyone stay there.”

Li Qiuchen said seriously, “If the Mountain Lord finds you, he’ll eat the people along with the food. Don’t blame me when the time comes.”

“Of course, of course, I understand.”

The old man was overjoyed and kept urging Li Qiuchen to drink. In his eyes, this wasn’t just a child; he was clearly a transformed Spirit Monster, and not just an ordinary one at that.

Ordinary small demons wouldn’t dare use the Mountain Lord’s name to joke around.

Seeing that the old man was fully convinced, Li Qiuchen didn’t stand on ceremony. He raised his hand to block the wine, pulled a copper basin out of his sack, dumped all the food from the table into the basin, shouldered his sack, and turned to leave.

Just as he stepped out, the old man chased after him, holding a half-sliced braised pig’s head. “Little brother, little brother, take this too! We have a vat of cornmeal in the back room; wait a moment, I’ll pack some for you…”

“Next time, we’ll talk next time!”

Li Qiuchen didn’t even have a Storage Pouch; how could he carry so many things? While the old man went back, he took off running.

After running two miles out of the village in one breath, Li Qiuchen took the sack off his back. Before he could even catch his breath, the White Crane descended from the sky with flapping wings.

“Ga ga—!”

“I know, I know! Don’t snatch!”

What was the point of snatching? You can’t even get it into your own mouth.

As soon as Li Qiuchen set the basin down, the White Crane dove in headfirst, burying its entire head in the basin and beginning to gorge itself.

A living person can’t let themselves be stifled by a bit of trouble. Although this way of eating looked a bit unsightly, it was better than starving to death.

This Stupid Bird thinks of nothing but eating all day long.

Sometimes Li Qiuchen even wondered if it just had a giant stomach under its feathers.

The entire basin of food was devoured in the blink of an eye, and the crane even licked the basin clean with its tongue. Even so, it still seemed unsatisfied, staring at the braised pig’s head in Li Qiuchen’s hand as if it still had ideas.

“Eating any more would be cannibalism.”

The White Crane fell silent for a moment. Once it realized Li Qiuchen was calling it a pig, it unceremoniously slapped him in the face with a wing.

Li Qiuchen decided to give it an even more unpleasant nickname: Ga Ga Pig.

After they were full, they returned to the lakeside, and Li Qiuchen began preparing for tomorrow’s plan.

He certainly didn’t know any Mountain Lord. Tricking the old man into setting a banquet was just because he was eyeing their big iron pot and wanted to score another free meal.

As for how to catch the Stone Clam and take the mysterious pearl, Li Qiuchen had some ideas, but he wasn’t in a hurry to put them into practice.

That old man seemed honest, but he hadn’t told the truth.

Or rather, he hadn’t revealed all the information.

From beginning to end, there were two things he never explained clearly.

One was the government.

This village wasn’t as remote and isolated as Songlin Village. Merchants came here to buy pearls, and the government came to collect taxes.

Now that such a thing had happened, why didn’t you report it to the authorities?

This point was understandable; perhaps there were all sorts of hidden troubles. For instance, the government might be useless, or the county seat might be too far away—distant water cannot quench a nearby fire.

Li Qiuchen didn’t understand the local situation, so he couldn’t make a judgment.

But the second thing was quite suspicious when he thought about it carefully.

The village had only ever fished up one mysterious pearl in all these years, and that was a long time ago. How did the newly arrived bandits find out about it and even come to their door to demand it?

Li Qiuchen felt there were two possibilities.

One was that the old man’s family had offended some enemy who used the mysterious pearl as an excuse to bribe bandits to cause trouble for them.

The other possibility was… his family actually did hide a method for obtaining pearls, but the news leaked out and reached the ears of someone with ulterior motives.

Or perhaps it was a bit of both.

“What do you think?”

Li Qiuchen felt it was superfluous to ask the silly bird this question, but there were no other living creatures around to chat with.

“Ga!”

The White Crane pointed at the food basin and squeezed its claws.

This Stupid Bird’s thoughts were quite simple: since they ate the person’s food, they had to help settle their problems.

“What if we can’t get the mysterious pearl, and those bandits are unreasonable and refuse to let the villagers go?”

“Ga!”

Then we’ll just have to kill them all!

The White Crane made a vicious throat-slitting gesture with its wing.

It had quite a murderous streak.

The problem was, how could a Stupid Bird who could barely feed itself, plus a child like me who couldn’t carry much or lift much, deal with a group of ferocious bandits?

Since things had come to this… “Let’s sleep first.”

With few clues and information at hand, Li Qiuchen couldn’t make any rash judgments.

Early the next morning, there was movement from the village.

Li Qiuchen hid in the woods and watched several villagers come to the lakeside to build a fire, set up a pot, and arrange tables, chairs, bowls, and chopsticks.

Country folk were quite honest. Since they said they’d prepare a banquet, they did so seriously, even lugging up a live pig weighing several hundred pounds to gut and butcher on the spot.

The local banquet had a very simple and direct name: the Pig-Slaughtering Feast.

After slaughtering a pig for the holidays, they would use the pig’s blood to make sausage, slice large pieces of fatty meat, and put them into a pot along with the heart, liver, stomach, lungs, and large bones to stew with shredded sour cabbage pickled the previous year.

This was the main dish. The remaining parts each had their own preparation methods. The most common were stewed pork with vermicelli, crystal pig hock, braised pig trotters, braised pig’s head, and roasted ribs… The methods were actually quite simple; whether it tasted good mostly depended on the quality of the pig.

The villagers didn’t know the Mountain Lord’s tastes, so they very cleverly only cooked half the pig. The other half was hung nearby, along with five large jars of old wine.

All this work took most of the day. Seeing the sun sinking in the west, the men discussed it and decided it was better to withdraw early.

The master had instructed that no one could stay at the scene. Who knew how big the Mountain Lord’s appetite was? If he wasn’t full, he might have them for a midnight snack.

As soon as these people left, Li Qiuchen stood up and walked out openly. He went to the pot, served himself a bowl of yellow millet rice, and sat down to gorge himself.