The famous Japanese mystery novel writer Masashi Yokomizu wrote a very famous novel called "Eight Tombs Village", the general content of which is: There is a ruined village in the mountains on the border between Tottori Prefecture and Okayama Prefecture, three hundred and eighty years ago, a general led seven defeated samurai and fled here with three horses carrying 3,000 taels of gold, seeking the shelter of the villagers and avoiding the pursuit of the enemy. The villagers saw that they were pitiful, and agreed, in fact, they coveted the gold they carried, so they killed them all when the samurai were not ready to launch a surprise attack. Before they died, the samurai cursed the village, asking God to punish the villagers for generations of death. The villagers were so frightened that they buried the samurai behind the hill, and since then the village has been known as the "Eight Tombs Village", and as time went on...
The novel "Eight Tombs Village" is full of eerie horrors, especially the thought that Masashi Yokogou was composed by the famous "Tsuyama Incident" in Japanese history (the massacre that occurred on May 21, 1938 in the village of Nishikamo near Tsuyama City), which is even more chilling. In the creation of speculative fiction, there are many later works that adopt a similar model, that is, in order to embezzle the property of a group of people who are in trouble and have sacrificed their lives, they first pretend to take in and help, and finally kill them, and a few years later, the perpetrator or his descendants suffered a cool report and were killed in a serial murder case...
What is less known is that in the ancient Chinese notes, there are also many such "eight tomb village stories", which make people fully appreciate the ugly and sinister side of human nature when read.
One or forty thousand silver, seven headless people
There is a Xiucai named Tang Shikun in Hangzhou, who is in his thirties and teaches in a family surnamed Fan. One night after school, he sat alone in the house. It was the winter month, and Tang Shikun had always been afraid of the wind, so he closed the window of the study as much as possible. At night, three drums, a light, the room is very quiet, Tang Shikun is reading a book, suddenly saw the window was pushed open, "there are headless people jumping in, followed by the latter six people, all headless, their heads are hung with belts around their waists." Looking at this scene, Tang Shikun was almost scared to death, who knew that an even more terrible scene happened, these seven headless people actually surrounded him, took off the heads hanging from their waists, "each with the blood dripping from his head, cold and wet", Tang Shikun was so frightened that he couldn't even make a sound. Just when the book boy came in and poured the urinal, he saw this scene and spilled the drowning in the basin at the headless people, and they rushed away. Looking at Tang Shikun again, he had already fallen to the ground unconscious. The master heard the news and hurriedly came, "pouring ginger soup and counting Ou", Tang Shikun woke up and asked to go home, and the master summoned him to send him. Tang Shikun's home was at the foot of Chenghuang Mountain, and when he was about to arrive home, he suddenly shouted and shouted to turn back, and the public opinions did not know the end, he said that he saw "the seven severed heads of the ghosts in the night sitting high, as if they had the intention of treating each other." There was no way, the public servants had to carry him back to the master's house as he was invited, "the master is helpless, still in the museum", Tang Shikun was hot and sick.
The owner of this family has always been kind, so he invited Tang Shikun's wife to take care of him and extended the treatment of famous doctors, but Tang Shikun was too ill, and the medicine was ineffective, and he died in three days. While his wife was weeping bitterly, he woke up again and said to his wife, "I can't live, so the reviver is the forgiveness of the underworld, let me say goodbye to you." As he spoke, he told a strange story that had happened in the underworld: When he was seriously ill and unconscious, he saw four people dressed in green clothes pulling him with chains and walking into the vast underworld of yellow sand, and he asked himself what crime he had committed? The qingyi man said: Someone has gone to the underworld to report you, and they want to ask for your life! Tang Shikun became more and more confused and asked himself who was in debt to him? Qingyi then took out a small mirror with a handle and let him watch for himself. He took a picture and found that the self in the mirror was "huge and burly, with a length of seven or eight inches", which was not at all the thin face of the white-faced student in this life, and suddenly remembered that what was presented in the mirror was his past life, and recalled the sins created in the past life.
It turned out that Tang Shikun's previous life surname was Wu Mingzheng, which was the Zhi County of Lou County at the end of the Ming Dynasty. At that time, there were seven thieves in Lou County, robbing rich households, getting forty thousand taels of silver, and burying them somewhere in the mountains. Soon, these seven thieves were arrested, and according to the law, they were beheaded, and the seven of them were a total, so it was better to use money to buy their lives, so they found Xu Mou, the governor of Lou County, and asked him to negotiate with WuZhi County on his behalf. Wu Zhen knew that the crime of theft was difficult and refused. Xu Dianshi quoted the "Kill Ru, Bi Will Yan Xiang" in the "Zuo Chuan" to exhort: "First promise them, wait until they give the place where the silver is buried, and then dig up their silver and still kill it!" Wu Zhen was greedy for a moment, so he agreed... And the seven thieves lost their lives, and naturally their anger did not disperse, and they went to the underworld to seek justice, and the Yin officials also thought that What Wu Zhen had done was extremely despicable, so that the Qingyi people locked him up for mr. Teaching in this life. Tang Shikun was taken to the Yan Luo Temple, only to see the seven ghosts "with their heads swayed around their waists, vicious, opening their mouths and showing their teeth, and biting my neck nearby", and could not help but plead desperately, and finally the Yin official only agreed to let him return to the Yang Realm to say goodbye to his wife for a while.
After saying these "past lives and this life", Tang Shikun stopped speaking and died without words.
"The Son Doesn't Speak"
Second, the killing of the bibi? Reincarnated defeated Ru family!
The story of Tang Shikun recorded in "Zi Bu Whisper" is easy to be considered by posterity as a pure ghost story, after all, the book of the owner of the garden is full of absurd content, but if you change the angle, you can find that excluding the seven ghosts of the severed head, the soul wandering in the underworld, etc., the story shows some real "black curtains" in China's ancient prisons.
The darkness of ancient Chinese prisons is by no means exhaustive in one article. In that dark place, the life and death of a prisoner is completely controlled by a net from the head of the cell to the prison to the zhi county, and it is really "to make you three more dead, and no one will leave you to five more." In this case, the prisoners' various methods of praying for survival can only be "gambling", betting that those black hands who control their own destiny can have a little humanity and open the net, but the result of the gamble is mostly to lose. This also caused stories similar to Tang Shikun to emerge in an endless stream, which was very common in ancient notes. For example, in the "Autumn Lantern Series" written by the scholar Wang Wei during the Qianlong period, there is such a thing:
Autumn Lantern Talk
Huiji had a master surnamed Tang, who was in a county in the early years of Qianlong. There were three local bandits, countless looters, and eventually arrested. On the eve of the imminent beheading, they found Master Tang "bribed thousands of dollars to ask for his help." Master Tang did not extend his hand to help, watching them being killed, but after all, he was ashamed in his heart, so he resigned and returned to his hometown. One day a year later, he went out with his friends, who were originally good, but suddenly changed his look on the way, ran home, hid in the hiding room, slapped himself and scolded: "If you curse me with gold, why should I die?" Traces have begun to meet in the past years, will flee Yahweh?! After saying that, he jumped up and smashed his body to the ground, "Jump up again, if there is a person who falls", it didn't take long for him to bleed to death.
The "Autumn Lantern Cong Dialect" was written in the winter of the forty-second year of Qianlong, earlier than the "Zi Bu Shu" ("Zi Bu Shu" was written in about the fifty-third year of Qianlong), and the "Autumn Lantern Cong Dialect" was not widely circulated at that time, and Wang Li's literary name was not obvious, because Yuan Mei may not have read this book, and it is unlikely that there will be a problem of "melting the stem" from it. That is to say, two literati living in the same period wrote the same type of story, indicating that such cases were common at the time.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, Wang Daoding wrote "Sitting on Flowers and Zhiguo", and nine times out of ten, it came from Tang Shikun's incident in "Zi Bu Shu": "There are huge thieves in Xuancheng who have been robbing for a long time, and there are many gold and the party is crowded, and the camp flood does not dare who is who." The imperial court was forced to appoint a "strict and talented" official to govern Xuancheng, and this official was indeed fierce, and within ten days of his duties, he managed to capture the giant thieves. The thief bribed him with tens of thousands of taels of silver, hoping to spare himself from death. The family advised the officials not to take this bribe, and the officials laughed and quoted the words in the "Left Biography": "Kill it, Bi will go to it?" "He paid his bribe, and then he still killed the great thief according to the law." On the night of the giant thief's ambush, the gatekeeper of the official office suddenly saw the ghost of the giant thief enter the door of the house, and was shocked, "Oh more, more than enough, into the inner chamber and destroyed." At dawn, the official's concubine gave birth to a son, and when he grew up, he spent the day drinking and committing evil deeds, and destroyed the family business that his father had painstakingly created--"people know that they are thieves."
Compared with What Happened to Tang Shikun, it should be said that reincarnated losers are much more "humane." What needs to be explained here is the origin of the phrase "kill Ru, Bi will go to the end". Wen see "Zuo Chuan , Seventeen Years of The Duke of Lai", which tells that Wei Zhuang gong has no way, the Rongzhou people attack him, Wei Zhuang Gong fled to Rong Zhou's own family to hide, took out a piece of jade bi and said: "As long as you save my life, yu bi is yours!" Ji Shi said, "If I kill you, where can Yu Bi go?" "Kill it and take it."
There are also some death row inmates, knowing that their sins are beyond reproach, and sacrifice their "bibi" in advance, just to seek a whole corpse, but they still can't get the promise of the promiser. In the Qing Dynasty scholar Zhu Hai's "Record of Delusions", it is recorded that a ginseng stealer in Shandong was sentenced to death after being arrested, and before he was sentenced to death, he found a jailer named Yang Qi, a prisoner named Yang Qi, who "bribed Yang with ginseng, and with thirty gold, asked him to sew a coffin." Yang Qiyi agreed. Who knew that after the ginseng picker was beheaded, Yang Qiqi "actually failed the contract, and remembered that human blood dipped in steamed bread can cure tuberculosis, so he took the blood as the law" - not only treacherous, but also heartbroken! As a result, as soon as he arrived home, he strangled himself with both hands and shouted, "Return my blood!" Pay me back my blood! "Instantly the throat is broken and he dies."
3. In order to eliminate the crime of unjust killing, it is even more necessary to eliminate the prosecution of wrongdoers
In fact, the things that the judiciary harmed people in order to "take their own favors" were still common until the Republic of China. In the "Little Chronicle of Dongling", Wang Mou, an aide directly subordinate to the Governor's Palace, once lived in a hotel in Tianjin and suddenly saw two "meditators" standing on the stairs: one was licensed, and the other was holding an iron chain, which was "vicious and terrible". Wang Mou shouted and went crazy, and kept saying nonsense: "When a certain case happened in the East Window, all five of you are people in the case, and you will all go to the Yin Cao Mansion to confront you in the near future!" "The family knew that he was hit by an evil spirit or a ghost, and he solved and healed him, but it had no effect, and he could only watch him die in a frenzy." Soon after, Wang's four colleagues who had worked together in the Governor's Palace also died violently. After people understood, they learned that it turned out that Wang Mou, during the period of the curtain, wielded power, and in the trial of a case, he and those four people coveted profits and "poured out harm", and finally caused the victims to complain about the meditation and were coolly reported.
"Cave Spirit Chronicles"
There is also a more vicious motive for harming people than "taking it", which can be called "extinguishing its traces". The "Notes on the Guest Window" records that Jiangsu Zhisi (the inspector in charge of a provincial prison) encountered a case: Peixian County citizen A quarreled with his wife, ran away from home, "there will be a corpse nearby, seriously injured, the face is not very recognizable, and the clothes and shoes are very similar to A." Because the wife of so-and-so has always had an adulterous affair with neighbor X-B and is widely known by the county people, people suspect that his wife and X-B colluded to murder their husband. When the county commander heard about this, he detained his wife and A B and interrogated them severely. Although the two people strenuously denied it, "there is evidence of adultery, and the corpses are similar", the two people are difficult to explain themselves, and under Miki, who can bear it, they have to be forced to confess. After review, the inspector and the commander approved the punishment and put the two to death.
Speaking of a certain A, after running away from home, he did not return to work in various places, and half a year passed, when he was on duty at the Xuzhou Industrial Institute, he heard his companions talk about this "husband-killing case" that occurred in his hometown, and he couldn't help but be shocked: "I am fixed in it, and my wife is dead"! He quickly ran home and turned himself in to the county court. When the county commander saw him, he was frightened and knew that he had killed the wrong person and committed a major crime. With nothing to do, the county order came to the Gate of the Imperial Household with a certain A, "Jin Gurudwara Secret Chen". He knew very well that once the case was spread, he was bound to be questioned by the imperial court for his mistake in approving the death penalty, so he asked the county order to put so-and-so A into the prison (according to the chasi cell), and that night A died in prison inexplicably, and the unjust murder of his wife and so-and-so was naturally over. Later, he was executed for interfering in a serious case during The Period of Ding You, and "his home was completely destroyed", and people at the time said that this was the "unjust imprisonment retribution" that he deserved!
Monsters cannot be fully believed, and ghosts are all made up. Whether there is retribution or not, I am afraid that no one can say anything unclear, the stand-up comedy of the fixed poem has a cloud" "Rap singing and persuading people, the three avenues go to the center, good and evil will eventually be repaid, the right way in the world is vicissitudes", all those who talk about retribution in ancient notes should be treated with this fixed poem - but where is the "head" of good and evil at the end? Are the real evil people afraid of "retribution"? I'm afraid there is no answer. In the final analysis, the exhortations of the ancients that the ancients painstakingly wrote were nothing more than hoping to sprinkle a few grains of sand in the shoes of the evildoers, hoping that after they had taken advantage of them, in case they had a disease and a disaster in the future, they would inevitably ponder the retribution, and there would be a little uneasiness... Thinking like this, the good person is both really kind and really helpless.