Changbai Mountain Ghost Stories: The Fox Immortal’s Enfeoffment and the Mother-Daughter Evil Spirits

She said I owed her a life

My name is Yang Jianjun, but everyone in the village calls me Er Zhuzi.

At the foot of Changbai Mountain, in Heixiazigou, I’m a spirit medium.

One day, Er Niu from the village came to me trembling. He said he’d run into a woman in a red padded jacket deep in the old forest.

Her feet didn’t touch the ground. She asked him, “Do I look human to you?”

Terrified, Er Niu said, “You look human.” That very night, he hanged himself from the old locust tree at the village entrance.

A red fox-spirit jacket was tied around his feet.

My grandfather said it was a fox spirit seeking a blessing. It had cultivated for a hundred years and was only one step away from ascending.

But things weren’t that simple.

After that, the descendants of the hunters who had taken part in the white fox hunt years ago began dying one after another.

Beside each body was a tuft of bloodstained fox fur.

I opened the family heirloom, Miscellaneous Records of the Wilds, and found a method of breaking the curse that chilled me to the bone:

We had to find where the white fox had been buried, then burn incense and pray using the blood of the spellcaster’s closest kin.

But when we dug open a lone grave in the mass burial ground, the coffin held…

Er Niu’s wife, who had just completed the seventh day of mourning yesterday.

Her fingernails were packed with dried fox fur.

Worse still, that night I performed a spirit-calling ritual to ask what was happening, but the one who came wasn’t the fox spirit.

As the candle flame turned green, I heard a woman’s voice:

“Yang Jianjun, it’s time to repay what you owe me.”