Old Events in Aijia Village

This book does not seek immortality or cheating, it only talks about things I have encountered in my life. It is not for the faint of heart. My name is Ai Yuan, and I was born in a place called Aijia Village in Jinxian, Jiangxi. The elders in the village said that when children hear someone calling their nickname in the middle of the night, they cannot answer; there is an extra pair of bowls and chopsticks on the wedding banquet, so they cannot ask; and if the door of the old ancestral hall opens by itself, no living person should look in. As a child I didn't believe it. Until one night that year, I heard my mother calling me to eat, but the voice seemed to come from the Ai family ancestral hall. It was Mr. Zhou Jiu who saved me. He is not a god, nor is he an expert in cultivating immortals. He is just a "sir" in the mouth of the country people. He can see things, send souls, suppress evil spirits, and tell the rules for the living and the dead with a handful of stove ashes, a copper coin, and a red thread. Later, I followed him around the villages near Jinxian. I saw the soul-returning night, sent over seven souls, moved to the ownerless grave, and also saw those people who should not sit down to eat at the wedding banquet. Master Zhou Jiu often said: "Taoism is not about killing ghosts, it is about observing the rules." But many years later I realized that the first person to break the rules in Aijia Village was not a dead person. It's a living person.