Chapter 81 Will
The bottom of the stilted building is not a good place. It is usually used to pile up some debris or garbage. Some even use bamboo fences to surround the land to raise pigs. In short, it is not for human habitation. place.
Putting the coffins containing the elders under the stilt building is treacherous enough in itself, not to mention that there is not even a bit of paper money or symbolic wreaths and cypresses around the coffin. Leaving a naked coffin downstairs is too much. The more you bury, the more you bury.
Ning Zhe shed his owl feathers in the forest and transformed into a young man wearing a windbreaker and an evil ghost mask. He walked to the open space below the stilted building, squatted down and touched it with his knuckles. He tapped the side panel of the coffin.
Dong dong.
The crisp and hollow sound indicated that the coffin board was very thin, perhaps less than 2 centimeters.
Traditional Chinese people pay attention to lavish burials. The poor have no choice but to sweep their corpses with straw. The emperor has always had a nine-layer coffin. Although Ji Bochang was not a feudal emperor, he was not a man who was short of money. , why is his coffin so cold?
Ning Zhe pinched the surface of the coffin with his hand, and his nails pierced directly into the wood.
“Paulownia?” Ning Zhe was even more confused.
Paulownia wood is a fast-growing wood. Small saplings can mature in as little as 5 years if planted and managed well. The light wood is mostly used to make cheap and affordable small furniture. It is easy to use and not expensive, but it is not very high-end. Using this kind of cheap wood to make a coffin is only slightly better than wrapping a corpse on a straw mat.
Ji Bochang is a well-known calligrapher and painter in Yunzhou after all, and he is suspected to be a person who has been promoted. Even if his children are unfilial, they will not be in such a state of poverty.
On second thought, Ning Zhe felt that he might have had some preconceptions:
[Ji Bochang held a funeral at Izumo Villa≠The person lying in the coffin at Izumo Villa was Ji Bochang 】
The inequality is over, this coffin may not have been tasted by Ji Bo at all. But if it wasn’t tasted by Ji Bo, who could it be? Is there anyone else dead in this villa?
Ning Zhe knows that some old people who have little time to live will prepare coffins for themselves in advance and store them in a separate warehouse, but he has never seen anyone leave such an unlucky thing like a coffin downstairs in their home. If you just throw it around, why don't you build a shed?
"The sheep statue standing at the gate, the weird couplets in front of the stilted building, the coffins scattered everywhere downstairs..."
Ning Zhe stood up from the paulownia wood coffin with the word 'Lu' painted on it, and wrinkled slightly brow.
This Izumo Villa is full of weirdness. Every flower and tree gives Ning Zhe an unspeakable sense of disharmony. It is obvious that there are nearly a thousand people gathered just a few dozen minutes’ drive east. The prosperous Yundu City with a population of 10,000 is surrounded by many other villas and manors surrounded by mountains and rivers. Only the painting style of this Izumo Villa is particularly strange.
It seems that this villa did not belong to this world from the beginning, but was an illegal thing forcibly cut and pasted from somewhere else.
It's like having Kailu's cat head photoshopped onto the head of the Emperor's armor. This is a sign that something strange is about to happen.
"No wonder Ji Bochang's children would send out black invitations to invite Yu Ziqian, a promoted person, to come and attend the funeral..." Ning Zhe thought as he turned to look at the vast Daze in the distance.
Just as he was turning around, something that looked like a branch or a stick suddenly fell from the sky and landed squarely on the place where Ning Zhe had just been standing, making a loud sound. Fortunately, Ning Zhe was lucky today, otherwise he would have been hit in the head.
"Huh?" Ning Zhe subconsciously looked up and saw that a window on the second floor of the stilted building above his head had opened at some point. A graceful figure was leaning against the window, and bright lights shone out. Her soft profile.
"I'll go, Pan Jinlian."
Ning Zhe bent down to pick up the wooden stick that fell on the ground, and found that it was not a wooden stick, but a large wolf hair brush.
"It turns out to be COS Pan Jinlian."
Ning Zhe breathed a sigh of relief and saw the man upstairs waving to him, so he waved to him too and walked around the hillside with his brush in hand. Going upstairs, the man was already standing at the door waiting for him.
Ning Zhe was greeted by a charming girl, her eyes were like water, her face was picturesque, her delicate figure was beautiful, but it always made people feel a little unreal, and even plastic surgery could not fix it. It looks like it came out of a painting.
The ferocious ghost mask on Ning Zhe’s face did not frighten the beauty at all. A polite smile appeared on her face and she said softly: “It turns out to be Mr. Ye Yao. The memorial service will not be held until tomorrow. "At first, no one else has arrived yet, you are a little early."
As the words fell, Taiyi's rules were quietly triggered, and a piece of information entered Ning Zhe's mind. The person in front of me is Ji Bochang's daughter in his later years. She takes her mother's surname of Shi and is called Shi Yurou.
Shi Yurou is an ordinary person. She has never been exposed to the strange events of the Communist Party of China and does not know Yu Ziqian. She only saw Yu Ziqian's photo from the will left by Ji Bochang.
Ning Zhe took out the invitation card from his arms, handed it to Shi Yurou along with the brush just now, and said, "It's the same in the morning and evening. Also, my surname is not Ximen, so don't hit me with a stick if you have nothing to do."
Shi Yurou smiled: "Mr. Ye Yao was joking. Come upstairs with me first."
"Okay."
Ning Zhe glanced sideways at the couplets on both sides of the door, and walked into the building with Shi Yurou.
The decoration in the stilted building is antique. A huge root-carved tea table in the center of the living room is very eye-catching. The four walls are made of solid wood, with idioms and calligraphy of "dragon and snake" framed on it. From decoration to furniture Even the arc transition at the corner is in traditional Chinese style, very standard for Yundu rich people.
But again, Ning Zhe didn’t see any funeral-related elements in this building.
"Whose is that coffin downstairs?" Ning Zhe asked.
"My father's." Shi Yurou answered truthfully.
It's really what Uncle Ji tasted...
"Then you are really rebellious." Ning Zhe said softly.
When your biological father died, you just made a thin coffin made of cheap wood, hastily packed the person and threw it in a pig farm? This is no longer an ordinary act of being unfilial, this is how you treat your enemies.
But Shi Yurou shook his head: "These were all requested by my father before he was alive."
"You mean, he himself asked you to throw his body in the pig pen. ?" Ning Zhe's tone became subtle.
Shi Yurou nodded, went up to the second floor, and led Ning Zhe into a study room. From her mouth, Ning Zhe roughly knew the situation in Izumo Villa.
Before his death, Ji Bochang left a will, instructing Shi Yurou and Ji Yunying to follow the instructions:
1. Ji Bochang requested that his body be contained in a thin coffin and placed in the Under the stilted building, nothing else is needed
2. Season Bochang asked them to keep all the things and objects in the entire building in the same state as before his death and not to move them rashly
3. Before Ji Bochang died, he gave the siblings a list of things they wanted to do. The two used black invitations to invite these people to their funeral
The names and contact information of ‘Ye Yao’ were also on the list, but the siblings were completely unaware of the true identities of these people.
"Also, at midnight last night, my brother and I were down below to keep a vigil for our father."
Shi Yurou stopped in front of the table where his father was writing, and turned his head to look at Ning Zhe's face. He wore a ghost mask and whispered: "Suddenly there were several knocking sounds in the coffin, as if someone was knocking on the wooden board inside... I remember clearly, three long sounds and two short sounds. This sound only rang. Once, then It never appeared again. I thought it was a hallucination at the time.”
“But when my brother and I returned to the building to wash up after the funeral the next day, we discovered that the two of us were carrying copper coins. Each one was missing one."
At this point, Shi Yurou's expression became solemn: "After checking again, we discovered that my father's body was also missing from the coffin."
(End of this chapter)