I am Li Ke, an obscure man who scrapes by with a bit of knowledge of the old ways, the arts that tread between light and shadow.
The thick stack of papers before you, covered in cramped calligraphy, is what you now hold: The Record of Strange Happenings. This is no sacred text, nor is it tales of scholars and beauties. It is the collection of my half-lifetime's wanderings – gathered firsthand from this vast, dusty world, the treacherous mountains and wild rivers, the lonely villages and remote inns. These are unsettling accounts I've picked up, heard whispered, or even witnessed myself. Tales steeped in the reek of mud and blood, wrapped in spectral chills.
You, dear reader, must be wondering: How does a poor scholar, barely literate, stumble upon so many bizarre encounters to gather these… bones?
That brings me to my long-departed master—Wang Yan, Master Wang.
Master was no ordinary Daoist, nor a temple monk chanting sutras. He was a folk practitioner, one who "walked the line between the living and the dead," a path frequented by restless spirits. To put it plainly: he warded homes for the living, found resting places for the dead, and occasionally… dealt with things that were unclean, things that walked crooked paths. This demanded he risk life and limb, forever journeying through the wildest frontiers. His footprints marked places forgotten by official records—remote mountain hollows, desolate waters, forsaken villages, and lonely graves.
And I, Li Ke, orphaned young, was taken under his wing. I became a little shadow trailing his burlap bag, a witness and chronicler forever skirting the edge of that divide.
My childhood held no primers or Confucian maxims. My first lesson in reading came by the faint glow of corpse-candles in a graveyard, deciphering the worm-like red characters on a talisman in his hand. The "beginning of man" I learned were the hushed village taboos and the mountain demons spoken of in fearful whispers.
This Record of Strange Happenings seeped into being from those precarious childhood memories—from the worn grain of Master's peachwood sword, from the flickering embers in his pipe bowl… like a stream finding its way through cracked stones. It chronicles Master's perilous battles against malign forces. It documents the tragedies born from villagers' ignorance and terror. And it etches into permanence the twisted entities that lurk beyond mortal sight, just out of the sunlight's reach.
Each major chapter of this book recounts one terrifying legend, rooted in some hidden corner of this land—a tale of the strange and macabre, beginning in the uncanny and ending in dread, vivid and visceral.
The words may be few or many, but their purpose is to capture the strangeness: the grotesque forms of the entities, the madness within humanity, and that pervasive, marrow-freezing chill that hangs heavy in the air.
Enough preamble.
Settle in, dear reader. Pour yourself a cup of strong tea to steady your nerves.
I, Li Ke, shall now tell you a small tale—a morsel for after supper, and the first knock on the gong heralding this book's beginning.
This story… feels like one Master told me long ago, a ghost story shared on a winter's night beside a clay stove. The fire crackled, the wind howled outside. He tapped his pipe, sparks catching in his grey beard, his voice low and measured:
"Cold, Ke'er? Here, Master will tell you a little tale… warm your ears… Think of it as a joke..."
"It's about my own uncle… a stubborn old wretch who ended up without a proper grave marker. My uncle, your grand-master—Wang the Limper."
The fire flared suddenly. Master paused, his gaze seeming to pierce through the flames, back into the rainy depths of decades past.
"In those days… in a mountain village on the edge of Sichuan…"
First Story: Concerning My Father — Li Erwa
You know of Jiangshi（Chinese zombie), he Hopping Corpses?
Forget the stiff, rotting-robed fools you see in films, mindlessly bouncing about. The true Jiangshi is a living terror steeped in subterranean cold and thick blood thick with resentment. They are the nightmares whispered of in tales that freeze the marrow in your bones.
Their bodies are matted with long, ghostly white hair, like a shroud woven from frost and moonlight. Their nails grow unnaturally long, curling like sickles sharp enough to claw through solid coffin wood. From their bruised-purple lips protrude pale fangs, curved like iron hooks forged by a blacksmith to snag life itself.
Though tales of them spread far and wide, twisted with the supernatural, those who truly encountered their visage... well, they lie deep beneath the yellow earth now, bones long turned to dust. Only the legends remain, saturated with primal fear. These whispers persist—under the flicker of oil lamps, in the corners of low, earthen huts—like the wind whispering through decayed window frames, endlessly stirring the thick, cold fog of the night.