shepherd

I asked Fu Yingxue if some complicated summoning rituals were required for the summoning of the Mu Shen, and whether it was mentioned in that book. Fu Yingxue regretfully told me that no, but she could borrow some books about ancient religions, especially the witch In terms of technology, maybe you can find similar content, which can be used as a reference. I said that after Fu Yingxue returns to China, one meal may not be enough, so I can invite a few more meals. Fu Yingxue said that she has saved the screenshots .

After sending the message, drowsiness hit me, and I fell into a drowsy sleep again. Since I bought food and drink from the supermarket these two days, it was a peaceful night, and I didn’t have any related dreams. I waited for the next morning The morning reading broadcast woke me up and my younger brother.

A few hours later, my junior brother and I were idly feeding the cows in the cowshed. Since we had collected samples and some experimental data, and a rough analysis showed that this month’s experiment had some results, so my junior brother and I I was in a more relaxed mood, and the notification tone on my phone rang suddenly. I took off my gloves and turned on the phone. It was the content sent by Fu Yingxue. After calculating the time, it should be getting late on her side. Sure enough, the first sentence at the beginning yes:

"I want to eat Japanese food when I return to China, the most expensive set meal."

I sent a few "OK" emojis in a row, and then she sent a lot of information and pictures. At first glance, the content is very messy, because the records of "Pun Shen" in this small area of ​​Province A are too poor. Fu Yingxue said that she sent me almost everything she could find that might be related, and said that it had been a long time since she had spent so much time in these musty old books, and now she felt dizzy of.I sent a red envelope to invite her to have a drink, and told her to go to bed early. These materials and pictures are enough for me to look at for a while.

Back in the room, I downloaded all the content in the chat history, and began to search for potentially useful content with my junior brother. Most of these materials were sent to me by Fu Yingxue after extracting the text from the photos taken on her mobile phone. English, and a considerable part of it was translated from English to Chinese and then recorded. My junior brother and I can only use a translator to translate English back to Chinese. When a language is translated into a foreign language, and then translated back, not only may the The special meaning given to the text by losing the cultural environment of the original text, and the translation may even be distorted, making it far from the original meaning. As a result, my brother and I often read nonsense sentences after translation, and some are really incomprehensible , the younger brother complained while watching:

"It's like when we wrote papers before, we were afraid that we would not be able to pass the plagiarism check. After translating Chinese into Arabic and then translating it back, the plagiarism check would fail. Now we are being retribution."

While we were translating, we sorted out the sentences one by one. If we couldn’t understand some parts, we had to skip them or save them in a separate file.

I have to say that the information sent back by Fu Yingxue covers a very wide range. I feel that there are many contents that are a bit borderline, but they are all sporadic and fragmented information. The God of Faun may indeed be the god of belief in a small religion, but this religion has not developed into a climate at all. Due to the continuous expansion of the ancient regime, the ruling class must clean up the unstable factors among the people if it wants to consolidate its position. Small local beliefs, There are special personnel responsible for culling, such as a well-known story "Hebo Marries a Wife".

"Historical Records" records that there is a place in H province called Linzhang County, which was called "Ye" in ancient times. There is a local saying that it is necessary to throw young girls into Hanoi every year to worship the god of the river in order to avoid waterlogging. In the end, Ye ordered Ximen Bao to throw the witch who believed in the river god and her disciples into the river, finally breaking the bad habits and saving the local people.If things go on like this, the small religions in these places have basically cut off their incense, and the related witch religions have gradually merged into Taoism after the merger of the three religions, and only a very small number of inheritances can be preserved.

My junior and I speculate that the appearance of this God of Mu is very likely that someone in Fuyuan Niuye discovered its inheritance and tried to achieve some purpose by summoning it. Now it seems that Wang Mulin, that is, Manager Wang, is The most likely instigators, Zhang Yi and Zhao Cong, are also likely to be believers in the God of Mu.

I have also watched a lot of movies and TV dramas with strange powers and chaotic gods. Generally speaking, if this kind of gods want to come to the world, there must be corresponding sacrificial ceremonies. The night of the full moon, the lunar eclipse and the solar eclipse are all good days for sacrifices. In the materials Fu Yingxue sent me, there are some ancient sacrifice ceremonies of other beliefs, some of which are quite detailed, but they all belong to that kind Harmless to humans and animals, of course, means that they are harmless to humans. Livestock must be slaughtered as sacrifices. The purpose of the sacrifices is basically to obtain good weather, prosperous farming, etc., and the sacrifice method is not evil, normal The killing of pigs and cattle, burning incense and praying, etc., are completely absent from the steps of skinning the cattle for public display and removing the bones and bones of the cattle that we encountered a few days ago.

Just as I was still trying to figure out the ritual of the god of shepherd from the vast amount of information, my junior brother suddenly gave me a strange cry, which startled me:

"What's the date today?" I glanced at the date in the lower right corner of the computer:

"July 28th, what, your period is here?"

"No, it's the first anniversary of my girlfriend and I being together on August [-]rd. I can't go back to accompany her. I have to buy a gift online and send it to her, or I'll be yelled at again."

"The special day must be commemorated. Hurry up and place an order, or it will be too late." As I spoke, I clicked on the calendar and found that August 8 this year happened to be the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, and the calendar also marked Zhongyuan Festival three words.The Ghost Festival is commonly known as the Ghost Festival among the people, but in fact, the Ghost Festival is a festival to worship the ancestors, to celebrate the harvest, and to sacrifice to the land. I saw in the information just now that some witchcraft sacrificial ceremonies need to be performed on the Ghost Festival. Do it today.

Thinking of this, I hurriedly looked back at the materials that Fu Yingxue sent me at the beginning. Sure enough, there was information about the time of the sacrifice of the God of Mu, but due to translation reasons, the material said the time of the sacrifice of the God of Mu, which was the Obon Festival. , so I didn’t care about it at the time, but in fact, the Obon Festival is the [-]th day of the seventh lunar month in Buddhism, and the Ghost Festival is a Taoist saying, but they are actually the same day, although because of doctrinal issues, the two festivals The meaning of the setting is actually different, and the name Obon Festival is a bit unfamiliar to me, so I didn’t pay much attention to it when I read the information for the first time, but now I count it, we still have about two weeks At that time, the real sacrificial activity of Mu Shen is about to begin.

I told my younger brother about this discovery, and told him that next month's No. 15 is the Ghost Festival, but my younger brother said:

"No, how did I hear that the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month is the fourteenth day of the Hungry Ghost Festival?"

"July and a half, haven't you heard that the ghost gate opens in July and a half? Isn't July and a half fifteen?"

"It seems that my grandfather told me specifically that July and a half is the fourteenth day." The younger brother recalled.

I quickly searched for the Ghost Festival on the Internet, and I found out that the real July and a half is the fourteenth of July, which is the day of August 8th. This statement comes from the "Book of Changes", which says " Repeat the same way, come and go in seven days, and the sky moves", which means that the number "seven" is related to the movement of heaven and earth, the ups and downs of yin and yang, and the fourteenth of July contains three "seven", which is exactly the number "seven". " means resurrection, so it is now said that the first seven days after the death of a person, that is, the "first seven", the soul of the deceased will go home to say goodbye to his family.However, since the information has been translated as the Obon Festival, it is probably July 14th, and the Ghost Festival may be counted on both July 15th and July [-]th, so I told my junior that we still have to do it. Get ready, it's possible in these two days, the younger brother agrees.

While talking about someone knocking on the door, the younger brother opened the door and found that it was Xiao Wu. Xiao Wu looked like he was just recovering from a serious illness. The younger brother took out a cigarette and lit it for Xiao Wu. Xiao Wu took a sharp puff, probably from sucking Too hard and a little dizzy, panting and said:

"I was sleeping just now, and I dreamed of a cow."

"That thing is called Mu Shen." I interrupted.

"Shepherd? You listen to me first. I dreamed that the cow rushed towards me, opening its mouth wide while charging. The mouth opened wider and wider. I couldn't move in the dream. I could only watch it towards me. It rushed over to eat me, its mouth was full of black air, like a tunnel, and guess what, I heard a tiger roar, and the thing's big mouth retracted like an air bag was punctured , and then I woke up, and I almost felt like I was going to be swallowed by it."

The amount of information in this passage is really a bit large, and my junior brother and I were taken aback for a while, but we can now be sure that Xiao Wu is on the same front as us, so I put together the information we have compiled these days, as well as the previous dream. After finishing the book, he told Xiao Wu what he saw.

After listening to our description, Xiao Wu nodded:

"I guessed that you might have dreamed about this thing before. It turns out that this thing is called Mushen. When I reported to Accountant Chen, I chatted with her. She also heard stories about worshiping the cow god. It is said that when she was a child, she listened to the gossip of the villagers, and heard that a long time ago, every July and a half, some high-quality pastures and fruits would be prepared as tributes to sacrifice to the bull god, which was passed down from generation to generation. I don’t know when the source happened.”

"Indeed, in our hometown, every family will tell the story of the savage mother-in-law to coax the children. If you are disobedient, the savage mother-in-law will come back to arrest you at night. I don't know the source, so it has been passed down from generation to generation." I talked about this hometown tradition. , Unexpectedly, the younger brother also echoed that he heard this version when he was a child, and added that this "savage mother-in-law" would eat children's fingers.Xiao Wu smiled and flicked the cigarette ash:

"Accountant Chen also said that in her impression, if she wants to worship the Bull God, besides preparing tributes, there are other things to prepare for the "four deaths and one life". She doesn't know exactly what the "four deaths and one life" are."

"Four deaths and one life", my junior brother and I smacked these four words. Obviously, in order to summon the God of Shepherd, apart from preparing common tributes on the Ghost Festival, these five things should be the most important. Four dead things It is easy to say that there is no sacrificial ceremony without sacrifice, but this "life" is confusing, and the younger brother clicked the smoke:

"It can't be a living sacrifice, it's too perverted."

"Living sacrifices are rare in the slave society. You have to thank Qin Shihuang for making terracotta warriors instead of living people. The old master Confucius still scolded him as the creator of the terracotta warriors, and there are no descendants." I replied, and Xiao Wu continued. :

"Just now I heard from you that Manager Wang and Zhao Cong were probably responsible for this incident. I wanted to ask them about the slaughtered cow in the past two days. It seems that I should be careful. By the way, I have to go to the supermarket to buy some food and drink and come back. The food in the factory is unusable, and the headquarters will have to let me go back in two days. The main reason is that I can’t tell the headquarters directly. Besides, you will call the police Well, there is no evidence and nothing, the police still have to say that you are feudal and superstitious, this is too outrageous, and I have to find an excuse to go back to the headquarters."

Hearing this, my junior brother and I also sighed deeply. Indeed, no one will believe this. Unless the police drink the water here and sleep again, it will not be convincing at all.Xiao Wu took out two tiger whiskers from his wallet, and handed one to me and my junior brother:

"In my dream, when I was about to be eaten, I heard a roar of a tiger, indicating that this thing might work. I have three sticks in total, so each of you can take one."

Originally, I didn't want to accept it. After all, it's a real tiger's beard, which is still very valuable, but then I thought that this thing might come in handy sometime, so I took it over. The younger brother used the technique of weaving fishing nets he learned in the video to make What kind of sailor's knot was made, two tiger whiskers were made into two rings, and each person wore one on his hand.Xiao Wu went to the supermarket, and I looked at the bracelet made of tiger whiskers:

"Yeah, wearing this, I guess I won't dare to feed the cats."

"No, they are all cats. If you wear this, the cat will be the same as your own father." After speaking, the younger brother turned on the phone, and when the point came, he was going to video chat with his girlfriend. It's the anniversary, I have to behave better, I understand.

With this tiger beard bracelet, I feel a lot more stable in my heart, which is more or less a psychological comfort.The following week, it was as peaceful as when we first came here. The countryside was pastoral, the wind was calm, and the younger brother resumed his daily fishing routine. I took the small fish caught by the younger brother to feed the cats in the factory, and my younger brother really liked it. Now, this wristband has no effect on the cat. Once the small fish is lost, the big and small cats will eat around my feet, but it is different when feeding the cow. In the past, when we sprinkled grass, the cow’s head stretched out. When I got out of the fence and started eating, I couldn’t even drive them away. Now when my junior brother and I entered the cowshed, the cow not only kept barking, but also waited until we sprinkled feed additives, and when we walked far away, we couldn’t look back and see the cow bowed its head to eat. I sighed in my heart. It's blood suppression.

The younger brother is in a good mood recently, and he is happy every day. It seems that the gift he bought for his girlfriend is very satisfactory. Every night during the video call, it is full of laughter. I just think I am a little redundant, so the younger brother and sister During the rounds, I lit a cigarette and left the room, ready to go downstairs for a walk.

The room next door is already empty, Xiao Wu has returned to the headquarters, and I don’t know how he told the headquarters about this, thinking that I went down the stairs and came to the yard, the bastard caught by my junior should have come from the pool The stone went up and down the water and made a "plop" sound. The surrounding area was very quiet, only the summer insects called twice from time to time, and there was a cow mooing in the distance. I took a deep breath and felt very unreal. I thought I was here for an experiment. , there are not many things like a vacation, I didn't expect to encounter such a supernatural thing, and the whole thing has developed to the present, it is still clouded, and it feels very magical.

Just as I was thinking about it, I suddenly heard a "meow meow" kitten calling in the grass. I walked over and took a photo with the light of my mobile phone, and found that the youngest white cat was stuck on the sticky mouse board that my aunt had placed before. I laughed I smiled, the sticky mouse board did not stick to the mouse, but stuck the cat to it. The female white cat next to me was spinning around anxiously. Seeing this, I walked over. Among the white cats, a pair of cat eyes reflected green light under the light of the flashlight.I said: Don't worry, I will help you get your son down.

The mother cat seemed to understand, and moved aside slowly. The little white cat seemed to have struggled to the point of exhaustion. Seeing me, it was shaking like a sieve. When the neck reached the faucet next to the kitchen, I wet my hands to clean up the glue on the body, let go, the kitten regained its freedom, and quickly ran back to the mother cat. The mother cat hastily licked the wet fur on the kitten's body twice , dodged into the grass.

Only then did I find a hole in the corner of the kitchen. No wonder these cats are always elusive. There is a secret passage here. I followed the wall and detoured to the back of the kitchen. I have never been here usually, because it is a place where feed is piled up. In the place of raw materials, there are hay bales piled up to two or three stories high and corn kernels like hills. In a corner, I saw a mother cat and a few kittens lingering on a pile of hay, which looked neat .There are wooden boards and wooden frames stacked next to it, which are used to place hay bales, but these have obviously not been used for a long time, are covered with dust, and cobwebs are also in a mess.I used the light of my mobile phone to take pictures everywhere, except for the light reflected by the eyes of the cats, there was also a strange reflection in one place. I took a closer look, and the reflection just now was a gold thread. I found another voodoo bag , also embroidered with a bull's head with gold thread, the same workmanship, packed a bag full of things.

Seeing no one around, I picked up the bag and walked to the room. When I got back to the room, my brother’s sweet phone call had already been made. I opened the drawer in two steps in three steps. Sure enough, the two bags were exactly the same. Holding another voodoo bag, also stunned:

"Why is there another one?"

My junior asked me to open it in a hurry. I untied the bag and poured out the contents, a lump of hair sticking together, a dry chicken beak, a stone with a cow's hoof drawn on it, and another dry "twig" , except that the painting on the stone has changed from a cow's head to a cow's hoof, everything else seems to be the same as what was in the previous bag.

We took a closer look at this branch, and when we saw it clearly, both of us backed up a few steps at the same time, and the junior and junior stammered:

"This, this, what is this!"

Only now did we know what the "twig" that was burnt last time was. The one in front of us is not a branch, but a human toe, and the shape of the last one is almost obvious. It is a finger. I didn’t see it the first time because the nail might have fallen off, but this one, the toenail on the toe is still there. Looking at the size, it should be the big toe. There is still a little dark red pigment on the toenail, like dry red paint , nail polish?Could it be that the owner of this toe is a woman?For a moment, my junior and I fell into an ice cellar.