Chapter 1490 - 1152: Tracing Back

"It’s just clearing away some lingering defilement, that’s all." Among the older folks of the parents’ generation, the old man wiped the cold sweat he’d just broken out in with the already black-and-shiny cuff of his sleeve, then reflexively retorted, "How could it be that troublesome?"

He and his son were city farmers, long since used to haggling before any proper talk of business.

They still thought Wuming was only here to jack up the price.

But the Demon Hunter was already impatiently waving her hand: "I told you from the start, this isn’t about money. The lingering defilement in your house is really troublesome; it’s not some ordinary stuff!"

The old man choked on his words, turning his head away.

But Lann was watching carefully; when he turned his head he still pursed his lips and rolled his eyes, clearly still not very convinced.

Yet whether he believed or not, the one who served as head of a farming household was always the main laborer, in other words, the able-bodied male master of the house.

"In your house, you often hear a baby crying from beneath the floorboards where there’s nothing, right?" Wuming first asked him. "You told me before that your family had a miscarriage once. So you suspect it’s the lingering defilement clinging to you."

The man nodded honestly, woodenly; the woman beside him looked stricken with grief.

"But we already paid to invite a Traveling Monk from Changzai Temple to perform a ritual." The man went on, "It’s just, it’s just we don’t understand why the lingering defilement is still there. It’s been three years now!"

The woman beside him said nothing, only tightened her hold on the little boy in her arms.

The boy looked about five; he should be the older brother of the miscarried child.

"House number Ren-20." Lann suddenly cut in, reciting an address. "Do you know that family? Or have you had any contact with them recently?"

"Ren-20?" The master of the house thought for a moment, looking blank. "That’s two streets away from here, right? No, my work never takes me past there. I haven’t even gone to that street."

"What about the other people in your family?"

Under Lann’s immediate follow?up question, everyone exchanged baffled looks, then shook their heads.

"You’ve never had any contact... at all?" Wuming frowned, sighing in frustration.

Bracing her hands on her knees, she rose from her sprawling seated posture and was about to go look into another direction.

This family’s background wasn’t complicated, so she didn’t feel they were likely to be lying to her.

When it came to lingering defilement, by the time you had to hire someone to deal with it, there weren’t many fools who’d choose to dodge the issue; people like that should’ve been wiped out in ancient times already.

The whole family looked anxious and ill at ease; it seemed that after hearing Wuming say this matter wasn’t simple, they were already growing uneasy inside.

But just as Wuming was about to drag Lann toward the door and head out, the Demon Hunter instead pressed down on her shoulder.

Lann, as if inadvertently, lightly patted the thin wooden wall of the house with his palm—flimsy, but at least enough to keep the wind out.

"Your family and the one at Ren-20 are not adjacent, and you’re not even aligned with them horizontally or vertically."

"But to be blunt, that household was discovered yesterday... all of them already dead."

Lann looked at this family; aside from the child who didn’t quite understand yet, their expressions shifted from shock to a thick, overwhelming fear.

Seeing their faces, Lann timely added a bit more fuel to the fire.

"And they weren’t killed by Demons and Evil Spirits someone summoned. They were driven to straightforward suicide under the influence of lingering defilement."

"Since you’re certain that you have absolutely no connection with that family, that you’ve never had any contact with them, then I can only guess... could it be this entire stretch of land...?"

Lann didn’t finish the sentence, and like Wuming earlier, he lightly tapped the tip of his foot on the ground.

But though the gesture was the same, what it pointed to was entirely different.

Generally speaking, a situation where lingering defilement remains in a single house, to the point it can taint others and even bring about their death, is already extremely vicious.

And lingering defilement that can extend its influence outward, no longer confined to a single house but spread over an entire piece of land...

"H?How is that possible?!"

The employer suddenly went limp all over, collapsing to the floor, his eyes staring blankly.

Even as a farmer, his instinct was to refuse to believe that such lingering defilement could exist!

As for his father, he displayed his rejection of this claim in an even more straightforward way.

"The entire stretch of land is polluted?" He showed the common way people in Japan react to sudden events—by loudly refusing to accept reality.

As if so long as he shouted, the cruel reality would be driven away by his voice.

"This is inside Iwamura Castle! There are ritual implements here that were brought from Kashima Shrine! Every few months, the City Lord takes out the implements and parades them once around the city!"

"This is also a main thoroughfare of Mino Country. Any Traveling Monk, Shinto priest, or Shugen Dao adept on pilgrimage or training has to stop here for a bit. Whenever they come, the City Lord always asks them to inspect the city to ensure its safety!"

The Shugen Dao he spoke of were the ’ascetic monks’ of Japan. Blending traits of Han Buddhism and native Shintoism, they sought to heighten themselves through harsh practice; among the common people they were also called Mountain Hermits.

The meaning being: people who live in seclusion in the mountains.

If they were proper Shugen Dao practitioners, then whether in Martial Arts or in their grasp and insight into religious rites and scriptures, their capabilities were unquestionably superior to ordinary Shinto priests or Monks.

Detecting and dealing with lingering defilement would be as easy as lifting a hand.

"Yelling and screaming won’t change reality." Lann spread his hands calmly. "Your house does have lingering defilement, doesn’t it? Otherwise why did you hire a Demon Hunter?"

"But how could lingering defilement possibly remain for so long?" The old woman who had been timidly bowing her head and saying nothing finally lifted her head now to speak.

"Our family has been living here for ten years now. Not just the Castle Town—even inside this castle nothing terrible has happened. What kind of [Residual Defilement] could cling to the land for more than ten years?"

Still the same point: if [Residual Defilement] didn’t naturally disperse as time stretched on, then where in this world is there a place where no one has died? Where no life has ever perished?

That would completely violate common sense and logic.

"I already said it, this particular [Residual Defilement] is abnormal in itself." Lann helplessly repeated himself, then as if suddenly recalling something, he narrowed his eyes slightly and looked at the employer’s family.

"You just said you moved here ten years ago?"

"Y-yeah."

"Then this area, or rather the Castle Town of Iwamura Castle," Lann’s hand drew an outline in the air, "were there many people like you who moved in?"

"You... really don’t know anything?" The employer glanced at his family and asked tentatively.

"Know what?" Wuming complained, grumbling, "We’re all roaming Demon Hunters from out of town. How are we supposed to know what’s happened in your city?"

The employer hurriedly scrambled up from the floor, leaned close to the two of them, and spoke in a low voice.

"It’s, it’s Lord Saito Risho, he forced the Tokugawa Clan into exile! Back then, in many of the castles across Mino Country, quite a lot of people were killed! If not for all those vacancies, we’d still be living out in some village in the wilds!"

Saito Risho is Saito Dosan, the current Lord of the Country of Mino.

Dao San is the name derived from his Dharma name after taking tonsure, "Dosan Nyudo."

Saito Dosan climbed to the position of Lord of the Country through several rounds of gekokujō, and before him, the Tokugawa Clan were the officially court-appointed and recognized "Guardians of Mino."

Gekokujō is, by nature, a coup; the fact that Saito Dosan succeeded shows he was indeed highly capable.

But no matter how capable you are, during a coup it’s inevitable that you’ll have to purge the entrenched old powers.

Clearly, back then a good number of powerful clans were slaughtered within this Iwamura Castle.

Yet for an operation that big, it’s all the more impossible they’d neglect dealing with [Residual Defilement].

In Japan, even if one wishes to turn into an evil spirit out of grievance and resentment, status still matters.

The resentment of commoners is of little consequence; it takes a grand house like the Heike Clan of old, or blood as exalted as Emperor Chongde’s, to leave behind grudges that cannot be dispelled and can only be appeased.

Those powerful clans, clearly, did not possess that level of nobility.

After the killing, they would have used Buddhist Techniques and spells to disperse the grudges, and that would be that.

Lann’s eyes narrowed slightly; he felt as though he had finally grasped a line of thought.

"So in other words, you’re not truly native locals."

"If you put it that way," the employer said quietly, "then in this Castle Town, with all the comings and goings over the years, there actually aren’t many families left who are real locals."

"Then there are still a few original residents left, right?" Lann asked crisply. "The longer they’ve lived in this castle the better. Tell me everything you know about those families."

The employer’s family looked at one another; in the end, the four adults—especially the old man and old woman—pieced their memories together with great effort and finally managed to come up with several households, giving their addresses to Lann and Wuming.

Then the two, who were already quick to act, immediately began visiting them one household after another.

Wuming might be simple, but she wasn’t stupid.

By the time Lann had asked a few questions, she had basically figured out what his line of inquiry was circling around.

—If this [Residual Defilement] really had far-reaching influence, if it was something that had accumulated from long ago, then to uncover the truth they would inevitably have to trace time backward.

Yet as the two of them visited and questioned one household after another, Wuming felt no sense of clouds parting to reveal the clear sky.

On the contrary... the Demon Hunter who had initially thought this would be merely troublesome now felt a chill spreading in her chest!

"Ah Ju’s family? Oh, they’ve long since left this place. I heard they moved to a village outside the city, but it’s strange—clearly they passed their house on to some very close relatives, yet for seven or eight years there’s been no word from them at all."

"Sanchuan’s family? Somebody still remembers them? Let me tell you, they had rotten luck. I heard that while out chopping wood he ran into something filthy. When Sanchuan came back he hanged himself! Later, the widow and orphans left behind remarried. When? About five years ago, more or less... back then there was a Monk chanting sutras in front of this house for an entire afternoon."

The Castle Town wasn’t the sort of place where neighbors constantly saw each other; everyone was busy making a living. If their paths in life didn’t overlap, strangers could go a whole lifetime without ever meeting.

People who had once met might go ten or twenty years without ever seeing each other again.

Thus, after they finished visiting all the so-called "original residents of Iwamura Castle" extracted from the employer family’s memories and tallied the results, they found that... nearly eighty percent of them had been wiped out to the last!

Even considering the coup, the number of original residents wasn’t that large. But if you added up the households that were annihilated, the total was absolutely enough to alarm Ando Shouji, and even Saito Dosan himself!

First there was the sheer brutality of entire families being wiped out; second was the manner of their deaths... more or less all tainted with something "unclean" in the sense of occult practices.

Yet such a huge number of annihilated households, all contaminated by filthy things, was scattered across the whole city, with the incidents stretched out over more than ten years.

So this vast number of victims presented itself as a series of isolated, scattered cases, and somehow no one ever became alarmed!

Until they questioned the last original-resident household, a family who had already moved out of the city to live in a hut by their fields so they could better tend their farmland.

From their mouths, Lann and Wuming learned that five years ago, everything from District C to District J of the Castle Town had in fact been the holdings of a single powerful clan.

And five years ago, during a family wedding held by that clan, the bride loosened the sash of her kimono that very night and hanged herself.

People said she was of loose morals and was caught in the act that night, so she felt too ashamed to go on living.