Chapter Ten: The Pup

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Before long, the children spotted Chen Ling walking along the road and immediately ran toward him.

When they reached him, one sharp-eyed child recognized him.

“It’s Uncle Fugui!”

“Uncle Fugui, help! There’s a dead person in the pit!”

By then, Chen Ling was already walking toward them.

“Where’s the dead person? Where?”

With an adult there, the children were no longer quite so frightened.

At Chen Ling’s question, the child who had recognized him first pointed toward a ruined temple in the distance.

“Over there, in the tree pit behind the Earth God Temple.”

“I saw it too. The clothes were all rotten, with hair and bones sticking out…”

“It was terrifying!”

“Yeah, yeah! I even saw the clothes moving.”

“No wonder my mother won’t let me play near the Earth God Temple. She says it’s the darkest place at night.”

“Once the sun goes down, the temple gates turn into a monster’s mouth. It goes ‘chomp, chomp’ and eats children. Looks like my mother wasn’t making it up after all.”

The children had barely caught their breath before they began chattering all at once.

As they spoke, they patted their chests, their little faces still filled with lingering fear.

But the more Chen Ling listened, the more something seemed off.

Suspicious, he questioned them carefully and soon discovered that none of them had actually seen the thing clearly.

They had merely stood at the edge and glimpsed some bones, a tangled mass of hair, and rotten clothes. Assuming it was a corpse, they had fled in terror.

None of them had gone closer to look.

Chen Ling was speechless when he heard this.

He had been rather tense just moments ago, thinking that someone had truly died there. In that short span of time, he had even imagined an entire folk murder drama straight out of the 1990s.

Now, judging from the children’s story, it was almost certain they had simply mistaken what they saw and frightened themselves.

“Liuni’er, why did you run so far? Is there nothing to play with at the eastern end of the village? Why come all the way west? Aren’t you afraid someone will kidnap you?”

Chen Ling addressed the child who had recognized him first.

The boy’s home was not far from Chen Ling’s. He had five older sisters, and when his parents were expecting him, they thought the baby would be another girl, so they had given him the childhood name Liuni’er in advance.

When he turned out to be a boy, they never bothered to change it.

“There’s a reservoir to the east, and my pa won’t let me go there.”

Liuni’er sniffed and grinned at Chen Ling.

“All right, now hurry home. Don’t come this far to play again without an adult.”

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Chen Ling waved his hand as he spoke.

“But Uncle Fugui, there really is a dead person behind the Earth God Temple…”

A little girl spoke in a small voice, her face pale and her expression still frightened.

“What dead person? Don’t talk nonsense. Didn’t the adults just make a grand offering at the Earth God Temple on the first day of the month?”

“It’s only been a few days. If there were a corpse there, do you really think the adults wouldn’t have noticed? Hurry home.”

After much coaxing, Chen Ling finally persuaded the children to go back.

Even so, once they had gone some distance away, Chen Ling decided to take a look at the Earth God Temple himself.

Though he was eighty percent certain the children had been mistaken, it was better to check, just in case.

…

The Earth God Temple was small and had not been repaired for many years.

Every New Year, people merely cleaned it, hung up fresh red cloth, and repainted the couplets on its pillars.

It stood alone beside a narrow path through the fields. Behind it was a deep pit, nearly two meters down and covering three or four mu. The pit was filled with trees more than a decade old.

In summer, their crowns blotted out the sky, making the place ideal for escaping the heat.

At night, however, it looked dark and oppressive, enough to send shivers through anyone who saw it.

That was why many adults invented stories about monsters living behind the Earth God Temple, using them to frighten their children into staying close to the village.

In those days, child trafficking was common, and once a child was abducted, finding them again was extremely difficult.

By then, Chen Ling had arrived at the temple and was looking around.

The temple gates were locked, but the gap between them was wide enough to see the objects inside clearly.

There was no one anywhere in the surrounding fields.

Only the kites belonging to Liuni’er and the other children had fallen nearby, their strings tangled together in a disordered heap.

Chen Ling walked over, untangled and wound up the kite strings, then stored the kites inside his pocket realm. He planned to return them to the children later.

Then he made his way behind the temple.

After climbing down into the pit, he searched carefully. Before long, between two large trees standing close together, he found the thing Liuni’er and the others had described.

Rotten clothes, tangled hair, and bones…

As Chen Ling approached, something beneath the rotten clothes began to writhe faintly.

Listening closely, he could hear intermittent whimpering. The sound was so soft that it was impossible to hear without coming right up to it.

Chen Ling crouched down and gently pulled the clothes aside.

Beneath them lay the body of a dog.

It was black and already stiff with frost.

Yet its belly still moved from time to time, and two tiny tails protruded from beneath it. Every so often, a weak whimper escaped.

Chen Ling immediately understood what had happened.

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Carefully moving the black dog’s body aside, he found two puppies—one black and one yellow—shivering beneath it. Their eyes had not yet opened, and they had clearly been born only recently.

Once Chen Ling moved their mother’s body away, the two little creatures began crawling about with soft whimpers, instinctively searching for milk.

Unfortunately, their mother was dead. Whether she had died in childbirth or from some other cause, they would never be able to nurse from her now.

“These two little fellows are probably only two or three days old. They’ve already had diarrhea in this freezing weather. I wonder whether they can even survive…”

Chen Ling stroked the two puppies, uncertain himself.

They had not eaten anything since birth, and several patches of thin feces stained the rotten clothes. It was obvious they had already suffered from diarrhea.

Anyone with experience knew that puppies in such a condition were unlikely to survive.

But he could not simply leave them there. All he could do was hope that the Sun-Moon Grotto-Heaven would be powerful enough to save them.

With a single thought, Chen Ling picked up the two puppies and brought them into the pocket realm.

…

Inside the pocket realm.

Holding the two puppies in his arms, Chen Ling walked to the stream and used his fingers to feed them drops of stream water.

After feeding them several times, the results did not disappoint him.

The two little creatures, who had been barely alive moments earlier, were now able to open their eyes.

They rubbed their tiny heads affectionately against Chen Ling’s chest, as though they still wanted more water.

“Well, aren’t you two something? This is stream water. Do you think it’s milk?”

Looking at the two puppies rooting around in his arms as if searching for their mother’s milk, Chen Ling could not help laughing helplessly.

He placed them on the ground and fed them several more times with water from the stream.

Before long, the two little fellows had become full of energy. They could toddle about over short distances, their legs carrying them in clumsy little runs.

As they ran, they let out bright, vigorous cries.

At last, Chen Ling no longer had to worry about whether they would survive.

Seeing this, he smiled and carried the two puppies back to the thatched cottage.

Then he picked up a hoe and left the pocket realm.

Back in the outside world, Chen Ling dealt with the black dog’s body. Using the hoe, he dug a hole nearby and buried it.

The temperature was still low, and the dog had not been dead long, so there was no unpleasant odor yet. Still, it would not have been right to leave the body there unattended.

After burying it as best he could and filling in the earth, Chen Ling returned the hoe to the pocket realm and continued toward the wasteland at the foot of the mountain.

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