The Village Exorcist

At sixteen, I dropped out of middle school and became an apprentice to an old village exorcist, while my younger brother also left school to follow me in performing rituals. The countryside had strict ancestral rules: those who died away from home could never be brought into the family hall. One farming family, grieving the accidental death of the male head, defied tradition and carried his body into their newly built, debt-ridden house. Instantly, white mist filled the room, ice crystals formed on the wooden bed, and a bone-chilling cold seeped in, even snapping all the incense sticks offered to the ancestors. Such a fierce haunting was too dangerous for local shamans to handle, so we contacted eight masters to perform the Eight Immortals Array to purify the house. We ordered a cinnabar-red coffin from a renowned coffin shop, obtained a three-year-old pure yang rooster, and used its blood to draw talismans for suppressing evil. When sealing the coffin, the vengeful spirit resisted fiercely—peach wood nails wouldn't drive in, and the wooden stool beneath sank under the oppressive aura, until the deceased's young son called out tenderly, and the malice slowly dissipated. We set up an altar to invoke the Five Ghost Emperors, slaughtered a pig to honor the ancestors, and eight of us circled the coffin chanting sutras. During the funeral procession, the coffin grew so heavy it nearly fell, so we used a live rooster nailed to the top to suppress the evil, releasing it only after burial. These are the eerie rural tales and age-old funeral taboos I, a young village exorcist, personally experienced. — Description from novelcodex.org