Daomu Biji: Wu Xie’s Private Notes

Banjie Li (1), Third Master Li, had the best stories among the upper three clans. He became disabled when he was young, because his partners broke his legs when they were in the tomb and left him trapped there for a week. He survived by drinking water from the coffin.

After that, he couldn’t stand up again, so he put a pad made out of cattail leaves under him, and then held two bricks in his hand to support himself. Maybe this early experience stimulated him, because he was the most ruthless person in the Mystic Nine.

Even his wife didn’t know how many people he had killed. He was extremely paranoid and distrustful of people. There were rumors that he slept in an ancient tomb at night and was accompanied by zombies because he thought that living people were more terrifying than dead people.

Even so, Banjie Lie’s tomb robbing skills were outstanding. His hands were very strong and agile, and even though he was short and small, he could climb trees faster than normal people with just his bare hands. He could enter places where many people couldn’t, and retrieve things that were hard to get.

Strangely enough, like Er Yuehong, the story that most people talked about wasn’t what he did in the tomb, but the relationship between him and his sister-in-law.

His eldest brother and both his parents had died early, so his sister-in-law took care of him since he was a teenager. At that ignorant age, his sister-in-law was like a mother to him. They were poor and his sister-in-law had to suffer a lot to raise both him and her own children. Banjie Li grew up in this kind of environment and had a sensitive heart, which was probably why he had such an extreme personality.

During the time when his sister-in-law was helping to wash clothes in someone else's house, she was beaten and became deaf in one ear because she ripped a cheongsam. After that, the house was burned to the ground. The case was never settled, but everyone thought that Banjie Li did it.

The two people were living under the same roof, and as Banjie Li grew up, the gossip gradually increased. Indeed, in that kind of house, you could always see something you shouldn’t if you looked behind the curtain.

His sister-in-law wasn’t much older than him, and the atmosphere slowly became strange. Even the way he looked at her also changed bit by bit.

His sister-in-law was a person who had romantic experiences, so she knew what Banjie Li was thinking. As a result, she sent him to other places to become an apprentice, but he always wanted to come back. That kind of atmosphere became stronger and stronger, and her many years of widowhood made her fear her body’s strange reaction.

Banjie Li knew very well at the time that there was a problem between the two of them, but he was very naive. His sister-in-law’s life was hopeless, so he wanted to be strong and keep her from suffering. After that, he thought he could marry her and take care of her for his elder brother. This was the best ending he could think of at the time.

As a result, he secretly learned how to rob graves. He was just like many kids back then, who dreamed of becoming rich overnight. In the end, his legs were broken and he almost died in a tomb.

His sister-in-law was devastated. This was a man who was somewhere between her husband and son, and now he was disabled. The pain she felt was two-fold. She originally thought her days of suffering might come to an end, but her hopes were dashed into darkness. She couldn’t face her late husband.

At the same time, however, these fierce emotions also broke through some of her psychological defenses, which was something Banjie Li wasn’t expecting.

After that, she had to take care of Banjie Li more carefully, like wiping him and helping him pee. The skinship between them became more and more frequent, more and more ordinary, and more and more uncontrollable. Even Banjie Li found that the way his sister-in-law looked at him had changed.

One night after New Year's Eve, the last straw finally broke the camel’s back. There was a heavy snow outside the house, and the gasping sounds of two people could be heard coming from inside. The passion that had accumulated for many years burst out at once, and everything went crazy.

Half a year later, Banjie Li recovered and returned to the tomb where he had been trapped before so that he could retrieve the artifacts he had hidden.

This time, he was no longer who he used to be. The hatred of being betrayed, and the guilt he harbored towards his sister-in-law made him extremely cruel to a point where he wouldn’t have mercy on anyone.

He found the partners who had tried to kill him back then, broke their legs, dragged them to the tomb where he had stayed at that time, and starved them to death.

Gods and ghosts were afraid of the wicked.

As Banjie Li became more and more wealthy, he bought a house and started his own business. After that, he gradually settled down. Most of his men were disabled, and one of them was dumb. They later became a group of their own, but I’ve decided not to elaborate on them for now.

After he became well-off, Banjie Li once thought of marrying his sister-in-law, but she hoped that he could marry someone else. She thought that she was dirty. She couldn’t allow herself to marry him since she had promised her husband to take good care of him.

His sister-in-law was very insistent, so there was nothing Banjie Li could do. They never talked about it again, but Banjie Li was resolute in his refusal to marry.

His sister-in-law wanted to find an honest man to remarry in order to keep herself out of Banjie Li’s mind, but Banjie Li was the most ruthless man in Changsha at the time, so no one dared to get close to her. Later, it was rumored that his sister-in-law eventually gave birth to their son.

I really wanted to write a sad story about how his sister-in-law was killed by someone or had a miscarriage and died in the end, but there was no such decisive reality in the world.

There were so many misfortunes in the world that no matter how cruel Banjie Li was, I still hoped he lived a long and healthy life, because his sister-in-law was definitely a good person. Although it wasn’t right, he was still a courageous man if he could maintain that happy balance between good and extreme evil.

Women would hope this abnormal love was fruitful, and men would want to hear more detailed descriptions of that night, but we may never really know what exactly happened.

The only thing that could be determined was that my grandfather had said he had met Banjie Li’s sister-in-law when it was her fortieth birthday. She was a very beautiful woman with a hint of glamour in her eyes, which was why my grandfather could clearly remember what she looked like. If he had a sister-in-law like her, he would never let another man marry her, either.

I asked my grandfather, “Does Grandma know what you think?” And he gave me a hundred yuan as pocket money.

Well, this story is gossip, but it also has some truth: If men want to protect what they love, they have to be strong enough. No matter what the outcome will be, don’t let women sacrifice themselves for men, or at least let their sacrifices be rewarded.

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TN Notes

(1) It literally means “Half-body Li” in Chinese.