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墨書 Inktalez
In the rural area of my childhood, there was no electricity and little cultural life. The greatest entertainment was listening to the elders tell stories in the Livestock Shed, where tales of taboos, rules, customs, as well as legends of strange creatures and demons were shared.
Due to the lack of electricity, unless it was a moonlit night, the village would be engulfed in darkness after sunset. The endless blackness often stirred up fears and imaginations.
Hu Family Village was relatively large, divided into front and back streets. The Front Street and Back Street were mostly connected by narrow alleys that were cramped, deep, and dark, often filled with many legends.
The yard of the Concubine's family was located deep within one such alley. It was said that on the outer wall of the Concubine's house, there was a "Bag Spirit." Whenever someone passed by at night, they would often find a large cloth bag leaning against the wall.
In those days of scarcity, there were always those who were tempted by wealth. Elders would recount tales of how someone’s Second Uncle had a distant cousin who saw no one around and joyfully took the bag away. But the further they walked, the heavier it became...
Eventually, they would collapse under its weight and know nothing more. When found later, they would be lying in a grave circle in the wild, exhausted and sore all over, having received their punishment.
Different elders told different versions of who had been punished, but each spoke with great familiarity.
Later versions of the story evolved further.
As these eerie tales spread, timid people tried to avoid that area at night while the bolder ones sought to experience it for themselves.
One night, Er Dadan, who had never feared anything since childhood, truly encountered the Bag Spirit at the corner of the Concubine's house: a large, bulging cloth bag stood there, tied shut with a rope so that nothing inside could be seen...
Er Dadan steadied himself, took a few puffs from his pipe, and began to talk to himself: "Whose bag is this left here? It's so big; what grain could it hold?"
As he spoke, he reached out to untie the rope. After loosening it without looking inside the bag, he casually shoved his burning hot pipe into it...
At this point, the elders often feel a jolt: suddenly, they hear a scream from an unknown source, and a shadowy figure, indistinguishable in form, flees with sparks flying. Since then, the Bag Spirit has never appeared again!
There is another legend with a similar meaning called "Millennia Black, Eternity White."
It tells of someone walking at night who suddenly sees two rabbits in the wild, one black and one white, hopping around. The person happily tries to catch them but can never succeed, and the rabbits keep multiplying...
Until the sound of a crow cawing breaks the silence, and as dawn approaches, the rabbits vanish in an instant. The one trying to catch them realizes they have been wandering in circles around a graveyard (looking back now, this story has a flaw: how could the black rabbit be seen at night?).
In the early 1980s, Annan County implemented the Household Responsibility System, and every family became busy. The livestock from the production team was distributed among households, and the Livestock Shed, which served as a "gossip center," ceased to exist.
Later, when electricity was introduced to the village and televisions became available, there was even less space for such stories to thrive. An era came to an end.
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