Chapter 78 77. Infant Drowning Pond

Time passes slowly.

A few days passed in a flash, and March is coming to an end.

One day, Mo Qingxue and Dasha found Xu Qing and Li Pingan, and the four of them went to the Infant Drowning Pond together.

"What's the situation with the drowning pond?"

"This name sounds strange. How could the government allow such a place to exist?"

On the way to the Infant Drowning Pond, Xu Qing wanted to understand the whole incident in advance.

"That's a deep pool in the mountains." Mo Qingxue said slowly, "You should know that some people can't afford to raise their children, or their children are born with defects, so most of them will drown their children after they are born, right?"

Xu Qing nodded.

Of course he knew this. Ordinary people at the lower classes did not have much entertainment at night. What else could they do except make babies?

In addition, whether a child can be raised to adulthood depends on fate these days, so people try to have as many children as possible so that they can be guaranteed a safe birth.

But having too many children can sometimes cause a big problem.

That is, if there are too many children surviving, some families simply cannot feed them all, especially when the harvest is poor, a mouth is a death warrant.

In desperation, many people choose to drown their newborn babies to reduce the burden.

However, drowning a baby is not something you can do casually. After all, ghosts really exist in this world.

This matter is usually handed over to midwives who have mastered some minor witchcraft to help handle it.

"The Infant Drowning Pond is where the locals drown their babies." Mo Qingxue continued expressionlessly, "The babies are killed as soon as they are born, and the resentment is huge.

It is very easy to turn into a vengeful spirit, and if one has a special fate, it is more likely to turn into a fierce ghost in one step. "

"And the babies who drowned in this baby drowning pond would not turn into ghosts, so over time, the villagers nearby would go there if they wanted to drown their babies."

Xu Qing raised his eyebrows slightly, and even Li Pingan was surprised.

"Why is this happening?"

"I don't know." Mo Qingxue shook her head. "The specific reason is unclear. Later, the villagers thought that there was a spirit living in the pond, and the drowned baby became the guardian boy of the spirit, so that he would not turn into a vengeful ghost."

"What a disgusting excuse." Li Pingan curled his lips.

"Who would not feel guilty if they killed their own child?"

Mo Qingxue also found this statement disgusting at first, but as a detective saw more disgusting things, he was not as disgusted as he was at first.

"You have to have a plausible excuse to deceive yourself and others, to continue living as if nothing happened."

"The key to the problem is not this, but that the villagers later spontaneously built a temple for the water god in the pond and offered sacrifices to him."

"Set up a temple to worship?" Xu Qing's eyes moved. "Mountain and water gods? This kind of worship is spontaneously offered by the villagers and has not been approved by the court. How could the government allow it to exist after knowing about it?"

Since the founding of the Dasheng Dynasty, there has hardly been any enthronement of any mountain and water gods, that is, earth gods.

Because the previous dynasties governed the local areas by enfeoffing local gods of mountains and rivers.

The local gods handle all incidents involving cultivators and evil spirits in a certain area, while mortal officials only need to manage the people under their jurisdiction, thus ensuring that the people in a certain area can live and work in peace and contentment.

However, these local gods who were recognized by the national dynasty and were responsible for protecting a certain area, not only did not help the previous dynasty to stabilize the situation when the previous dynasty collapsed, but instead added insult to injury.

Taizu had seen how those mountain and water spirits, who were held high and worshipped as gods by the people, enslaved the people after the collapse of the previous dynasty. Some even turned into evil demons, ate living people, and enjoyed living sacrifices.

Therefore, after Taizu established the country, he did not inherit the system of mortals governing the world and gods governing cultivation in the previous dynasty, and no longer established any gods of mountains and rivers.

Instead, he created the Yang Fire of the State, which protected a city or a place by combining the national destiny with the vitality of living people, and relied on the baptism of national destiny to allow all scholars who passed the imperial examination to enter the door of cultivation.

In this way, everyone under the Dasheng court system is both an official and a cultivator.

The previous situation of separation between mortals and cultivators was changed to unified management by the imperial court, with officials having the triple responsibilities of protecting the people, eliminating evil spirits, and restricting cultivators.

Nowadays in the Great Sheng Dynasty, except for a few places, it is rare to see mountain and water gods.

At the same time, setting up temples and worshipping privately is also a serious crime.

"The government did destroy the temple and even stopped allowing villagers to drown their babies in the pond, but a lot of trouble followed."

"Many poor people didn't have the extra money to hire a midwife to take care of their babies, and the government banned going to the Infant Drowning Pond, so they could only find a random river to drown the babies or strangle them to death and then bury the bodies."

"As a result, many infant spirits were born and caused chaos. The government was overwhelmed by the situation and had no choice but to lift the restrictions on the Infant Drowning Pond."

"The government's ban and release actually helped to make the Infant Drowning Pond famous. The Water God Temple beside the pond was later rebuilt and became very popular. There was even a rumor that it could protect dead children."

"The nearby villagers would place the bodies of some babies who died prematurely or children who died unfortunately into the pond."

"I hope their poor child can be successfully reincarnated under the protection of the water god."

"It was for this reason that Liu Sanniang chose to sink the child's body into the drowning pond after the child was accidentally miscarried."

After listening to Mo Qingxue's words, Xu Qing's face became gloomy and he felt something strange.

Although it is true that there is a lot of resentment when babies are killed just after birth, not every infanticide will lead to a ghost disaster.

Otherwise, wouldn’t the world be full of ghosts?

Moreover, the phenomenon of people drowning newborns had continued for countless years. Before the appearance of the Baby Drowning Pond, there had not been a concentrated outbreak of the ghost baby disaster.

He expressed his doubts aloud.

Mo Qingxue’s answer was that the government did have doubts.

But after sending people into the pond to investigate, they found nothing unusual, and the incense offered by the villagers was very scattered, not concentrated on an individual who might steal the incense.

The final conclusion is that the bottom of the pool may be a node where water veins circulate. The resentment of the killed baby who fell into it would be carried away by the water veins, thus forming this special situation.

"That's odd."

Everything about this pond is weird, but nothing can be faulted, which is in itself quite intriguing.

Never mind. I'll know what's going on when I see it with my own eyes.

Unable to get more information from Mo Qingxue, Xu Qing stopped dwelling on it and asked, "The purpose of our trip to the Infant Drowning Pond this time is to retrieve the remains of Liu Sanniang's child."

"Yes." Mo Qingxue nodded. "Since the black snake demon wants to use the corpse of Liu Sanniang's child to deal with the Cao family, we judge that there may be other demons targeting the corpse in the future."

"Rather than letting the other party take it, it's better for us to recover it first."

"Can we find it?" Fatty Li felt that what they were doing was like looking for a needle in a haystack. "There are so many bodies that have sunk in the Drowned Infant Pond over the years. How can we find it just because we want to?"

"You can't do it, but Taoist Master Xu Qing can."

(End of this chapter)