Legend has it that there was a shepherd who was tending sheep on the mountain beside the Wei River.
Suddenly there was an earthquake in the mountain.
One of the sheep was frightened and fled into a dark cave.
The sheep all belong to the owner, and they are more valuable than the life of the shepherd.
If they were lost, the whole family would be ruined and they would not be able to afford the compensation.
Regardless of his personal safety, the sheepherder hurriedly pursued the sheep into the cave.
After passing through the invisible tunnel, the sheepherder's eyes suddenly lighted up, and he came to a large, brightly lit cave.
In front of him, there were people standing in darkness.
These people are all folk jugglers, performing their own unique skills diligently.
There is a palace with a stern atmosphere further away, but there is no one there, and it looks gloomy.
The sheepherd had never seen much of the world, and had never done anything else except herding sheep.
He was naive and stupid.
He did not notice the strange atmosphere here.
The artists all had expressionless faces, and the strangest thing was that there was no audience, only thousands of people.
Hundreds of artists were performing acrobatics on their own.
The sheepherder was curious and looked at the shadow puppet show being performed in front of him.
Time passed by and he completely forgot how long it had been since he entered the mountain, and he also forgot about the sheep he was looking for.
The shadow puppet artist was an old man.
The old man looked at the sheepherder with cold eyes for a long time.
He suddenly stopped playing the shadow puppet and shouted to him in a low voice, "You are not from here, so hurry up and leave."
The sheepherder woke up from a dream after being told by the old artist.
He seemed to suddenly understand something, and stumbled out.
When he ran outside and looked back, he found that the cave had disappeared.
Later, when I went back and told the villagers what had happened, the elderly people in the village said that this kind of thing would happen to someone every few decades, as if they were possessed by a demon.
They said that they saw hundreds of people in the cave.
Thousands of artists are performing juggling, which is probably related to the fact that a large number of folk artists were buried in Qin Ling.
It is said that after the death of Qin Shihuang, in order to allow him to have the same enjoyment after death as before his death, on the day when the emperor made a grand ceremony, the government deceived folk artists from all over the country with heavy rewards and let them perform in the underground palace of the emperor's mausoleum.
Then the underground palace was suddenly sealed, and the artists were buried alive inside and became ghosts.
Every night, they repeated their actions in life.
Some people have seen such a "ghost show" in the mountains more than once.
Of course, this is just a folk legend, mentioned here to provide some reference for the story in the ghost blowing the lamp novel.
At the beginning of the novel, Hu Bayi and Fatty Wang go to the countryside to join the queue.
This is the origin of the shadow puppet show seen in the tomb of the Empress Dowager of Liao Dynasty where Jiulong covers Yulian in Niuxin Mountain in Northeast China.
There are many legends about "ghost shows", and there are many different versions.
The common point is that the participants all have high fevers and are delirious.
In deep mountains and poor valleys, areas with no air circulation, light, shadow and airflow will produce some confusing illusions, and it is not surprising to see anything inside
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