Chapter 23 Part 1

The humanoid resentment trailed behind them, its dripping wet hair making it look even more pitiable and helpless. The lamp vessel was its territory, but Chen Huaiyue had always been an extremely restrained person. Her love and hatred were both measured and proper; even if she craved more, she would never demand it.

Influenced by her, the resentment couldn’t act wildly. It wore an expression of mingled hatred and grievance, yet it was utterly powerless against the two intruders.

Meanwhile, at the mountain gate, Chen Huaiyue stood holding an umbrella, waiting for the person she longed for with all her heart.

Yuan Jie had rolled up his monk’s robes. The rain wasn’t heavy, but he looked like he’d traveled a long distance—his clothes were soaked through, his monk shoes darkened by water and caked with mud. In one hand, he carried a cloth bag stuffed with freshly bought vegetables—

Chen Huaiyue’s health had never been good. The doctor had examined her and noted that while the temple’s diet was light enough, it was too monotonous. Fresh from giving birth to a stillborn child, she needed proper nourishment, so her meals were prepared separately from those of the other monks.

In his other hand, Yuan Jie held the crystal ball. From afar, through the hazy drizzle, he shook the toy at her, sending artificial snowflakes tumbling down.

Chen Huaiyue had never been able to bear the sight of snow in her life. She was born in winter, sold off during a heavy blizzard. Later, when her parents came demanding money, snow had fallen outside again, and she was beaten until her eardrums burst, leaving her deaf for a long time—as if that silent snow had never stopped falling.

But when the former abbot found her, it had been snowing too. Soaring Firmament Temple was blanketed in white, its front hall under repair with the golden Buddha statue yet to be installed. It sat amid a pile of dry grass. He held his palm upward, cupping a handful of snow. As Chen Huaiyue passed by, a mischievous senior brother swept the snow from the Buddha’s palm, dumping it all over the little girl.

Yuan Jie placed the crystal ball in Chen Huaiyue’s hand. “Happy birthday. I heard it snowed when you were born. Snow is good—it brings life to all things.”

“Snow is good—it brings life to all things.”

Xue Tong extended her hand from under the umbrella into the rain, and Chen Huaiyue’s joy surged forth.

With that, Chen Huaiyue’s brief life came to an end.

The sky grew pitch black. She sat before the dressing table, the artificial snowflakes in the crystal ball just settling. The face in the dressing mirror spoke to Chen Huaiyue. “I want to kill that monk. Because of him, you have to leave me! Because of him, our child died!”

The living soul in the mirror was the true fierce ghost. As long as Chen Huaiyue lived, it would never let her go.

Xun Ruosu didn’t consider herself some paragon of virtue. She lacked a strong sense of justice and rarely forced a strict right or wrong on things.

Heaven and earth had their own retribution. Even someone as formidable as Xue Tong had to rely on the chill of an air conditioner for relief. Some retributions came late—they weren’t explanations for victims but an inevitable fairness.

That fairness was called the heavenly dao, towering above all rules. It wouldn’t bend for personal favoritism.

Even so, Xun Ruosu felt a surge of disgust toward the living soul in the mirror.

“Got you mad?” The rain outside had stopped, but Xue Tong still held the umbrella. “I figured someone like you was born with a heart of stone.”

Xun Ruosu, who had lived this long without ever being called heartless, usually had customers who, on leaving, grabbed her hand and praised her effusively as a living bodhisattva. Some even embroidered thank-you banners and brought them over, emblazoned with huge characters: “Skilled in business, master of exorcism.” Signed, “A Departed Soul.”

It had kept her friends from lingering at her home for over half a month.

Like a long-buried secret exposed to sunlight, Xun Ruosu stood stunned for a moment. Suddenly, she felt she truly excelled at deceiving the world and stealing reputations. Her own loves and hates were too faint, hardly those of a normal person.

Xun Ruosu stayed silent for a long time. Xue Tong glanced up at her and saw Xun Ruosu fixated on the locust tree branches. The weather was still cold, the branches bare and stark. Several twigs hanging at eye level had already been snapped off by Xun Ruosu.

Finally, she lifted her eyes innocently toward Xue Tong. “Does this count as destruction?”

“That would only count if you sawed down the whole locust tree.” Xue Tong wasn’t one for playing by the rules herself. In the past, when she entered lamp vessels alone, while others relived their heart-wrenching memories, she’d sit nearby molding clay figures.

No matter how she shaped them, they always came out looking like a bodhisattva—whose features somewhat resembled Xun Ruosu’s.

Chen Huaiyue’s memories had reached their final stage. She wore a pretty floral dress that seemed outdated now but had been rare thirty years ago. Though the coldest days had passed, spring hadn’t arrived. There were no calendars in the monks’ quarters, so the exact date was unclear. Yuan Jie was absent; even the lamp in his room was out.

Chen Huaiyue placed the wooden doll at the door to Yuan Jie’s room and laid a sheet of paper beside it. She couldn’t read or write, but she could draw. Her simple sketch was recognizable: it urged Yuan Jie to care well for this child. Then, slowly, she walked toward the square well.

“I used to be terrified of ghosts. Little Brother told me this courtyard’s feng shui had been checked—malicious ghosts can’t get out or in,” Chen Huaiyue said calmly, speaking to herself. “Didn’t you want to haunt me forever, to be together always? Then we’ll be together forever.”

“What are you doing? Stop! Stop right now!” The living soul writhed and twisted inside Chen Huaiyue’s body. “I don’t want to die with you. You’re not worthy!”

“Too late.” Chen Huaiyue stood at the well’s edge, facing the towering locust tree. Moonlight illuminated her face, revealing relief and defiance. “Little Brother said people live for a reason. I used to think I had none—who loved me? Who cared? Until I came up the mountain… The brothers in the temple treated me so well. I realized you can live like that, be a little willful, and it’s fine.”

“But that still wasn’t my reason for living. Now I get it. I live to learn to fight back. I hate you so much. I hate how you clung to me, how you saw me as your possession. You always said bought things could be ruined at will…”

Chen Huaiyue suddenly leaned back. She was already thin and frail, and the square well mouth was larger than most households’. With hardly any resistance, she tumbled in.

Xun Ruosu instinctively reached out to grab her, life and death brushing past her fingertips. But this was merely Chen Huaiyue’s memory; as an observer, Xun Ruosu couldn’t interfere. Only a lingering phrase hung in the air: “When you bullied my kindness and weakness, did you ever think I had a bottom line you couldn’t cross?”

Everything in Soaring Firmament Temple had been Chen Huaiyue’s safe haven from her nightmares. Pliant by nature, if she’d been utterly alone, she might have let herself be beaten to death without seeking revenge. But now she wasn’t alone. Her heart was bound to this mountain, to every blade of grass and tree. To protect them, she was willing to stake her life.

As she died, Chen Huaiyue still clutched the crystal ball Yuan Jie had given her. Though hollow, its heavy glass base made it sink upon hitting the water, destined to rest forever with her bones.

Chen Huaiyue’s lamp vessel was incomplete precisely because the wooden doll and crystal ball had split her obsession. She had a touch of choice paralysis, unsure which mattered more to her.

Xun Ruosu had lunged forward several steps in her attempt to grab her, nearly plunging into the icy well water herself. Xue Tong flipped her umbrella around and hooked the handle onto Xun Ruosu’s shoulder, yanking her back from “joining Chen Huaiyue in death.”

“Though a lamp vessel is just memories and dreams, getting hurt inside is still dangerous… What moves the body is ultimately the three souls and seven po. If the soul isn’t whole, neither is the body.”

Xue Tong pointed at the grudge soul across from them, still dripping water. “Sometimes they use the final images from life to trick intruders into helping. Good thing you knew better, or those few steps would have been enough to send you into the well.”

“Thanks.” Though Xun Ruosu had stepped back from the edge, she could still hear the splashing from within.

The struggling was just instinct. Chen Huaiyue never cried out for help from start to finish; she drowned herself quietly in the well.

With that, the memories ended. The scenes froze in eternal stasis, like a landscape inside the crystal ball. The courtyard would know no more sunrises or sunsets.

“Now that we’ve uncovered the whole story, how do we resolve her knot?” Xun Ruosu asked.

“Two ways: brute force or roundabout. I usually go brute force,” Xue Tong said frankly. “Brute force brings retribution, but roundabout is a hassle.”

Rules were a harsh boss, offering no slacking opportunities to their employees. Any shortcuts were lined with thorns, barbed wire, and live electricity. But Xue Tong didn’t care—as long as there was a shortcut, she’d take it.

She often ended up clawing at the rules in retaliation.

Xun Ruosu actually admired that trait. She finally complimented Xue Tong. “Feels a bit like slacking off at work.”

Xue Tong, however, didn’t catch the praise in her words.

“I recall the Xun family makes a living from fortune-telling. Not rich, but comfortable. You worked a regular job?” Xue Tong and Xun Ruosu were still in the phase of testing each other, not fully acquainted yet.

Xun Ruosu glanced into the well before replying. “Yeah. Right after my mom died, I lost interest in divination and exorcism. So I got a job, trying to blend in with normal people.”

“And what turned you back? Realized you were too weird, couldn’t make friends, got isolated?” Xue Tong sounded a bit gleeful.

“…” Xun Ruosu shook her head. “Work was way more trouble than fortune-telling. Clients calling at 2 a.m., and after my colleague dropped dead from overwork, neither the clients nor the company wanted responsibility. So I quit.”

The rules set by the heavenly dao were harsh to the point of inhumanity, but they were utterly fair—giving what was due without withholding merits, even tossing in bonuses for jobs well done. No grudge held for calling out “heaven’s blindness.”

Plus, the overworked colleague showed up at Xun Ruosu’s door that midnight, perched by her bed complaining all night about the bastard boss and demanding clients. Only after venting did it find release. But Xun Ruosu had to be up at seven the next morning. On her resignation day, her face was thunderous; no one dared argue. She wrapped it up in three days.

Looking back, that had been a turning point. The Xun ancestors had been county magistrates, carpenters, teachers… moonlighting as fortune-tellers. Xun Ruosu, though, was a full-fledged diviner, accumulating merits faster. But with a thin family foundation and thinking she’d die young, her “granary” remained empty to this day.

Mentioning this past inevitably brought Xun Ruosu’s thoughts back to why she still couldn’t just lie down in a coffin and rest forever. It was because of her own ancestor and Xue Tong—one whose bones were gone, soul turned into a Sanskrit script tattooed on Xue Tong’s collarbone; the other… well, she couldn’t blame her.

Xun Ruosu deflated.

As the mistress of Sumeru, Chen Huaiyue had been thoroughly ignored for a spell. Though her memories had been wiped clean, her obsession was still acting up. It probably still remembered nursing a grudge against Xun Ruosu. A chill wind whipped through again, and Xun Ruosu let out another sneeze.

“Sorry,” Xun Ruosu said, rubbing her arms. “I forgot about you there for a moment…”

She turned to Xue Tong with utmost seriousness. “How exactly do I force it?”

“Chen Huaiyue’s feelings all stemmed from Yuan Jie,” Xue Tong explained. She was no stranger to such unethical maneuvers. “Just erase him completely from her life, and she’ll let go on her own. All her lingering memories are trapped in the lamp vessel—wiping them out would be child’s play.”

“What about the backlash?” Xun Ruosu asked, weighing her words.