Chapter 32

Xun Ruosu first dabbed some cinnabar onto the corpse’s forehead between its brows, then pressed the hyacinth flower down on top. She couldn’t rough up the body too much—otherwise, it would be hard to explain when the police showed up.

She pressed one hand against the flower’s heart and the cinnabar while curling the fingers of her other hand into specific knuckles. Xue Tong had no idea what Xun Ruosu had divined, but she watched as Xun Ruosu’s brows furrowed deeper and deeper. At the same time, Xue Tong’s gaze fell on the hyacinth flower, her expression turning thoughtful.

“There are other bodies!”

“Yuqin was killed by it too!”

The two women spoke almost in unison. Xue Tong continued, “It’s collecting three souls and seven po, but not to eat them—it’s processing them to extend its time lingering in the human world. No wonder Yuqin’s soul was incomplete, as if worn away at the edges over endless ages. No wonder her behavior was off, nothing like a young lady from the Republic of China era. No wonder she struck me as discordant from the first glance, like her soul had been crudely stitched together.”

“Hyacinth, hyacinth… Eternal yet fleeting life. To think I’d been fooled into not seeing it!”

“Zhong Li and Yuan Jie are in danger!” Xun Ruosu had been half-crouching on the ground. When she suddenly stood, her vision went black. She swayed for a moment, and Xue Tong reached out to steady her. “Don’t panic. Wuchang is with them—no major disaster will strike. Since this thing went to such lengths to deceive us both, it must have planned this long ago. Can you figure out how it selects its victims?”

“I’ve checked. This man in front of us and the one who died a few days ago weren’t hateful enough, had no connections between them, and came from completely different backgrounds and statuses. Add in Yuqin… She was from the Republic of China era, with even less tie to these two. From what we can see so far, it claims a few lives each time it revives. The key probably isn’t what these people did, but what their ancestors did.”

Xun Ruosu pressed hard against her temples. The pressure made her forehead throb and chased away the darkness clouding her eyes. “Zhong Li may be from a side branch, but she’s still of the Zhong Family. The Zhu Clan traces its roots to ‘Zhong.’ Though that line was slaughtered to the last back then, if you trace it back far enough, the two surnames were originally one. Zhong Li counts as a descendant.”

“The Zhu Clan.”

“Sacrifice.”

“Evil god.”

“A manufactured malicious ghost.”

“Three souls and seven po from nowhere.”

And “Ganyuan Year 3.”

These fragments slowly wove together into a clear thread, but Xun Ruosu still couldn’t grasp the motive behind whatever was stirring this up. By all rights, it should have been like the Buddhas in Soaring Firmament Temple, gazing down on all living beings with compassion.

“Can you still walk?” Xue Tong asked.

“I’m fine. I just stood up too fast and got dizzy for a second—it’s passed.” Xun Ruosu took a deep breath. “Wuchang is powerful, but with no word this long, things might not be looking good… Getting back to the abandoned building site from here takes at least five or six minutes at best. We need to plan our response.”

“Also, I need to borrow some of your blood.” As she spoke, Xun Ruosu pulled a sheet of talisman paper from the cloth pouch at her side. She bit her own fingertip hard to draw blood, then leaned down and bit Xue Tong’s as well. “Don’t worry—I had a full checkup three months ago. No communicable diseases.”

The two drops of blood fell onto the yellow talisman together. Xun Ruosu folded it into a paper crane in a few deft motions and said to the little thing, “Go.”

The paper crane flapped its wings and sped off toward the abandoned building site. It moved much faster than its predecessors, vanishing in the blink of an eye.

Xun Ruosu knew many arts, and so did Xue Tong, but neither commanded a technique to shrink distances to inches. Otherwise, they could flit back and forth between the Xun Family Old Estate and the graveyard in moments, or between the countryside villa and Soaring Firmament Temple just as easily—saving a lot of trouble.

“The regret of not arriving in time” was one of the Rules, after all. Otherwise, with Xue Tong’s abilities, she could roam the world at will and would have achieved fulfillment long ago.

When Xun Ruosu had learned these arts as a child of four or five—who could barely read—she hadn’t been the prodigy of the family like Zhong Li, but merely average. Yet that one Rule had etched itself firmly in her mind; she’d never forgotten it after hearing it the first time.

Five minutes later, Xun Ruosu stood before the abandoned building site. What had once shown some promise of structure looked like it had been ravaged by every natural disaster imaginable. The gray-white walls had crumbled, exposing jagged rebar in the middle. Several load-bearing pillars had been demolished, leaving the entire building teetering on the brink of collapse. It could bury someone alive at any moment.

Neither she nor Xue Tong had hearts of gold. The malicious ghost, bound by scriptures, served as one of the load-bearing pillars, barely steadying the sway between the first and second floors.

The malicious ghost: “…”

No one had ever treated it like this before.

The second floor stood empty. Even Wuchang was nowhere to be seen. The floor was littered with clumps of cat hair, but no bloodstains. The paper crane Xun Ruosu had sent ahead was gone too—it looked like it had arrived in time.

No matter how formidable the thing lurking in the shadows was, Yuan Jie and Zhong Li weren’t pushovers. Add the fierce, battle-loving Wuchang, plus all the safeguards Xue Tong and Xun Ruosu had sent over, and it wouldn’t come to disaster in just a moment or two.

“When I divined for the deceased earlier, I glimpsed a cave—it must be the lair, the Ten Thousand People Pit.” Xun Ruosu’s tone was grim, icy and oppressive. “That pit must be thick with resentment. The monk might hold out, but Zhong Li is only thirteen.”

Her mind wasn’t fully mature yet—the age most prone to sensitivity and melancholy, swayed by the world around her.

How long could Zhong Li last in a place like that?

“Chase!” Xue Tong said, her word sharp and unyielding.

The malicious ghost, as spoils of war, naturally came along. The two women headed toward the Ten Thousand People Pit like they were walking a dog on a leash…

The pit wasn’t far from the neighborhood. The developers had originally planned a luxury villa district there—low density but vast in scope, wrapping halfway around the mountain. The front gate was near the highway; the back nearly abutted the pit.

The developer was an outsider, probably swindled from halfway across the country. Any local would never dare break ground there. Legends about Soaring Firmament Mountain spread by word of mouth in too many versions. Even if they were all false and no demons or ghosts existed in the world, no one would buy property anyway.

Thanks to Xun Ruosu’s urging and the malicious ghost clearing the path, they didn’t dawdle. By the time they reached their destination, even Xun Ruosu—who rarely sweated—was starting to feel warm.

The Ten Thousand People Pit had changed much over the eras. It lay beside a pool of verdant water, deep and jade-green like solidified gemstone. The surface was calm and clear, devoid of life. Xun Ruosu had divined the “Water” trigram and thought the pool itself might be the original site. Only when she drew near did she realize otherwise.

Beside the deep pool stood a small shrine built of stone and bricks. But the shrine held no deity or plaque—only a couplet: “Diamond glare slays the deluded killer; the butcher’s blade remains—deceive not your heart.” The lines didn’t match in meter or rhyme, but the running script was elegant.

This little shrine was the Ten Thousand People Pit.

No divination or proof was needed. Standing before it, Xun Ruosu felt malice surging within her. It was a silent tombstone, interring far too many souls. Even with Soaring Firmament Temple suppressing it, this was merely “stopping killing with killing, blocking floods with dams.” It wouldn’t last.

“Someone’s laid a seal here—it’s not in its true form.” Xue Tong circled the shrine once. She flicked her finger against the air in front of her. The already faint sunlight skewed in an instant, vanishing entirely from overhead. Darkness in a bloody crimson hue engulfed them.

This darkness differed from night or overcast skies; everything around them remained visible. But it pressed down with misery and bleakness. The crimson was endless bloodlight. Before Xue Tong and Xun Ruosu unfolded a vision of Hell—

Corpses strewn everywhere, one atop another. The rotten ones lay at the bottom; the top layer still writhed with the not-yet-dead. In the open wilds, the stench couldn’t gather, yet it still clawed at the throat.

The pit stretched beyond sight. In the center lay an open square. A massive Bodhisattva statue was buried in the earth, only its chest and above protruding.

All the blood flowed toward it.

This was a Bodhisattva carved from hanbai jade. The exposed portion alone stood four or five meters tall, forcing onlookers to crane their necks. Even the malicious ghost—far larger than normal—was but a speck before it.

The statue bore no paint, and the hanbai jade wasn’t the finest quality. It resided quietly in this hellscape. When Xun Ruosu and Xue Tong had stood before the shrine—one ahead, one behind—they now stood the same way before it—

Xun Ruosu on the open ground, facing the Bodhisattva head-on. She could almost reach out and touch the mudra it formed.

The Bodhisattva’s right hand rested on its knee, finger to the ground; its left arm bent upward, palm outward. One might call it wrathful-eyed, but its expression held serene compassion—though laced with more killing intent than the incense-bathed Buddhas in the temples…

This was no evil god. Quite the opposite—a proper, orthodox Bodhisattva statue.

When Xun Ruosu raised her eyes, she found the statue gazing right at her. Its eyes brimmed with clarity and depth, holding a hint of familiar amusement.

In its eyes, Xun Ruosu seemed distinct from the suffering masses below. She received none of its pity.

Xue Tong stood at the statue’s back.

The back was one seamless slab of hanbai jade. For such a massive figure to be carved whole—not pieced together—showed the effort poured into suppressing the mountain’s resentful ghosts. But this flawless jade was drenched in blood. Crimson trailed along the stone’s veins like the body’s meridians.

Beyond that, Xue Tong noted several Arhat Buddha statues buried here alongside the Bodhisattva. Most stood amid the corpse piles, uncleared and unspaced. Several were fully entombed, only mudra-forming hands protruding from the gaps.

These Buddha statues stood two or three meters tall, exposed ones fired in white porcelain or carved in stone. Xue Tong even suspected the bound malicious ghost had once been one of them.

But neither Xue Tong nor Xun Ruosu found the people they sought. Even Wuchang was missing.

Xun Ruosu pulled out two copper coins and struck them together. The crisp chime of the bronze barely carried far, fading after just a few steps. But as she struck them a second time, then a third, a fourth… each sound grew more resonant and piercing than the last. By the eighth strike, even the malicious ghost could no longer bear it and began to struggle faintly.

Just then, a frail and delicate yellow talisman paper crane flew back from amid the cluster of corpses!