Chapter 33 Part 2

Xue Tong stood off to one side. She knew full well that she ought to intervene and stop the “Yuqin” from saying any more—that some truths were still too dangerous to expose just yet. But Xue Tong didn’t budge an inch. She watched the scene like a disinterested spectator, neither joining in nor interrupting, her full attention fixed on Xun Ruosu. She even caught the fleeting flicker of confusion that crossed Xun Ruosu’s brow.

Xun Ruosu had always known that being born into the Xun Family meant she wasn’t an ordinary person and could never expect a tranquil life. Still, farewells and hardships were things she could anticipate. That all changed two days ago, when she clawed her way out of her own coffin. Suddenly, everything was different.

Xue Tong had appeared in her life—a figure with whom she shared a deep, preexisting connection—and with her came revelations that peeled back layer after layer.

For all her bewilderment, Xun Ruosu’s heart was perhaps too steady. She showed no excessive shock. After all, every soul reborn into the human realm had passed through hundreds of cycles of reincarnation. In a previous life, one might have been an emperor, a cat or dog, a favored child of heaven, or a beggar who died young.

She herself had turned through the wheel of reincarnation. To live an utterly unremarkable life in every single one was a feat in itself.

The “Yuqin” continued speaking, pouring out words laden with emotion. Then, abruptly, it fell silent, lowering its gaze and murmuring, “Amitabha.” That distant, serene peace returned to its form. “Bearing these sins doesn’t feel like a hardship to me. It’s just… heartbreaking.”

It reached out, pointing to the corpse of a young man on the left. The body had been there for years—long enough for the blood to congeal. He was dressed like a scholar. “He was heading to the capital for the imperial exams. Jealous of his talent, three local scholars from the county lured him into the deep mountains and murdered him. When his body was found, his parents hanged themselves in grief, and his wife drowned herself in the river. He lingered in the world seeking vengeance, only to be shattered by a dust whisk, losing one of his souls. In his next three reincarnations, he was born an idiot and died young each time.”

“That one over there—fifty-eight years old, on his way home after seeing his daughter off to her wedding. He was struck and killed by a drunk driver at the roadside.”

“And there, when an epidemic broke out, rumors spread that burying a pair of twins in the village well would save everyone. To protect their children, the parents and the whole family of four were stoned to death.”

“There are thirteen thousand six hundred and eighty-two corpses here in total. Not a single one met a peaceful end.”

The “Yuqin” wore a serene smile, but its eyes trembled faintly.

“You’re killing people to avenge these wronged souls, aren’t you?” Xun Ruosu let out a deep sigh. “I performed a divination for those who died in the past two days… Their ancestors all had ties to the Ten Thousand People Pit.”

As she spoke, Xun Ruosu suddenly drew a copper coin from her sleeve. It was an odd coin—brand new, yet its square hole in the center was incomplete, marred by several cracks worn into the top edge.

Xun Ruosu had been pinching it between two fingers at first, but now she let go. The coin floated in midair, though unevenly, tilted head-heavy and not entirely upright. Xue Tong’s pupils contracted as she watched from nearby.

Two extremely fine threads passed through the coin’s square hole—nearly invisible in the blood-red gloom. Xue Tong traced them back and saw one end tied to the “Yuqin’s” fingertip, the other fastened to the paper crane’s wing.

The paper crane had flown out from inside the cage, so the threads looped around the golden bars and now stretched taut.

“The ancestor of the woman who died in the abandoned building site a few days ago was one of the planners of the Ten Thousand People Pit,” Xun Ruosu continued. “Due to the wars and natural disasters back then, countless people died in Clear Canal County and the surrounding towns. Most were buried in shallow graves, and without proper handling, the corpses risked spreading plagues or even rat infestations. So someone proposed digging a pit up here on the desolate Soaring Firmament Mountain, a place where no one lived, to collect and dispose of all the bodies uniformly.”

Xun Ruosu’s eyes were pitch-black voids, impenetrable. Though she spoke from the divination signs, her divinations usually required sharing vision with a person or ghost—a connection that could span widely, depending on what she was divining. Thus, the scenes and experiences playing out before her eyes didn’t belong to Yuqin itself, but to its ancestors.

At the time, creating the Ten Thousand People Pit wasn’t wrong. If the bodies weren’t dumped here, they’d rot elsewhere. Deaths on that scale wiped out entire families; even if one or two survived by luck, they couldn’t afford proper burials and had to rely on the authorities to cart the remains away.

“The college senior who died in the abandoned building site a few days ago—his ancestor was a general who crushed a peasant uprising, slaughtering three hundred people, all thrown into the Ten Thousand People Pit.”

“And Boss Fang’s death was even more inexplicable. The branch of the family you wanted revenge on had long since died out. Boss Fang’s ancestor was a distant uncle to that man. Even if he carved the giant stone statues for the Zhu Family, helping bring you into being, it wasn’t a capital crime.”

The Ten Thousand People Pit had evolved through a tangle of historical causes, not the work of any one person. No one bore the full blame. In the beginning, planning the pit was meant to give those who perished in the disasters a place to rest. Carving the stone statues and burying them here was intended to benefit the local people. Good intentions, malice, carelessness… all these strands of karma had converged, forging the pit as it existed now.

During the Ganyuan Era, the Ten Thousand People Pit was dug on Soaring Firmament Mountain, though the exact year and date were lost to history—from groundbreaking to completion, and the arrival of the first batch of bodies, time blurred together. Once a certain number accumulated, ghosts began haunting the area. In Ganyuan Year 3, to pacify the region, the Zhu Family proposed burying a white jade Bodhisattva statue here. For three months, all was peaceful.

But three months later, the Zhu Family was wiped out in a single night, and the hauntings grew worse—bloodthirsty and murderous.

“The people you’ve chosen are far too innocent,” Xun Ruosu went on. “Even implicating their entire families doesn’t justify this. Unless something happened during those three months—a trigger that shook your bodhisattva heart.”

With that, Xun Ruosu flicked the copper coin on the thread. A tiny vibration traveled along the silk string all the way to the “Yuqin’s” fingertip, making its finger tremble in response. Xun Ruosu spoke again. “It was an old woman—Hu Clan Zhang Yingniang?”

The name rang no bells; it wasn’t in any historical records, and Xue Tong had never encountered it. Yet the “Yuqin” froze, stunned into silence for a long moment.

The paper crane hovering in the air grew agitated instead. It tugged at the thread tied to its wing and flew toward a Buddha statue, perching on its shoulder.

This Buddha statue was half-exposed, and since its companions were all partially hidden with no clear reference points, nothing seemed amiss at first glance.

Xue Tong had been observing quietly for a while now, so when she finally spoke, it startled Xun Ruosu. “That Buddha statue is different.”

“…When did you move up next to me?” Xun Ruosu wasn’t petty, but Xue Tong had made it clear earlier that they were strangers. So she instinctively stepped aside, wondering to herself, “Maybe that patch of dirt is softer and more comfortable to stand on, so Xue Tong inexplicably shifted over.”

Then she stared straight ahead at the Buddha statue, not glancing sideways.

Xue Tong: “…”

Whether in craftsmanship or material, this Buddha statue matched the other seven perfectly. Only its pose differed slightly.

Of course, each of the eight statues corresponded to different manners of death around them, so their poses weren’t identical to begin with. The hands emerging from the corpses reached upward, jabbed downward, or thrust forward like zombies. Seven held ritual implements, but the one with the paper crane perched on it struck a merciful pose, hands empty and forming a teaching mudra.

Compared to the other seven, it resembled the white jade Bodhisattva more closely.

“That’s a gravestone,” Xue Tong said. “There’s probably a body buried underneath.”

To put it bluntly, aside from the two of them and the few statues taking up space in the Ten Thousand People Pit, everything else was corpses—dumped in haphazardly like trash. Perhaps the first ones were laid out neatly, but later arrivals were just tossed inside.

No body in the pit had been properly interred. If someone truly lay beneath that statue, it meant that out of thirteen thousand souls, only this one had found rest.

That made it stand out.

“…” Xun Ruosu and Xue Tong exchanged a glance, silently communicating: “You dig?”

Before they could agree, Yuqin suddenly blocked their view. Its face had been young and beautiful at first, complemented by bright red robes that made its skin gleam snow-white. But as time passed, that pallor edged toward porcelain, its features growing softer, the corners of its eyes aligning almost perfectly in a smooth line…

Look closely, and it resembled flawless jade more than human flesh.

Yuqin clearly didn’t want them touching the body under the Buddha statue, so it positioned itself to obstruct them, on the verge of turning hostile. The entire Ten Thousand People Pit trembled faintly, the crimson hue deepening. Xun Ruosu’s eyes blinked uncomfortably, and she noticed the air growing sticky and damp, laced with a bizarre mix of incense and blood.

The Buddhist Qi emanating from Yuqin had already overburdened its three souls and seven po. Its original owner wasn’t a cultivator; even if she had been, such overwhelming Buddhist Qi couldn’t linger long on a soul severed from karma without causing irreversible damage. The Bodhisattva statue might not mind, but the Heavenly Dao would sniff it out and strike with a barrage of lightning.

That was why it always massacred upon reviving. Souls didn’t expire; with special preparation, they could serve as vessels, allowing it free movement for a time.

“Let Wuchang dig it up,” Xue Tong said, ignoring the female ghost’s radiating malice. She turned to Xun Ruosu. “You didn’t wrap the thread around the copper pillar just to show off your foresight, did you?”

The thread had come from inside, meaning Xun Ruosu had tampered with Yuqin and paper crane long ago—even before Yuan Jie and the others were caught. As a backup plan, and given her confident promise to resolve the mess and release them afterward, it showed she’d had everything figured out. The golden cage was no obstacle to her.

Xue Tong clicked her tongue and looked away. This girl had been sticking close to her—when had she started guarding against Yuqin?

“Good thing you got it wrong, or I’d have thought we were soulmates,” Xun Ruosu replied, flicking the floating copper coin again. “I can’t open the cage. Whatever it’s made of rejects me completely.”

“Hm?”

Xue Tong uttered a monosyllabic query. Moments ago, even the paper crane couldn’t enter the golden glow around the cage, yet Xun Ruosu had walked right up to it. She’d assumed the cage tolerated Xun Ruosu more.

Much as she hated to admit it, the jade Buddha statue and Xun Ruosu were cut from the same cloth. Probably only Xun Ruosu could dispel the karmic obstacles plaguing the Ten Thousand People Pit.

But if that happened, everything she’d concealed for so long would be laid bare in the sunlight. If Xun Ruosu recovered her memories—her reincarnation wheel path differed from others’. For most people, their three souls and seven po remained independent across each reincarnation, but Xun Ruosu’s were interconnected. She truly might be able to recover her memories!