Chapter 54

Xue Tong was nothing like Xun Ruosu, who treated her blood like it was free. She would bite through her skin at the slightest provocation, banking on the merits contained within her blood and bone to save the day.

Merits typically accumulated in two parts. One portion secured external material needs—food, drink, entertainment, or social obligations. The other merged into the body itself, accelerating recovery from injuries or illness, and even determining one’s lifespan.

For someone like Xun Ruosu, her body, skin, and hair were all infused with merits. Her blood regenerated quickly and held vast quantities of them… but yanking out teeth or hair mid-fight was hardly practical.

Xue Tong was different. Even if they drained Xun Ruosu dry, it wouldn’t match the depth of merits in a single drop of Xue Tong’s blood. Whenever Xun Ruosu borrowed some, it was just a tiny wound, enough to squeeze out one or two drops. Xun Ruosu was thrifty about it, even recycling what she used. Xue Tong, however, didn’t seem to care. The healing wound on her hand was at least half an inch long.

Xun Ruosu’s heart twisted in pain. That was so much merit wasted.

The small house was layered inside and out with restrictions and talismans and incantations. Huang Xiaoran could tell the two women were doing everything in their power to save her, so she obediently huddled with them in the cramped space formed by the piled bricks, her eyes darting about to follow their movements.

“We’ve done everything we can for now,” Xun Ruosu said after bustling about. She fetched a small stool from the corner, gave it a quick wipe, and sat down across from Huang Xiaoran. “Now tell us—how did you end up in such a state?”

Huang Xiaoran might have looked young, but she had wandered the mortal world as a ghost for five years. Ghosts didn’t need sleep, so her days stretched twice as long as a living person’s. By that reckoning, she was the equivalent of fifteen or sixteen years old, with the mindset of a teenage girl.

That was rounding up a bit unkindly, though. Huang Xiaoran was sharper than most her apparent age, but she still fell short of a true adolescent’s cunning.

“I… I’m not really sure,” Huang Xiaoran said, blinking in confusion. “I remember finding the person you mentioned, Sis. I think I even greeted him. But after that… nothing. I spend a lot of time wandering aimlessly. Then I snap out of it, and it’s like today—corpses everywhere.”

The mastermind behind it all was cunning and sly. In terms of raw power, Huang Xiaoran was no match for them; otherwise, she wouldn’t have ended up “guilty and deserving execution.”

A wound on Xun Ruosu’s fingertip oozed blood, mirroring Xue Tong’s. Without a word, she pressed it to Huang Xiaoran’s brow. The girl’s clear memories flooded into her mind.

There wasn’t much that was novel. Most of it matched what Huang Xiaoran had described—hazy and vague. The sharp impressions were all of mass killings or disasters, even more numerous than what the newspapers reported. Fires, collapses—all engineered by the mastermind.

These catastrophes shared one trait: they always ensnared children around ten years old. It was as if the culprit was running endless experiments, sifting through a vast database to find or eliminate a particular child.

Xun Ruosu quickly exhausted the surface memories and delved deeper. Out of respect for Huang Xiaoran’s privacy, she focused only on the period after the girl’s death. The recollections of the living were shielded by the Rules; prying into them recklessly came at a steep price.

Xue Tong stood by the door without interrupting them. Xun Ruosu had her back turned. Truth be told, as a diviner, Xun Ruosu shouldn’t have been so vulnerable. Her current state was even more dangerous than sleep. This place, fresh with the dead, teemed with wandering ghosts. If they saw an easy mark in the diviner, mere trouble would be the least of it—they might even try to hijack her body.

“She trusts me this much? No defenses in front of me at all?” Xue Tong thought. “If I stepped away, or decided not to protect her, escaping unscathed from a place this hostile would be next to impossible.”

For some inexplicable reason, Xue Tong felt moved—by herself. She puffed out her chest. “See? She really can’t do without me.”

The logic was shoehorned at best, but Xue Tong, a bit slow on the uptake in that moment, convinced herself it made perfect sense. Xun Ruosu dropped her guard around her precisely because she couldn’t do without her.

Xun Ruosu’s eyes remained closed as she hunted for details in the girl’s mind. She had no idea Xue Tong had twisted a bit of romantic nonsense into a tangled mess, convinced there was some profound meaning hidden in it.

Huang Xiaoran’s memories reached five years prior. She had followed Zhong Cangyun’s business card, stumbling along in a daze for who knew how long, until she arrived at the gates of a grand estate.

The Zhong Family lacked for nothing in merits. Their ancestral wealth was substantial, and unlike the Xun Family’s dilapidated old house, this property was newly purchased—a cluster of four villas housing family members. The high-end community formed a single courtyard with a shared Chinese garden and main gate. It was serene and secluded, yet conveniently located; a drive to the city center took only about ten minutes.

Even more absurd was the plaque hanging over Zhong Cangyun’s house, boldly inscribed with the words “Zhong Mansion” in huge characters. The old man looked like a terminal case of teenage delusion.

The perspective pushed onward. Xun Ruosu finally laid eyes on her great-uncle. He matched her memories of him; earlier that very year, she had helped her father reclaim his place in the genealogy.

Zhong Cangyun said something. Then the entire scene dissolved like an old television losing signal, overwhelmed by static snow. The person lurking behind Huang Xiaoran had sensed the intruding gaze. A colossal force shoved Xun Ruosu out. Her soul slammed back into her body, blood and qi surging chaotically. Just as incompatibility set in, Xue Tong forced it back into place.

“What happened?” Xue Tong’s voice came from above her. “Did they spot you?”

Xun Ruosu took a deep breath and coughed twice. Finding no serious harm, she replied, “The mastermind wants to watch the girl get struck by heavenly thunder. As long as she lives, they can’t craft the next scapegoat.”

She raised her hand. As Xue Tong leaned down, Xun Ruosu pressed her fingers to the other woman’s collarbone. The Buddhist Seal binding them flickered with faint golden light at her touch. “Huang Xiaoran is their half-body.”

Crafting a half-body demanded intricate rituals, immense sacrifices, and profound obsession—not to mention considerable power. The Xun Family had endured as an independent branch, though it never flourished and teetered on the brink of merit exhaustion. Xun Jian’s ability to carve out a legacy across twenty-six generations among ordinary folk wasn’t for nothing.

Yet the one hiding behind Huang Xiaoran treated half-bodies like disposable tools, cycling through a new one every few years.

Even Xue Tong found it hard to believe. “Dissolving your own half-body demands a price equal to the initial sacrifice. But if heavenly thunder scatters the soul, it doesn’t count as self-dissolution—a clever workaround, but…”

She mimed firing a gun at Xun Ruosu. “If you died, I’d suffer backlash. Not as bad as dissolving it myself, but no picnic. If it were me, I wouldn’t risk it lightly.”

“So who can afford that cost? Xiao Ran isn’t the first, nor the last. All this trouble just to kill? How important can the target be?” Xun Ruosu pulled out her phone. “Let me check for similar cases from five years ago.”

Her cinnabar brush and yellow paper served not just to ward off ghosts but as ordinary writing tools—perfect for jotting notes. Xun Ruosu had meant to scan only recent news from five years back. Instead, cases from ten, fifteen, even twenty years ago popped up.

Back then, print media dominated; many reports lacked online text, preserved only in photos. Scattered across years and regions, they resembled isolated accidents. But collating them by their sole common thread revealed the truth: every year, droves of young children perished in unnatural mishaps or foul play.

These weren’t simple accidents, either. Each claimed five or more lives, spanning all ages and genders, so the focus on children wasn’t immediately obvious.

The culprit had been pulling strings in the shadows for years.

Xun Ruosu paused. She had already scribbled events, death tolls, and dates across the yellow paper. But twenty-seven years ago, incidents involving children under ten plummeted—not disappearing entirely, but dropping from roughly eight a year to two, aligning with natural probabilities rather than deliberate selection.

A specific month twenty-seven years prior marked the dividing line. The pattern of cases began after that.

She segmented the timeline further on the paper and arrived at a chilling conclusion. “Xue Tong, the mastermind is trying to kill me—or another me.”

“What do you mean?” Xue Tong’s brow furrowed.

“Twenty-seven years ago, I was born in August, midsummer. Three months later, the child-death cases began. The November incident was an earthquake at a hospital—countless dead and injured, including five infants barely a hundred days old.”

“That hospital… I stayed there. With the Xun Family merits running low, I was premature and frail at birth. Mom kept me there a full three months before taking me back to the old house.”

Xun Ruosu pointed to the next date. “When I was two, a train derailed. The last three cars held children my age. A year and a half later, a tunnel collapsed, crushing five private cars—including a pair of twin sisters the same age as me, per the police report. That was the train my whole family had rebooked from, and the tunnel we drove through often.”

“Seven years on, the Tongfeng Street gas explosion hit right at dismissal time, catching two first-graders. Tongfeng Street was my regular route home from school, but that day I had a sudden headache and stayed home sick.”

“Then came my thirteenth birthday… Whoever’s orchestrating this wields power beyond my imagination. I don’t know if Mom could divine the risks with the Xun Family’s divination arts and steer clear, but in my memories, at least the Tongfeng Street incident caught her completely off guard. It was my body that warned me first.”

“That’s not right,” Xue Tong said, puzzled. “Your thirteenth birthday was different. No accident, no serial killer—just a malicious ghost bursting into your home.”

“Exactly. From that point, it was like the mastermind confirmed something. They spared me and turned to hunting someone else.” Xun Ruosu gazed at Xue Tong. “Do you think… there might be two of me in this world?”