“I’ll be damned! What the hell is this bug?!” Ye Chan jumped back in fright.
Gu Xianwang asked gravely, “What is this?”
The tour guide’s eyes bulged. “Fly Ghost Head—that’s what you outsiders call Gu. Fly Gu Worm!”
Yao Cuo had only heard a brief rundown from Gu Xianwang about last night’s ordeal with the Gu Witch and the zombies. He’d been half-skeptical, but now that he’d seen it with his own eyes, he felt utterly lost.
“Is this Miao Gu? Do you recognize it? Are there really Gu Witches around here?”
The tour guide slapped his knee and dropped into a squat, wailing mournfully. “Where’d all these Grass Ghost Witches come from? How could it be this thing? It’s gonna kill me! I-I’m just tryin’ to earn an honest buck. Why me?!”
Gu Xianwang could see he was genuinely terrified, tugging frantically at his own hair. She tried to reassure him. “Calm down first. Have you seen this kind of Fly Gu Worm before? That means someone knows how to get rid of it.”
“Gone, all gone,” the tour guide muttered. “That was the Grass Ghost Witch I ran into as a kid. She’s long dead.”
Gu Xianwang’s heart sank. She quickly ran her hand over her own back—her skin was still smooth, no irregularities. Thinking of Ye Chan, she grabbed her and lifted the hem of her shirt for a close inspection. Nothing there either.
Ye Chan was truly frightened now. She stared at Gu Xianwang with wide almond eyes brimming with tears, like a patient awaiting the doctor’s verdict. “D-Do I have it?”
“No.”
“Phew, that’s a relief.”
Gu Xianwang had just started to relax when her gaze locked with Ye Chan’s. She noticed the blotchy redness in her eyes seemed even deeper, crimson veins spiderwebbing out across the whites. Looking closer, amid the moist sclera, something thread-thin was wriggling.
Gu Xianwang’s lips twitched. “…But there’s something moving in your eyes.”
Ye Chan blinked. “In my eyes?”
She nodded.
Ye Chan froze for a second, then let out a wail. “No way! You damn bug, get out of me! Crawl on my back instead! My eyes are important! Waaah, I still wanna ogle hot guys and girls! I wanna read web novels! I wanna binge TV dramas!!!”
Gu Xianwang couldn’t keep up with her wild train of thought. She glanced at Yao Cuo. The two of them exchanged looks, utterly speechless.
The outburst actually lightened the tense mood. Gu Xianwang collected herself and reviewed everything from the beginning. No doubt about it—the Gu on them had come from the Gu Witch. Based on her words last night, she hadn’t meant to kill them.
“The rice ball! The Gu Witch said there was one in the stove last night. Eating it would ease the effects!”
The tour guide sprang to his feet and bolted toward the old house.
~~~
They tore the place apart like a police raid—kitchen, bedrooms, storeroom, even the outhouse. Every nook and cranny got flipped.
Nothing. Not a damn thing.
Gu Xianwang truly hadn’t expected them to leave absolutely zilch behind.
“She’s really that ruthless,” Gu Xianwang murmured, standing in the courtyard and feeling a chill seep into her bones.
“Xianwang.” Yao Cuo called out.
She hurried over to the storeroom where he stood, staring at an old painting hung above the incense table. It was crude, like something a country gentleman had copied by hand back in the day. The image showed a bizarre tree thrusting up into the clouds, incredibly tall, with a massive serpent coiled around its trunk, as if using the tree as a ladder to vault through Heaven’s Gate.
Flanking the table were two black pottery jars holding a thin layer of incense ash that gave off an odd scent, bitter with traces of medicinal herbs.
In front of the jars sat an empty white porcelain cup, its former contents a mystery.
The storeroom faced the Gu Witch’s room directly across the courtyard. Both were dim, windowless spaces, so when Gu Xianwang had woken up, she’d assumed it was still the dead of night.
“All empty,” Ye Chan said as she emerged from Sara Longli’s room. She spotted the incense table and suddenly paled, pointing at the white porcelain cup. “That one… there was a lump on it…”
Gu Xianwang whipped around.
“I ate it.”
Yao Cuo stared in disbelief. “You—you ate it?!”
“Hang on,” Ye Chan said, fidgeting nervously like a schoolkid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “It was just… kinda salty. Last night, I didn’t look that closely.”
“What’d you find?” The tour guide overheard and hurried over.
Ye Chan shot him a pitiful look. “Little Hei—”
He scanned the room, his eyes landing on five or six jars of varying sizes in the corner, each covered with strange grass lids. Realization dawned. “That old hag was a Grass Ghost Witch! Damn it, we gotta track her down for the Ghost Medicine. Ain’t nothin’ here!”
Gu Xianwang fell silent for a moment, then let out a quiet sigh.
Finding her? Easier said than done. The Hundred Thousand Great Mountains, stretching across Yun, Gui, and Chuan provinces, made searching for a single person like hunting for a needle in a haystack. And that was assuming the Gu Witch hadn’t been snatched away by Sara and her crew—they were too meticulous to set out without proper gear.
Disheartened, the group trudged back to the tour bus. Yao Cuo grabbed several bottles of water and packs of biscuits from inside and passed them around.
The tour guide nibbled on a couple bites of biscuit, regaining a bit of his strength. Suddenly, he dashed to the nearby stream, crouching low to rummage through the undergrowth. After overturning a dozen or so stones, he finally found some leaves. He scooped up a handful of stream water, mashed the leaves to a pulp with a small rock, tilted his head awkwardly, and slapped the paste onto his back.
There was still some area on his back he couldn’t reach. He ran back to Yao Cuo. “Hey, brother, lend a hand?”
Ye Chan eyed the dark green sludge. “Little Hei, what’s this stuff?”
“Local name’s Snake Scale Grass. It’s got some poison in it, but mash it up and slap it on the blister—it’ll soothe the burn.” The tour guide glanced at her eyes and dabbed a bit on his fingertip. “Want some?”
The stuff reeked of fish and rot. She’d sooner go blind than smear it on her eyes. Ye Chan shook her head frantically and ducked behind Gu Xianwang.
“Sis, what do we do now?”
Perhaps because Gu Xianwang now had people, a vehicle, and a phone at her disposal, the others had started treating her like the group’s anchor. She didn’t reply right away. Instead, she stared into the depths of the mountains, lost in thought for a moment.
Truth be told, she had no desire to drag these two along—not even Yao Cuo.
For one thing, it would be inconvenient. For another, she worried she might get them killed.
But they were all infested with Gu Worms now. Head back to the city, and no hospital could help them. Any delay in between could spell irreversible disaster.
It was a rock and a hard place either way—heavy responsibility no matter what she chose.
Gu Xianwang let out a sigh and turned her head. “Senior Brother, the medical kit.”
Yao Cuo pulled the medical kit from the trunk. These supplies were all things she’d listed out one by one and had him purchase before they set off. She took out a sterile cotton swab, disinfected her hands with alcohol, and said to Ye Chan, “I need to swab a sample from your eye. It won’t hurt much—just hold still.”
Without a word, Ye Chan pried her eyelids open wide. “Psh, this is nothing, Sis. Go ahead and poke. Better yet, squeeze that bug right out.”
Ignoring the quip, Gu Xianwang worked with utmost care. She gently rolled the swab in a circle around the blood-speckled area of Ye Chan’s eye before withdrawing it. Then she snipped off the used cotton tip with scissors, clamped it into a small glass vial with tweezers, and sealed it tight.
It felt just like a lab experiment, and Ye Chan was getting into it, craning her neck forward. “Next up, we pour in the solution, right?”
Gu Xianwang shook her head. She fished a windproof lighter from the bag and burned the swab stick to ash, then disinfected her hands once more. Only then did she slip a hand into her collar and draw out a pendant.
The pendant was a personal gift from her master when she’d formally taken him as her teacher—a token of their bond and a truly rare treasure besides.
What were called Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures? The earthly kind were marvels shaped by eons of wind, water, and stone in the wilds, occasionally infused with spiritual essence. They lurked only in the deadliest places, their pursuit a gamble of nine deaths to one slim chance of survival. Sighting one was a feat in itself.
Even a peerless master like Shang Ruyun in the prime of his life had spent decades to acquire just this one specimen. To anyone who knew its worth, no price was too high.
Ye Chan peered at it curiously. “Beauty’s got some unique taste, huh? The carving on this little green turtle is top-notch.”
Gu Xianwang’s hand froze at the words. She shot Ye Chan a wordless look.
Catching her expression, Ye Chan realized her blunder. She rubbed at her eye and forced a sheepish grin. “Whoops, didn’t see it clearly before. Sis, this is jadeite, right?”
The “green turtle” in question was about the length of a finger, its body flawlessly lustrous and translucent, without a speck of impurity—like a priceless tsavorite. But it wasn’t carved from jade at all. It was a genuine living creature.
Her master had told her it was called an Undying Turtle, something he’d stumbled upon by sheer luck in a narrow crevice at the heart of a sheer cliff face.
As the old saying went: a thousand years for a kingly turtle, ten thousand for the rest. This Undying Turtle put them all to shame. Perhaps some cataclysmic shift in the earth ten thousand years ago had trapped the divine creature inside the mountain. That peak had originally been a jade mine, one that yielded a rare strain of black jade. Sustained for ages by the jade vein, the creature had transformed entirely into jade, taking on its current form.
“It’s not,” Gu Xianwang said flatly. “Just an ordinary piece of jade.”
Nor was that entirely a lie.
When her master had entrusted the Undying Turtle to her all those years ago, he’d strictly instructed her to keep it on her person at all times. To that end, he’d commissioned a custom chain pendant. An extra jade plate was set beneath the creature’s four feet, housing an intricate mechanism that locked it fast to the fine steel chain. To release it, one simply pinched the plate between thumb and forefinger, twisting up and down on either side—and the catch sprang open.
For all these years, Gu Xianwang had meticulously followed her master’s instructions, guarding the Undying Turtle even more carefully than she did herself. But to be honest, she had never once seen the thing come alive. Were it not for her master repeatedly and earnestly teaching her how to use it, she might have dismissed it as nothing more than an ordinary jade carving.
Ye Chan watched as Gu Xianwang pulled another brocade pouch from her bag. From it emerged a black jade disk, a touch smaller than the span of her palm and shaped like an inkstone. Gu Xianwang placed the green turtle at its center, then used a pair of tweezers to extract the cotton wool and set it in the groove at the inkstone’s front.
With a solemn expression, Gu Xianwang murmured under her breath: “Kan holds Peng Xiu in the first position, Rui’s death flows second in Kun’s palace. Chong’s wound strikes the third in Zhen, while Xun aids Du to lead the four. The bird star dies at five, the heart opens at six, the pillar’s shock roams from seven in Dui. Only Ren star graces the eighth as good; for the ninth, seek Ying’s vista from Li.”
Wow, so mystical, Ye Chan shouted silently in her heart.
But moments stretched into a long silence, the surroundings utterly still. The green turtle remained just that—a green turtle. The black inkstone stayed black. Nothing happened.
“Ahem.” Ye Chan cleared her throat awkwardly and shifted her feet.
Yao Cuo, looking somewhat baffled, whispered, “Why isn’t the Undying Turtle reacting?”
Gu Xianwang’s voice was even quieter: “…I don’t know.”
Seizing the chance as they spoke, Ye Chan asked, “Sister, what was that you just recited? Some kind of spell?”
Gu Xianwang flushed with embarrassment. How could she admit it was merely the incantation for Qimen Dunjia—one she knew only by rote, not how to actually employ?
Her master had once explained that the Undying Turtle possessed spiritual awareness. Having recognized her as its mistress and been nurtured by her care, it would attune itself to her will. Whenever she used it, she need only focus her mind on the object of her desire, and the turtle would sense the aura of any spiritual item within a hundred li, revealing its location to her.
That was why she had not only visualized it in her mind earlier but, when that failed, resorted to reciting the incantation aloud from memory.
“It’s nothing…”
“So you’re waiting for this little emerald divine turtle to do something?”
Yao Cuo muttered, “Waiting for it to move.”
“Ho, it moves? Like it’s electric?” Ye Chan peered at it closely, then chuckled. “Oh, no power cord, though.”
She circled Gu Xianwang twice before stopping right in front of the Undying Turtle. Lowering her head, she focused her double pupils and teased, “Hey, you know, the more I look at this little divine turtle, the more unique it seems—like it’s got an expression. Look at that eye of its, glaring right at me like it’s pissed off. Hilarious.”
Gu Xianwang: “…”
Yao Cuo: “…”
No one said a word for a beat. Ye Chan blinked. Why were they all staring at her like that?
“What’s wrong? What’re you getting at? Did it actually get mad?” Ye Chan laughed nervously, unnerved by their gazes. She bowed with an awkward grin. “Fine, my apologies, little turtle. I was wrong. You’re no lowly green turtle—you’re an exquisite masterpiece, priceless and unique, the one irreplaceable divine turtle of the ages.”
Straightening up with a cheeky smile, Ye Chan opened her mouth to say more—only to freeze as the Undying Turtle stirred of its own accord. Without a breath of wind, it began rotating clockwise within the disk. In the blink of an eye, it came to a halt, pointing squarely toward the northeast.
The four onlookers stared in stunned silence at the transformation. Yao Cuo, who had heard tales of it for years but never witnessed it himself, said stiffly, “It really does move.”
Ye Chan blinked in shock. “It really was mad at me.”
