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Chapter 26: Skeletons Beneath the River (III)
As the little marble silently regurgitated what he'd swallowed, the puddle of ejected water began to spread, edging ever closer to Xuanmin's feet. Xuanmin glared at the marble and, though his cold face betrayed no emotion, his tone was strained. "Are you going to throw it all back up?" he asked.
Xue Xian ignored him. He continued to spout water while radiating hatred.
"And after this, do you plan to bathe in the same water?" Xuanmin said, scowling.
Xue Xian: “...”
The marble stopped.
After a while, Xue Xian grumbled, "Damn grifter. You really know how to gross someone out..."
"You are too kind. However, that is not actually one of my skills," Xuanmin replied, looking away. He walked over to the statues.
Xue Xian hesitated, then decided to follow along, rolling hot on Xuanmin’s heels. "Can you pick me up? I'm light-headed from being so full."
Xuanmin glanced at the streaks of water on the marble's surface. "I will once the corpse water on your body has dried."
“...” Xue Xian rolled to a stop. "If you keep grossing me out like this, I'll make sure to projectile vomit all over you!" he shouted. "Believe it or not!"
"I believe it." Xuanmin stopped too, and looked back at the marble with irritation. Finally, he bent down to pick Xue Xian up, gingerly tossing the marble into his pouch, as though he was disgusted even to touch him.
"How dare you handle me with such revulsion!" Xue Xian's muffled voice hollered from inside the pouch. "You're just as drenched with water as I am!"
Hearing this, Xuanmin stopped again. He drew a gash on his fingertip and casually squeezed out a drop of blood, which he used to draw what looked like a simple talismanic scrawl onto his own palm. In an instant, all of the water on his body evaporated, leaving no trace at all. As the white hemp robe dried, it became as light as a cloud –– even Xue Xian, inside the pouch, became fully dry.
Having gotten what he'd wanted, Xue Xian was content.
Even better, Xue Xian discovered that that strange spot on Xuanmin's hip even had the ability to help him digest –– he could clearly feel that the thing he'd absorbed from that patch of black soil was happily integrating itself into his golden marble.
Before, when Xue Xian had still been in a daze, he had sucked up the item from the soil without even knowing what it was, but now that he'd come back to his senses, he understood –– buried beneath the soil had been a part of his true body: either some of his blood, or one of his vertebrae, or a strip of his muscle.
It was only a fragment. But as it slowly melted into the marble, Xue Xian felt indescribable contentment. Finally, after having been painfully empty for half a year, his spine began to have some feeling again.
Whether you are growing your spirit or your qi, your flesh or your bones, you need to have some kind of starting point or source –– just like how flowers or trees require a seed.
Xue Xian had spent half a year building up a form for himself through his qi, and had cobbled together a prosthetic spine from a string of qi in order to at least give the top half of his body some mobility. But qi could not compare to real bone –– qi was hollow, not a dense physical material. Now, though, Xue Xian finally felt as though he really had planted a seed for growing his spine back.
Though Xuanmin had no idea what Xue Xian was thinking about inside the pouch, he was glad that there was no more trouble.
There were too many fallen statues around the pool for Xuanmin to inspect each and every one. He focused on the ones that had split open.
After looking at around a dozen, Xuanmin realised that there did seem to be a pattern to these statues. All in all, they could be grouped into three different categories: those with angry faces, those with crying faces, and those with grinning faces. And each of these categories seemed to hold a different type of body.
The angry statues' corpses lacked heads; the sad statues' corpses lacked both legs; and the happy statues' corpses lacked both hands.
"What have you discovered?" Xue Xian asked. "What are these statues for? They look extremely evil."
Frowning, Xuanmin replied, "I think I know."
Xue Xian was shocked. "How do you know everything?"
"Perhaps I read about it in a book,” Xuanmin replied calmly. “It must have made an impression."
These hundreds of statues were clearly not ordinary burial gifts, made to accompany the dead person into the afterlife. The statues clearly had a logic to them –– which meant they also had a purpose. In places like these, things related to the number three always held some kind of deeper meaning. Although Xuanmin could no longer remember where he had read about it, he did remember such a passage––
There was a feng shui design that could be used to reverse one's fortune, called ‘Hundred Soldiers Push the Flow.’ If done properly, it could help one avoid natural disasters and ensure a hundred years of prosperity –– the results were excellent. The main problem was that it was an evil design that harnessed yin energy, which most people were not willing to undertake.
Because to construct it, one had to sacrifice three hundred lives.
A hundred warriors, a hundred suffering commoners, and a hundred villains.
These three different stone faces seemed to correspond to those categories: the angry ones were warriors, the sad ones were the suffering commoners, and the laughing ones were the villains.
"Three hundred..." Xue Xian was stupefied. "What the hell? When mortals get up to no good, they can do as much damage as I can. Where do you even find three hundred people? That's no small number. Even if you went after them one by one, surely someone would notice? You'd have to be blind not to notice hundreds of people going missing."
As he spoke, Xuanmin saw something fall out of a statue with a dingdang sound. It sounded close — like some kind of copper sheet or other metal object.
Xuanmin frowned. He tore another strip of cloth from the bottom of his robe. After all, the item had belonged to a dead man and had clearly been in contact with all sorts of decomposing substances.
Hearing the tearing noise, Xue Xian said, "If you keep going, your robes are going to be shorter by a huge chunk."
Of course, he had been using hyperbole. Xuanmin’s robes were long enough to cover his feet, but fell just short of dragging against the dirt, so that, even when he walked, they did not touch the ground. Even after all the pieces he'd torn, the robe was only missing around half a palm's length –– he could keep going another seventeen or eighteen times, and a change would still not show.
But Xue Xian couldn't shut up. He constantly felt the need to annoy Xuanmin.
His hand wrapped in the hemp cloth, Xuanmin pinched the item that had fallen to the floor and inspected it beneath the dim glow of the night pearls.
It was a small metal flake, with a carving of a beast on one side, and what seemed to be a name on the other — though the name had been furiously scratched out, leaving only illegible scribbles.
Seeing that Xuanmin had not responded, Xue Xian stuck his head out of the pouch while Xuanmin remained crouching. "Hey –– that looks familiar."
"You have seen it before?" Xuanmin had wanted to shove him back inside, but upon hearing Xue Xian's words, he instead brought the object closer to Xue Xian.
"I remember now," Xue Xian said. "On our way to Wolong County, we passed through several abandoned temples in the mountains. We found one of these in a temple. The temple was covered in old bloodstains. I assume a battle had taken place. Then, in front of Wolong Xian Cheng’s city gates, me and the bookworm came across another one."
These almost identical-looking objects must have been mass manufactured, or at least have come from the same workshop. Most likely, they were associated with the military.
All soldiers constantly walked that fine line between life and death, and any man who had been to battle could not escape with his sword unstained –– they neatly fell into the definition of ‘warrior’. But armies were very strict with their members. How could a hundred soldiers disappear without anyone raising an alarm?
Xue Xian had spent the past six months among humans, and knew little about the military. But Xuanmin knew a little more.
Every military man had a metal flake like this. Firstly, it was useful for army administration, and secondly, it could be used as a form of ID. Thirdly... if they died in battle and their corpses could not be recovered, then the tag could act as an index for the body, and be brought back to their ancestral home and interred in their body’s place.
If the soldier did not die in battle and left the army due to retirement or injury, the tag would not be taken back, but instead the name would be scratched out.
"Where did you hear about all this?" Xue Xian asked, looking up at Xuanmin.
Xuanmin paused, then said, "I don't remember. Perhaps I overheard some townspeople gossiping."
Xue Xian found the bald donkey extraordinary –– based on the spider-shaped mole, he clearly did have some kind of illness, and a grave one at that, considering he seemed to often wake up to find himself unable to recognise anyone around him. But for an aloof, arrogant monk who considered himself some kind of saintly high priest, who had amnesia and was also far away from home getting into all kinds of trouble... for such a man to overhear so much information from town gossip... that was hard to believe.
Xue Xian asked himself, Does he look like the kind of person to make small talk with locals?
Xue Xian responded, No.
Xuanmin reached out with his finger and prodded that smooth head... or maybe it was Xue Xian’s body, who cares. In any case, he pushed the marble back into the pouch.
"The warriors are soldiers who aged out of the army or could no longer fight due to injury. So who are the suffering commoners and the villains?" Xue Xian mumbled from inside the pouch.
"Beggars and mountain bandits."
The response came not from Xuanmin, but from another voice –– a warm and peaceful one.
Xuanmin turned to see that Lu Shijiu and Liu-laotou had woken up and were walking toward him.
Liu-laotou was frail with age, and Lu Shijiu was even more twig-like than Jiang Shining –– how could those two have been the first to come back to consciousness? Plus, both the force of the whirlpool and the impact of the fall onto the pool floor had been painful, violent experiences, but neither of the two seemed to have any new injuries.
They looked exactly how they had when the group had first met them at the stone doors –– down to the streaks of damp and the patterns of silt on their clothes. Nothing had changed at all.
Xuanmin took all this in, but said nothing. Instead, he turned his gaze to the hundreds of statues. "How do you know?"
Lu Shijiu raised the bundle of sticks that he held in his hand and twitched his finger. "I can see, and I can deduce. Just now, I touched a few of the statues.”
He continued: “These soldiers were abducted on their way home. It's actually extremely easy to kidnap these types of soldiers –– you can just tell their families they'd died in battle and their corpses couldn't be recovered, and you'd immediately be able to avoid all suspicion."
As for the drifting homeless... Most people never took notice of them to know if there were more of them or less of them on the street on any given day. It was even easier with the mountain bandits: to most people, exterminating bandits was great news, and if, after they were ousted from the mountains, someone wanted to come and cut off their heads and take them away somewhere, people hardly cared.
With those three types of sacrifices obtained, the feng shui array could be constructed.
Lu Shijiu's blind eyes were highly useful in a situation like this. He looked around, then pointed at two different places and said, "Something's here."
Xuanmin strode to each place and picked up two pieces of stone embossed with talismanic text. He could feel what was carved onto them just by feeling the surface with his fingertips. Xuanmin studied them, then said, "Looks familiar."
"What part?" Xue Xian asked.
"The talismanic text. I have seen it before."
But it was far too dark inside the tomb. No matter how hard Xuanmin looked, he could only see the outlines.
Lu Shijiu turned to look at Lu Nianqi, who laid unconscious not far from where they stood, then asked Xuanmin, "Nianqi, he..."
Xuanmin could hear the questioning tone in the boy's voice. Without turning around, he said, "He seems unusually afraid of water."
From inside the pouch, Xue Xian piped up. "Yeah. When I was in my daze, I couldn't hear anything that was going on outside. But that kid's constant screaming, I did hear."
Lu Shijiu hung his head. "That's my fault."
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This chapter was beta’d by Rogue!
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