[Revised TL] 53 铜钱龛世 | Tong Qian Kan Shi | Copper Coins -- 木苏里 | Musuli -- 英语翻译 | English translation -- Chapter 53

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Chapter 53: 'Ride the Air' Design (IV)

These motherfuckers really had buried his dragon bones into the fucking mud!

Of course, Xue Xian was delighted to have found another part of his body. But in addition to joy, he also felt an immeasurable rage. To have to go across the entire land digging in the dirt to find bits and pieces of his own body... Probably no one else in the world understood the complexities of that feeling.

    

Xue Xian had felt that feeling at Gravestone Island, and then again at Stone Zhang's compound... Now, he was starting to get used to it, and it really bothered him. He didn't plan on waiting for Xuanmin –– Xue Xian had already investigated the surroundings of Wen Village and was now headed toward Thumb Mountain, sure that Xuanmin would not lose his way.

    

Thus, Xue Xian summoned another gust of wind to push his wheelchair and zoomed away. In an instant, he was sitting by the old ginkgo tree at the foot of Thumb Mountain.

    

Normal trees' crowns always faced the sun –– this was the case no matter what, even if the tree's trunk was twisted this way and that. But this ginkgo faced the earth, its forehead skimming its ankles so that it was entirely bent over –– a strange sight.

    

Although Xue Xian had never been to Thumb Mountain before, he could see that there used to be a stream coming down it. The hint lay not in traces of the water on the mountain, for there were none, but because the ginkgo's orientation demonstrated that, in recent times, it had found far more nutrition in the earth below than in sunshine. Although sunlight filtered in from above, it was dimmed by the village's fog.

    

Thus, if Xue Xian wanted to find his dragon bone, all he had to do was look beneath the tree.

    

Xue Xian slowly pushed his wheelchair so that he could see the patch of earth beneath the ginkgo tree. The patch of earth was about one zhang in width, and was of a slightly darker color than the soil around it –– it was damper and contained more moisture, and seemed less packed, as if someone had recently dug it.

    

Although the person who had disturbed the earth had attempted to cover their tracks, a close look revealed the difference. Besides, just Xue Xian's presence made the patch of mud begin to tremble. The person who had buried the bone had assumed that no ordinary townsperson would visit a haunted, abandoned village in the middle of nowhere, and had thus assumed their hiding spot would be safe. But they had not considered that the dragon himself [a] might come knocking at the door.

    

Xue Xian laughed coldly. He curled his fingers into a claw shape and swiped at the ground. In response, something deep within the earth jolted with a peng, like a heartbeat, sending a large ripple through the entire mountain and scaring a flock of birds away. 

    

As the piercing caws of the birds dissipated, Xue Xian clawed again.

Peng––

With this jolt, something invisible seemed to thrust into that patch of damp mud, making the earth look recently ploughed.

Peng––

And after that third jolt, Xue Xian lost his patience and clawed as hard as he could.

Suddenly, the entire patch of mud sank deep into the ground, as though sucked away by something, and the earth around it began to quiver, soften, and slide. A pitch-black hole appeared and grew ever wider as more and more earth fell in, so that it quickly became a kind of sinkhole, hungrily devouring everything around it.

    

In the blink of an eye, even that bent over ginkgo tree was also sucked into the sinkhole, which made no sign of stopping as it began to loosen the very foundations of rock beneath Thumb Mountain. Xue Xian hurriedly pushed his wheelchair back, trying to resist the pull of the sinkhole.

    

Clearly, all of this had been caused by Xue Xian trying to get at his bones. It seemed that the dragon bones had been clamped down tightly, tied to some kind of array, so that any slight shift would harm the entirety of Wen Village. 

The things Xue Xian had to go through to take back what rightfully belonged to him... Xue Xian laughed with rage.

    

He relaxed slightly, and the shaking earth beneath the village and the mountain seemed to calm down a bit too. The sinkhole itself became less aggressive; it was now swallowing everything around it in a slower, less terrifying manner. Even Xue Xian's wheelchair was no longer straining as hard against the sinkhole's pull...

But when Xue Xian closed his hand into a fist to summon the dragon bone, the earth around him began to rumble once more, and the sinkhole resumed its eager current.

    

Xue Xian's brows furrowed, and his expression became cold.

With that aloof expression set against his pale face, he appeared uncannily apathetic, and extremely intimidating. The difference between his demeanor now and his unserious, carefree day-to-day attitude was as clear as night and day — and highly unnerving.

    

You extracted my spine from my body while I was still alive, and now you’re telling me I’ll kill people if I try to take back what’s mine? What the hell are you playing at?

But it was precisely because of this absurdity that Xue Xian was unable to proceed.

    

As Xue Xian stared into the sinkhole with a face full of hatred, another figure appeared beside him. Although the figure did not approach him, Xue Xian could feel their body heat — which, amidst the freezing chill of the fog, felt like such a breath of fresh air that Xue Xian's heart suddenly skipped a beat, then slowly resumed again. With the advent of that warm body, Xue Xian’s anger and irritation suddenly seemed to dissolve by half –– replaced by a profoundly reassuring sense of peace and relief.

    

"Let me," Xuanmin's deep voice rang out from behind him.

Then, that light white robe drifted past Xue Xian's vision as a slender arm reached over his shoulder and retrieved the copper coin pendant that Xue Xian had still been gripping tightly in his hand.

    

Xue Xian listened, stunned, as that familiar chime of the copper coins rang out from behind him and was followed by an immense force pressing down upon the plants and rocks around them. It pushed against the fierce current of the sinkhole, which slowed down and finally came to a complete halt, the mud and boulders no longer tumbling into the abyss. The mountain now stood rigidly again.

    

Xue Xian looked up and saw that Xuanmin was, in turn, looking down at him. Xuanmin said, "I'll hold it back for you. You go ahead and retrieve your bones."

    

Two short, simple sentences, but they seemed to wipe away all of the fear, confusion, and resentment in Xue Xian's heart. Xue Xian looked back into the seemingly infinite sinkhole in front of them, feeling the thrumming call of his dragon bones buried deep within, and suddenly snorted with laughter -– a laugh that was so different from his daily mockery and sneering; a laugh that contained no irony. A genuine, sincere laugh. 

    

Xue Xian didn’t say the fake polite phrase If it’s not too much trouble; neither did he give a word of thanks. He simply flexed his shoulders and said, “Mn. Are you holding it steady? I'm going for it now––"

Then, he reached out those fingers and clawed again.

    

This time, Xue Xian stopped trying to restrain himself. Although Xuanmin was using all of his power to hold down the shifting earth beneath the mountain, there were still slight tremors when Xue Xian began to pull. As the force buried in the soil shuddered in response, the skin between Xuanmin's thumb and forefinger split from the pressure and began to bleed. But Xuanmin’s face did not change –– he continued to hold down the mountain with his copper coin pendant, steady and safe.

    

As Xue Xian strained harder, the pendant's ringing grew louder; the fog surrounding Thumb Mountain seemed to be drawn toward them, so that it wrapped itself around them and began to swirl violently. 

Just as Xuanmin's hand fully split open, a distant dragon's roar rose from within the dark abyss. Next, a thick piece of white bone leapt out from the ground and flew into Xue Xian's hand –– in the instant that it came into contact with his skin, it seemed to suddenly melt from some great heat and slowly sink into his flesh, integrating itself fully into his body.

    

It felt as though someone had lit Xue Xian's palm on fire, and that the flame had crept into his body and crawled all the way to his heart, before making its way up to his head and scorching his brain.

For a brief moment, all Xue Xian could feel was that endless flame extending all across his body, accompanied by burning pain. Apart from the agony, Xue Xian was aware of nothing else, not even where he was or what was happening. The only thing he could remember, somewhere in the ocean of his blurred mind, was that the reliable Xuanmin was standing right beside him.

    

After a long period of pain, Xue Xian finally found something that could help appease the scorching flame inside him.

He nuzzled eagerly against that thing and allowed it to cool him down while his half-conscious mind gradually began to emerge from its agonised daze. When he was finally able to open his eyes and look at his surroundings, Xue Xian saw that he had long transformed back into his dragon form –– from the looks of the flipped-over wheelchair and the tattered grass around him, it seemed that he had done so rather suddenly...

    

And that 'something that could help appease the flame' happened, of all things, to be Xuanmin –– 

Xue Xian's dragon body had somehow managed to coil itself around Xuanmin. And not only was he wrapped around Xuanmin, but his scales kept rippling against Xuanmin's body, as though needing to extract every bit of relief from Xuanmin's ice-cold body to soothe his own...

Xue Xian: “...”

    

What now? This was rather embarrassing...

A divine dragon had somehow become someone's large, unwieldy pet. Seeing the way Xue Xian was slithering all over Xuanmin's body, those who knew the context would be able to chalk it up to a panicked attempt to cast off some of the heat in Xue Xian’s body. But those who did not know the context... would think he was extremely clingy.

The main problem was that, apart from Xue Xian himself, no one else was able to actually know about his ‘about to die of heat’ context –– including Xuanmin.

    

Xue Xian wanted to die. [b] But he finally forced himself to peek over at Xuanmin's face.

Although he was being crushed on all sides by immense dragon scales, Xuanmin was simply standing there calmly and silently with his eyes closed. One hand was folded in a Buddhist greeting, and the other was still gently rubbing the copper coin pendant. Somehow, perhaps due to Xue Xian's newfound dragon bones or some other enigma, the coins looked just slightly different from before.

    

Xue Xian had been using the coins to heal his body earlier. It seemed that he had established some kind of minor connection with the pendant, as though tying a thin thread between him and the coins. 

As Xuanmin traced the contours of each coin with his thumb, Xue Xian could feel, ever so slightly, that something within the coins was slowly loosening –– and on the surface of the coins was a dim, oily glow, as though they had finally begun to shed some of that dull rust they’d had before...

    

Xue Xian suddenly recalled that Xuanmin had mentioned a seal on the coins, but that two of the seals had begun to loosen. Soon, some kind of turning point would cause the seals to shatter.

Seeing the way Xuanmin was now, it seemed that the turning point had arrived.

    

Realising that Xuanmin was not paying the slightest attention to the thing wrapped around his body, all sense of embarrassment evaporated from Xue Xian's mind. Compared to his own body temperature, Xuanmin's coolness was extremely comfortable, and, now that he had nothing to worry about, Xue Xian abandoned the last shreds of his dignity and enthusiastically resumed running his long body against every part of Xuanmin's, hoping to cool himself down as quickly as possible.

    

The copper coins in Xuanmin's hand trembled one by one, each tremor sending a strange, prickly feeling rippling across Xue Xian's body, as though each of his scales were lifting up to let the hot air escape through his pores. This kind of intimate connection with the pendant was a new feeling to Xue Xian, but it was so beneficial that he readily accepted it.

    

Kada––

As a sound reminiscent of reeds knocking against each other rang out within Xue Xian's mind, he lazily opened his eyes and shifted his long dragon body. Raising his head, Xue Xian rested it on Xuanmin's shoulder to look over at Xuanmin's hand –– in doing so, he noticed that the copper coins had entirely changed their appearance. Two of the coins had shed their drab grey shells, and now shone brilliantly with a layer of oil, so that their raw spiritual power could be felt from afar.

    

But then, Xue Xian noticed the wound on Xuanmin's hand; fresh blood welled up from a horizontal gash between his thumb and forefinger, streaming down the back of his hand. The blood dripped onto the ground, which was already splattered with several large bloodstains. 

It was obvious where the wound had come from. Within Xue Xian's conscience, he suddenly discovered the emotion of guilt. It occurred to him that, as a divine dragon, every part of his body was a treasure to humans. From his dragon scales to his dragon spit… Basically, he could easily help stop the bleeding.

    

Thus, a certain dragon — whose mind was still in the throes of disorientation and confusion — bent his head and licked a stripe across the wound. As the metallic taste of the blood hit his tongue, Xue Xian's mind suddenly cleared. That finger of Xuanmin's — which had, until this moment, been unconsciously clicking away at the coins — suddenly stopped too. Xuanmin opened his eyes.

Xue Xian: “...”

Question: If I explain my ‘context’ now, can I get my dignity back?

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The author has something to say: 

Just to say: I need to take tomorrow evening off. The morning after it I have an exam, and I have an essay due too Orz. After that I’ll do a double update~ 

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[a] The Chinese here is 本尊 (ben3 zun1), where 本 means “oneself” and 尊 means honorable/venerable. 

[b] Musuli uses 生无可恋 (sheng1 wu2 ke3 lian4) here, which is a slang term meaning “nothing left to live for”. 

This chapter was beta'd by Rogue!