[Revised TL] 64 铜钱龛世 | Tong Qian Kan Shi | Copper Coins -- 木苏里 | Musuli -- 英语翻译 | English translation -- Chapter 64

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Chapter 64: Tongshou Spider (IV)

Heart Demons...

Xue Xian frowned. Naturally, he had heard of Heart Demons: such arrays were often set by those who found themselves in the most dire of situations, such as being faced with a far more powerful opponent, or being surrounded on all sides. The array would delay the opponent and give the spellcaster a lifeline to escape.

    

This was a good tactic for a weaker person who needed to defeat a stronger person, or for a small group of people to defeat a larger group of people. Indeed, everyone had demons in their heart — whether these were regrets or doubts — that would plague them from time to time. This was the case no matter how big or small, no matter how near or far the regrets and doubts were.

It was a hidden trick that snuck up on you, so that by the time you realised what was happening, you would already be trapped. The array was able to bring out all the demons that haunted you.

    

This was why Xue Xian had frowned when he heard the words ‘Heart Demons’... Astonishingly, his Heart Demons hadn't had anything to do with being maimed in Huameng County, nor with obtaining revenge against those who had maimed him...

The vision had not made mention of any of those things. Neither had the vision been about his desire to get out of the stone dungeon: such a weak and circumstantial desire would never have been enough to get someone like Xue Xian trapped in the array. So since none of those options had been the bait to lure him into the trap... then it had to be something else. Or someone else.

And there had only been one other person in the vision: Xuanmin.

    

That explained why, earlier, Stone Zhang and Lu Nianqi had suddenly disappeared, leaving Xue Xian alone with Xuanmin –– this was how the array had manufactured a situation to draw out the demons in Xue Xian’s heart.

The only reason Xue Xian had gotten out so quickly was because his demons had never been lodged that deeply –– or because the flaws in the array had been too obvious.

As Xue Xian realised all this, his face went through a series of complicated expressions before settling back into that neutral, cold look. He threw the dying man to the ground, and slowly wiped away the blood splatters that had landed onto his hands.

    

Although the man was close to death, he still held some dredges of hope for survival within him, so hidden amidst his murky eyes was a manic glint.

    

Xue Xian recalled what the man had been blabbering about earlier and said coolly, "What are you doing here? If you're frank with me now, I might let you live another shichen. It will only take me a while to figure it out on my own, but if you're stubborn enough to make me have to do it myself, then I’ll kill you before a shichen passes.”

    

The man curled on the floor launched into another coughing fit, wheezing and hacking so hard that Xue Xian thought he might die right there –– and wondered whether the man had even heard what he'd said.

As Xue Xian had suspected, the man did not seem to have any intention of replying to him. Or perhaps he was simply too out of breath.

    

Xue Xian was not surprised by this –– he was spinning silk out of the thoughts in his mind, trying to understand what this dying man was so desperately hiding, and what that sliver of hope was that was keeping him alive...

What do dying people hope for? For someone to come save them, or to escape death by some other means.

The former was unlikely to happen in this situation –– even if someone did come, they still had to go through Xue Xian to get to the man, and with all those obstacles, the man was likely to die before he was even saved.

And the latter was an utter fairytale. This man might not even survive being saved by a friend, let alone saving himself. If he kept lying there, he would die any second now, and there was no hope for survival. Unless...

Unless he found some special way to extend his own lifespan.

    

Xue Xian's face hardened: It really seemed that this man intended to add to his lifespan.

Each person has their own lifespan. If you were already about to step into the afterlife, it was not possible to just tack on a few more years for free. The art of life extension consisted of two categories: life exchange and life binding. In the former, you switched out another person's lifespan with your own, and ultimately, someone still had to die for the transaction to succeed. In the latter, you bound your lifespan to that of another. That way, the two of you were bound in life –– and in death.

    

Initially, the former sounded more evil and the latter sounded quite harmless. In reality, it was the opposite: the former used years to buy years, and the latter used fortune to buy years. In life exchange, the only stakes were the years of your lifespan. But in life binding, you not only had to share your fortunes, but also your misfortunes. Life binding had far more potential to go horribly wrong. 

Six of one and half a dozen of the other [a] –– the two methods were the same, really.

    

If the man planned to extend his lifespan, then there had to be someone with whom he could exchange his life with, or bind his life to.

And this matched up with the nonsense he'd been spluttering earlier: he'd lost one, but still had three.

    

As Xue Xian realised this, dark clouds passed over his mind. 

    

He hated to owe anything to anyone, least of all kindness. This trait was both a good and bad thing: the good part was that he led a clean and clear life of no debts at all, in which he was not forcibly connected or entangled with anyone else; but the bad part was he never actually became close to anyone. 

Of course, this was only bad to normal people; to Xue Xian, it was exactly how he liked it.

    

Putting aside definitions of closeness, Xue Xian had brought Lu Nianqi and Stone Zhang here, and thus they were ‘his people’. [b] And then there was Xuanmin.

For anyone to wish harm on people around Xue Xian... That person must have a death wish.

    

Xue Xian's eyes swivelled as he recalled the sound that he'd heard when he'd escaped the Heart Demons spell –– it had sounded like a small pearl rolling onto the floor. It had been much lighter than a marble made of silver, gold, or amber, but not as brittle...

That thing was most likely the key to the life extension spell.    

Time was of the essence. Xue Xian didn't have the patience to wait for the piece of shit [c] on the floor to tell him everything of his own accord.

    

He remembered what Stone Zhang had said back when they'd first met: this man had taken him to a mountain, and had made him carve seven stone locks and two tomb guardians...

“Let me ask you this," Xue Xian said now as he gripped the man's neck and held him up again. "Do you know about Gravestone Island, on the river in Wolong County? There is a tomb beneath that island, and inside that tomb there are three hundred lost souls that cannot rest. Do you think that if the souls trapped in that tomb met you, they would recognise you?"

    

The wheezing man suddenly convulsed. It was as though — now that he stood in front of death's door — his own sins filled him with dread.

The man breathed a heavy sigh, seemingly remembering something, and then weakly said, "I..."

    

"Now you want to tell me? Sorry, I don't want to hear it anymore," Xue Xian interrupted. Tilting his head, he said, "I'm just confirming. I'm thinking about how to make you pay."

He flipped his other hand over, and those scratched-out dog tags appeared in his palm. He said, "Trapped innocent souls are full of resentful energy. Although they have now been buried, they will not begin to fade until at least another eight or ten years. Especially... when they see those that harmed them."

    

Xue Xian lowered his voice, then twitched his index finger again. A crimson scratch wound appeared on the dying man's forehead. The man suddenly jolted awake, as though he were coming back to life.

"Pain is better felt when lucid," Xue Xian said. He casually tossed the dog tags onto the man's body.

    

The dog tags were only thumb-sized flakes of metal, and the ones that Xue Xian had collected from the bottom of the river only added up to about twenty or thirty in all. He threw them out very easily and they fell lightly onto the man, but the man reacted as though he had been pinned down by the weight of five mountains. His entire body became rigid and he lay sprawled on the ground, struggling against the weight, yet ultimately unable to budge.

Next, he seemed to see something. His eyes bulged out, and he began to scream.

    

"Aaaahhhhhhh ––– ! Go away! Get away from me!" The man appeared overwhelmed with terror and began to shake again, crying and wailing for mercy. He seemed to have gone insane instantly. "Please! Please, please, please –– Ask me anything –– ah –– go away –– make them go away ––"

Perhaps the man's cries were particularly grating and harrowing –– Stone Zhang and Lu Nianqi, who had been lying unconscious on the floor, suddenly spasmed, as though dreaming about falling. Their legs kicked out and they came to.

Pata––

Again there was that sound of something clattering to the floor. This time, it made two separate sounds.

    

Stone Zhang took huge gulping breaths, as though having awoken from a bad dream. His eyes bulging, he stared into space, dazed, for a long time before coming back to his senses. "What is it?" he breathed. "What just happened? How could I fall asleep here?"

He looked over at Lu Nianqi, the stubborn, detached boy who was nonetheless reliable when things became difficult. Lu Nianqi was just waking up too, and Stone Zhang became even more confused. "Hey, Xiao-Qi, [d] did you dream too? What did you dream about?"

    

Lu Nianqi looked ghastly pale and seemed still to be in the throes of his vision. After a long pause, he finally said in a low voice, "I saw Shijiu. But he looked different––"

"Ahhhh! I'm begging you, I'm begging you, please––" 

Before Lu Nianqi could finish, he was interrupted by the wailing man. The melancholy feeling Lu Nianqi had brought out with him from the vision seemed to dissipate a little, and he brusquely asked Xue Xian, "What is wrong with this person?"

    

Xue Xian frowned as he glanced at the still unconscious Xuanmin. Then he looked back at the man on the floor and hooked his finger. "I'll let you take a break. I'm asking you again: What did you do?"

As the prickling pain of a hundred ants gnawing at his heart disappeared momentarily, the sobbing man curled up on the floor, took a few deep breaths, and said, "I can't die... I can't die... I used a Tongshou Spider… [e] I put it in the array..."

    

He was talking absolute gibberish, but Xue Xian understood.

Tongshou Spider?

    

"How do you break the array?" Xue Xian yelled.

"The array breaks the spider... The spider dies... The array doesn't break..." The man blinked open his eyes and looked over weakly at Xuanmin. "I only need one second... Pierce the skin... Dr-draw blood..."

As he spoke, Xue Xian had already begun searching Xuanmin's body, frowning.

"All you need is a drop of blood… And then..."

    

Found it!

Xue Xian thought he could see a hidden dot of red on the side of Xuanmin's neck. There was no time to spare –– he pulled away Xuanmin’s collar and automatically moved closer to that wound spewing dark blood...

    

"You can't draw it out. Once it's gone into his body, it can never come out," the man said. Perhaps it was because he was still energised by that flick to his forehead earlier, but as the man recovered, he seemed slightly less frail than he'd been before. Now, he could even speak in full sentences.

    

The man's eyes gleamed as he stared at Xuanmin's neck, and Xue Xian with his face pressed hard against Xuanmin’s skin. There was a unique manic feeling to the man's darting gaze. He mumbled, "It's over... It's useless. I've succeeded. Once spider legs creep out of the wound, I can live again."

    

He sighed with pleasure as he looked down at his own hands, which seemed to be coming back alive.

    

Frowning, Xue Xian lifted his head and spat out the taste of blood from his mouth. Although the patch of Xuanmin's skin was growing dark red from Xue Xian’s attempt to suck the blood out, the wound itself was completely intact. In fact, it even looked as though it were getting larger –– was this what the man was saying about the spider's legs?

    

But as thin blood vessels really did begin to creep out of the wound, Xue Xian froze.

   

This was familiar...

With one hand behind Xuanmin's neck to support it, Xue Xian looked up at the red mole located between the monk's neck and lower jaw. Every time Xuanmin had a bout of amnesia, that mole would also extend out into a network of blood vessels–– exactly like the Tongshou Spider!

    

At that moment, the new spider mole that had attached itself to Xuanmin's neck grew two long, veiny legs, then froze. Suddenly, its legs retracted, and, in the blink of an eye, the entire wound was gone.

Before Xue Xian could register what had just happened, he felt Xuanmin's body beneath his stir.

    

"You're awake?" Xue Xian asked as Xuanmin's eyes blinked open.

For a moment, Xuanmin seemed to raise his hand.

    

"We walked right into a trap. Heart Demons," Xue Xian said. He remembered his vision, and a complicated expression crossed his face. He didn't even notice Xuanmin gently raise his hand, then let it fall back to his side.

Xuanmin closed his eyes for some time, then suddenly opened them again –– now he was fully awake.

    

Next, he looked slowly over at Xue Xian.

    

Xue Xian was confused by the look, but then remembered that his positioning was a little ambiguous. Not only that, but that red patch of sucked skin on Xuanmin's neck was a clear indication of what Xue Xian had just been doing.

Xuanmin: “…”

Xue Xian: “…………” No, I can explain.

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[a] The Chinese phrasing used here is 半斤八两 (ban4 jin1 ba1 liang3), meaning “half a jin, eight liang”. These two measurements are exactly the same, so this idiom has the exact same meaning as the English idiom “six of one and half a dozen of the other”.

[b] The Chinese here is 自己人 (zi4 ji3 ren2), meaning “own people”. This is a common turn of phrase used to refer to one’s own side or tribe. 

[c] Musuli uses 杂碎 (za2 sui) here, which means offal / the cooked entrails of an animal. Since this is used as an insult, I went for “piece of shit” in English. 

[d] Stone Zhang calls Lu Nianqi 小七 (xiao3 qi1), literally “Little Seven”, here, as a nickname.

[e] The Chinese here is 同寿 (tong2 shou4). 同 means “same” or “together”, and 寿 means “lifespan” or “years”. In my first translation I translated this literally as “Spider of the Same Age” but this was a mouthful and doesn’t match with [spoiler alert] Wuming Spider which appears later in the story. 

This chapter was beta’d by Rogue!