“…Hello?”
Qin Shu gathered his courage and quietly greeted him.
To tell the truth, compared with fighting or confronting ghosts and dead souls, speaking face-to-face with a corpse that was actively decomposing was much more frightening.
The collapsing, split skin of his face; the teeth and skull half exposed between rotting flesh; the softened, misshapen tissue in unnatural colors and greasy yellow fat; the dried hair soaking in some unknown liquid… At this exact moment, Qin Shu desperately wished the other person had been nothing but a skeleton.
Unfortunately, reality refused to cooperate.
He could only devote every ounce of energy to controlling his expression and avoiding any visibly disrespectful reaction before speaking again. “May I ask, were you the one who brought my friend and me here?”
The decomposing corpse nodded slightly.
A piece of skin fell off his face.
Great.
Extremely frightening.
But at least they could communicate.
The corpse trembled and cautiously shifted farther back, maintaining a safe distance from Qin Shu’s “eye” before slowly beginning to speak. Perhaps because the soft tissues of his throat had long since dissolved into sludge, his voice sounded exceptionally muddy, hoarse, and viscous.
“Save us. The Cave God is dead. This place… dangerous… This world… a huge hole has been torn in it…”
Qin Shu’s brows knitted tightly. “When did the Cave God die?”
“Thirty-four years ago. When the Cave God’s consciousness was fading, the deity still carried worries and could not let go of Phoenix Village’s safety. To protect the people, the Cave God continued suppressing this place with the divine corpse, maintaining the village’s rules and guarding its peace… But later, later something began… eating the Cave God’s corpse! Corroding and devouring the suppressive power left behind! Dangerous. Dangerous…”
Thirty-four years ago.
Wasn’t that right around the beginning of the spiritual energy resurgence?
Every other deity seemed to have taken advantage of the resurgence to awaken again. How had Phoenix Village’s Cave God somehow died instead?
Qin Shu carefully committed that detail to memory and listened closely to the corpse’s halting explanation before immediately pursuing the question he could not ignore. “Excuse me, but is there something unclean inside Phoenix Village that requires a dead god to suppress it with the divine corpse?”
“A hole.”
“?”
“Yes. A flaw… The Cave God has been suppressing a flaw in this world for countless thousands of years, generation after generation. Even if all the Cave God left behind for our clan was a corpse, simply lying within the mountain and continuing to suppress it for another thousand years or so should have been effortless…”
When the corpse reached the crucial point, all his earlier timidity suddenly disappeared.
He began struggling violently inside the coffin that confined him. One misshapen arm stretched desperately toward Qin Shu’s “eye,” only to grasp empty air.
But apparently, that was enough.
Clutching a handful of nothing, he stared at Qin Shu with his decaying eyeballs and continued in a trembling, hoarse voice. “But after the Cave God quietly died, the divine position and authority were stolen by some contemptible thing, and all the incense worship was seized for itself. I don’t know what that thing is! But if the Cave God’s body is completely corroded and a breach appears… then, then…”
“Then what happens?” Qin Shu had an extremely bad feeling.
“This world will cease to exist. The ones suffering torment will no longer be only me, nor only the people of Phoenix Village buried deep inside these caves…
“It will be all of you.”
＊
Half an hour later, Qin Shu finally ended the lengthy conversation.
He tried to withdraw his line of sight, slowly retreating from the sealed coffin.
Another familiar squelch sounded.
This time, the experience of passing through the barrier was far clearer.
He felt as though he were prying apart a layer of skin—soft, cold, sticky skin—before carefully squeezing himself through the tiny opening and escaping from the coffin.
For an instant, his entire field of vision spun wildly.
Then, when Qin Shu could see clearly again…
He discovered that he was still inside the pitch-black cave.
Lying flat on his back.
Zhang Mei Jiang was floating above him, calmly tilting her head.
At the same time, Qin Shu saw a familiar pair of eyes.
They resembled glittering, extravagantly expensive gemstones, shining with a cool and limpid glow in the darkness.
His head was resting on Pei Zhao’s lap.
Pei Zhao was gently stroking the top of his head, cool fingertips threading through his hair and transmitting a reassuring touch and temperature.
“…Zhaozhao.”
“Mm?”
Qin Shu was still a little dazed and was reluctant to sit up immediately.
So he continued lying shamelessly on Pei Zhao’s lap, stared into those beautiful eyes, and quietly asked, “Just now… did my soul leave my body?”
The corner of Pei Zhao’s lips lifted slightly as he gave him an affirmative answer. “Mm. It’s called soul night-roaming. Congratulations. You unlocked a new skill.”
Elio’s Notes: 神魂夜游 literally describes the spirit or soul “roaming at night.” Here, it refers to Qin Shu consciously perceiving and moving beyond his physical body in an out-of-body state.
“But I wasn’t trying to leave my body. I just wanted to take a closer look… What if I accidentally pop out of my body in the middle of the street one day and get hit by a car?”
“Practice more. Familiarity makes it easier to control. Leaving your body isn’t that simple in the first place.”
Pei Zhao seemed to be in a good mood. He was clearly very satisfied with what Qin Shu had managed to accomplish tonight, and there was an undisguised hint of a smile in his eyes.
He patiently explained, “Phoenix Village is the most suitable place for you to practice. Death actually removes unnecessary interference and lets you slowly familiarize yourself with the true connection between your soul and your body. You learn to distinguish them, then learn to control them.”
Qin Shu listened seriously, but resting with his head on Pei Zhao’s lap was far too intimate a position.
The familiar faint fragrance filling his nose belonged to Pei Zhao.
It made Qin Shu unable to resist doing something even more intimate.
Without thinking, he caught Pei Zhao’s hand and immediately put on an aggrieved, clingy act. He pressed his own face into Pei Zhao’s palm, narrowed his eyes, rubbed against it, and mumbled, “Zhaozhao, you’re so good-looking. You’re way too good-looking. My eyes are so happy…”
Pei Zhao froze, immediately becoming somewhat uncomfortable.
It was not that he minded Qin Shu being clingy, but the timing was obviously inappropriate.
He reminded him faintly, “Mind where we are.”
Hearing that, Zhang Mei Jiang hurriedly pretended she had seen absolutely nothing.
With an expression as though nothing had happened, she turned her head toward the wall beside her by a full one hundred and eighty degrees.
Yes.
Only her head turned.
Her body remained facing its original direction.
Several faint, crisp creaks came from her neck.
“…Cough. Sorry, sorry.”
Zhang Mei Jiang’s extremely deliberate attempt to give them privacy was so obvious that even Qin Shu, who was rarely embarrassed, felt a little awkward.
He hurriedly pushed his heavy body upright, breathed out, and forced his relaxed nerves to tense again.
“There’s something major going on. No, actually, there are a lot of major things. Listen carefully.”
Qin Shu paused, his expression grave. “First… over the last thirty years, meaning ever since the spiritual energy resurgence began, every single person who died inside Phoenix Village died an unnatural death.”
Not one of them had died of old age.
Not a single one had reached the natural end of their lifespan.
All of them had been poisoned with Gu that induced a state of apparent death so convincing that nobody could distinguish it from the real thing. Their clanspeople then sealed them inside coffins, formally buried them, and turned them into another dab of pigment deep within the cave.
Because the people of Phoenix Village were born with the unusual characteristics of “corpses” to begin with, as long as their souls had not awakened from that apparent-death state, their bodies could remain preserved for long periods as though they were simply sleeping.
That was right.
They had been perfectly preserved inside this dark, cold, and dry burial cave, locked within coffins covered in yellow talismans, lying there silently like corpses until the day someone deliberately awakened them.
But waking did not mean salvation.
It meant horrific torment and despair.
Every one of them remained trapped inside their own coffin, forced to watch helplessly as the last of their natural lifespan slipped away and their bodies began to rot, without any way to call for help.
Only after those intense negative emotions were magnified to their absolute limit would they finally obtain true death.
According to the owner of the bright-red coffin, the thing that had replaced the Cave God had only awakened all of them approximately one month ago, deliberately creating this man-made purgatory.
Whenever one of them became unable to endure the torment and completely broke down, that thing would take away the shattered soul and use it to refine an even more horrifying and vicious Gu poison, which was then used to corrode the suppressive power left behind by the Cave God.
And by now, the owner of the bright-red coffin was the only soul that had not yet collapsed.
He had “died” thirty years ago.
His name was A-Bu, and he had once been the most respected Grand Shaman in Phoenix Village, particularly skilled in divination.
Because of that, before his supposed death, he had already prepared himself for the miserable fate that awaited him in the future. He had even specifically instructed his clanspeople not to seal his coffin completely and to use certain unusual materials to leave a few concealed weaknesses in it.
That was why, when Grand Shaman A-Bu opened his eyes, he did not collapse, scream, or sink into overwhelming despair.
He waited for his chance.
At the same time, he silently endured for an entire month, observing every suspicious movement he could, collecting as much information as possible, and attempting to communicate with the other souls as they broke down.
Of course, none of those attempts could reach the outside.
A-Bu could only watch his own body decay beyond recognition while gradually realizing that the seriousness of the situation had completely exceeded anything he had anticipated.
And the opportunity A-Bu had been waiting for…
was not Qin Shu.
It was Pei Zhao.
More than thirty years ago, A-Bu’s divination had produced several extremely strange lines:
Living? Dead? Neither one nor the other? Where lies the boundary? Formless and colorless? A chaos of myriad hues? With this anomaly, take all under Heaven; mend Heaven’s breach, and close Heaven’s peril.
It sounded completely baffling.
And in truth, it was completely baffling.
But A-Bu had not invented those words.
They had been spoken by the Cave God, who at the time was also approaching death.
The Cave God had intruded directly into A-Bu’s divination, murmured those words inside the future he saw, and offered no explanation whatsoever.
Not long afterward, the Cave God died.
A-Bu himself gradually approached the end of his life as well.
As the most gifted Grand Shaman in Phoenix Village, A-Bu had studied the Cave God’s words extremely carefully and arrived at his own interpretation.
Only the anomaly spoken of by the Cave God could save the future that was already teetering on the edge of collapse.
Therefore, he had to wait for that anomaly to arrive.
He had to wait for someone neither living nor dead, a person of chaos whose full nature could not easily be perceived, to appear in Phoenix Village.
That was extremely difficult.
Before Pei Zhao appeared, every single outsider who entered Phoenix Village became, objectively and biologically, a corpse.
Without exception.
Blood circulation ceased.
The heart stopped beating.
The neurons in the brain stopped sending and receiving signals.
It was that simple.
Qin Shu understood this perfectly well, because he himself was currently trapped in precisely that peculiar state of “death.”
Pei Zhao was different.
Pei Zhao genuinely had not died.
Phoenix Village’s rules had not affected him in the slightest.
He breathed.
His heart beat.
Although he was cold all over, touching him could still make him blush and grow warm…
More importantly, Pei Zhao was mysterious. There were far too many things about him that nobody could ever see through as long as he himself did not want them to.
To A-Bu, that made him the perfect “anomaly.”
As for how the “anomaly” was actually supposed to help, even A-Bu himself had no idea.
For that reason, Qin Shu had no intention of placing any pressure on Pei Zhao. He would simply lay out the facts first. Everything else could wait until they understood the entire situation more clearly.
Pei Zhao did not react much.
After listening to the whole explanation, he merely nodded lightly, his expression exactly the same as usual.
His attention was somehow still focused on the rocks in the cave.
For once, he even took the initiative to speak and asked Zhang Mei Jiang to break several smooth, snow-white little stalactites from high up inside the cave so he could keep them as travel souvenirs…
Zhang Mei Jiang was perfectly happy to help because she needed something to do.
Her expression had long since frozen.
She remained silent for a long time, struggling to digest the enormous amount of information Qin Shu had just given her.
She did not dare believe it.
Yet she had no reason not to.
“Why am I fine?”
Only after Pei Zhao had satisfactorily put the little stones into his pocket did Zhang Mei Jiang sit on top of her own coffin and force herself to face reality, murmuring with lowered eyes.
“You died in Yuncheng, not Phoenix Village. Your natural lifespan really did end. Because your obsession remained unresolved, you immediately became a malicious ghost instead. Ironically, that let you escape all this.”
Qin Shu thought for a moment. “The people who died inside Phoenix Village were probably all controlled by Gu poison before their natural lifespans ended and forcibly put into apparent death… Sister Zhang, you understand Gu better than we do. What kind of Gu could force someone into a state of apparent death so convincing that even accomplished practitioners among your own people couldn’t detect anything wrong?”
“That would be extremely rare. Gu creatures aren’t omnipotent, nor are they particularly mysterious. Usually, they’re simply tools for harming or killing people. Even the famous love Gu doesn’t actually possess the ability to force someone to fall in love. It’s a tool used to kill an unfaithful lover, someone whose heart has changed. Unless…”
Zhang Mei Jiang fell silent for a moment.
“Unless whoever administered the Gu used one of the secret Gu arts bestowed by the Cave God. Those arts cannot be passed outside the family. They can only be taught to one’s biological daughter, and even other members of the clan have no right to ask about them.” Zhang Mei Jiang paused. “For example, the power Xu Qian possesses now also came from a unique secret art that I asked the Cave God to grant me.”
“Sister Zhang, the Gu poison being used to harm your clanspeople—and whatever changed Xu Qian into what she is now… may not actually have been secret arts bestowed by the Cave God.”
Qin Shu spoke quietly.
His tone softened slightly, becoming more cautious, but he still had no choice except to emphasize the point again.
“The Cave God is gone. The deity died more than thirty years ago, around the time the spiritual energy resurgence began.”
“…”
Zhang Mei Jiang fell silent again.
The deeper she thought about that terrifying fact, the more difficult it became to accept, and the colder she felt inside.
“If someone asked the Cave God for a special secret art, would the other people in Phoenix Village know about it? We could start investigating the culprit from that angle.” Qin Shu tried to shift the subject. “Logically speaking, not everyone would be qualified to ask a god for something like this, and not everyone who asked would actually receive it.”
Receiving a divinely bestowed secret art was probably an extremely rare event.
If everyone had one, there would be nothing secret about them at all.
And if they were rare, then they could simply make a list and investigate the names one by one.
Zhang Mei Jiang nodded lightly. Her expression remained somewhat dazed, but she still answered Qin Shu seriously. “Fewer than one person in a hundred receives a secret art. From the time I was born until now, aside from me, there have only been four: the village chief, Granny A-Shu, the current Grand Shaman Chen Li Chi, and Liu Yang Yang.”
“…Liu Yang Yang?!”
Qin Shu jumped in surprise.
A moment later, he shook his head. “Doesn’t feel like him. Brother Liu’s pretty kind. He’s got that innocent kind of stupidity.”
“Yes. He’s very stupid, but somehow extremely talented.” Zhang Mei Jiang finally showed the faintest smile. “We were fairly close when we were young. He doesn’t have much scheming in him; he’s simply very good at getting himself into trouble. Please look after him when you can.”
As for the remaining three, Zhang Mei Jiang could not say with certainty.
She had spent too little time around them in recent years and was no longer familiar enough with them.
She had never been someone who enjoyed settling down.
That was why she had studied hard from a young age and left her hometown early, going out into the wider world to explore what she truly wanted and loved.
Different relationships.
A different career.
A life different from that of a Gu practitioner.
If fate had not played such a cruel joke on her…
There was no use thinking about it now.
Without hesitation, Zhang Mei Jiang told them everything she knew.
First was the Grand Shaman, Chen Li Chi.
He was Chen Shui’s maternal uncle.
As the person with the greatest spiritual sensitivity in Phoenix Village and the one closest to the divine, the Grand Shaman generally performed three major duties: divination, ritual sacrifice, and healing.
As a result, Chen Li Chi possessed considerable prestige within Phoenix Village.
Back when Qin Shu and Chen Shui had still only been communicating online, Qin Shu had occasionally heard Chen Shui mention this particular “elder” in a tone of complete trust.
Judging from Chen Shui’s descriptions, the Grand Shaman took good care of the younger generation. He had even secretly performed a divination concerning Liu Yang Yang’s disappearance. Ordinarily, he was highly authoritative and conducted himself according to the rules.
Zhang Mei Jiang was somewhat afraid of him and rarely interacted with him, but even she would describe him as conscientious and steadfast in his faith.
The current village chief of Phoenix Village, meanwhile, was a cheerful woman named Liu Bai Long.
She was in her fifties this year, which counted as the prime of life in Phoenix Village.
She had also done Zhang Mei Jiang a great kindness.
Zhang Mei Jiang’s mother had died young, while her father had been an incompetent outsider. As a result, nearly everything in Zhang Mei Jiang’s childhood had depended upon Village Chief Liu Bai Long’s care.
Her clothes and food.
Money for school and exams.
Even the living expenses she needed when she first established herself in Jiangcheng.
Village Chief Liu had contributed to all of it.
Money might not be scarce these days, but not everyone was willing to personally worry over and support a child all the way into adulthood.
What Liu Bai Long had done carried real weight.
“She sounds really nice. We were supposed to have dinner at her house tonight…” Qin Shu looked thoughtful. “She probably knows something about the Cave God too. Once we get out, I’ll test the waters with her.”
Then he continued, “What about Granny A-Shu?”
“She’s blind. Born blind, actually, and she isn’t someone you want to provoke. I heard that before Liberation, she once went down the mountain and used Gu poison to take out an entire company of Japanese soldiers. Killing people used to be an ordinary part of life for her.”
Elio’s Notes: In mainland Chinese usage, “before Liberation” commonly refers to the period before the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Here it is being used as a broad historical marker.
Zhang Mei Jiang sank into her memories. “But she has always been gentle with the clan. She became much kinder with age. She used to make soup or noodles and bring them to my house, then slip a few bills between the pages of my textbooks so I could buy snacks for myself. Thinking about it now… I wronged her too. Before I died, I never went to say a proper goodbye or sit down and talk with her.”
“Is there anything you want me to tell her?” Qin Shu asked quietly.
“…Just tell her I’m sorry.”
“Got it.”
Qin Shu prepared to leave.
He brushed the dust from himself, instinctively hugged Pei Zhao’s arm, and looked toward the endless darkness deeper in the cave.
“Sister Zhang, you keep saying you aren’t close with your clanspeople anymore, but whenever you talk about them, they all sound really, really good. Kind. Sincere. None of them sound like the kind of person who would maliciously poison the entire village with Gu.”
Zhang Mei Jiang’s expression became complicated. “But what if something contaminated them? What if they were being controlled by the ‘thing’ Grand Shaman A-Bu mentioned… Everyone has malicious thoughts, even when those thoughts are normally under control.”
“Mm. And if some irresistible force induces or manipulates them, those malicious thoughts could lose control or even become stronger,” Qin Shu quietly agreed.
“So once you leave here, the two of you must be extremely careful. If the Cave God truly is dead, and if the secret Gu art I received wasn’t an orthodox art, wasn’t a genuine inheritance bestowed by the Cave God…”
Zhang Mei Jiang paused.
Brilliantly colored bloody tears trembled at the corners of her eyes and slipped down her deathly pale cheeks once again.
“Then perhaps I don’t understand at all what terrible thing I actually did.
“And I’m even more afraid to imagine Xu Qian…
“Xu Qian.
“Xu Qian.
“What in the world did I turn her into…?”
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