CH 31

With a flick of his finger, Xuanmin's robe suddenly became dry. He let the now-dry Jiang Shining out of his pouch and then strode after Lu Nianqi, who was walking back to the river port where several boats had gathered.

Xue Xian remained coiled on Xuanmin's wrist, with his flimsy tail hanging flaccidly out of the edge of Xuanmin’s sleeve. Now, he rearranged himself so that his tiny head peeked out. He looked over at Lu Nianqi.

Previously, the kid had been extremely skinny and short, though slightly more lively-looking than Shijiu, probably because Nianqi liked to run around more and had a stubborn personality –– in general, he came off as an energetic, blunt little rascal.

But now, each step he took seemed to take a great deal of effort. He walked in a light and drifting manner, as though each time his foot touched the floor he had to immediately lift it up again because any amount of pressure was agony. The boy seemed to be in unbearable pain. 

Lu Nianqi had only taken a dozen steps, but his face had already gone as white as paper, and his forehead, which had just been blown dry of river water by the breeze, was now covered in a layer of sweat again.

"Just now you said you weren't feeling well. What do you mean?" Seeing the boy's pallor, Xue Xian decided that this could not simply be an effect of grief, so he could not help but ask about it.

The blood had drained from Nianqi's lips, too –– he looked terminally ill and feverish. The whiter his face turned, the blacker his eyes looked, and the less light seemed to bounce off his pupils: he did not even look alive anymore. The boy's eyelashes fluttered and he stuck out a tongue to lick his chapped lips. Shaking his head, he said, "It's nothing. I don't know either. It's just that... my bones feel sore and swollen, and every time my foot touches the floor, it sends that painful sour feeling all over my body. I don't want to move around too much."

Then, before Xue Xian could respond, Lu Nianqi lowered his voice and mumbled, "I'll bear with it... It's still not as painful as dying."

Jiang Shining glanced at him. "Not necessarily."

Suddenly, as though he had remembered something, Lu Nianqi stopped and turned to Jiang Shining. Although the boy was older than he looked, he was still a child in Jiang Shining's eyes, so the latter usually let him get away with speaking rather brusquely and tactlessly. Lu Nianqi stared at Jiang Shining coldly and asked, "You're not alive anymore, right?"

In that moment, even Xue Xian, tucked inside Xuanmin's sleeve, thought he could see a flash of light across Lu Nianqi's eyes, as though the boy had been falling off a cliff but had suddenly been able to grab onto an edge. [a]

Jiang Shining was a gentle soul. Though he sometimes liked to bicker with Xue Xian, he was not about to treat a child in such a way. He paused for a moment, then nodded. "Yes. I've been dead for three years, but my last request has not yet been fulfilled, so I'm living in a paper body temporarily."

Hearing this, Lu Nianqi briefly forgot to take care in the way that he walked. As he took another step, he accidentally put too much pressure and shrieked with pain. Another bucketful of sweat poured down his forehead. But he ignored it, and said to Jiang Shining, "Really? So even if you die, it doesn't mean you'll disappear without a trace?"

Jiang Shining stole a glance at Xuanmin, then ambiguously muttered, "Souls will at least stick around for an hour, and in special situations, they might stay a bit longer. Right, dashi?"

Xuanmin glared at Jiang Shining. He did not speak nor did he acknowledge the question. Instead, he pointed ahead –– they'd arrived. A number of fishermen were gathered at the river port, and it was not appropriate to discuss such things in a crowd.

Lu Nianqi took that as a ‘yes’. His face seemed to flush with a little bit of warmth.

Seven or eight boats jostled for space by the riverbank. The boats' passengers had all gotten off and were milling about in a group –– they seemed to be working together to drag something onto shore.

"Heavens, ah... When did these people drown?" someone said. "Why are they all rotten?"

"In all the years that I've collected corpses here, I've never come across anything like this." That was the voice of the corpse-diver.

After Lu Nianqi had come back to life on the corpse-diver's boat, the old man had decided to leave the other bodies in the water for the moment and row back with the three that he'd already collected. Only after placing Lu Shijiu and Liu-laotou on the embankment, and giving Lu Nianqi some hot wine to warm him up, had the corpse-diver returned to the river. 

Hearing the corpse-diver describe the scene, the resting fishermen by the shore had decided to give him a hand.

But their boats were not fit for carrying the dead –– being fishing boats and pleasure cruisers, it would have been a bad omen. Instead, they’d decided to help the corpse-diver to bring the bodies that looked like rotten cotton wads from his boat. Soon there was an eerie row of bodies arranged on the shore.

Xuanmin saw the row of waterlogged bodies and frowned.

"Gave me a nasty fright," the corpse-diver was saying as he and his colleagues brought the last of the bodies to the riverbank. "At first there were only six bodies –– I counted! They were floating by the islets. But as I returned to collect the last two, I don't know what happened. Another one floated up. It came right up to the side of my boat. That feeling… Horrible!"

Xue Xian subtly scratched Xuanmin's wrist and said, "Bald donkey, look at those bodies. The corpse that the corpse-diver mentioned was probably the one I released. There's no way this isn't related to that 'Hundred Soldiers Push the Flow' design. I'll explain more later, but pay attention for now –– check if there's anything amiss with these corpses."

His voice came out muffled so that nobody else could hear, but Xuanmin received the message quite clearly –– as though the sound had followed the shape of his sleeve and crept up to his ear.

Xuanmin's brow furrowed again, then he glanced down and said, "Mn." His finger then thumped Xue Xian's little tail again, as a warning for the niezhang not to move around too much and stay hidden.

But the niezhang’s response was to bite down on his hand, hard.

Dully, Xuanmin said, "Let go."

Jiang Shining and Lu Nianqi gaped at him. "What do you mean, let go?"

Xuanmin's expression did not stage –– he continued to stare blankly at the bodies that had been dragged out of the water. His gaze scanned them from their rotten, skeletal feet to the mess of black hair on their heads. Compared to the wrinkled, dry faces of the fishermen as they dry heaved with disgust, these corpses actually had an ethereal [b] feeling to them. 

The atmosphere on the riverbank was chilling. When Jiang Shining received no response from Xuanmin, he was too afraid to press, so he decided that he had merely misheard. Silently, he looked away.

Xue Xian was still gnawing at Xuanmin's thumb, unable to forgive the bald donkey for tugging at his tail. Finally, exhausted, he let go.

Xue Xian's instinct had been correct –– although the seven corpses did not look particularly remarkable, they all had something tied to their waists. While the fishermen were busy dry heaving, Xuanmin, with his hand wrapped in another torn piece of cloth, removed each of the items from the bodies' waists.

All seven were military dog tags, with the names scratched out.

Clearly, this group of bodies had been sourced similarly to the ones trapped in the tomb. 

As Xuanmin wrapped the items in the cloth and put the bundle away, Xue Xian said, "Right, we also have the tags that we got from the bottom of the river. Let's take a closer look later."

Xuanmin walked over to Lu Shijiu's body.    

Nianqi was kneeling by his brother, his hand hovering above Shijiu’s body, trembling. He wanted to touch Shijiu, but was afraid to do so –– as if, with that touch, Shijiu would really, truly be dead.

"Look––" Nianqi said, raising his head. As his gaze fell upon Xuanmin, his eyes seemed strangely emptier than they had been earlier, as though he were increasingly turning... blind. 

"I can feel that he's here, and I can touch him, but I can't see him," Nianqi continued. "I can see you. I can see the men on the shore. I can't see you clearly –– I can't distinguish the faces –– but I can see. It's just Shijiu that I can't see."

Xuanmin glanced at Shijiu’s body on the ground and then looked back into Nianqi's dark eyes. "The way you 'look' is not with your eyeballs,” Xuanmin said. “Your eyes have gone blind –– you just did not notice."

"What do you mean?" Nianqi's throat tightened.

Covertly, Xue Xian peeked his head out of the sleeve. He, too, inspected Nianqi's eyes. "Of course! I was wondering why your eyes had stopped reflecting light. It shouldn't've had anything to do with the water." 

Xue Xian thought for a while, then added, "Lu Shijiu exchanged his life for yours. It seems that he transferred his fuji skill to you as well. The changes in your body seem related to that, too, but it's still in the middle of happening, which is why you feel so much pain."

Stunned, Nianqi stammered, "You mean... you mean my eyes will become like Shijiu's?"

"Not will. It seems to already be occurring," Xue Xian replied. "What you're seeing now probably isn't normal silhouettes, but qi. Everything in your vision is probably what Lu Shijiu used to see every day."

"So the reason I can't see Shijiu is because..." Nianqi's nostrils flared as his breathing quickened –– he seemed to be choking. He frowned and his eyes brimmed red. "Why?"

Xuanmin raised his thumb and pressed down on Nianqi's forehead, where the minggong pressure point was. "You have grown a red mole here. Your brother had the exact same one. It is a mark of a successful life exchange. If his soul had stayed in this world without leaving, there would be no such mark."

Life exchange spells were forbidden arts, because even if the procedure did succeed, the survivor would suffer side effects. They would start to take after the person who had given them their life: either their appearance would change to look more like that person, or their personality and sanity would become muddy. The longer the dead person's soul stayed in the realm of the living, the more adverse the impact would be on the survivor.

In other words: in order to minimise the side effects on Lu Nianqi, Lu Shijiu had departed as soon as possible. The neutral, unemotional words he'd said to Nianqi back at the tomb had been his parting words. 

And with that farewell, they would probably never see each other again.

"Don't cry." Jiang Shining didn't have a handkerchief, so he used his hands to dab Lu Nianqi’s silent tears. "Perhaps..."

But before he could finish, all the blood vanished from Lu Nianqi’s face, and the boy fainted.

Perhaps the pain in his body had gotten to him, or perhaps it was the grief. He did not wake up for a very long time.

No matter how aloof Xuanmin was, or how much of an asshole Xue Xian was, they were not about to leave a dead youth and an unconscious boy behind and simply swagger off –– that would be despicable. So they decided to temporarily settle down in that tiny courtyard that Lu Shijiu and Lu Nianqi had grown up in.

The courtyard was a dispiriting wreck composed only of one minuscule kitchen and one equally small, drab living room. Inside the living room was a four-person table, and two bedrooms branched off to each side, each with a narrow bed and wooden closet –– one for each brother.

We say ‘settle down’, but the only person actually to settle was the unconscious Lu Nianqi. As soon as Xuanmin and the others had laid the boy to rest in his room, they went to the local funerary stall to order a coffin. They placed Lu Shijiu into the coffin and put the coffin in the other room for the time being.

Just as Xuanmin had sat down by the table in the living room, planning to begin thinking about the mystery behind the stone lock and the dog tags, Xue Xian stuck his head out from Xuanmin’s sleeve. "Don't sit down yet. Go to a clothing shop, or a textile shop."

Xuanmin stared down at him, waiting for an explanation.

Xue Xian scratched his dragon head with his claw. With a tight, embarrassed voice, he said, "I'm not wearing any clothes."

Xuanmin: “...”

Xuanmin digested Xue Xian's words as he blankly scanned the dragon's thin, curled body. Finally, he said, "What book taught you that it was okay to just go ahead and wrap yourself naked around someone's hand?"

Xue Xian bit him.

That niezhang's teeth were rather sharp. Each bite left a half-moon mark.

Xuanmin pulled up his sleeve, revealing his slender hand. He curved his index and middle fingers and presented them to Xue Xian. 

On the two fingers were a total of six different bite marks –– all that niezhang’s good work.

Xue Xian looked away and shrugged, denying responsibility. "Stop showing off your hand. It's not that much prettier than a chicken foot, plus it's uncomfortable as hell. It may look nice, but it's not practical at all, and unpleasant for me to wrap around. Now, if you please, get moving and go find me some clothes."

Jiang Shining was about to enter the room when he heard the niezhang ranting. Not wanting to bother, he quickly returned to the darkness of the kitchen, where he stood in a corner.

Xuanmin shook his head, but got up to leave.

The trip they were about to take started out as a shopping trip for the dragon, but it serendipitously netted other rewards, too.

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The author has something to say: 

Tomorrow afternoon I don’t have class~ Will try to update with a long and fat chapter =3=

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[a] The exact phrasing Musuli uses here is “caught a life-saving stalk of grass” (i.e. when falling off a cliff), but it was too long in English. 

[b] The phrase Musuli uses here is 飘然出尘 (piao1 ran2 chu1 chen2). 飘然 means “gloating/gliding”. 出尘 literally means “exiting into the dust”, and is used to describe when someone who has lived their life away from human society/concerns (especially a religious person such as a Daoist cultivator or a Buddhist monk) decides to enter the common realm / enter society. 红尘 (hong2 chen2), literally “red dust”, means “human society”, where worldly affairs occur.