CH 48

Chapter 48: Kindness (III)

It was the first month of summer, in Huameng County, and his muscles and bones were being extracted from his body –– countless golden threads appeared out of nowhere in the air and fell upon him, some wrapping themselves around his body and tying him down to the ground, others worming their way between his scales and tightening their grip, trapping him like a giant cage.

The golden threads were as thin as hair, so that even if they did pierce his skin, he would not immediately begin to bleed, as the wounds were too small. But no blood did not mean no pain –– those golden threads sent scorching agony all across his body, the outside ones scorching his skin, the ones that had dug into him scorching his flesh and sending pain into his very muscles and bones. Every little move sent more pain rippling across him, and it was as painful as being devoured by millions of ants.

But what was Xue Xian like? When he wanted to move, he would move, even if ten thousand arrows had pinned him to the ground –– he would simply pluck the arrows out one by one no matter the pain, and then decapitate whoever had done that to him.

Indeed, physical pain had never been able to stop him.

The reason why he hadn't forced his way out of the cage that day was because it happened to be his catastrophe period, which only occurred once every century.

There were great catastrophes and small catastrophes, but they were really all just storms.

To Xue Xian, tempests were the least fear-inspiring catastrophes. When was a dragon emerging from the sea not accompanied by some rain and thunder? He had long gotten used to thunder, especially the noise, so that no matter how mightily a roll of lightning shook across him, he could simply sit there and watch, his eyes unblinking.

Ordinary thunder could not even hit him, especially as much of it had been summoned by him –– and even if he was struck, it did not hurt nor even itch. But thunder during the catastrophe period was different: not only was it able to strike him, it in fact aimed itself directly at him, sending bolts of lightning onto his body one after the other until he began to bleed. His skin peeling away was a small matter –– there were far worse things, such as harm to his soul. If he did not practice his Buddhist meditation skills well enough to combat the pain, his soul could be entirely shattered by the thunder, and his empty body would melt into dust and mud. 

In order to save their own lives, most people, if experiencing a catastrophe, would come up with all sorts of ideas to protect themselves –– like the Eight Immortals crossing the sea, each person might come up with a different idea. But Xue Xian could do no such thing: each and every move affected the rivers, lakes, and seas upon which humanity depended. If he tussled, it would turn all nearby bodies of water into churning, dangerous things. Every once in a while he would cause a flood somewhere, and during a critical moment such as this, he had to be extremely careful not to send out a great wave to flatten whole cities.

When Xue Xian was experiencing catastrophe, he would always transform back into his dragon form: his colossal dragon body could bear the agonising lightning strikes to the flesh. Whereas if he stayed human, only a few strikes of lightning would peel all of his flesh away –– and then what would he look like?

When catastrophes were small, Xue Xian could not be bothered to move around too much –– he would find a random deserted island and draped himself across it to let the thunder pummel him. When it was over, he would simply go to sleep right there and let his wounds heal. Then, when he was no longer bleeding from every pore, he would slither into the bottom of the sea and mend his soul, before going back out again to make trouble.

But when catastrophes were great, he could not be so slapdash. Indeed, most land could not bear the brunt of the colossal thunder of great catastrophes –– if it fell upon a desert island, only a few bolts would break the island into pieces and send it sinking into the water. If there happened to be people there, then it would become a real disaster.

In order to avoid the thunder of great catastrophes striking the earth because of him, Xue Xian would fly into the sky and burrow into the thick black storm clouds. Shafts of lightning came down from the heavens and made their way into the clouds to strike him, and only him. For humans, the noise was frightening, but there was no real danger at all.

And that year, in the first month of summer, Xue Xian encountered a great catastrophe.

And that catastrophe seemed even greater than previous great catastrophes, so that, after he had born the strikes of thunder, he found that his soul had been seriously harmed and he swiftly fell from the clouds onto the beach below.

When one's soul was harmed, one would become only semi-conscious and disoriented, with no spiritual energy. Because of this, when those countless gold threads had appeared to tie him tightly to the ground, Xue Xian could barely even open his eyes, let alone see who his enemy was or try to break his fetters. Even for a long time after that, he could not remember the memory at all, only bits and pieces, like the fragments of a dream.

But now, at the abandoned village, Xue Xian felt something ripple through his mind. Perhaps it was a coincidence, or perhaps something else, but a frame from that memory suddenly flashed into his mind, and Xue Xian was seized with paralysing terror. Beyond those dense whirls of golden thread had been the silhouette of a person –– perhaps the person was dressed in white, but because there were too many obstacles, it was hard to see details, only a contour.

Just by the contour, Xue Xian could now see that the person was thin and tall, and, amid the billowing of their robes in the wind, he could also see wispy flying shadows against the person's face –– long hair that had come loose.

And yet...

There was something indescribably strange.

The weng–– noise began to die down in his mind, and Xue Xian finally freed himself from the memory.

"What's wrong? Hey, wake up––"

As Xue Xian regained his five senses, he began to hear a female voice shouting in his ear with worry and panic.

"Little Xingzi, please stop shaking me, if you keep going, my head is going to roll off..." Xue Xian muttered, his eyes still closed. 

"You're awake?" Xingzi exclaimed in delight –– she was so overwhelmed that she stumbled and grabbed onto Xue Xian's shoulder to steady herself. She yanked her hand back as though she'd touched fire, then awkwardly shuffled to the side and explained, "Just now you suddenly lost consciousness. You'd even stopped breathing. We were all terrified, and I just... I..."

Frowning, Xue Xian finally lazily opened his eyes. Squinting, he patted his chest and said, "So you decided to pinch me?"

Xingzi leant against the carriage wall and sighed with resignation and a sense of immense, heavy guilt. "Yes, I pinched you in the chest."

"Thank you very much. I'm grateful," Xue Xian said with a smile. Then, his face fell, and he looked out into the village again.

"Ai?" Not expecting a word of thanks, Xingzi blushed again. She wrung her hands and spluttered, "No worries, no worries, I'm just glad you're awake now."

Of course, Xue Xian didn't hear her at all. He was gazing intently into the abandoned village, wondering why Xuanmin hadn't returned yet.

"That bald donkey..." He stopped, realising that it might not be appropriate to call Xuanmin that in front of others. He cleared his throat then injected some more seriousness in his voice. "How long was I out just now? Has anything happened since the monk entered the village?"

"Something happening?" Xingzi shook her head, worried. "It's been some time, and I haven't heard anything. Should... should we go inside and look for him?"

Perhaps it was because the carriage taking flight earlier had destroyed the three mortals' spirits, but when it came to the group's plans, the three happily deferred to Xue Xian. Even if they did feel apprehensive about something, they did not dare speak up. But it had been a while, and who knew what kind of danger lay inside the village?

Hearing Xingzi's suggestion, Xue Xian frowned. Then he reached out and patted his waist. "Bookworm, why are you so quiet?"

Now that these mortals had been in the sky, how could they possibly be afraid of ghosts? Xue Xian had no problem bringing Jiang Shining out anymore.

But it was indeed strange... his own sister and brother-in-law had been kidnapped and brought into a haunted forest, and Jiang Shining hadn't even stuck his head out of Xue Xian's pocket. That wasn't like him at all.

"Bookworm?"

Silence.

"Jiang Shining?"

Silence...

As Xue Xian uttered that name, Uncle Chen, Auntie Chen, and Xingzi all stared at him.

"Young Master Jiang... did you call Young Master Jiang just now?" Auntie Chen stammered.

"Yes," Xue Xian said as he looked into his pocket, confused.

Great. It was empty.

Jiang Shining had long disappeared.

With a blank face, Xue Xian looked back onto the village again –– Jiang Shining had probably been unable to contain himself and gone off with Xuanmin. 

The sun was quite high in the sky now, and the fresh morning was laden with dew and humidity. A thick patch of white fog settled into the village, so that only the outlines of some broken buildings could be seen, dark and shadowy.

"Where's Lu Twenty-Seven?" Xue Xian asked, still staring out.

Twenty-Seven said, "I'm here. What is it?"

His tone was one of deep irritation. He was squeezed between two huge quails –– Uncle Chen trembling on the left, and Auntie Chen quivering on the right. The couple seemed to consider him some kind of saint, and, too afraid to approach Xue Xian, had clustered around him for safety.

"Could you try and find out what the bald... what Xuanmin is doing now?" Xue Xian said, gazing into the fog.

"I can try," Twenty-Seven said. "But I need something that the monk has touched."

Before Xue Xian could reply, Twenty-Seven added, "The carriage is too big. It won't work."

Xue Xian fell into a thoughtful silence, then turned and shoved his claw into Twenty-Seven's face. "How about my hand?"

Twenty-Seven and Xingzi both raised their eyebrows.

There was something weird... or maybe everything was weird.

"I can't use living beings, only objects." Twenty-Seven had never been afraid of Xue Xian, nor did he fear being beaten, so he shrugged and casually said, "Why don't you martyr yourself right now, and I can try."

Xue Xian laughed coldly and turned away. 

Meanwhile, from a collapsed compound inside that long abandoned Wen Village came the noise of a quarrel. 

The compound was composed of two two-story buildings connected by a corridor. around which were the four walls of a courtyard. Inside the courtyard had once been some gardens, which had now become a wide patch of weeds as tall as half a person, plus a wizened, almost dead tree. The windows of each room were rotten, the paper windowpanes long tattered, letting a mighty draft into the rooms whose sound resembled a melancholy, mourning wail. 

The quarrelling noise came from the eastern room of the ground floor of the front building –– the only room without a draft.

"Didn't you say we'd never go wrong if we listened to you? Now we can't get out at all!" a hoarse male voice complained.

"What else can we do? If we keep going ahead, will Uncle Liu, Jianzi, and Little Stone survive?" another voice retorted. "At least there's a roof here to shelter us from the rain. Why didn't you whine when you were picking mushrooms in the morning?"

Several beggars were gathered in the eastern room, all with dishevelled hair and dirty faces. Their clothes appeared never to have been washed before, and emitted a sour, rotten smell. But that wasn't the only smell in the room –– mixed in with the mildew was the piercing, heavy stench of fresh blood.

The hoarse-voiced man's had no hands –– his wrists tapered off into two smooth stumps. It seemed that he had lost his hands many years, or even many decades, ago.

In front of the no-handed man was a bonfire, on top of which was a broken pot, gurgling with some kind of liquid. The no-handed man used his stumps to pick up some wild leaves from a pile on the side and tossed them into a pot, muttering, "So what if we have food? We don't even know if we'll still be alive after eating it..."

"We definitely won't be alive if we don't eat it, so hurry up and cook!" the same man replied. That beggar's face was covered in ugly scars, and he only had one eyeball –– the other eyelid was sealed tightly shut, with no sign of protrusion, implying that the eye socket was empty.

A group of beggars sat around the arguing men. Those that weren't missing arms or legs were gesticulating wildly, and were clearly either mute or deaf.

Behind them was a small wooden bed, on which were lying three people: one old and two young, seemingly the "Uncle Liu, Jianzi, and Little Stone" that the one-eyed man had referenced. A blanket full of holes had been draped across them, moldy and damp, but at least it was some kind of cover.

The three people on the bed breathed laboriously, as though feverish, and their grey faces burned with an angry redness. They had blisters on their lips, some of which had burst, and across their necks were also splotches of wounded, gangrenous skin.

That heavy smell of fresh blood came from them.

And in the corner of that room sat one man and one woman, both young and healthy-looking, who seemed familiar with one another. Although they wore humble, basic coats, these were not ragged nor rotten; and although their hair was a bit messy, they looked utterly out of place among the beggars.

The woman was Jiang Shining's sister, Jiang Shijing, and the man was his brother-in-law, Fang Cheng.

Fang Cheng leaned over to his wife and muttered, "Ah Ying... Are you hurt?"

Having known each other since childhood, Fang Cheng had always called his wife by her nickname. 

Jiang Shijing shook her head. "You?"

"I'm fine. Don't worry, I don't think they intend to kill us, nor hold us for ransom," Fang Cheng said in a low voice. "It actually seems like..."

They both looked over at the wooden bed, where the three sick people were sleeping.

After the beggars had brought them to Wen Village, they had untied all of the couple's rope bindings except for those on their wrists, and had barked, "We had no choice."

Just as the beggars had been about to explain the matter further, a... highly unusual noise had appeared in the room.

It had sounded like someone slowly walking down the stairs with heavy, trudging steps –– perhaps someone physically unwell, or an old person.

The beggars had all frozen in place and looked over at each other. One of them had even lifted a finger to count the number of people in the room: "Five, six, seven... and with Uncle Liu and the other two, that makes ten. We're all here."

As he said this, the beggars' faces all contorted with fear –– if everyone was in the room, then who was coming down the stairs?

One of the braver beggars had scoffed and muttered, "You guys are scaring yourselves." He'd gone out of the room to see who it was, but then had disappeared without a trace. Even when the sound of footsteps had ceased, he had not returned.

Then, two other beggars had paired up to go look for him. They claimed to have gone up and down the building multiple times without seeing sign of their vanished friend –– but that the village had suddenly become covered in thick fog, so that they could no longer see into the other rooms nor feel their walls.

This bizarre development had made all the beggars remember the tales of Wen Village being haunted. Terrified, they'd knit themselves into a tight circle around the bonfire, too afraid to leave the room again.

Now the one-eyed man said to Fang Cheng and Jiang Shijing, "Doctors, would you like to drink some wild leaf and mushroom soup? Consider it a token of apology from us. If you could find it in your heart to forgive us humble beggars, we would like you to check the pulses of Uncle Liu and the others. They have rashes all over their bodies. If they keep going like this, they're all going to die. We had no choice but to come up with this devious plan."

"Although we barely lead a livable life, we also don't wish to die," added the no-handed man. "But we had no money to pay a doctor, nor could we afford medicine, so we had to commit a crime..."

It was just as the couple had guessed.

Fang Cheng shook his head. "We've had many disasters in the past two years. With starvation spreading across the county, life has gotten harder for us all. If you can't pay, hen don't –– would we turn a dying person away at the door? And even if I was a miser who refused to give you any medicine, my wife here would never allow it. It's just that..."

He looked pointedly at the one-eyed man and said, "How could you go so far as to blindfold someone on the street and kidnap them? If you can do this, then what else are you capable of?"

"We also wish to make a normal living, but no one is willing to take us on," the no-handed man said, lifting his wrists helplessly. "For people like us, even if we did get jobs, we would be too clumsy to perform them well. All we are is a charity case. But in these difficult years, people can barely make ends meet for themselves, so why would they do charity?"

"No one wants you?" Fang Cheng replied unhappily. "Did you ask us whether we wanted to be kidnapped? If you had just said, 'We cannot pay, can we work off the bill,' do you think we would've denied you?"

The no-handed man opened his mouth to speak, but suddenly that slow trudging noise outside appeared again.

Everyone in the room froze in terror.

"Gouzi, you guys are closest to the door, hurry up and shut it!" the one-eyed man whispered.

A youth with a missing arm bounded up and scurried to close the door, then quickly rushed back to the bonfire, where he sat and anxiously observed the door for movement.

"I heard... and I only heard––" A beggar with a missing leg sitting beside Gouzi said, shuffling closer on his hands. He lowered his voice and added, "Ghosts haunt Wen Village every year, always around the end of the winter months. The sound of theatre performances will suddenly appear in the village, and you can hear the sound of drums and music from afar, and the high-pitched sounds of singing... Aiyou, it's terrifying!"

"Yes, yes! And, they say that if you accidentally stumble into the village, a white fog will cloud your vision and prevent you from escaping."

"You can even hear coughing, clapping, and laughing..."

As the beggars spoke among each other, they became more and more afraid. They clustered even closer together, trembling, but suddenly the one-eyed man gestured at them to be quiet, and they all fell silent again.

The slow steps seemed to come out of a room upstairs and begin to walk down the stairs. It lingered in the sitting room, as though it had sat down on a chair to rest. Then, it seemed to stand up once more and begin walking around the room.

Bit by bit, the steps approached the eastern room and became ever clearer, finally stopping right in front of their door.

As they stared at the door, each person in the room thought their heads were going to explode from sheer dread. That door was old and fragile, so although it had been locked, it would likely collapse under the slightest amount of pressure, and was thus completely useless. 

Just as the blood had drained from the beggars' faces, the sound of coughing emerged from behind the door. The coughing noise betrayed a sense of weakness, as though it came from someone who was extremely ill, and was followed by a sound of wheezing. Then it trudged away, toward the door across the hall.

Hu––

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

But the door to the room across the hall creaked shut again and the steps edged closer to the eastern room once more.

While the beggars were sweating with fear, the group waiting inside the carriage outside Wen Village all let go of breaths they'd been holding –– they saw a silhouette finally emerge from that thick fog. The monk's white robes appeared to be made of the fog surrounding him, and they billowed lightly in the breeze.

"Master! Master is back!" Xingzi shouted. 

Uncle Chen and Auntie Chen finally let go of their iron grips on Twenty-Seven's arms and crawled to the carriage doorway to look out. "And Young Master and Young Mistress? Are they back too?"

They squinted hard at Xuanmin's silhouette but their hopes were dashed when they realised there was no other person walking alongside him.

But when Xue Xian saw that Xuanmin was alone, he frowned.

Xuanmin quickly materialised from the fog and walked over to the carriage. 

"Master, did you not find Young Master and Young Mistress?" Auntie Chen asked anxiously.

Xuanmin said, "I have found their location, but cannot approach."

"Cannot approach?"

"Yes," Xuanmin said. "However––"

Before he could finish, Auntie Chen and Uncle Chen collapsed back into the carriage, their eyes red and brimming with tears.

But Xue Xian silently looked Xuanmin up and down and asked, out of nowhere, "When did you shave your head and become a monk?"

Confused by his question, Xuanmin turned to Xue Xian. "When I was a child. Why?"

"Are you sure?" Xue Xian's tone remained neutral, betraying no emotion. "Didn't you forget your past?"

Why would he suddenly ask such a thing?

It was just that, just then, when Xuanmin had emerged from the white fog, his silhouette had looked so much like that of the person with the golden threads... both wore light white robes, both were slender and tall, and both were unusually powerful...

The only difference was that the person with the golden threads had had a head full of hair.