CH 64

Chapter 64: Spider of the Same Age (IV)    

Heart Demons...

Xue Xian frowned. He had heard of people using Heart Demons to trap others –– such spells were often used by those who found themselves in the most dire situations, such as if faced with a far more powerful opponent, or if surrounded on all sides. The spell would be able to delay the opponent and give the spellcaster a lifeline to escape.

This was a good tactic for a weaker person 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 conflicts, that they would think about from time to time, no matter how big or small, near or far the regrets and conflicts were.

It was a hidden spell that snuck up on you, so that, without even realising it, you would already be trapped, and the spell would make its way into your heart.

Thus, even Xue Xian 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 that he'd just had had not made mention of any of those things, and it hadn't been his desire to get out of the stone room that had enabled the spell to trap him in the vision. So since all that hadn't been the bait to lure him into the trap... then someone had been.

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

That explained why, earlier, Stone Zhang and Twenty-Seven had suddenly disappeared, leaving him with Xuanmin –– that had been how the spell had drawn out the demons in his heart.

The only reason he'd gotten out was because his demons had never been lodged that deeply –– or because the flaws had been too obvious.

A series of expressions crossed Xue Xian's face as he realised all this, then he settled into that neutral, cool manner again. He threw the dying man to the ground, and slowly wiped away the blood splatters on his hands.

Although the man was certainly fading away, he still held some dredges of hope 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 hour. It will only take me a while to figure it out on my own, but if you're stubborn enough to make me do it, then you won't even have that hour."

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 he'd 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 men still hope for? For someone to come save them, or to escape death some other way.

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 that delay, the man was likely to die before he was even saved.

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

Unless he found some magical way to extend his own life.

Xue Xian's face hardened: It really seemed that the man intended to extend his life.

Each person has their own life: if one is already about to step into the afterlife, it was not possible to just tack on a bit more for free. Life extension magic consisted of two categories: life exchange, and life binding. In the former, one used magic to switch out another person's life with one's own, and ultimately someone still had to die for it to succeed. And in the former, one bound one's life to that of another, so that they lived bound, and died bound.

Initially, the former sounds more evil and the latter sounds harmless. In reality, it was the opposite: the former bought years with years, and the latter bought years with fortune; in the former, one gave one's years to another, but in the latter, one not only gave the other one's fortune, but also one's misfortune –– life binding had far more potential to go wrong.

Six of one and half a dozen of the other –– they were the same, really.

If the man wanted to extend his life, 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 he realised this, dark clouds passed over Xue Xian's mind. 

He hated to owe anything to anyone, most of all acts of kindness. This trait was both good and bad: the good part was that he led a clean and clear life of no debt 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 him, it was exactly how he liked it.

But whether or not they really were close, Xue Xian had brought Twenty-Seven and Stone Zhang here, and thus they were "his people". And then there was Xuanmin.

For anyone to wish harm on those close to Xue Xian... they 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 sounded like a light marble rolling onto the floor, 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 on the floor to suddenly decide to tell him everything.

He remembered what Stone Zhang had said back when they'd first met: the 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 at Wolong County? There is a tomb beneath that island, and inside that tomb there are three hundred lost souls. Do you think that if the souls trapped in that tomb met you, they would recognise you?"

The wheezing man suddenly convulsed, as though, as he stood in front of death's door, even 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 have much vengeful 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."

He 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 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 found at the bottom of the river only added up to about twenty or thirty. As he threw them, 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.

"Ahhh ––– ! Go away! Get away from me!" He appeared overwhelmed with terror and began to convulse again, crying and wailing for mercy, seeming, in one instant, to go insane. "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 Twenty-Seven, who had been lying unconscious on the floor, suddenly spasmed, as though dreaming about falling, and, as they kicked, they violently awoke.

Pata––

Something else clattered onto the ground, making two successive noises.

Stone Zhang breathed laboriously, as though having come to 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 Twenty-Seven, the stubborn, detached boy who was nonetheless reliable when things became difficult. Twenty-Seven was just waking up too, and Stone Zhang became even more confused. "Hey, Little Seven, did you dream too? What did you dream about?"

Twenty-Seven 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 Nineteen. But he looked different––"

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

Before Twenty-Seven could finish, he had been interrupted by the wailing man again. The melancholy feeling he'd 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 regarded the still unconscious Xuanmin. Then he looked 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, the sobbing man curled up on the floor, took a few deep breaths, then said, "I can't die... I can't die... I used a spider of the same age... I put it in the spell..."

He was talking absolute gibberish, but Xue Xian understood.

A spider of the same age?

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

"The spell breaks the spider... the spider dies... the spell doesn't break..." The man blinked open his lost 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..."

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 the monk'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." Perhaps it was because he was still energised by that flick to his forehead earlier, but as the man recovered from the dog tags' haunting, 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 it. There was a unique manic element to the man's darting eyes. 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 come 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 his 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 "spider of the same age"!

In that moment, the new spider mole that had attached itself to Xuanmin's neck grew out two long legs, then stopped. 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 move.

"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 that Xuanmin's hand, which he had gently raised, fell 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, and that, in addition, that red patch of sucked skin on Xuanmin's neck was a clear indication of what he had done.

So they looked at each other. No, I can explain.