CH 66

Chapter 66: Dog Tags (I)

One dose of dragon spit would be highly powerful on ordinary people, but to Xuanmin it had merely been an annoyance that he could easily repress. But two doses of dragon spit had double the power: ordinary people would be driven crazy by it, and even Xuanmin had sweated bucketfuls last night. 

Now it was three doses...

Although Xue Xian could not imagine what it felt like, he figured that ordinary people would not be able to handle three doses at all –– they might even die from it. And Xuanmin was now using all his energy to repress the effects within his body, but it didn't seem sustainable, and might end up making it worse.

Just the monk's body temperature was enough to burn someone to death.

Now things had gotten too complicated, but Xue Xian still had to figure something out. After all, the dragon spit had come from him. Xue Xian found a shred of kindness in his heart to begin to contemplate solutions. Although he did not know what to do, he knew that no matter what he did, it could not be in a public place with people milling about –– it needed to be somewhere with no distractions or obstacles, as, after all, the situation was highly awkward and needed to stay confidential.

After pondering this, he said to Xuanmin, "Since this building is connected to your past, don't you want to search it more thoroughly and see if you can find any clues?"

Of course Xuanmin intended to do that. So he said, "Yes."

Now Xue Xian turned to Stone Zhang and Twenty-Seven. "So as not to make Jiang Shining worry, the two of you should head back now. The bald donkey and I will go through the building with a fine comb."

Since Twenty-Seven could barely see, he had no objections, but Stone Zhang hesitated for a bit. He wanted to stay and help: although it was technically a "small building", there were still many rooms to go through. But then he decided that anything Xue Xian and Xuanmin said was probably correct and deeply wise, so he did not ultimately protest. He nodded and said, "Alright. The two of us will go back to the Fang compound."

Without the fog, the road out of the forest was clear and straightforward, and they were not too far from the Fangs'. But, based on Stone Zhang and Twenty-Seven's pace, if they left now, it would still be nightfall by the time they reached the Fang compound.

Fearing that they might miss the cutoff time for the city gates, the two delayed no further, and departed.

By the time they left, Xuanmin had already put Xue Xian back into the wheelchair outside the building. Xue Xian watched their silhouettes disappear into the forest, and suddenly heard Xuanmin's voice behind him say, "Speak."

He turned around. "Huh?"

"You made them leave on purpose," Xuanmin said, gesturing toward the road.

Was it that obvious? Xue Xian scratched his face and avoided Xuanmin's gaze, looking out onto the road too. Finally, he said vaguely, "It's my fault."

For a second, Xuanmin did not understand, and looked at him with puzzlement.

Xue Xian crossed his arms and scratched his elbows. Then he jutted his chin out at Xuanmin's neck and said, "Dragon spit."

Xuanmin was momentarily stunned by Xue Xian willingly owning up to his mistake. Then, with a face of exasperation, he looked him up and down before sweeping his robe and turning away. Walking back into the room, he said, "It's nothing."

"As if!" Xue Xian snapped. "Your skin is hotter than a stove, and you have the audacity to tell me it's nothing?"

The effects of dragon spit multiplied threefold –– even Xuanmin could not bear it. How could it really be nothing? The monk was simply used to repressing himself in every way, and was treating it like ordinary pain.

Xue Xian wanted to say more, but, inside the room, Xuanmin summoned the crow again. The bird went hurtling toward the corner of the ceiling, and the floor beneath Xuanmin trembled, bringing him back down into the stone room below.

After some time, he re-emerged with the now-dead man. He raised his hand and took something from the man's hip, then took him outside. Because Xuanmin hated touching others, he was using talismanic power to lightly levitate the man's body beside him. He went into the vast forest beyond and found a place to bury the man.

When he returned to the building, Xuanmin drew another talisman and magically cleaned the entire room as well as his own clothing.

Xue Xian rolled his eyes. Your robe didn't even touch the guy!

The whole time, Xuanmin performed every action with that neutral, unperturbed face. Xue Xian sat there, watching him walk back and forth. It was only when the entire building was completely cleansed of any pollution from the man that Xuanmin finally came back over to stand in front of Xue Xian.

"Let's go in," he said mildly, lifting Xue Xian back into his arms and walking into the room. He placed Xue Xian back onto the table, though the table was now spotless.

Xue Xian sighed when he saw this. This monk is obsessed! he thought.

They intended to hunt for clues, so naturally could not only do a superficial search. Xuanmin walked to the bookcase and extracted a book. He didn't try to ignore Xue Xian: he stacked two books onto the table beside the dragon, and began himself to look through some more books.

The meaning was clear: he was giving permission for Xue Xian to help him read the books for clues.

Xue Xian was pleased that Xuanmin was able to so absent-mindedly fold him into his interior world, without any hint of caution or guardedness. He picked up a book and began to flip through it, but as he flipped the pages, his heart wasn't in it.

Because he was still thinking about the dragon spit.

Xuanmin seemed to have decided to simply contain everything that was inconvenient inside his body, without letting any trace of it peek out. As the monk flipped the pages of his book, his fingers were steady and slow, looking through each and every page with precision, revealing no hint of his discomfort at all.

Xue Xian tried to focus on the book in his hands, but his gaze soon fell on Xuanmin again. Contemplatively, he reached out to quickly feel the temperature of Xuanmin's hands before moving his own hand away again.

Xuanmin's fingers were scorching hot.

Finally, Xue Xian unexpectedly said, "Let me help you."

Xuanmin's full attention was still on the pages, so he merely agreed to Xue Xian's words. His gaze did not lift at all from the book, nor did the hands that were flipping the pages stop moving. He had clearly not understood what Xue Xian had been vaguely hinting at, and had probably assumed that the dragon had simply meant he'd help him look through the books.

But Xue Xian had already begun to speak, and there was no real way of going back now. So he added, "I mean the dragon spit."

The hands that flipped the pages froze.

Ever since he'd been given two doses of dragon spit from the beast, Xuanmin had tried his best to avoid being too close to Xue Xian. Apart form the fact that the beast could not walk, and therefore Xuanmin had no choice but to help him, he tried to stay as far away from Xue Xian as possible.

For example, right now, he had given Xue Xian some books and then gone a bit farther away to the bookcase to flip his own books, rather than standing right next to Xue Xian.

If anyone else did this, the meaning behind it would be far too obvious, but, coming from Xuanmin, there was little to read into, as he'd always been the kind of person who hated to be close to others. But Xue Xian had detected it, and it was partly why he was in such a hurry to cure Xuanmin from the effects of dragon spit –– so that Xuanmin could stop avoiding him as though avoiding a ghost.

Xue Xian absent-mindedly flipped a single page back and forth as he repeated, "Let me help you."

Xuanmin was silent for a while, then turned to him and asked, "How do you break the spell?"

His demeanor was still cool and collected, with no hint of doubt at all –– he'd taken Xue Xian to mean that there was a normal cure, just as all poisons had an antidote.

Xue Xian winced and bit down on his tongue, wondering how to say it. Finally, he cleared his throat and said, "Do you know what people say when they encounter an imminent flood? It is better to let it run than to try and block it. How did you become a monk? In those images from your youth, do you remember if you had some kind of supervisor... a master? Was the monastic discipline strict? Don't they say something like, Alcohol and meat will pass through and leave your body, but the Buddha will always remember that you ingested it. If you didn't have a master..."

It took a rare patience for him to cushion the fall with all that preamble –– and he wasn't sure whether he were trying to convince himself or convince Xuanmin. But the atmosphere in the room remained unchanged, so that, as he spoke, he became less and less sure of himself, and eventually trailed off.*

Xuanmin said nothing.

So Xue Xian said nothing either.

They looked at each other. Although their faces were both blank and calm, very un-peaceful words brimmed beneath their forcibly neutral exteriors.

Xue Xian was getting annoyed again. He slammed the book he'd been holding onto the table, where it landed and flipped shut with a loud splat. "It's up to you," he said. "Do you want me to help? Huh?"

Xuanmin broke eye contact and looked down, resuming his page-flipping as though he'd not even heard what Xue Xian had said. Next, he seemed to suddenly remember something, and dug around in his pouch, then swished his sleeve.

And stuck a talisman onto Xue Xian's forehead. 

"I––" Xue Xian forced himself to swallow down the curses. With the talisman freezing his movements, there was nothing he could do, and it took all of his effort to repress the anger and frustration that had swelled inside him. If it wasn't for the fact that he'd been the cause of all this trouble, he would long have fainted from rage. "Alright, alright, I give up. But I wouldn't freeze me if I were you –– I have to go dig your grave later."

The grave part wasn't a threat. The effects of dragon-spit were long-term and took some time to fully emerge in someone's body. If he remembered correctly, last time, it had taken Xuanmin until nighttime to begin burning up. The effects of the third dose hadn't seemed to have appeared yet, but the bald donkey was already behaving this way. Once the dose fully entered his body, if he kept trying to force it down like this, something was bound to go wrong, and he'd likely die.

It was only now that he had restrained Xue Xian that Xuanmin spoke. "No need," he said.

Fuck your 'no need'.

Furious, Xue Xian ignored him. But Xuanmin added, "If you have nothing else to do right now, you may borrow my pendant to do some healing."

Fuck your 'healing'.

Every time Xuanmin spoke, Xue Xian felt more anger rise within him and wanted most of all to retort. But this bald donkey was untouchable, and nothing he said would have any effect on him at all –– all Xue Xian would probably achieve would be to make himself even madder. So Xue Xian grumbled to himself, Fine, then die. But he nonetheless closed his eyes and began to focus on mending more of his body, shutting himself off from the world.

Xuanmin's pendant really was very useful. Apart from the fact that, if he used it too long, it would start to create some kind of spiritual connection between him and Xuanmin, it did not seem to have any other side-effects. Xue Xian was happy to use it to speed up his healing –– it was reliable. So he soon fell into a meditative state, and heard nothing of the outside world.

Last time, it had taken him the whole night to get those golden threads inside him to grow by half. This time, for some reason, the golden threads mended themselves far faster.

And the pendant was extremely intuitive to use, as if it had already begun to recognise him as some kind of second master. Perhaps it was because Xuanmin had absorbed dragon spit, so that the two of them had begun, to some extent, to influence each other's qi.

Xue Xian thought he could even feel the pull of the golden threads toward the next bit of broken bone. Every step of the process was exhausting, but with each step completed, he would feel a sense of relief and comfort.

But at the same time, he could feel some other sensation creeping into him, as though mixed into the magic power of the copper coins themselves. The strange feeling followed the growth of the threads and slowly extended its way across his body.

A hot, numb, and slightly sour feeling, which made him feel anxious and restless, as though ants were running all along his skin and sinking their teeth into him –– and yet it did not hurt.

Xue Xian forced himself to ignore the discomfort and tried to focus all of his attention on mending the threads.

A little bit more...

No, it's too hot...

But there's only about an inch left...

Oh fuck, it's so hot...

Xue Xian lurched back and forth between confusion and focus amid the sweltering heat, and just as the brimming sense of anxiety was about to reach a breaking point, he tugged those threads across his body and hooked them onto that broken piece of bone. In that moment, the path to the entire section of his spine from his waist to his legs suddenly cleared, and the heat followed the veins in his hips as well as the golden threads that replaced those missing parts of his pelvis, rushing into his legs...

He'd succeeded...

The tension in his heart suddenly relaxed, and he felt as though half of all of his worries were instantaneously lifted from his mind. But it would have been best if he'd not relaxed: as soon as he did, he felt that ant-like anxiety suddenly pour into him with a vengeance, flooding him with a new, strange sense of unease.

He heard himself breathe a heavy sigh, and as his senses of hearing and touch returned to him, he found that he was soaked in his own sweat. His sense of touch seemed to have become uncannily sharp, sharp to the point that... even the slightest movement that caused the folds in his robe to rub gently against his skin gave him an acute sense of shock, and made him sweat even more.

Confused, he faltered, and before he was even able to process the gratitude and joy he felt from getting his legs back, another thought exploded through his mind, paralysing him––

The effects of the dragon spit seemed to have... because of the connection established by the pendant... come right back into his own body...

In that moment, Xue Xian had only four thoughts:

Picking up a stone to crush your own foot.

Karma.

When you hurt others, ultimately it will come back to hurt you.

Who in the world can bear this horrible feeling?!

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* I genuinely have like no idea what is going on here sorry (or in denial???) but I promise i'm translating as literally as I can.