CH 86

Chapter 86: Valley Spell (II)

Controlling thousands of yin corpses was not something just anyone could do. And thus the stranger hiding inside the stone forest could not be some anonymous lackey, but the Daoist priest Songyun himself.

As this thought crossed Xue Xian's mind, he suddenly felt a jolt of pain in his spine, one that reminded him of that day post-catastrophe when someone had taken advantage of his fatigue to extract all the bones from his body –– it was as though it were happening again.

But here and now, that pain only made Xue Xian link his current grudge to his previous grudge. Xue Xian took in that nauseating stench and watched the mass of yin corpses who filled the entire valley as well as the stone forest itself, and his face became as cold as frost.

He stood there calmly and looked out at the incoming wave of corpses. He lightly brushed his robe, and then was shrouded in a cocoon of thick fog.

In the blink of an eye, an enormous black dragon flew up into the clouds and roared. The mountain peaks began to shake once more, and savage thunder as well as howling wind struck down upon the valley. Bolts of lightning crashed into the earth.

The dense mass of yin corpses in the valley began to scatter under the lightning like hornets out of a nest. The stone forest exploded under the thunder and, as the shattered stone flew into the air, a silhouette dressed in grey dove to the ground and disappeared into the sea of corpses.

As he did so, he changed his costume and melded completely with the group of bodies whose flesh was rotting off their limbs, becoming impossible to spot.

The black dragon pirouetted through the sky, then swept his long tail and sent a great gust of power through the valley that appeared enough to break mountains and split the sea. 

Honglong––

Where the dragon tail had struck the ground, now great vessels of cracks were appearing and spreading out. The piles of yin corpses were swept into the sky by the strong wind, then dropped back down into the ground, where they crumbled into sacks of bones. Countless corpses began to roll into the cracks of the earth.

At the same time, a dragon of fire also rose into the sky. A long, mighty tongue of fire roared in the chaos of the wind and brought circles of yin corpses into its hungry, blazing mouth.

In the black clouds above, Xue Xian looked indifferently down at the melee of writhing, crawling corpses –– but the wizard Songyun, the one he was really looking for, was hiding among that sea like a rat in the sewers. He wasn't even above turning himself into a blood-covered skeleton with swaths of flesh dropping away from his body.

But what was the point of hiding? Was there a difference between dying now and dying a short time later?

Those threads that connected the shattered bones within Xue Xian's spine were trembling from sheer rage, and were beginning to destabilise because the magical power invested in them was depleting. Physical pain was not an issue for Xue Xian –– but now, all pain only fuelled his anger.

Soon, half of the mass of corpses in the mountain had been felled by the bolts of thunder and raging flames. Swept up by the power of Xue Xian's dragon tail, they were swallowed by the earthquake. 

And among the unintelligible groans of the yin corpses, there came a high-pitched scream.    

Xue Xian laughed coldly as he brought his tail crashing into the mountain peak. The side of the mountain emitted a deafening explosion sound before snapping in half, the entire peak sliding down into the valley, bringing countless boulders and shattered rock with it, crashing into the spot where that scream had come from. 

Suddenly, dust rushed into the air and became a suffocating, grey fog.

Along with that scream, the rest of the yin corpses were also buried beneath the slice of mountain, unable to move.

Was that it? Had Xue Xian gotten his revenge?

Xue Xian hadn't intended to ask the wizard anything. To him, even speaking a single word to that man would be to allow himself to be polluted by Songyun's evil. Nothing would make him interested in what Songyun had to say, and allowing the man the time to say any extra word was an excess of mercy.

But to have kicked Songyun so easily and effortless into the abyss? Somehow, that irritated Xue Xian too. He had spent half a year dragging a pair of lame legs all over the place looking for his enemy, and now it had taken, at most, an hour to kill that enemy.

It was as though he had punched a wall of cotton: it had done nothing for his rage, but now he was more annoyed than anything.

And in that moment, the body parts and bones scattered across the valley suddenly began to twitch and move beneath the whirling wind. In the blink of an eye, they reconstituted themselves into a sea of yin corpses –– and from that infinitely deep crack in the earth, countless of the corpses who had tumbled in were now climbing their way out.

Lightning could not destroy them; fire could not burn them; boulders crushing them couldn't prevent them from coming back together; and they could climb back out of any hole.

These yin souls refused to go away –– and Xue Xian, incensed, began to laugh, for in the clattering of the bones coming back to life once more he had heard the sound of someone trying to disguise their breathing, though this sound was no longer coming back from the spot in the valley where he'd brought the mountain crashing down.

Seeing the yin corpses beginning to march toward him once more, Xuanmin finally moved his fingers to grip that copper coin pendant.

Heavy yin energy and the sorrow of souls who'd died innocently, after converging in the atmosphere for so many years, had now become like a sticky spider's web that covered the entire valley. With the corpses' movement, the atmosphere had become so dense that all bodies were being slowed and impaired. Not even Xue Xian or Xuanmin could prevent this. And the stronger the yin energy, the more it sucked living beings into its embrace –– the effect of yin energy was particularly strong on dragons. 

Ever since the beginning of time, yin and yang had pulled and struggled against each other. Nothing could change this.

The sorrow of these thousands, even tens of thousands of yin corpses could move mountains and divert rivers. Its power was as sharp as a knife, and any ordinary human would long have been whittled down to bone. 

Xue Xian and Xuanmin were skilled in pushing back such negative energies, but even they could not completely destroy them. As the yin corpses reanimated themselves once more and began to lurch forward in waves, small bleeding wounds began to erupt across the two's skin. 

As though endless thin knives were slashing themselves across their bodies.

The injuries grew more numerous as time went on, and the yin and sorrowful energies were becoming thicker and more tangible as the corpses continued to return. Each time a blast of Xue Xian or Xuanmin's magic struck down a group of corpses, the yin and sorrowful energies would only grow stronger, plunging them into a cycle from which they could never escape.

No matter how many injuries appeared across his skin, Xue Xian did not mind, nor did he pay attention to the ever growing stench of fresh blood –– compared to his catastrophe periods, this was nothing.

He continued to allow that rage simmer calmly within him as he scanned the crowd of corpses for the wizard, bringing strikes of lightning down onto the man every time he spotted him in the valley. In the mess below, Xue Xian suddenly caught sight of Xuanmin, and suddenly faltered, because the monk was looking back at him, too.

He was in the heavens, and Xuanmin was down in the deep valley. The distance between them was such that they could not even see each other's faces.

But in the moment that Xue Xian looked down at Xuanmin, he felt as though Xuanmin's gaze held some particularly profound feeling within it. He watched as Xuanmin raised his hand to catch something in mid-air, and pinched it between his fingers.

Xue Xian saw a patch of red bloom on Xuanmin's hand and suddenly realised that what Xuanmin had caught in the air was Xue Xian's own blood, falling from above.

In that instant, some indescribable, unutterable emotion suddenly erupted in Xue Xian's heart, as though someone had pricked the most vulnerable part of his flesh with a needle.

That piercing pain had come so out of the blue that, for some moment, as he reeled from it, Xue Xian did not understand where it had come from. Until Xuanmin retraced his gaze and moved his fingers across the copper coin pendant.

Since neither fire nor lightning was able to harm the yin corpses, Xuanmin took back the dragon of fire. As he muttered some kind of prayer under his breath, the copper coins in his hand began to glimmer with light, as though some long-stagnant magic within it was awakening again.

Out of the five coins on the pendant, only three had had their seals broken, yet the glow that they cast was so bright that even Xue Xian, behind the clouds, felt it sting his eyes.

As the copper coins were awakened by Xue Xian's blood, he began to feel an enormous wave of heat in his spine.

Stunned, he finally realised that the piercing pain in his heart from before had not been his own pain at all –– but Xuanmin's feelings, transmitted through the copper coins and into Xue Xian's body, and which had perturbed his senses.

But before Xue Xian could react, the copper coins were already resonating across the savage swirls of wind. Xuanmin chanted his prayer, rubbing the pendant with one hand and reaching out a finger of his other hand. That finger flicked the air, and suddenly an immense talismanic symbol appeared to hover in that murky air choked by smoke and dust. The talisman emitted a deafening ring as Xuanmin sent it toward the sea of corpses.

Dang––

In the moment that the talisman rushed into the onslaught, a ripple crossed the sea of corpses as their very souls succumbed to Xuanmin's magic. As the ringing echoed, the bodies of the corpses began to tremble.

Indeed: lightning could not destroy them; fire could not burn them; because yin and sorrowful energy could not be vanquished by such forces.

In that instant, Xuanmin was saving the souls of those tens of thousands of corpses. Xuanmin closed his eyes and calmly prayed, resisting the agony of the cuts that appeared ceaselessly across his skin.

Dang––

Another ring, and, as though enchanted, the sea of corpses across the valley all froze. Slowly, they turned their bodies, and the yin energies dissipated from Xue Xian's body, seeming all to be drawn to Xuanmin instead.

Xuanmin pressed down on those copper coins again and again, and finally that sticky cocoon of yin energy departed from Xue Xian completely. It rushed toward Xuanmin and wrapped itself tightly around his body, while the countless corpses across the valley began to wail manically to the ring of the talisman.

For a moment, Xue Xian was too stunned to move, but then, with a sweep of his tail, he vanished in a gust of black mist that down glided into the valley toward Xuanmin and crashed into the ground in front of the monk.

The force of Xue Xian's impact sent the surrounding corpses flying and the earth shaking once more. The black mist dissolved and Xue Xian, in his black robes, stood before Xuanmin, raising his hand so as to protect Xuanmin from the incoming surge of yin energy.

But just as Xue Xian moved, he felt another swell of pain knock into his spine. He had spent too much magic and the threads that linked his broken bones, which had required enormous effort to maintain, now appeared to be on the brink of snapping.

He felt the nerves in his legs pull away from him slightly, and lost his footing.

At the same time, the blinding light from Xuanmin's copper coin pendant grew ever brighter, and the coins circled the monk's palm faster as they began to quiver violently, as though beginning to become restless, or beginning to succumb to some great force pressing down upon them. The dull grey shell around the fourth coin began to crack, and brilliant yellow light shone forth from beneath its seal. 

Dang––

Xuanmin's eyes were still tightly shut, and he appeared completely unaware of everything around him. His voice as he read his prayer was deep and composed, each word resounding purposefully in Xue Xian's mind.

As the yin and sorrowful energies streaked across the sky and consumed the earth, and as those corpses groaned and reached out their mangled hands, the last bit of dullness dropped away from that fourth copper coin, and the coin suddenly jolted.

Xue Xian suddenly felt a kada sound in his brain, like the opening of a lock.

He knew that the seal had been broken and that he was receiving echoes of what rang through Xuanmin's mind. Still, he could not curb the overwhelming effects of the vision –– he felt a sudden light-headedness as a veil of darkness fell before his eyes. Then, fragmented scenes began to rush into him like a great tide...

His point of view in this dream was low –– he had been transported into the body of a child. Unable to control his movements, all he could do was follow the child's gaze and look down at the bottom of the robe of the person standing in front of him.

The ground was covered in thick snow, which seemed to pass his knees. There was a low desk, across which were spread various books, with a brush leaning against a brush stand. A thin layer of ice encased the tip of the brush.

He heard a muffled voice come from above him. "You were born with the Buddha's bones in your body. You must not take this lightly. Today, you will copy sutras here. In the evening, I will come pick you up."

He himself said nothing. He gripped the brush and dipped it into the inkwell, then brought it to the thin paper before him...

Suddenly, the sky turned dark, and he could no longer see the marks he was making on the paper. Xue Xian heard a light crunch in the snow beside the desk and slowly looked up to see that the man in the white robes had returned. He still did not look at the man's face, instead gazing at his hand with deference or some other emotion.

The hand turned, and retrieved from its wide sleeve a small portable heater. Then, the voice said, "Are you cold?"

Xue Xian wanted to scoff and ask, Why don't you stand here all day and see if you're cold?

But what he said was, "I'm not cold."

His own voice sounded fuzzy too –– it felt both extremely close, and years apart from him. Yet Xue Xian could hear that this was the voice of a child, though it was so cold and calm that it did not seem childlike at all.

"Teacher is not trying to hurt you. You have the Buddha's bones in your body. You mustn't lead a mediocre life." The man sighed and placed the heater in Xue Xian's lap, then patted the top of his head like a father figure. He took him from that snow-covered place to a small building in the middle of nowhere...

These were Xuanmin's memories.

Despite the blurriness of the dream scenes, Xue Xian managed to maintain some clarity.

Another enormous wave of dizziness crashed into his mind. Automatically, he shut his eyes and shook his head. When he opened his eyes again, his vision was assaulted by a series of nonsensical images again –– sometimes he was in the hallways of a temple, other times in a pagoda. Sometimes, he was shrouded in silence, but other times he could hear others speaking softly outside the courtyard.

Sometimes, his point of view was low, and other times high –– the memories were not in chronological order.

Xue Xian felt heat in his spine and some murmuring sound by his ear, and realised that his connection with Xuanmin's pendant was stabilising again. Those blurred scenes began to become more distinct––

Now, he saw that he was sitting in front of a long desk again. A messenger dove perched dutifully in a corner of the desk, as though taking a rest –– it looked peaceful, yet somehow fearful.

In his hand, he held a piece of paper that he had unfolded. It was covered in text, and as he scanned it, he only caught a glimpse of some of the characters in the letter's signature. And in those characters, he only saw two clearly before his fingers suddenly moved to fold that paper once more and place it to the side.

Those two characters were Taichang –– the Ministry of Ceremonies.

He picked up a brush and dipped it in ink, then wrote sparse words on a nearby sheet of paper: We must not delay the Taishan ritual.

And then he moved his brush to sign the letter with two characters––

Tongdeng.

Xue Xian's mind lurched in bewilderment. He thought he must have misread the letter, but before he could check again, the scene before him transformed again––

He was standing on the balcony of a tall pavilion, and a palace lantern nearby cast a warm, vague glow.

The turmoil from seeing himself write Tongdeng had not yet gone away, so it was a long time before he realised that someone behind him was speaking to him. He had not been able to hear what the other had said, but now he was turning to walk back into the pavilion. He pushed a piece of paper toward him on the stone desk inside the pavilion and casually said something.

Although the scene was still murky, and although his voice was still not completely distinct, he could still recognise that his voice was Xuanmin's.

He heard himself speak in Xuanmin's cool and collected voice. He said one sentence: "Wuchen year, seventh day of the sixth month."

After that, Xuanmin spoke some more, or perhaps asked the other person a question, but Xue Xian heard not a word. His ears were ringing and his entire body felt cold as he repeated the sentence that Xuanmin had so casually flung out earlier over and over again in his mind. Each time he repeated it to himself, he felt colder.

That pain in his spine swelled up again, but Xue Xian was numb.

Wuchen year was this year, and the seventh day of the sixth month was exactly the day of his catastrophe.

In other words... that was the day that he had been maimed.

He could not believe that it was so. He felt a strange sense of heaviness emerge and trap him inside. In his daze, he wanted to look again at the scene, see if there might be someone or something, anything at all, in the vision that might tell him that what he had just heard was only a coincidence.

But his gaze was fixed on that stone desk, and he seemed to glance at something –– in the instant of that glance, a strange, indescribable feeling rose in his chest –– a very faint feeling, so faint that Xue Xian suspected it was not his own.

It seemed to be loathing, or maybe something else.

Xue Xian did not have the time nor the desire to analyse that feeling further, for he had seen what was placed on the side of the desk. It was two masks: one made of silver and gleaming dimly in the light; the other painted thickly with a design that was solemn and primitive, with two long strands of hair plastered to the side of the mask, like the fur of some beast...

As Xue Xian stared at the pair of masks, his mind became blank, and the pain in his spine only became more acute.

That pain was unbearable. It was as though it had followed the length of his spine and tunnelled its way into his heart, and then followed his veins and spread itself all around his body, giving him a false feeling –– a feeling of sudden panic and terror, and sadness...

None of the other flashing images registered in Xue Xian's mind. Gradually, the copper coins' ringing sound faded, taking the memories along with it.

Suddenly, Xue Xian closed his eyes, and did not open them for a long time. When he did, he took in the wilderness of the valley again. The valley was right in front of him, yet felt a world away.

At some point, Xuanmin had leapt to a low peak nearby. He continued to chant his prayer, which echoed endlessly within the valley. The lifeless groans of the yin corpses had become a mournful crying as the yin and sorrowful energies that had marinated on this land for a hundred years began to dissolve.

The fog had become so dense in the valley that Xue Xian could not see Xuanmin's face. He only saw that Xuanmin seemed to look over at him. The magic still pulsed through the monk's pendant, and more talismanic symbols were appearing in the air, emitting a dim golden glow that looked like a great web covering all of the heavens and all of the earth, encasing the valley inside its cage.

That dim glow was not bright, yet looking at it made Xue Xian's eyes hurt. The pain reminded him of that day by the sea, and the golden threads that had appeared in the air to trap him within.

An intense sadness welled up in his heart, a sadness much, much sadder than he thought he'd feel, and, unlike that net of golden threads, he saw no way out of it; even he was surprised by how heavy it felt...

And in that moment, somewhere in the valley beneath the piles of white bones, a shocked voice suddenly called out to Xuanmin, "Great Priest? How... how could you be here?"