CH 88

Chapter 88: River of Blood (II)

Daze Temple stood on Mt. Jiangsong. At the foot of the mountain was Heishi Shore, a black pebble beach covered with rocks and boulders, some of which were so tall that they seemed to be part of a forest. Past Heishi Shore was the wide river, and the endless horizon.

Bodies were piled all across Heishi Shore –– perhaps two hundred. They were all pale-faced, as though drained of blood. With their eyes tightly shut and their faces pulled into slight frowns, they appeared unconscious. They even looked, at first, to be dead, but their bodies were not rigid.

Based on the attire of these unconscious bodies, which were mostly ragged and torn, some emitting a sour smell from not having been washed in some time, they were either outright beggars or itinerant, starving migrants.

But some of them wore beautiful clothing, though the material of their clothes were not of high quality, and, from the split open callouses on their hands and their sun-wrinkled dark skin, they also looked to be poor working people.

And inbetween these bodies, there were also some that looked like the lives they led were not bad. Perhaps they had gotten lost, or were in the countryside, when they had been kidnapped and brought here. Included in this group were Stone Zhang and Lu Twenty-Seven, who had been waiting for their companions at the teahouse.

If they were awake now, they would probably be frightened by the scene. Because the two hundred bodies were arranged into circles –– circle within circle, all together making up a circular feng shui design.

In the middle of these concentric circles was a stone sculpture around the size of a person, which had been crudely carved into the form of a monk stepping on a lotus leaf. From the back, this monk looked to be wearing a thin robe that billowed gently in the wind, like a stone Buddha. But, if one went to the front, one would discover that the monk's face could not be seen, because the monk was wearing a mask in the form of a beast's face. The mask was solemn and primitive-looking, and emitted a faintly evil aura.

Even stranger, the monk's entire robes were carved full of complex talismanic writing, which looked to be similar to the text carved onto the small stone sculptures at Daze Temple, Mt. Wanshi, and Dongting Lake. The only difference was that the text on the monk looked to be mixed in with some other, mysterious script, which seemed to be some simple writing system invented by some bygone clan.

If Xue Xian were here, he would recognise that script immediately as the exact same script that he had seen carved on the all in the Cave of a Hundred Insects –– but the handwriting was different. The difference was in fact minuscule, so that even the owner of the two handwritings might, in an absent-minded moment, mistake the two. 

The lotus leaf part of the sculpture was covered in yellow talismanic papers.

And beneath the lotus leaf, someone had also used blood to draw a circle around the sculpture.

The two hundred bodies on Heishi Shore were arranged so that their heads faced the sculpture and their feet faced outward. Apart from this, they were in all sorts of positions, though there was one more thing that was identical –– on each of their foreheads, at their life pressure point, they had a small dot of blood, which looked to be a red mole.

The wind blew hard across the river, sending ripples of water lapping against the shore. On a tempest day like this, each incoming wave threatened to drown Mt. Jiangsong itself.

The circular design that these two hundred bodies had formed an iron cage around the sculpture, protecting it. The savage wind, strong enough to cut flesh and rip cloth, whirled past furiously, but the fragile talismanic papers on the sculpture did not budge. The pouring rain made the river water steadily rise, but not a single drop landed on the clothes of those two hundred.

Outside the circle, a group of men in grey all knelt with one knee. They wore masks that looked similar to that of the Great Priest, except the Ministry's masks were red in color, whereas these masks were primarily green-black. With the Ministry's masks, these were yin and yang –– one light, one dark.

All the men in grey also wore hip ornaments made of peach tree wood –– the exact same as the one that Xuanmin had taken from the man in the stone room at Dustpan Mountain.

"Eight characters all aligned makes one hundred and eighty people. Not one more, not one less: ninety yin, ninety yang," reported the leader of the men in grey. Beneath the mask, his voice sounded muffled, and his words were broken up by the raging sound of the rain, so that it was almost impossible to hear what he was saying.

They were kneeling before a man standing between two large black boulders, facing Mt. Jiangsong, with both his hands behind his back. The man wore a snow-white monk's robe with not a speck of dust. As the splattering storm approached the monk, it suddenly fell completely silent –– and even more mysteriously, when the rain fell upon him, it did not make him wet at all.

This man was very tall, with a slender and elegant frame, so that just from his back he appeared to only recently have left his insular Buddhist realm to enter into human society. He looked utterly unapproachable.

On his face, he wore a silver mask so that no one could see his appearance –– only a pair of black eyes. He was looking up at Mt. Jiangsong, and his cold aloofness seemed also to be mixed with some other feeling.

As he heard the report from the leader of the men in grey, he rubbed his fingers, yet did not move his gaze.

The grey leader looked up and glanced at the monk, then quickly looked away again, silently waiting for the monk to speak. Even this brief moment of silence made the men in grey feel uneasy and even ashamed, as though they had done something deeply wrong.

The monk rubbed his fingers, then finally said, "Did you involve unrelated bystanders?"

His voice had a fundamental sense of coolness to it, like the icy surface of a frozen pond.

But this simple question made the men in grey begin to tremble. The leader quickly said, "No, no, we only kidnapped people from marginal areas, and if there were some idle people nearby, we brought them along too. There are no witnesses, and no proof."

The monk rubbed his fingers again, then said, neither happily nor angrily, "Kidnapped?"

"No, no, no, invited," the leader hurriedly amended.

The leader forced himself to appear calm again despite his mistake, but for a long time there were no further words from the monk. Anxiously, the leader glanced at the monk and saw that he was still staring calmly at the peak of Mt. Jiangsong. Although he could not see the monk's eyes, the leader detected a sense of strong emotion in the monk, as though, somehow, the monk was feeling nostalgic about the mountain.

Mystified, the leader suddenly felt foolishly brave. He had the audacity to ask, "This is an anonymous place in the middle of nowhere, with nothing special. Great Priest, why have you chosen this location?"

Immediately, the grey leader wanted to slap himself dead on the spot. He had been raised by the wizard Songyun since childhood, and, from the age of sixteen, had begun to assist Songyun and the Great Priest in small matters. It had been seven or eight years since he'd taken on that role, but the number of times he'd actually met the Great Priest, he could count on the fingers of his hands. He still mostly received orders from Songyun and then would leave to execute them. Yet despite the fact he'd interacted little with the Great Priest, he still knew about the Great Priest's notorious temper––

The monk had always had abnormal moods, and hated it when those beneath him had the audacity to ask unnecessary questions.

In terms of what question was 'unnecessary', the monk had never clarified, so to the men in grey, that meant, "don't ask any questions."

No matter what the monk's plans were, they were bound to be justified. They had no place to interject.

Yet, when the grey leader had asked his question, the Great Priest had not become angry. In fact, the monk replied, "Many years ago, I met a saint here."

Now that was.... too many years ago, so long that not even he could remember how old he had been at the time, what he'd looked like, who his parents had been, and why they had abandoned him on this wild mountain. If it had not been for that saint, he would probably have long died and have been resurrected several times by now, and would not be here today.

Hearing the Great Priest's answer, the grey leader paused, shocked, then lowered his head and said, "That saint had a most excellent eye, or else we would not have peace on this earth today."

"A most excellent eye..." The Great Priest seemed to be greatly amused by this phrase, then seemed to tease, "Peace? If the earth was peaceful, we would not have to do all this, and we would not have to come here now, nor invite all these suffering commoners."

For a moment, the grey leader did not know how to respond. Indeed, the Great Priest was a man of few words, and it was highly rare that he would say so much in one go. If the grey leader did not respond, that would be a great offense. So he thought for a while, then said, "We are the foolish ones, who cannot part from tragedy."

Hearing this, the Great Priest's gaze shifted and calmly scanned the grey leader, before turning back to look at Mt. Jiangsong again. Finally, he mildly said, "Everyone has some use. Do not belittle yourself."

He gazed at the abandoned temple on the mountain, and lifted his hand in Buddhist greeting to it.

To him, his whole life had begun right here, so it was fitting also to "die" here –– it was the only way that things could be whole. Besides, that he was here now was in part a disobedience of that person's wishes, so to come and repent before he "died" would give him a sense of peace.

He believed that if the other lived, he would understand his motivations.

When the Great Priest finished greeting the temple and looked up again, the talismans stuck onto the stone sculpture in the middle of the circle made of hundreds of bodies suddenly began to tremble.

One was facing Daze Temple, another faced the direction of Dongting Lake, and another faced the direction of Mt. Wanshi.

Those three talismans trembled simultaneously, emitting a whoosh sound, like the vigorous slap of the wind against a war flag.

Next, the circle of blood surrounding the sculpted lotus leaf shone with a light, and that blood, which had been drying and becoming brown, suddenly glowed fresh again, and seemed to flow slowly.

The Great Priest turned. He swept his sleeve, and a gust of wind sliced across the spell. The thumbs of the hundreds of people inside the spell burst and blood began to flow through those wounds and drip onto the ground. As though something were drawing them in, the rivulets of blood began to crawl toward the stone sculpture in the center. 

It was an astonishing sight –– those hundreds of thin streams of red blood slowly, calmly making their way to the sculpture, like so many snakes. In the blink of an eye, they had made contact with the foundation of the sculpture.

Although the men in grey had been prepared for this, they still felt a chill run down their spines as they watched the blood flow. The carved lotus leaf turned blood red in its entirety, then the redness began to crawl up the sculpture's feet.

It seemed that the whole sculpture was going to be dyed red.

How much blood that required, the men in grey did not know. They only knew that the blood in the two hundred bodies laid out for this spell was bound to be drained –– and none of these unconscious people would survive. 

As they stared, dazed, the Great Priest glanced at them calmly and sent another gust of wind flying. The men in grey felt a sharp pain in their own thumbs, and then, before they could react, their right hands were slammed to the ground as though suddenly weighed down by an immense force.

The force was so strong that none of them could fight back. Unable to control themselves, the men in grey crumpled to the floor and could only watch as their own blood was drawn out of their hands, sent crawling toward that stone sculpture, too. And it seemed that it was not only blood being drained out of them, but their very lives. 

At first, they were too stunned to move, but then they began to struggle desperately. But no matter how much strength they expended, and what kinds of tactics they tried, their right hands were locked to the ground, and did not move an inch. Still, the blood flowed.

The leader of the men in grey suddenly realised something. Shocked, he looked up at the Great Priest, and happened to meet eyes with the monk.

There was not a ripple nor flicker of empathy in those black eyes. It was as though the monk were not looking out at hundreds of living human beings, but at a patch of grass outside a window.

As he looked through those serene eyes, the grey leader finally understood the true meaning of what the monk had said: Everyone has some use. Do not belittle yourself.

He also understood why the Great Priest had divulged so much earlier. To the monk, all this had been equivalent to talking to himself, with no one around to hear... after all, once they were all dead, they would no longer be anyone.