When the scene shifted back to the dilapidated temple, Song Aiguo had yet to recover from the shock of seeing Xu Yun fight through a bloody battle, carrying Lin Ji on his back as they hacked their way out of encirclement.
“Brother… why did he want to save this bandit leader? Do they know each other?”
Song Aiguo watched as Lin Ji slumped across Xu Yun’s back, his arms hanging limply and motionless, as if he had lost his breath.
“This guy… isn’t dead, is he?”
Lin Ji’s previous knife strike had been intended as a mutual destruction pact; after wounding Xu Yun, he had exhausted every last shred of energy and passed out cold. The crowd of martial arts practitioners naturally refused to let him go, shouting cries to hack him into a thousand pieces. Yet Xu Yun disregarded everything to rescue him, fleeing all the way down the mountain with him in tow.
Both men had sustained severe injuries, and on the road their blood trails proved difficult to conceal, so Xu Yun had leaped into a river and drifted downstream along a tributary until arriving at this secluded mountain forest.
Xu Yun laid the person on his back down onto the dry grass. The wound on Lin Ji’s chest was wrapped with strips of torn cloth, but blood continued to ooze out ceaselessly. Because he wore black clothing, it wasn’t particularly distinct, whereas half of Xu Yun’s light green robes had been dyed crimson by blood, looking exceptionally shocking to the eye.
Both of their garments were soaked through, and the dripping, pale pink blood pooled into shallow puddles on the ground. Kneeling on one knee and using his sword to support his body, Xu Yun rested for a long time before propping himself up with his blade to gather some dry firewood from outside the ruined temple to start a fire.
He stripped off his upper garments and set them up before the flames, using torn cloth strips to wrap his abdomen and back wounds tighter, before turning back to look at Lin Ji.
Clutching a small porcelain vial in his hand, his gaze landed upon the dark red little mole beneath the bandit’s left eye. His usually clear eyes were now clouded over, dense and heavy like gathering storm clouds.
He then bent down to untie the man’s garments.
A cold hand seized his wrist, clamping firmly onto his pulse point.
“So Hero Xu has such hobbies after all?” Lin Ji opened his eyes. Though his face was deathly pale, his expression carried a hint of leisurely amusement.
“Your wounds need tending.” Avoiding his gaze, Xu Yun placed the porcelain vial beside him.
“Hero Xu risked his life to save me could it be he took a fancy to this skin of mine?” Releasing his grip on Xu Yun’s hand, Lin Ji hooked the corners of his mouth lightly, though the amusement failed to reach the depths of his eyes.
Undressing himself with his own hands, he revealed a well-proportioned upper body covered entirely in intersecting scars—slash marks, whip wounds, burn scars… and even bite marks from wild beasts.
The muscles in Xu Yun’s throat twitched. Saying nothing more, he turned around.
After Lin Ji applied medicine to himself and bandaged his wounds, he saw Xu Yun draped in half-dried clothes, clutching his sword and sitting far away beneath the dilapidated divine statue.
“Hero Xu, aren’t you going to tie me up? Aren’t you afraid I’ll run away in the middle of the night?” He tossed the remaining half-bottle of healing ointment across the room.
Catching the bottle, Xu Yun merely tucked it away: “Get some rest early. At daybreak, we’ll leave this mountain.”
“I hear Hero Xu detests bandits and outlaws the most. When you were seventeen, you wiped out the Flying Tiger Stronghold single-handedly and made a name for yourself. Ever since then, traveling North and South, whenever you crossed paths with places overrun by bandits, you’d always step forward to dispense chivalrous justice,” Lin Ji chewed on a stalk of straw stuck between his lips. “How come today, toward me a bandit chieftain—you’ve suddenly found it in your heart to show mercy?”
Without answering, Xu Yun maintained a long silence before asking: “Why did you end up in the Black Cloud Stronghold?”
“Ha?” Lin Ji found it amusing. “I’m the chief, of course I’m in the Black Cloud Stronghold.”
“Why did you… enter the Black Cloud Stronghold?” Xu Yun rephrased his question.
“If I say it was against my will and the twists of fate, would the young hero believe me?” Pillow his head in his hands, Lin Ji drawled lazily. “I used to live a life free from worries about food and clothing, knowing nothing of human malice, until one day my whole family was slaughtered, and I watched with my own eyes as my parents died before me… After suffering endless torment and hardship in this human world, I discovered that this very hell was the only place where I could survive.”
“In the past I had no choice, but from then on, life and death are mine to command.” Pausing for a moment, a smile blossomed unbridled across his face. “How about it, isn’t this story terribly cliché?”
Xu Yun’s fingers tightened their grip around his sword hilt. After a long moment, he said: “I believe you.”
Hearing this, Lin Ji burst out laughing: “Doesn’t the young hero know that someone as heinous as me is most skilled at lying?”
Having said that, he slowly closed his eyes, his expression looking thoroughly exhausted.
Without further words, the two drifted off to sleep separately.
The scene shifted to daylight as they were quenching their thirst by a small stream. Xu Yun handed Lin Ji a mantou (steamed bun), but the latter shook his head in refusal. With pale lips, his complexion looked even worse than before.
“Hero Xu, if you drag me along, you won’t get far.”
With his injuries unhealed and having carried him all the way here, Xu Yun’s own complexion hadn’t improved much either. Coughing softly a few times, he used his sleeve to mask the blood at the corner of his mouth and simply said: “I’ll protect you until you’re out.”
Lin Ji looked at him, the corners of his mouth lifting in a half-smile. The ghost mask he had always worn previously made him look sinister and terrifying; now stripped of the mask, though missing one eye, it still failed to obscure the handsome contours of his features. In particular, that red mole lent his entire face a dual aura of righteousness and wickedness, exuding an enthralling allure.
“Why bother…” Lin Ji closed his eyes. “You are the breeze traveler, I am mud in the turbid world. You and I are as far apart as clouds and dirt.”
Turning over, he spat out a large mouthful of dark, coagulated blood and slowly collapsed.
When Lin Ji woke up, he was inside a mountain cave. Xu Yun was feeding him water, and as he turned his head slightly, he still felt profoundly dizzy.
“—Hero Xu, you’re still trying to save me?” He discovered he was resting against Xu Yun’s lap.
“You were poisoned why did you force yourself to hold on until now?” Xu Yun’s complexion was atrocious, dark circles shadowed his eyes, and his lips lacked a shred of blood.
“I didn’t mean to force it; like I said before, you people are the ones who poisoned me,” Lin Ji twitched the corner of his mouth. “Nobody cared anyway.”
Pressing his lips tight without a word, Xu Yun softened a mantou in clean water before feeding it to him bit by bit.
Frowning, Lin Ji reluctantly opened his mouth to consume a small portion.
“Detoxifying me must have drained seven or eight tenths of your internal Qi… If those righteous heroes hunted us down right now, would the young hero still have the strength to protect me?”
Chewing the mantou slowly, a nonchalant smile perpetually hung across his pale face.
“You wanted to die,” Xu Yun said slowly. “Was it because you didn’t want to implicate me?”
“…You martial arts heroes, are you all so full of unrequited delusions?” Before Lin Ji could manage a smile, a spasm hit his throat, and the little food he had just consumed came right back up.
The vomiting proved unstoppable; coughing and retching alternately, he didn’t ease up until he had vomited out bitter bile and stomach acid.
“I’ll take you to find a physician.” Wiping him clean with a handkerchief, Xu Yun prepared to hoist him onto his back.
“Don’t… it’ll expose us,” Lin Ji clutched at his clothes, his knuckles turning white. “Cough, cough… I won’t die, don’t worry.”
Leaning half-seated against the cave wall, he panted for a long while with his eyes closed as if falling asleep. When Xu Yun thought to fetch some water and shifted slightly, Lin Ji suddenly opened his eyes halfway.
“—When I was first captured, they starved me for three days and three nights.” Lin Ji’s lips moved faintly, his breath weak as though speaking in a half-dream state. “On the fourth day, they led me to a giant cauldron… boiling meat soup was bubbling inside, thick and fragrant… But the moment I smelled it, I retched, my stomach twisting in agony…”
Pausing, he closed his eyes once more.
“I knew that meat was human flesh…”
Xu Yun’s gaze shifted, his palms clenching tight.
“—I refused to eat anyone else’s flesh. So to keep me from starving to death, they, in their great benevolence, dug out one of my eyes,” Lin Ji smiled with his eyes shut tight. “And forced me to eat it down.”
“Later on, for a long, long time, everything I ate came right back up…” Subconsciously pressing a hand against his abdomen with brows knitted tight and cold sweat streaming down, he looked deeply distressed.
Sitting down beside him, Xu Yun pressed his palm against the man’s abdomen, channeling a gentle wave of true Qi inward.
Lifting his eyelashes, Lin Ji’s expression slowly relaxed.
“They… wanted to crush all goodness, to grind human nature straight into the filth… to… force me to sink down the same dark path with them,” he said intermittently. “And they succeeded… I wallowed in depravity alongside them in the Black Cloud Stronghold for eight years, step by step climbing to the position of second-in-command, until finally… I killed the chieftain and half the stronghold… I had no way back, I could only keep on killing…”
“Now, it’s someone else’s turn to hunt me down…”
“Stop talking… get some shut-eye.” Pulling a cloak over his body, Xu Yun reached out to test his forehead, only to discover he had developed a high fever.
Guarding him and tending to him through the night, Lin Ji remained delirious with fever, muttering a few more phrases in his sleep until the heat finally broke around early dawn.
The scene shifted once more, this time inside a small cabin. Lin Ji woke up in bed as Xu Yun pushed open the door carrying a bowl of hot porridge.
“Try to eat a little… drinking medicine directly will upset your stomach.”
“Are you pitying me, Hero Xu?”
Perhaps just waking from sleep, Lin Ji hadn’t yet put on his usual nonchalant smile, leaving him looking somewhat cold and distant.
Taking the bowl of porridge, he lowered his head to take a small sip.
“Someone as heinous as me doesn’t deserve pity.”
“It’s not…” Xu Yun said softly, “not pity…”
“If not pity, then what is it?” Raising his eyes to look at him, Lin Ji slowly smiled. “Could it be that Hero Xu genuinely expects me to repay this with my own body?”
His features possessed a naturally striking handsomeness; losing one eye lent his profile a touch of gentle mercy, exuding a paradoxical aesthetic beauty that blended righteousness with evil.
“Brother, now I finally understand why King Lanling wore a mask when going into battle,” Song Aiguo muttered, stroking his chin. “If the bandit chief sported a face like that, he probably wouldn’t last a single day lingering around the mountain peaks.”
Meanwhile, on the bench opposite the bed, a row of three people sat neatly, eating melon seeds and watching the show.
“You’ve been watching for so long, and that’s your takeaway?” Song Huaiyan glanced sideways at him.
“To tell you the truth, I’m a bit confused,” Song Aiguo sighed, switching his chin to support it with his other hand. “But I did come away with one realization: it turns out deleting chat and browsing histories on your phone before dying is useless you’ve gotta clear your memory too!”
“Rest assured, with a heartless, breezy soul like yours, you won’t form an obsession after death, so nobody’s going to care about your petty little secrets,” Song Huaiyan smiled. “Though once you reach the netherworld, whether the King of Hell publicly executes your lifetime memories in the open is anyone’s guess.”
“Is the King of Hell really that idle? He’s gotta review everyone’s entire life story?” Song Aiguo looked utterly speechless.
“And you think we look very busy?”
“Pretty busy.”
Resting his chin in both hands, Song Aiguo stared pleadingly at Song Huaiyan: “Brother, does this count as us moonlighting for the underworld? Is there a salary? Do we get official benefits?”
Song Huaiyan spoke the unvarnished truth: “No, we’re purely generating electricity out of love.”
Song Aiguo asked sincerely: “Then what on earth is the Hall of Affairs even for?”
“You can think of it as a ferry pier,” Song Huaiyan explained. “Souls that wander the mortal world unable to enter the cycle of reincarnation due to deep obsessions or crossing over from other worlds will find their way here; the Hall of Affairs is the welcoming post that guides those souls. Question no worldly matters, let all things turn to emptiness. The duty of the successive ‘guides’ of the Hall of Affairs is to forge dreams and resolve obsessions for the deceased, allowing them to lay down everything and cross into the Yellow Springs with a clean slate.”
“Oh…” Song Aiguo’s brain spun through a few turns. “So paper crafts and paper money are meant to anchor the obsessions of the living, while entering the Samsara Realm is meant to lay to rest the obsessions of the dead…”
Song Huaiyan smiled. “The kid’s got some intuition.”
Thinking it over, Song Aiguo asked thoughtfully, “Is this job dangerous?”
Song Huaiyan assumed a profoundly inscrutable look: “It depends.”
Song Aiguo uttered an “oh,” then asked: “What about the current situation, then?”
“Hard to say.” Looking at the pair inside the illusion across from them, Song Huaiyan turned to ask him: “Can you tell whose Samsara Realm this is yet?”
“Uhm… I’m starting to suspect whether we accidentally broke into some random wandering ghost’s Samsara Realm?” Song Aiguo mused. “None of this resembles Grandpa Xu at all! I feel like I’m sitting here watching a wuxia drama.”
“The Samsara Realm is infallible; this is the memory of Xu Lin’s past life,” Song Huaiyan said slowly. “Though… not this current lifetime.”