Although Yin Xiaoyang had told everyone to go back, the boy’s family couldn’t rest easy and insisted on coming along, so Yin Xiaoyang had no choice but to let them accompany them as far as the foot of the mountain.
The boy’s mother looked listless, as if she hadn’t slept all night, weeping while blaming the boy’s father. The man who had stepped forward earlier was the boy’s uncle, and he kept softly comforting her.
Cen Yuchi gathered the gist of it: yesterday morning, the boy’s father had led his brother-in-law and his son up the mountain to hunt, and they had run into him. Mistaking him for the legendary mountain spirit, they had panicked and scattered in the chaos. The two adults made it home first, but the child was nowhere to be seen. Fearing her son had come to harm, the mother kept urging the man to go up the mountain and search, but the boy’s father was stubborn by nature and refused no matter what. Besides, by then he had realized that what they’d encountered on the mountain was no mountain spirit at all. Feeling he had made a fool of himself, he redirected his anger at the child for making such a fuss. Thinking of how the boy was always timid and easily frightened spoiled rotten by his mother his temper flared, and he blocked everyone else from going to search. A whole night passed and the child still hadn’t returned. The father clearly couldn’t sit still any longer either, but he still refused to back down out of pride. The mother had cried herself into a tear-soaked mess, going door to door asking for help, preparing to go up the mountain together to find the boy.
Before long, they reached the foot of the mountain.
The morning mist was thick. Perhaps it was just his imagination, but the mountain before them seemed different from yesterday, as if harboring something whose nature good or ill was impossible to say, sending chills down Cen Yuchi’s spine.
Strange, Cen Yuchi thought. He hadn’t felt this way when he was on the mountain yesterday. It was as if some subtle change had come about afterward for some reason.
Yin Xiaoyang clearly felt a trace of unease as well, his expression turning grave. He spoke up: “You two should stop here.”
The woman had been sobbing, but at these words she suddenly burst into wails, insisting on going up with them, only to be stopped by the man. He said gently, “Sister, let’s leave it to these two Immortal Masters. If we go, we’ll only get in the way.”
The woman sniffled and said reluctantly, “All I know is that he’s my own flesh and blood. He’s never left my side since he was little, I could pick him out of a crowd with my eyes closed. I want to go up the mountain to find my son. How does that make me a hindrance? Have you forgotten how you fell into someone’s cellar as a child from playing too much? In the end, wasn’t it me who found you…”
Cen Yuchi cut in: “Sister, that’s not the right way to look at it. The bond of blood is indeed powerful, but do you know who our Yin the Immortal here actually is?”
At that opening, Yin Xiaoyang knew nothing good would come out of this little thief’s mouth. Sure enough, Cen Yuchi immediately continued: “He’s a prodigy the likes of which the Shangyang Continent hasn’t seen in thousands of years!”
Seeing the woman stunned by his words, Cen Yuchi leaned in slightly and deliberately lowered his voice: “Immortal Arts! What are Immortal Arts? Never mind your son, even if a mosquito took a sip of your son’s blood, our Yin the Immortal could pick him out of a whole nest of mosquitoes for you! Could you do that?” Cen Yuchi then glanced at the man beside her. “Could you?”
The two of them shook their heads.
“That’s more like it!” Cen Yuchi clapped his hands smugly. “And our great Immortal Yin here when he displays his divine powers, no outsiders are allowed to watch. That’s all heavenly secrets. Anyone who sees it loses years off their lifespan! So go home and wait with a hundred-percent peace of mind!” Having said this, Cen Yuchi even winked at Yin Xiaoyang with a “you’re welcome” look on his face.
Yin Xiaoyang rolled his eyes, unwilling to engage. He took out a piece of talisman paper and a brush, held them out to the woman, and said, “Please write the birth characters of the person you’re seeking on this.”
The woman, evidently still dazed from Cen Yuchi’s barrage of nonsense, seemed not to understand what Yin Xiaoyang was saying and froze, instinctively looking toward the man. The man lowered his head, murmured a few words of comfort, then took the paper and brush and wrote the eight characters onto the talisman paper.
Only then did the woman seem to suddenly understand, letting out an “oh,” before she began quietly sobbing again.
After seeing off the boy’s family, the furrow between Yin Xiaoyang’s brows finally eased slightly. He took a Soul Bell out of his storage pouch and tied the talisman paper bearing the boy’s birth characters to it with a red thread.
Cen Yuchi was startled. “You know how to do this?”
Yin Xiaoyang looked at Cen Yuchi as if he were an idiot. “Didn’t you already know I’m from the Yin Family?”
The person-tracking soul-chasing art did indeed belong to the Yin Family, and the Soul Bell was a Magical Artifact commonly used by them. But Yin Xiaoyang had spent years on Immortal Feather Peak specializing in swordsmanship, so Cen Yuchi had assumed he wouldn’t know his own family’s techniques. Who would have thought this kid hadn’t missed out on any of it.
A side branch of the Yin Family specialized in Artifact Refining, and among the things they refined, the most well-known was this Soul Bell.
Only inner-sect disciples of the Yin Family could wear a Soul Bell, and it had to be used in conjunction with the Yin Family’s person-tracking soul-chasing art to function. Its effectiveness was closely tied to the medium used and the cultivation of the bell’s holder. The so-called medium was anything with some connection to the person being sought, it could be an object, a person or animal, or simply, as in Yin Xiaoyang’s case, the person’s birth characters. The stronger the connection, the easier the tracking. And the higher the holder’s cultivation, the easier as well. The cultivation mentioned here was not the advancement-and-leveling concept discussed earlier, but rather the degree of mastery attained in the person-tracking soul-chasing art. If an eighth-rank cultivator who had never practiced the art held the bell, it would be nothing but a mute bell; but if someone had trained in this art, even a low-rank cultivator could make it serve some function. Naturally, the higher the rank, the better the results of training.
In fact, when used properly, this art was extraordinarily powerful which was exactly why everyone was willing to stay on good terms with the Yin Family. In other words, nobody wanted to offend this enormous clan. These old ancestors, with their person-tracking soul-chasing art, could chase you to the ends of the earth Cen Yuchi had suffered greatly from it. Yin Yunluo used to keep a Soul Bell in hand at all times, and no matter how Cen Yuchi hid, he could never escape. At first she used small things like hair or a brush, but later, as Yin Yunluo’s mastery of the art grew more and more outrageous, she stopped using a medium altogether and just shook the bell directly utterly uncanny.
Yin Xiaoyang pulled out a strip of red cloth from who knows where, tossed out a single line, “Follow me” and blindfolded himself without another word.
Follow a butcher and you’ll learn to slaughter pigs. Through constant exposure, Cen Yuchi could pick out a few tricks of the trade. The person Yin Xiaoyang was seeking was a boy he didn’t know at all, so he had asked for the boy’s birth characters, covered his eyes with red, and relied solely on the bell’s chime to guide his way.
Yin Xiaoyang, blindfolded at this moment, was no different from a blind man. Cen Yuchi, feeling mischievous, stuck out a foot to trip him but who would have thought that although Yin Xiaoyang couldn’t see, the Soul Bell saw everything perfectly clearly. The bell gave a shake and let out a burst of rapid ringing.
Yin Xiaoyang, still blindfolded, frowned slightly and stepped right over it.
“Boring.”
The Soul Bell then, as if to show off, ran a circle right in front of Cen Yuchi’s eyes, as if to say: “Boring.”
Not a single one he could afford to provoke…
Having failed at his prank, Cen Yuchi could only obediently follow along.
The mountain path was rugged and shrouded in mist, yet the Soul Bell seemed to have grown a pair of eyes, knowing every inch of the route intimately even taking small trails that only those who frequented the mountains would know leading Yin Xiaoyang around every obstacle. Cen Yuchi was puzzled at first, until he spotted a long-extinguished campfire and understood: the path the Soul Bell was following was the very route the boy had taken the day before. Looking at the deer missing one leg on the ground, Cen Yuchi silently recited half a passage of the rebirth prayer in his heart.
Fortunately, the Soul Bell didn’t linger there for long. It soon veered sharply downward and plunged into the woods. Cen Yuchi knew the crucial part was only just beginning.
The lost boy had fled in panic without choosing his path, and the Soul Bell followed suit, darting wildly. Traversing the forest was no pleasant experience branches scraped against their bodies, and one careless move would leave a gash. Cen Yuchi covered his face and shouted, “This damn bell has gone mad! Why would it pick a path like this?!”
Yin Xiaoyang strode ahead, paying no mind to whether Cen Yuchi lived or died. Cen Yuchi, cursed with being tethered, could only run along blindly. He simply lifted the hem of his clothes and covered his face with it, playing blind alongside the blind man.
Before long, he heard Yin Xiaoyang’s voice, both startled and furious: “What do you think you’re doing?”
Cen Yuchi pulled the cloth from his face and saw that Yin Xiaoyang had already removed his blindfold and was staring at him with an expression of incredulous, hopeless exasperation.
Cen Yuchi smoothed his disheveled hair and grinned. “A thief never leaves empty-handed, I’m stealing an art!”
Yin Xiaoyang rolled his eyes skyward, then turned his head to look at where the Soul Bell had stopped.
Before the two of them stood a house or more precisely, a mountain god temple. The temple wasn’t grand in any way, simple and ordinary, but it looked neat and clean, clearly tended and visited by worshippers on a regular basis. The temple doors stood wide open, offering a faint view of the interior, and the Soul Bell at this moment hovered right in the middle of the doorway, still ringing without pause.
This had to be the place.
Cen Yuchi stood at the entrance and peered inside. “Immortal Yin, you’ve lost your touch? This temple doesn’t look like anyone’s inside.”
Yin Xiaoyang was of course well aware. He focused his senses and probed not only was the temple empty, but within several hundred meters around, there was no one but the two of them.
But the Soul Bell couldn’t be wrong; the boy had vanished from its tracking right here. Yin Xiaoyang’s brow furrowed again this matter was indeed strange.
The moment the two stepped into the temple, Cen Yuchi let out a “whoa.”
What was enshrined inside was neither god nor ghost, but a single piece of horizontal wood.
“Even a poor mountain can produce a divine tree, the one who built this temple was a master.”
Cen Yuchi murmured in admiration, then looked around.
His words weren’t entirely a joke, either. The temple’s layout and feng shui were both of the finest quality, and even the decorations inside followed careful principles: guardian objects were placed in all four directions east, south, west, and north and bronze statues of snakes and horses stood at the northwest and southwest corners to dispel malevolent forces.
The Five Elements and Eight Directions, down to the finest details, the formation employed many high-level techniques. Even Cen Yuchi had to marvel at its ingenuity; it was not something any ordinary folk Taoist could set up by merely pinching his fingers. If a divine statue were enshrined in this temple, such an auspicious site could nurture a Divine Sense even with sparse incense offerings. But what was enshrined here was a piece of withered wood, dead wood has no spirit, and no amount of incense would do anything. Whoever built this temple possessed such great power that they must have understood this. What could their purpose be?
Cen Yuchi pondered for a moment. It seemed the mystery within this withered wood could only be uncovered by questioning the nearby villagers after descending the mountain.
The most pressing matter now was to find that boy. According to the Soul Bell, the boy had vanished in this temple, yet he was clearly not inside, and there were no signs of a struggle. How had the boy disappeared into thin air?
The Soul Bell kept ringing before the temple gate, and the paper bearing the boy’s birth characters fluttered along with it in the air. Cen Yuchi stared at that talisman paper, lost in thought.
Yin Xiaoyang had searched around and found nothing. Seeing Cen Yuchi gazing blankly at the temple entrance, he remembered the Soul Bell had not yet been recalled. The incessant ringing was grating on the nerves. Just as he was about to recall it, he heard a “crash” behind him. Yin Xiaoyang whipped his head around, only to see Cen Yuchi extend a single palm and smash the withered wood on the altar to pieces.
A ball of raging fire instantly exploded from Yin Xiaoyang’s heart up to his forehead. He shouted, “Are you insane?!”
But Cen Yuchi paid him no mind. He leisurely picked through the pile of shattered wood, selected a rather sharp short stick, raised his head, and asked, “Young Immortal, tell me, the Soul Bell always finds the current location of the person it seeks, is that right?”
Yin Xiaoyang hesitated.
In principle, that should be the case. But the location the Soul Bell pointed to right now had no one there. Yin Xiaoyang could only assume the Bell had tracked the boy to this point and could track no further, concluding that the boy had vanished upon arriving here. But the words of this little thief before him made Yin Xiaoyang wonder: what if he had been wrong from the very beginning? Yin Xiaoyang felt as if a knotted rope had been placed before him, and he was on the verge of finding the thread that could unravel everything. Unconsciously, a single word slipped from his mouth: “Yes…”
The moment the words fell, he heard Cen Yuchi give a low laugh and toss out a line: “Young Immortal, remember to fish me out!” Then, fiercely driving that piece of shattered wood into his own chest, he sprinted toward the open temple gate.
Yin Xiaoyang watched helplessly as, the instant Cen Yuchi passed through the temple gate, he vanished.
He lowered his head and looked at the few drops of blood that had fallen to the ground. After a long absence, he felt a suffocating gloom or rather, panic.
Yin Xiaoyang had not felt this way in a very long time. In this moment, he seemed to return to that night years ago, the dazzling red, the nauseating stench of blood, the ceaselessly ringing Soul Bell, the talisman paper scattering everywhere. He touched the ring on his left thumb. But the life on the other end of that ring, which he had been able to sense all these hours, vanished in the very instant Cen Yuchi’s figure disappeared through the temple gate.