Amnesia
The withered grove was in complete disarray. The bloodstains on the ground had already charred black, and only a few messy marks remained. The huge hand seal that had terrified even ghosts was gone. The two evil ghosts had been obliterated, not even a trace left behind, and the only remaining evil ghost did not dare move an inch.
The evil ghost did not dare budge. “Daoist, I was wrong, I won’t run anymore!”
The youth’s eerie eyes turned toward him, as if he still wanted to move closer in that direction, but then the youth let out a muffled cough of turbid blood, leaning back against the tree. His violent panting made his chest rise and fall nonstop, the veins in his neck bulging, as if something were surging rapidly through his meridians.
From the corner of his eye, the prone evil ghost caught sight of the scene in the distance, and an inexplicable chill surged up from the soles of his feet. The young Daoist who had just suppressed them now looked as if his skin were splitting apart and knitting back together. A pool of blood had gathered beneath him, and the yin energy around him was still scrambling to retreat into his body.
To an outsider, he looked half dead, with a broken leg, covered in blood, and marks from falls and impacts everywhere.
And yet, even so, he still clung to his last breath.
Being washed over by yin energy was not a pleasant feeling. His body was full of it, surging about at random.
What the youth felt first was that this yin energy was little by little gnawing at his meridians. He urgently wanted to drive it out of his body, but his body was behaving abnormally, absorbing that yin energy instead, ravenously trying to take all of that frigid stuff into itself, like some kind of survival instinct he could not resist.
The empty dantian within him was now gathering a large amount of external yin energy. After washing through his meridians, it slowly flowed toward the enormous eye totem residing deep in his dantian. He tried to pull his thoughts back from the pain, but all kinds of obscure runes and memories were tangled together in his mind, carving wildly through his sea of consciousness.
With a thud, he felt as though he had been dragged from searing pain into an icy deep pool. Suddenly, numerous scattered memories surfaced in his sea of consciousness.
In the freezing depths of a pond, people around him sneered as they pressed his head under the water. When he was about to suffocate, they pulled him out almost as if granting him charity… He heard himself wailing in tears, heard the perpetrators’ smug, superior pity as they mocked him while degrading him and, like some benefactors, hauled him back from the gates of hell.
The piercing cold vanished. Suddenly, the clamorous sound of an argument rang in his ears. In the ancestral shrine, that man who had always been proud and self-possessed, treating him like an ant, flew into a rage out of humiliation. The elders who usually stood high above him were panicked and at a loss… He knelt alone in the very center of the ancestral shrine, the wound cut open in his palm aching unbearably. Yet he could only dazedly listen to the words of those elders who had once shown him a trace of kindness, now turning on him and hurling insults, cursing him as trash. Someone seemed to step on his hand, grinding it down, coarse sand pushing deep into the wound.
Who is this?
It is you.
Who am I……
Su Yu.
The clamoring in the ancestral shrine suddenly receded farther and farther away, like a revolving lantern being yanked away at once.
What came last? Su Yu wondered, as if about a stranger… oh, in the end, he had been pushed off a cliff by someone.
In his sea of consciousness, the admonition, clinging like a tumor to the bone, rang out again.
Intense pain once more filled his sea of consciousness.
‘You can’t die.’
Too noisy, shut up already.
Get out, get out of here!
Su Yu instinctively tried to cover his ears. The pond water in his memories receded, and the rushing wind that had been sweeping in eagerly now flooded into his eardrums all at once. With a bang, all his past recollections were abruptly dragged back. He gasped sharply, then suddenly opened his eyes.
Soon after, that sense of being clamped by the throat disappeared. The feeling of his body being controlled vanished too.
Su Yu closed his eyes. The urging voice in his sea of consciousness seemed to have disappeared. His memories were a complete mess; he wanted to think back carefully, but found that he could not remember anything. Once the docile yin energy settled down within him, the strange, obscure runes in his mind vanished along with it. His nearly drained body seemed to have been given a breath of life.
In the withered grove, yin wind howled. Bone-chilling gusts surged on, and the blood on the ground slowly spread out.
The evil ghost trembled in the yin wind, edging a little to the side in fear, avoiding the blood he usually loved as though it were a venomous snake. How could anyone lose so much blood and still be alive? The youth wasn’t going to die, was he? Then what about the ghost? Would he die too?
The evil ghost cautiously raised his head, and the moment he looked up, he saw the youth sitting in a pool of blood in the distance.
The golden threads in the youth’s eyes were slowly fading. His eyes were dark and deep, with only a faint trace of gold left around the edges of his pupils. At that moment, those eyes were looking right at him.
The evil ghost was even more terrified. “Daoist, don’t look at me like that… I’m scared.”
When Su Yu could move his fingers, the clamoring voice begging for mercy beside his ear became even clearer, and a different point of light appeared in his originally dim field of vision. He looked at that point of light as at something strange, and it overlapped with the pleading voice by his ear. In his mind, that strange totem kept turning, the vast yin energy crouched back within his dantian, his nearly dead body had been saved, and a light cluster had also appeared before his eyes.
That was a human-shaped white light cluster.
No, he should not be able to see it.
Su Yu recalled, as if it belonged to a stranger: I am blind.
“Come here.” Su Yu blinked uncomfortably, watching that white light cluster stand up and move toward him at his command.
The evil ghost had been guarding here for a long time and did not dare go out. The longer he looked, the deeper his fear of this young Daoist became… Injured like this and still alive? Was this even human?
But the evil ghost did not dare ask too much. Whatever the Daoist told him to do, he would do.
After circling around several times, the Daoist finally stopped him from moving further.
“What are you?” Su Yu asked.
The evil ghost looked lost. “I just… I’m just a little ghost raised by the yin energy of Nanwu Mountain.”
Yin energy? Su Yu looked at the human-shaped qi cluster before him.
After that question, Su Yu said nothing more. The evil ghost thought he had not explained clearly enough and, trembling all over, continued, “I… my name is Zhang Fugui. I’m from Xinglin Village in Nanwu Town. When I was alive, I was a traveling physician. I went out to gather herbs and accidentally fell off a cliff…”
The surrounding yin wind was still howling. Zhang Fugui’s legs, which he had been keeping still, were getting a little sore. His mouth was dry from talking, and seeing that Su Yu did not respond, he asked carefully, “Daoist…?”
Su Yu paid him no attention at all. Instead, he had begun examining his own condition.
When he raised a hand, there was still a sluggish, dull pain in his body. Control over his body had already returned to him. He reached down and touched his own foot. From the angle of the bone, he could tell that his leg had already been broken. At the moment he touched it, all he felt was warm blood. Thinking that all this blood had flowed out of his own body, he could not help feeling a trace of disbelief.
Even like this, how was he still alive?
As soon as that thought arose, the eye totem in his dantian appeared again.
A powerful force of control shrouded him, and in the next moment he uncontrollably spat out a mouthful of fresh blood.
Still vomiting blood! The evil ghost watched in terror. This, this, this… was this still a human being?
The youth not far away was indeed already a sight neither human nor ghost. After vomiting another mouthful of blood, his body seemed to have reached its limit. Even though the evil ghost called him several times, the youth did not move again. His eyes were closed, and he leaned against the tree like a corpse.
“Daoist?”
Was he really dead? The evil ghost’s heart suddenly surged with a burst of delight. Once he was sure the youth was no longer moving, he turned and ran out of the withered grove.
Only, before he had run very far, he was suddenly bound by an invisible great force. With a clatter, the evil ghost was yanked back several steps. When he turned around in horror, he found a blood-red chain now tied around his ankle. The chain looked as if it had been condensed from fresh blood. One end was connected to him, and the other end to the youth in the distance.
He cautiously tried to move farther out, but the farther away he went from this person, the more he felt as though his soul body was being torn apart. After trying several times, he finally realized that he had been bound together with this young Daoist. A ghost like him, one who had only just cultivated a soul body, if torn apart, would never again have any chance of cultivation, and was even more likely to be scattered to the winds.
At that moment, the yin wind high up on Nanwu Mountain swept even more fiercely. The evil ghost watched which way the wind was blowing up high.
“No way… is the seal about to close?”
Zhang Fugui clenched his teeth and finally gathered the courage to move toward the young Daoist. When he reached the youth’s side, the person still showed no sign of movement. Seeing the youth’s broken leg, Zhang Fugui hesitated, looking at the yin wind in the distance, then at the blood covering the ground.
He could not die here. He still had to escape.
“Good, it can still be saved.” Zhang Fugui let out a breath of relief. He floated over to the youth’s broken leg, carefully feeling along it with his fingers, as if judging something. When he found the location of the broken bone, his fingers suddenly gathered strength. Only a crack was heard, and the unconscious youth could not help letting out a muffled cry of pain.
Zhang Fugui’s movements became even more careful. Frightened by the youth’s muffled groan, he paused for a few breaths, then apologized while he worked. “Daoist, pardon me. Your leg has to be saved. If it’s too late, it may really be broken for good.”
The bent broken leg was forcibly straightened. After setting it, Zhang Fugui picked up some dead branches from nearby, tore a few pieces of cloth from the youth’s clothing, and with practiced movements fixed the broken leg in place, and did some simple work to stop the bleeding.
Only after finishing all this did he carry the youth on his back.
The chain tied around Zhang Fugui’s ankle showed no backlash at all. He easily hoisted the youth onto his back. When he had been dragging him earlier, he had already felt that this person was very light. Now that he carried him, he found this person even lighter, to an excessive degree.
He was dressed quite well, so why wasn’t he a bit fatter? Were cultivators really this obsessed with staying lean and trim?
Zhang Fugui thought of his son, whom he had not seen in a long time. When he was still human, his son had been a chubby little boy. By the age of seven, he had been so fat that he panted when walking. Whenever Zhang Fugui told him to eat less and exercise, that brat would act spoiled and try to win him over all day long.
Thinking of this, Zhang Fugui remembered that he had not seen his wife and child for a very long time.
Nanwu Mountain was a place where yin thrived and yang was weak, and the fissure at the bottom of the mountain gorge was a grave for souls that let ghosts in but never out.
Zhang Fugui, the evil ghost, had died here at the bottom of the cliff on Nanwu Mountain while gathering herbs years ago. After cultivating a soul body, he had been racking his brains ever since to leave this place, but a special seal pressed down within the fissures of all Nanwu Mountain. He had heard it was left behind by some powerful cultivator. Any living being that died here would be unable to leave Nanwu Mountain for the rest of its existence, and even the vicious malice spirits living here could not shake it.
Zhang Fugui had originally thought that, for the rest of his days, he would only be able to be a ghost here.
But a few months ago, those famous vicious, terrifying beings in Nanwu Mountain suddenly began slaughtering one another. It seemed they were fighting over some kind of secret treasure, and right then, the Nanwu Mountain seal that had previously been like an iron prison weakened. That weakening continued until a few days ago, when a crack finally appeared in the seal on Nanwu Mountain’s western side.
The chance to escape Nanwu Mountain had come.
Su Yu woke again amidst the swaying. The dull pain in his sea of consciousness had not yet faded. He felt himself lying prone on a cold body. He opened his eyes slightly and saw that white light cluster carrying him through the forest.
“Where are we going?” Su Yu asked.
Zhang Fugui was panting from exhaustion. Hearing the voice, he answered instinctively, “Of course we’re getting out. If the seal closes any later, then… Daoist!? Daoist, you’re awake!”
Su Yu tried to move and found that much of the pain in his body had eased. The most obvious was his leg. He could feel that the pain at the broken bone had lessened, as if it had been fixed by something, and the jolting did not aggravate the broken bone.
He looked down at the evil ghost and suddenly asked, “You did this?”
Zhang Fugui hurriedly nodded.
The person on his back gave no response. Zhang Fugui glanced to the side.
The youth’s eyes, still not fully cleared of those gold threads, were half-lidded, as if he had not noticed him nodding.
He really was blind…?
Su Yu sensed the white smoke cluster moving. “Why aren’t you talking?”
Zhang Fugui blurted out, “I, I did it.”
If that broken leg had not been treated, losing use of it would be one thing, but bleeding out would be fatal. Besides, if he did not treat the wound, how was he supposed to carry this person and run? If that blood kept flowing like this, every wandering ghost within ten li would be drawn over.
Zhang Fugui had been a traveling physician when he was alive. What he hated most was patients messing around and not listening to medical advice. If this had been one of his patients in the past, and they had said something so outrageous, he would have scolded them black and blue.
Full of grievance, Zhang Fugui did not dare say it. He could only answer meekly, “If the injury is just left alone… you’ll die.”
Su Yu: “What’s so bad about dying?”
What was good about death? Absolutely nothing!
But facing the youth, Zhang Fugui did not dare say a single word of rebuke.
There was no other reason, only that he cherished his life. Besides, dying would only make it more painful.
Their conversation stopped. Zhang Fugui fell silent, and the person on his back did too.
The youth did not seem to care where they were going. Aside from the first few sentences, he did not say another word, seeming uninterested in everything and showing no thought of where he wanted to go.
The Nanwu Mountain seal’s exit was on the west side. Zhang Fugui carried the person for two shichen and, gasping for breath, reached the end of the withered grove.
From afar, he could see the mist outside growing thinner, and traces of air from beyond Nanwu Mountain were faintly seeping in. Overjoyed, he quickened his steps outward, but just as he reached the edge of the withered grove, he suddenly sensed the scattered yin grass and broken yin energy around him.
It was too quiet. Why was there not even a ghost in sight…
Zhang Fugui’s body went cold all at once. Just as he was taking a few steps back, a fierce gust suddenly came roaring from the distance, sweeping up waves of wind that pushed him back several steps. He hurriedly crouched beside a dead tree to resist the gale.
“What’s going on?” The wind stung Zhang Fugui’s eyes. Suddenly a hand pressed down hard on his shoulder. “D, Daoist?”
That force seemed to pin him down. Zhang Fugui, who had originally wanted to flee, found his legs frozen in place. Turning his head, he saw that the person on his back was not looking at him. Those eerie eyes were staring straight into the distance.
The youth glanced slightly sideways, and the pupils that had been as calm as dead water seemed to shift.
“Don’t move.”