Volume 1: The New Master of the Abyss
Chilly winds rustled as the sun sank into the horizon, and a pitch-black mist pervaded the high, precipitous mountains.1崇山峻嶺 (lit. high mountains and lofty peaks) is a reference to Wang Xizhi’s “Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion” signifying tall and steep mountains. All of a sudden, a figure broke straight through the mist, smashing into the perilous cliffs and overhanging rocks unrestrained. It tumbled down with momentum until it crashed into fragile withered branches unable to bear its weight, coming to a halt only upon falling into the forest.
After a few breaths of silence, chatter sounded from within the black mist.
“What sound—”
“Something fell down.”
Several dim figures floated after the sound from within the black mist, trailing after the distant dead leaves gently drifting down. They appeared to catch the scent of some aroma, and, stimulated, floated over while trembling, perceiving a slip of a body among the gravel and fallen leaves, oozing blood.
They watched it with pleasant surprise.
“A mortal! They’re close to death.”
In the deep secluded forest, a youth lay prone over a tree’s coarse roots. His garments were torn apart by the abrasive rock of the rugged cliff face, and the exposed flesh on his arms was badly mutilated. Blood filled his mouth and flowed between his teeth, his right leg assumed an unnatural twist, and his eyes were half-open, giving off a sense of decay akin to one who had a foot in the grave.
Even stranger was that a wisp of a ghost hovered above the youth.
The ghost looked at the youth calmly, and as he lowered his head, he could feel the blood slowly draining from his body. His consciousness seemed to be swept away alongside the seeping blood, and the pain within his body as if it were gradually drifting away. He reached out to touch his body, and as his transparent hand passed through it, a ridiculous sense of absurdity arose within him.
Tsk…even with matters reaching this point, he still couldn’t touch himself.
The ghost was born with a wisp of innate evil.2Being born under a malignant star, destined to be in danger and unlucky, bringing about disaster and misfortune. Also referred to simply as an ‘evil spirit,’ ‘calamity,’ or ‘jinx’. Upon his birth, he was unable to enter his body safely, thus leaving his hun and po incomplete.3You may recall this from the previous chapter, In Daoism, people are thought to have three hun and seven po. Hun are the yang souls that leave the body after death and go to heaven, whereas po are the yin souls which remain with the corpse. A baby is born entirely po while the hun enters afterwards, and as such, Su Yu’s ghost is a hun soul, leaving his physical body missing one of its three hun. He could only float beside his body as he did now, watching as it dully spent his days, while he experienced his body’s pain, illness and torment………Now, emerging from the soon to come relief from this suffering, was a pleasure that washed over him.
Am I dying?
He ought to be dying.
The youth’s breathing ceased, and the ghost closed his eyes.
Just then, the pitch-black mist surrounding them stagnated briefly, and as though subjected to something’s lead, the yin qi within the cold forest suddenly enveloped the ghost on the verge of dissipating. It wrapped around the bleeding form before slowly penetrating the youth’s body.
The yin qi that had flowed into his body abruptly dispersed. The scattered yin qi rotated slowly, quickly piecing together like puzzle pieces, the many complex and obscure lines forming a strange sort of totem. Soon after, the glit lines became more and more vivid, converging into a depiction at the totem’s center—A bizarre pair of eyes dyed red under a golden light.
When the youth caught sight of it as his consciousness failed to hold, those eyes suddenly opened.4Not literally ‘caught sight’ this will be explained later on in the novel
As they gazed at each other, the revolving lantern of memories in his mind promptly stopped, and the entire totem seemed to come alive altogether.5走马灯的回忆 – lit. memories of the revolving horse lantern; refers to life flashing before one’s eyes before death. The horse lantern is a reference to the lanterns in the Shangyuan Festival. The lines on the eye totem above him unexpectedly began to cycle, as if opening and closing a huge fanged mouth, its movements together forming an inscrutable pithy—
‘You cannot die.’
The youth’s psyche appeared to take a tremendous blow, a buzzing sound rippled throughout his ocean of consciousness, it was as though all his awareness momentarily returned to the cage. A shattering pain ran through his whole body, and shackles seemed to bear down on his shoulders as if to tear him asunder. What immediately followed was the pain breaching his ocean of consciousness inch by inch, giving him a splitting headache.
His whole body was as though it was driven by an unknown force. Just then, a fishy smell in his mouth immediately brought the youth back to his train of thought. The bloody smell spread and climbed up his throat. He violently spit out a mouthful of turbid blood, and the meridians throughout his body appeared to unexpectedly come to life.
“Huh?”
“You’re not totally dead yet?”
What’s that sound?
Who’s speaking?
The voices around him gradually became clearer, and the smell of rotten soil drifted to the tip of his nose. The youth slowly opened his eyes and felt the rough bark under his belly. The rustling wind blew in his ears, and his whole body was seemingly dragged forward by some invisible sort’s power. The cold wind rushed into his collar, making him involuntarily shiver.
“After falling from such a height this mortal can still move?”
The youth fought back his headache, and abruptly realized that the person dragging him along wasn’t human. Unlike a human, their skin was biting cold and had an utterly disgusting slippery feel.
He made a fuzzy judgment. The memories within his mind were muddled and unclear. Yes, he had an impression of falling off the…
Who pushed him down?
Who am I?
The youth was shocked, his mind went blank.
The invisible chill winds coalesced into an odd touch, just like a person’s hand, caressing the youth’s body and marking something with a few light strokes.6三下兩下 (lit. three strokes, two strokes) is an idiom for doing something effortlessly and swiftly. Also, the ‘chill wind’ used here also doubles as a reference to ghosts, as they are thought to bring chill winds with them when they appear. The youth’s ears twitched, he was still trying to avoid the frigid wind, and as he moved the faint voices in his ears became more clear. Before his eyes was darkness, there wasn’t even a speck of anything within his ink-like vision. He could only rely on sound to judge the speakers’ locations.
“Let’s make a deal first, You guys will divide the flesh and blood in half, the head will be mine.”
“…I want to eat the head too.”
“If it weren’t for the bigwig ghosts and their turf wars, which of these platters would we get to enjoy? Hurry up, don’t let the other ghosts beat you to the punch.”7截胡 (lit. to cut) is a mahjong term for when a player wins by discarding another player(s)’s winning hand. After a player plays a card, even if multiple people after them can win, only the player counterclockwise beside them is considered the winner. Thus, it informally refers to snatching someone’s fruits of labor just as they’re about to succeed. What spoke seemed to be the backbone of these creatures. “Drag it over there. Let’s take advantage of the seal on this side being weak. We’ll finish eating, and leave quickly.”
The youth listened to the chatter in his ears. His broken leg was already painful in the first place, and as he was dragged by the evil spirits, an intense, concentrated pain surged up his leg. He smelled the scent of blood on his body, but in the end, couldn’t tell whether it was his own blood or the fishy scent carried by those things.
His body was bereft of any feeling aside from pain, its interior desolate, not possessing a shred of spiritual energy either. He had to waste a lot of strength to raise his head, his dull and aching ocean of consciousness in chaos. He barely understood his situation. Listening to the conversing voices, he knew that there were three voices around him—probably ghosts.
Even if he hadn’t fallen to his death, he would still die soon.
When he thought of death, his ocean of consciousness turned dull and painful again.
At this moment, the complicated formation in his ocean of consciousness abruptly froze. Complex and obscure patterns appeared in the youth’s ocean of consciousness. His consciousness, near collapse, was restricted by an inextricable, strange force, and the mantra-like pithy sounded once more.
—You cannot die.
Kill them.
His whole body seemed to accept the palm control array within his ocean of consciousness. A kind of indescribable agitation flooded his state of mind. His bloodsoaked fingertips moved uncontrollably and touched the damp rotten soil.
Amid their chatter, the evil spirits who were discussing how to divide their food lowered their heads and glimpsed the mortal, who should’ve been thoroughly dead, move his head. Shortly after, they saw the mortal slowly raise his bloodstained face, his pair of dark eyes staring at them. Those eyes were beautiful, like works of heaven, but they were very off, as if they had been born without focus. They seemed to be looking at them, yet also seemed to be looking through them, at a much farther place.
“This looks like a blind.”
“You’re right. This mortal’s pretty good-looking, just a little thin.”
He was skinny and shriveled, but he seemed to still have some soft skin and tender flesh.8细皮嫩肉 (xì pí nèn ròu) – an idiom meaning white, delicate and well maintained skin; smooth-skinned. Such meat wasn’t of bad quality.
The more the evil spirits watched, the more they wanted to drool. They couldn’t wait to drag the mortal into the remote cave.
With every gust of chill wind, more blood oozed out of the youth’s body, and his head, which he had made an effort to support, fell down.
The evil spirits beside him gazed at the blood seeping into the ground with pity. Mortal blood is quite nourishing……
Then suddenly, the evil spirit towing the youth along stopped moving.
The evil spirit walking in front paused and glanced back at his two companions in surprise, “Why did you stop? Hurry up, eat, then leave.”
The evil spirit dragging the mortal trembled slightly, it spoke in a quivering voice: “Dage, the blood—”9大哥 – lit. big brother; In this case it’s the term used for the leader of the ghost trio, but it can also refer to the eldest among one’s peers, or, simply for an older male.
Only then did the leader of the evil spirits turn to look back. The blood flowing out and dripping from the youth’s body wasn’t absorbed by the withered tree roots, which liked to feed on blood and vitality. Instead, it strangely remained on the surface of the rotten soil. The dark traces grew deeper in hue, so deep that they faintly took on a crimson bloody luster.10血光 – Though it literally refers to the shine of blood under light, this term is also a shortened version of 血光之灾 (calamity of bloody luster), and hints at the superstitious belief that the luster of blood (and by extension bloodshed) signals being killed. When the bloody luster shone, the three evil spirits jointly looked behind them. They saw that a bloody line had unknowingly emerged all the way across to them, along the ground on which they had dragged the youth.
The whistling chill winds around them had died down at some point, and the related pitch-black mist had also thinned, both gradually absorbed by the blood. The crimson blood then came to life, and a steady stream of blood rushed to the youth’s body.
The evil spirit was so scared that it swiftly let go, and the next moment, a huge bloody circle appeared around the body.
“What’s going on!?” The three evil spirits’ faces changed drastically, and they raised their heads to see a small vortex overhead.
Unbeknownst to them, the fingertips of the youth fallen on the ground had started to move at some point. Below the pale hand covered in dirty blood, an originally blurred character, bit by bit, became clear. Only at this point did the evil spirits discover what was off with the hand, while the surrounding yin qi concertedly plunged into the bloody lines uninterrupted. Under the spirit-gathering rune’s influence, a huge handprint suddenly began to form.
They looked at the mortal in horror, only to see him struggle to stand up by holding onto the withered tree trunks around him, the huge handprint suspended beside him.
Then, transparent chains extended from the handprint and immediately bound them.
The handprint condensing from the yin qi gradually took shape in a horrifying shade of silvery white, majestic and solemn in the thick mist. The blood on the ground obeyed the handprint’s guidance from high above and climbed up little by little, the bloody lines outlining a kind of profound rune on the handprint’s palm.
The bound evil spirits felt all kinds of painful sensations coursing throughout their bodies, burned by the flames the rune formed. But they couldn’t break free from the handprint’s range, delineated by the blind mortal before them. They gazed on as the endless yin qi around them was absorbed by the rune and turned into a roaring yin flame, specially chosen to burn their souls.
The three evil spirits didn’t have advanced cultivation. They had the bodies of mortals before their deaths, and after becoming ghosts, they had to once again start cultivating from scratch.
Usually, they’d just pick up corpses to eat their fill, depending on human flesh and blood to barely preserve their spirit bodies and slightly advance their cultivation.
How could the evil spirits have ever encountered such a tough mortal?11硬茬 – Literally ‘hard-stubble,’ slang for someone powerful or with great ability that’s hard to deal with. They had initially looked at his body, thought he had no cultivation, and believed he could provide them with a full meal. Who could’ve known this person walked a sinister and wicked path, and that he would deliberately lead them to his body, thoroughly trapping them here to die.
Observing this technique, they had never before met nor seen a Daoist priest who used such a vicious method!
“Daoist Master!!”
“Spare my life!!”
The youth didn’t listen to their pleas. He moved the handprint a bit, and the body of the first evil spirit was torn to pieces by the formation.
The shattered yin qi was absorbed by the bloody lines. Then, the bloody lines extended out from the huge handprint and grabbed the second ghost, crushing it to death in a swift and decisive act.
“Please have mercy on me. I’ve never eaten a human. I really have never eaten a human…”
The last evil spirit knelt down and begged for forgiveness: “I was just passing by the cliff and accidentally fell down. There’s no one to save me.12超度 – Like in the previous chapter, the word ‘save’ here refers to transcendence from the cycle of reincarnation (the six realms of existence), allowing the deceased to alleviate or prevent suffering as asuras, animals, hungry ghosts or denizens of hell. It’s a ritual that requires a Daoist priest to chant mantras (among other things), which is why the ghost here can’t transcend. If I don’t find something to consume, I’ll die. At home, I have a wife, children, and elderly. I want to leave this place to search for them. I don’t want to die…”
The evil spirit had yet to finish speaking when he abruptly noticed that the restraints around his body had weakened.
The figure of the youth before him staggered half a step, and immediately after, dropped to his knees with a thud.
His body felt weak from being used up. The technique that maintained the handprint faded, and a heavy sense of fatigue alongside the pain from the fall’s injuries welled up.
This was a mortal body, one without spiritual energy, yet it had borrowed yin qi to control ghosts.
An earth-shattering backlash thus came to him at this time, the meridians within his body felt cold after being washed by the yin qi.
The youth’s hands pressed down hard on the ground, supporting his heavy body. The beating sounds within his chest drove the surging qi and blood throughout his body, and he uncontrollably took in a deep breath. His long-depleted meridians were cleansed by the yin qi, and he was shivering with cold. But he felt an indescribable excitement.
The yin qi around him spun, as if stirred by something in the dark.
When the remaining evil spirit saw the mortal kneeling on the ground, it was instantly ecstatic, taking the chance to hastily escape through the weak spot in the bloody lines. Although it had no idea what was going on, now was still a good time to run for its life.
However, before it could take a few steps away, a voice he had never heard before suddenly came from behind.
“…Want to leave?”
Isn’t this nonsense! If I don’t leave now then when!
Wait, who’s talking?
The evil spirit turned around, meeting a slowly raised head and its pair of incredibly bizarre eyes beneath the disheveled hair.
Golden threads dyed red kept climbing up from the depths of the youth’s eyes. The originally gloomy and lifeless eyes seemed to suddenly come to life, looking straight at it.
