The withered forest was a total mess. The bloody marks on the ground had been charred black, with only a few disordered traces left on the ground. The huge ghost-piercing handprint from earlier had already disappeared, and the two evil spirits, whose souls had flown away and scattered, had left not a mote of dust behind. The sole remaining evil spirit dared not even move.
The evil ghost who didn’t dare move: “Daoist Master, I was wrong. I won’t run away!”
The youth looked at him with his bizarre eyes, as if he wanted to get closer to it. But just then, with a muffled sound, the youth vomited up a mouthful of turbid blood and leaned back against the tree. The violent panting constantly made his chest rise and fall, the blue veins on his neck bulged, and it was as if something was rapidly surging through his meridians.
Through the corner of its eye, the evil spirit got a glimpse of the situation from a distance, an inexplicable chill rising from its feet. The young Daoist priest, who had overwhelmed them moments ago, now had skin that looked like it would burst and fuse back together. A pool of blood gathered under him, and the surrounding yin qi returned to eagerly scrambling back into his body.1争先恐後 – Literally the yin qi ‘vied to be the first and feared to be the last’ back inside his body.
To others, he looked to die soon; An injured broken leg, blood all over, and bruises from the fall abound.
But even so, his breathing never ceased.
The sensation of his meridians being rinsed by yin qi wasn’t pleasant, his body was filled with yin qi running in every direction.
The first thing the youth felt was this yin qi eroding his meridians bit by bit. He urgently wanted to expel the yin qi from inside him, yet his body abnormally accepted the yin qi. Like how the starved eat anything, it wished to bring all of this cold substance into him unconditionally, akin to a sort of survival instinct he couldn’t resist.2饑不擇食地 – (lit. hungry people cannot choose where they eat) This is used more literally here, but metaphorically means that one cannot be picky about food when starving; beggars can’t be choosers.
At that moment, a large amount of yin qi from outside his body clustered in his empty dantian. After the yin qi washed through his meridians, it slowly flowed to the huge eye totem staying in his dantian’s depths. He attempted to recover his train of thought despite the pain. All sorts of cryptic runes and memories mixed in his mind, barging about and developing in his ocean of consciousness.
With a thud, he perceived himself being dragged from the scorching hot pain and pulled into a deep, freezing pond. Suddenly, numerous scattered memories surfaced in his ocean of consciousness—
Beside the bone-chilling deep waters of a pond, the people around him pressed his head into the water with sneers. They waited until he was about to suffocate, and then pulled him out of the pond almost as if giving him alms…He heard his own loud wails and listened to more of the instigator’s schadenfreude and haughty pity. On one hand, he was mocked and humiliated, whilst, on the other, he was again given alms and pulled back from the gates of hell.
He stopped feeling the biting cold, abruptly, a violent and noisy dispute ringed out in his ears. In the ancestral hall, that always arrogant and self-possessed man who looked down upon him as an ant raged in humiliation, and the usually high and mighty elders were embarrassed and at a total loss……He knelt right at the ancestral hall’s center, alone and helpless. The knife wound on his palm pained endlessly. But even so, he listened dazedly to those elders, who used to show him mild goodwill, turn on him with hostile words, condemning him as trash in unpleasant, humiliating voices. It felt like someone stepped on his hand and then kicked it aside, coarse sand penetrated deep into the wound.
Who is this?
This is you.
Who am I…
Su Yu.
The clamoring voices in the ancestral hall suddenly drifted away, like a revolving lantern that was abruptly pulled back.
What was at the end? Su Yu thought unfamiliarly…Oh, in the end, he was pushed off the cliff’s edge.
In his ocean of consciousness, the pithy, like a thorn in his mind, sounded again.3 如附骨之疽 – Literally, ‘like an ulcer attached to bone’ which is a metaphor for something hostile that’s difficult to remove.
An intense pain flooded his ocean of consciousness once more—
‘You cannot die.’
It’s so noisy, stop it.
Get out, get the hell out!
Su Yu subconsciously wanted to cover his ears. The deep water in his memory receded, and the sound of the rapid sweeping winds now poured into his eardrums. With a bang, every one of his past memories was suddenly hauled away. He took in a deep breath of air and abruptly opened his eyes.
Soon after, that dominating feeling clutching at his throat vanished, and so too did the feeling of his body being controlled.
Su Yu shut his eyes. The urging voice in his ocean of consciousness seemed to have disappeared, and the memories in his mind were in chaos. He wanted to mull over them carefully, but found that he couldn’t recall anything. He waited until the yin qi settled down and lay dormant in his body. Alongside it, the weird and cryptic runes in his ocean of consciousness also went into slumber and disappeared. His nearly drained body seemed just like it had gotten a sliver of vitality.
The chill wind howled through the withered woods, and a biting cold came with each successive gust. The pool of blood around him slowly spread out.
The evil spirit shivered in the chill winds and moved aside in fear. It avoided the blood, which it usually loved most, as if avoiding the plague. How could a person still be alive after losing so much blood? Is he not going to die? How will it flee? Will it die too?
The evil spirit cautiously began to lift its head. As soon as it raised its eyes, it looked at the far away youth sitting amid the blood.
The dyed golden lines in the youth’s eyes gradually retreated. Within the profound jet-black eyes, only vague golden lines were retained at the edges of the pupils. At this moment, those eyes stared at it.
The evil spirit was even more terrified: “Daoist Master, you don’t look at me like that…I’m scared.”4The ‘you’ here is the formal you (您) in Chinese.
When Su Yu’s fingers could move again, the noisy voice in his ears begging for mercy became clearer, and an incongruous light spot appeared in his originally dusky vision. He looked at that unfamiliar light spot, superimposed with the voice he heard pleading for its life. The strange totem rotated in his mind, and the huge amount of yin qi in his dantian huddled up like a turtle. His body was saved from the verge of near death, and a ball of light had also appeared in front of him.
—It was a humanoid ball of white light.
No, he shouldn’t be able to see.
Su Yu oddly recalled, I’m blind.
“Come here.” Su Yu blinked in discomfort, watching as the white ball of light stood up and moved towards him, approaching him just as he instructed.
The evil spirit had stayed in place for ages, but it hadn’t dared walk up to him. The longer it had stood in place, the deeper its dread of the young Daoist priest before it had grown……He was injured to this extent and is still alive, is he even human?
Yet the evil spirit didn’t dare ask further, it let the Daoist priest do as he pleased, and just did whatever he asked of it.
After it had walked round and round in circles for a good few times, the Daoist priest didn’t let it move at all.
“What are you?” Su Yu asked.
The evil spirit was at a loss, “I’m just…I’m just a little ghost formed by the yin qi around Nanwu Mountain.”
Yin qi? Su Yu looked at the humanoid ball of qi in front of him.
Su Yu didn’t ask any more questions after the first. The evil spirit thought it hadn’t explained it clearly enough, and continued to speak tremblingly; “My…My name is Zhang Fugui, from Nanwu Township’s Xinglin Village.5杏林村 – (lit. Apricot Forest Village) The term ‘apricot forest’ (杏林) also figuratively means ‘fine doctor’ It originates from the story of Dong Feng, who instead of payment for treatments, asked the patients he cured to plant apricot trees. A forest of apricot trees came to surround his home as a testament to his skill. During my life, I was a traveling doctor. I unfortunately fell off the cliff while collecting medicinal herbs…”
The surrounding chill wind continued to howl. When the evil spirit’s unmoving legs and feet started to get a little sore, and its mouth dry, seeing that the other wasn’t paying attention, it carefully and cautiously sounded out the youth: “Daoist Master…?”
Su Yu truly wasn’t ignoring it, but examining his current situation.
When he raised his hand, he felt a dull pain in his body. All control over his body had returned to his own hands. He touched his leg, and determined from the degree of his leg bone’s bend that it was broken. As he touched it, he felt blood all over his fingertips. It was a little warm. When he thought of how all this blood had come out of his body, he felt a bit incredulous.
How could he still be alive in this state?
As soon as this thought entered his mind, the eye totem in his dantian emerged once more.
A powerful dominance enveloped him, and in the next moment, he uncontrollably spit out a mouthful of blood.
He’s still vomiting blood! The evil spirit watched on while scared witless. This, this, this…is this still a human being?
The youth nearby really didn’t look like a human or a ghost. After vomiting another mouthful of blood, his body seemed to have reached its limit. Even though the evil spirit called out to him several times, the youth didn’t move again. With his eyes closed, he leaned against the tree like a dead man.
alverose: Since I’m splitting this chapter, I’ll try to get the second half up as soon as I can! I’ve also decided to keep all the sect names in the novel untranslated, so ‘Heavenly Void Sword Sect’ (from Chapter 1) will be ‘Tianxu Sword Sect’ going forward. Chapter releases will be up every Monday, and I’ll also try to get a second chapter up each week (no promises though).
