84: Blood as the Key to Life

Something had happened to Xu Buhuo.

I could read it in Old Master Sun’s face.

Taking a deep breath, I clenched both fists and forced myself to speak calmly. “Old Master Sun, what exactly happened?”

At once, he told me what he had learned.

This morning, a cleaner came to work and saw someone lying in the bushes. After calling out several times and getting no answer, he assumed the man was dead and called the police immediately.

When the police arrived and examined the scene, they found that the person in the bushes was still breathing faintly, so they rushed him to the hospital. Because his face was badly injured, they could not identify him at first. After checking fingerprints and the like, they discovered that it was the very man Old Master Sun had been looking for, and sent word at once.

Right now, Xu Buhuo was still lying in a hospital bed. His condition was far from good. No one knew when he might wake, and at any moment he could still die.

Thinking of the dream I had last night, so vivid it felt real, I understood that such a dream had not come by chance. The injured Xu Buhuo must have used some secret method to warn me that something had happened to him.

As for the matter of altering fate, what I needed to do had basically come to an end. The rest depended entirely on Sun Qing’s own destiny. I explained the situation to Old Master Sun, and also told him that Xu Buhuo needed me.

To ordinary people, Xu Buhuo was still alive. But in my eyes, he was a living corpse: someone already dead, now kept barely tethered to this world by a single breath, sustained only by a secret art.

Before Grandma passed away, as though she had foreseen this very day, she deliberately told me the method by which Xu Buhuo had become a living corpse. Her intention was that if Xu Buhuo ever came to the brink of death, I would be able to help him.

Now I knew that day had arrived.

“Little master,” Old Master Sun asked, staring at me with pleading eyes. “Can Xiao Qing get through this?”

He had paid such a great price that he desperately wanted a definite answer.

Fate was never easy to speak of.

After thinking for a few seconds, I said, “If you do as I tell you, there may still be a sliver of hope. But in the end, it still comes down to fate.”

With helpless resignation, Old Master Sun’s shoulders slackened, as though he had given up struggling. He called in Hao Jianguo and asked him to take me to the hospital where Xu Buhuo was being treated.

With a police escort clearing the way, we made very fast progress. Along the way, Hao Jianguo asked me how much chance Sun Qing had of surviving the fatal calamity. I shook my head and said I did not know. In truth, I did not have much confidence in this working out.

Fate could be seen, but never touched.

A person’s destiny was shaped by many things: the virtue accumulated by elders, the feng shui of ancestral graves, the feng shui of the home, and more. A slight change might avert disaster, or it might bring total ruin.

So whether Sun Qing could survive this ordeal would only be known after the thirteenth.

A four-hour journey took little more than two hours under Hao Jianguo’s privileged passage, and we reached the hospital. To my surprise, people from the Sixth Division were already waiting outside the ward. Among them was someone I had seen before: the woman who had come to the village last time to investigate, apparently named Li Yao.

After nodding to Li Yao in greeting, I asked urgently, “How is he?”

Li Yao shook her head, her expression grim. “Just as he was when he was found this morning. His breath is very weak. He could pass away at any moment.”

Hearing that nothing had changed, I finally confirmed that Xu Buhuo had not yet completely died. He was still being held here by the very last breath preserved by the secret art Grandma had once cast upon him.

If nothing was done, Xu Buhuo likely would not last three days before dying for good.

“I can save him, but I need some things.”

Grandma had been a member of the Sixth Division, and after the last incident, Li Yao had not appeared again. That did not mean she was unaware that I had learned my craft from Grandma.

“All right, I’ll prepare them right away. What do you need?”

I told her everything I required and asked her to get it as quickly as possible. After she left, I entered the ward and saw Xu Buhuo with an oxygen tube still in place.

In a little over half a year, Xu Buhuo had changed beyond recognition.

The man he had once been, though not exactly a sight for sore eyes, still carried an indescribable air about him, a presence that gave others a sense of vitality. But now he looked like a filthy old man living in a garbage heap, his face marked with many injuries, his hair gray-white, tangled and disordered.

I did not know what Xu Buhuo had endured in these past months, only that what he had suffered was no ordinary matter.

What I could not understand was this: that woman had fled from the cave. Once she was gone, she was gone; even Grandma had abandoned the pursuit. Why had Xu Buhuo still chased after her so relentlessly, as though he were risking his life to do so?

Thinking back to the dream from the middle of last night, my hatred for that woman burned all the more fiercely. I knew she was the reason Xu Buhuo had been reduced to this state.

Half an hour later, Li Yao brought the items over. Just then the doctor in charge of Xu Buhuo came in for rounds. Seeing the things we had laid out on the floor, he grew furious and demanded that we leave, saying we were indulging in superstition.

“Get out of here.”

The grief in my chest made me unable to hold back, and I shouted at him. The attending physician fled in a panic, muttering that he was going to call the police.

A rooster’s blood, mixed with cinnabar.

I immediately drew a ritual formation on the hospital floor, then moved Xu Buhuo from the bed into the center of it.

His clothes all had to be removed, and the secret art required absolute stillness. I asked Li Yao to take the people from the Sixth Division and leave, then began inscribing the formation upon Xu Buhuo’s body.

After being injured again, the condition of Xu Buhuo’s body had become just like it was before, horrifying at a glance and enough to make one’s scalp tingle.

The severity of it all made my own heart sink, and I could not help feeling uncertain whether Grandma’s secret method would truly be enough to wake Xu Buhuo.

But at this point, there was no way to know except to try.

Once the formation was complete, Xu Buhuo’s birth details were arranged on yellow paper, nine sheets in all. One was pressed beneath the oil lamp placed before his forehead, while the remaining eight were set around him according to the eight directions.

The secret art was called Fate Awakened by Blood.

The blood here was human blood, my blood. With my blood, I would awaken Xu Buhuo’s life.

After placing the knife within reach, I took an oil lamp in hand and began to pace the ritual steps. Each time I came before Xu Buhuo’s head, I would place the lamp against his glabella and cast the hand seals.

After nine circuits of the ritual steps, the lamp was set upon Xu Buhuo’s chest.

What remained was the bloodletting.

Bleeding oneself, cutting into one’s own flesh, was no easy matter. But looking at Xu Buhuo, still unconscious before me, I gritted my teeth and drew the blade across my palm.

Bright red blood welled up. I clenched my hand and let the blood drip as fully as possible onto Xu Buhuo’s forehead.

When the forehead could no longer hold any more blood, I placed my palm over his mouth, forcing the blood to flow directly inside.

At that moment, the flame of the oil lamp on Xu Buhuo’s chest began to shift from dull yellow to red, gradually deepening until it became a true blood-red.

I reached out and took three incense sticks. Using the blood-red flame of the lamp to light them, I then swept my still-bleeding hand across the three sticks and continued walking the ritual steps.

Ordinary incense, once lit by the blood-red flame of the oil lamp and smeared with my blood, gave off black smoke and a sharp, nauseating stench.

That foul black smoke did not disperse. Instead, as I moved, it drifted down and settled over Xu Buhuo.

As the black smoke wound around him, the corpse spots on his skin, caused by slow decay, faded away bit by bit.

By the time the three incense sticks had burned out, the terrifying sight on Xu Buhuo’s body had vanished. His skin now looked much like that of any normal person.

Yet Fate Awakened by Blood had only just begun.

I returned to the space before Xu Buhuo’s head and sat down, placing the oil lamp that pressed upon his birth details, along with those details themselves, onto his blood-soaked glabella.

Lamp meets blood, and the soul is fixed in place.

The moment the lamp was set down, the flame that had been burning normally seemed to lose oxygen, shrinking until it was no bigger than a yellow bean.

The life lamp allowed one to glimpse Xu Buhuo’s current state of soul at a distance. His soul was extremely weak. If the life lamp went out, it would mean Xu Buhuo’s soul had completely dispersed, and the secret art would fail.

I took down the red thread, which had been tied at both ends and pinned to his clothing. One end I thrust directly through the philtrum beneath Xu Buhuo’s nose.

The philtrum is bound to a person’s lifespan.

In physiognomy, a short philtrum marks a short-lived wretch. That is what it means.

The longer the philtrum, the longer the life.

Back then, Grandma had spent her own lifespan to turn Xu Buhuo into a living corpse, in order to prolong his life and preserve what living breath he had.

If Xu Buhuo had not been injured these years, he truly could still have lived as an ordinary person. But the repeated injuries had already damaged the formation that maintained his life.

Now it was as though everything had to begin again. If Xu Buhuo was to awaken completely, his life would have to be prolonged by life.

And the price would be my own lifespan.

Holding the needle tied to the red thread, just before piercing his philtrum, I began to tremble all over. My raised hand had no strength left in it.