COPPER COINS

Chapter 28: Skeletons Beneath the River (V)

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"What smell?" Terrified at Jiang Shining’s words, Lu Nianqi stopped breathing. He'd opened his mouth to speak, then quickly remembered and covered his mouth again, fearing that some strange substance might worm its way into his body.
Now that Jiang Shining had pointed it out, Xue Xian, whose five senses were naturally more acute than humans' –– including Xuanmin’s –– began to detect a smell of...
"Vegetation," Xue Xian said.  
   
The smell... It was as though someone had taken a plant and ground it up so that it released the unique smell of sap. It smelled neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but it was indeed highly strange to come across it in a dark, sealed tomb.
Having grown up in a clinic, Jiang Shining had spent his childhood smelling all kinds of herbs. Though his pharmaceutical expertise was far from that of his parents, he still had some basic knowledge. He was highly sensitive to the smells of medicine, and knew how to identify different types. So for him to notice such a thing was rather important.
   
"There's no need to block your nose or your mouth." Emboldened by Xue Xian's words, Jiang Shining had courageously stuck his head out of Xuanmin's pouch and caught sight of the frightened Lu Nianqi. Waving his paper arms dismissively, Jiang Shining said, "You probably aren't familiar with this smell, and, to be honest, I haven't smelled it that many times either. I've seen people who have died from this a couple of times, so it made a huge impression on me. I don't know if you've heard of a poison called 'Up seven, down eight, dead nine'. It means that once you've been poisoned by it, you can at most take seven steps if you're going uphill or eight steps if you're going downhill –– either way, you'll be dead before you take your ninth step."
"Isn't that See Blood Seal Throat?" Xue Xian said. "I have heard of it."
   
"Oh," Jiang Shining said. "That's true. You're from the south. That tree usually grows in warmer climates, and when brought here it doesn't grow for very long. If you want to use it to make normal medicine, you have to wait for the summer or the autumn and buy it off a southern pharmacist, and save it up."
Whenever Jiang Shining spoke, he always ended up talking about medicine again.
"Can you please get to the point before the new year?" Xue Xian said coldly.
   
“...” Embarrassed, Jiang Shining stopped himself from going on. He said, "Don't touch anything here. I suspect that all the walls here, and the floor and ceiling, are all covered in the poisonous tree sap. All of us are wounded: if anyone gets it on them, they'll become paralysed within a few steps."
As Jiang Shining spoke, his voice receded and his confident demeanor faded –– because as he went on, he saw that Lu Shijiu had turned around to regard him with those blind eyes, and then Liu-laotou had slowly turned too, fixing his old eyes on him without moving his gaze… until even Xuanmin was staring down at him.
   
"You guys––" Jiang Shining mumbled, then cleared his throat. Awkwardly, he shrank back into the pouch. "Stop looking at me," he said. "I'm going back into the pouch. Be careful, everyone."

Xuanmin looked over at Shijiu and Liu-laotou, then glanced at Nianqi.
It seemed that, ever since they'd gone through the metal door, the sequence in which they walked had flipped. Before, Lu Shijiu and Liu-laotou had led the way, followed by a calm Xuanmin, with Jiang Shining and Nianqi slinking behind him. It had given Xue Xian, right in the middle of the group, a sense of protection.
But now it was different: although Lu Shijiu and Liu-laotou continued to walk at the front, the one directly behind them was Lu Nianqi, and Xuanmin no longer served as a protective ‘barrier’ between the two brothers –– instead, he had retreated to the back of the group, in case anything should try to sneak up on them.
   
Lu Nianqi had long taken his hand away from his nose. Halfway through Jiang Shining's explanation, he had suddenly swivelled around so that he now had his back to Xuanmin and faced Shijiu, with his gaze firmly set on his blind older brother.
But Shijiu had not noticed this.
   
Having wrapped up his lecture, Jiang Shining calmly retreated into the pouch.
The flame in Xuanmin's hand danced lightly, casting its orange glow ahead, with the edge of its beam landing by Shijiu's feet. In front of Shijiu was a patch of darkness, and behind him was that warm yellow light –– with every step he took, he seemed to be treading on the boundary between light and dark.
   
The material on the back part of Shijiu’s collar had been ripped quite badly and his messy hair fell over his pale neck, casting a large shadow across his skin. In the dim light in the tomb, most people would not notice anything wrong.
And Nianqi, who was abnormally short and always stood a few steps beneath his brother, had no way of peeking past Shijiu’s shoulders to notice the skin of his neck.
   
It was just as Jiang Shining had deduced: all the stone surfaces of the tomb's staircase were slathered with the sap of the See Blood Seal Throat tree. The closer they got to the outside, the stronger and more obvious the smell became.
"We're here." Shijiu stood at the top of the staircase, his back to the group. "Across from this corridor is the last part of the route. I've never gone all the way to the end, but I assume that once you push the stone doors open, you can leave."
   
I've never gone all the way to the end...
At first, there didn't seem to be anything wrong with that sentence, but upon reflection, it was indeed strange –– if he'd come all this way, and the stone door had been right there, why had he not simply walked out?
   
Liu-laotou stood next to Shijiu on the top step. From Xuanmin's point of view, it was possible to see the man's profile as he gazed off into some faraway point in the distance, as though Liu-laotou’s soul had left his body, or as though he were in a trance.
Lu Shijiu did not take another step. Instead, he looked back at Nianqi, who stood behind him.
   
"What are you staring at me for? You can't even see my face, only my qi." Lu Nianqi said as he stumbled to a stop. He was losing his voice, so that his words only came out as a half-squeak, half-whisper. For some reason, there was also a slight... tremor in his voice, as though he were fighting an overwhelming sense of panic and terror. "Stop looking at me. Move! What are you standing there for? If you have anything to say, wait until we're out. I can't be bothered to listen to you ramble now."
   
Calmly, Shijiu said, "I can see you. Just not very well."
He had completely ignored the second half of Nianqi's complaint. He reached into his shirt pocket and took out that bundle of sticks he liked to use, which was tied in the middle by that faded red string. The string had been in use for who knew how long, yet it did not show any sign of wear and tear –– it seemed to be a quality item.
"This fuji instrument... [a] Take it," Shijiu said, handing the sticks to Nianqi.
   
Frowning, Nianqi stepped away and looked down at his feet. Annoyed, he snapped, "I don't want it. Hold it yourself! Why do I need to carry all your stuff for you... Stop talking. You're in the way. Walk! What are you waiting for?"
The corners of Shijiu’s mouth lifted as he smiled. "I'm not going."
   
This was probably one of the handful of times that Lu Shijiu had ever smiled in the long years they'd spent together since their father's death. But Lu Nianqi didn't see it. Still looking down, still with his brows furrowed, he avoided looking at Shijiu and spat, "What do you mean you're not going? Don't be absurd..."
When Nianqi lifted his head, his eyes were red and swollen. He reached out and pushed Shijiu as hard as he could. "Why won't you –– go!"   
   
The flame in Xuanmin's hand illuminated Lu Shijiu's face. Something about that extreme pallor was shifting –– there was now a small cluster of scars on his forehead, as though he were about to grow new freckles. The scars had appeared at the minggong pressure point –– the exact same spot where Nianqi had previously had freckles, too.
"But I can touch you. You're right here. Why won't you go?" Stiff-necked, red-eyed, Lu Nianqi looked up at his brother, his voice choked with sobs. He repeated himself again, as though trying to convince himself: "Look, I can hold your hand, there's no difference between you and normal people. Don't they say... don't they say you can't touch ghosts..."
   
Ever stubborn, he continued to gaze at Lu Shijiu, yet found that a blur had entered his vision, so that he could not even see his brother properly anymore. He sniffed and went to wipe his eyes, brushing away all his tears. But when he looked again, he still could not see.
"Stop rubbing." Lu Shijiu sighed a small sigh and shoved the bundle of sticks into Nianqi's hands. Then, grabbing Nianqi's hands, he began to forcibly pull the boy up the steps.
   
The more Shijiu told Nianqi not to rub, the harder the boy rubbed, until he covered his eyes entirely with the backs of his hands and refused to go further.
   
Slowly, Liu-laotou took a few steps forward and bent down at the foot of a wall. Soon, he returned to the staircase and he, too, shoved something into Nianqi's hands.
"This is Liu-bo’s [b] wallet. Inside is the boat money that he's most recently earned, and also some herbs from the island. Bring it back to Liu-daniang. [c] The herbs will soothe her headaches," Lu Shijiu said, on behalf of Liu-laotou. After a pause, he added, "I don't have much for you..."
   
He reached up and stroked Nianqi's head. "I'm going to find Dad. Don't forget to burn paper money for us for Qingming and Zhongyuan. That's how you make sure you'll live a long and happy life, with an abundance of sons and descendants."
He lightly patted his brother's head, then let his arm fall back to his side.
   
All Lu Nianqi could feel was a cold weight on his head, and when it disappeared, his heart sank. He furiously rubbed his eyes again and looked around for it, but found that his vision was still a complete blur.
As Lu Nianqi pawed at the space in front of him, trying to distinguish something, anything, from the thick fog, he found that Lu Shijiu and Liu-laotou, who had just now been standing across from him, were now gone. He rubbed his eyes again, and finally saw a patch of shadow around two zhang away.
   
Xuanmin went over with the flame and saw two bodies lying against the wall of the hallway.
The smell of the sap smeared on the walls pierced their noses now, becoming sharper the closer they crept to the exit. Xuanmin noticed streaks of blood running down the walls and understood –– Lu Shijiu and Liu-laotou had been wounded on their backs, necks, or some other part. Those wounds had then come into contact with the wall and become infected with poison.
   
When Lu Shijiu had collapsed, he’d had the time to use his blood to draw a circle on the floor, within which he had scrawled complex talisman text –– a strange and confusing sight.
Nianqi still couldn't see much. He wanted to help Lu Shijiu up, but inadvertently took a step into the circle. [d]
   
Xuanmin watched as the brown, dried blood markings suddenly came to life, turning bright red again. At the same time, Nianqi’s minggong pressure point and the gash on his palm also flashed with red light, before quickly dying down again.
An almost imperceptible wisp of fog escaped from Lu Shijiu's cold, long-rigid corpse and circled Nianqi three times, as though finally having completed a long-awaited ritual. Then, it bowed deeply in Xuanmin's direction. The last request had been fulfilled.
If it hadn't been for the Lus' father, Shijiu would have died in that temple thirteen years ago. Today, he swapped a life for a life. To him, it was worth it; it was fair; it was what he desired.
It was just that, from now on, he had to burden Nianqi with an extra lantern to place on the river for the Zhongyuan Festival. Shijiu didn't know if the boy would cry...
   
As the life exchange spell came to an end and the trail of fog disappeared, the hallway suddenly fell into darkness.
Perhaps, having swapped a life for a life, they had perturbed the balance in yin and yang and disturbed the three hundred souls in the tomb. Suddenly, from behind the group surged the piercing whistle of a gust of wind. It snaked rapidly toward them, accompanied by the sound of stone knocking against stone and shattering into pieces.

Xuanmin slapped Nianqi's shoulder and was about to say Let's go when he felt something pounce on him from behind. The new gust of wind carried a strange, suffocating rotting smell.
Although the three hundred souls may not have been particularly mobile in life, being trapped in the tomb for all these years had turned them nimble and aggressively fast. In the blink of an eye, a mass of people appeared at the bottom of the staircase and came bounding up –– not one, not two, but dozens or even hundreds of yin corpses [e] came hurtling toward them, putting Xuanmin in a difficult situation.
  
Never mind two hands, even eight hands couldn’t stand a chance against this horde!
The hallway seemed to suddenly shrink into the size of a coffin: there was nowhere to go and nowhere to hide.
   
Xuanmin took up the copper coin pendant at his hip, but there was something in his frown that revealed a sense of reluctance –– perhaps he did not want to use it, or found it inconvenient to use it, or... did not know how.
The mass of yin corpses became denser, filling the hallway with a wall of indistinguishable bodies that quickly rushed in to surround the group.
There was a brief moment of calm as the horde gathered itself together and the yin corpses bowed their bodies, as though building up momentum. Then, with a twitch of their limbs, they leapt toward Xuanmin like a dark wave.
   
"Bald donkey?!" Xue Xian had been knocked dizzy by the rocking of Xuanmin's pouch, and all he could detect was the stench of blood that had exploded around them. Within the metallic smell was hidden a faint, medicinal element. At the same time, something seemed to trigger that part of Xuanmin's hip and, in an instant, it began to burn feverishly again, becoming even hotter than it had before.
And maybe it was the boiling feeling, or maybe it was something else, but there was a ka-dunk in Xue Xian’s chest as a void suddenly appeared, and his heart dropped.
And then the smell of blood became stronger.
No, no, no, how are we ever going to make it out alive?
Although Xue Xian was panicking, in reality he was only a golden marble and was not able to die. Or even if he did die, as a dragon, his destiny [f] was almost endlessly long –– he would eventually be able to find a way out.
So the phrase How are we ever going to make it out alive? made no sense when uttered by Xue Xian, nor had it been uttered out of concern for the long-dead Jiang Shining.

Out of everyone here, only two needed to worry about staying alive.
Lu Nianqi... and the bald donkey.
   
The former had nothing to do with Xue Xian. The latter... Xue Xian’s relationship with the latter was more like a handful of random coincidences strung together –– an entanglement –– so Xue Xian did not understand why a sense of panic had come crashing down upon him.
But yes, Xue Xian really was quite stressed. He got Jiang Shining to give him a push so that he could jump out of Xuanmin's pouch. As he leapt into the air, his marble body still carrying that strange sense of warmth from Xuanmin's hip, Xue Xian felt something completely indescribable, perhaps because he had finally managed to finish digesting the thing that he'd absorbed from the black soil previously––

Dang––! The golden marble clattered onto the ground, with Xue Xian face up.
Xue Xian saw that Xuanmin's snow-white robe was half-drenched in blood and that the talismanic flame was still in Xuanmin’s hand, but that the flame was darting around violently, like a fierce beast struggling against its chains. The horde of yin corpses were pushing and pulling from every angle, perhaps biting, perhaps tearing, but Xuanmin maintained that ever-cold expression, as though he had no care in the world: not for others' lives, and definitely not for his own.
   
Somehow, when Xue Xian had fallen to the ground, Xuanmin had not noticed –– but the flame in his hand now twitched.
The golden marble rolled across the floor manically, like a headless fly –– or like someone with a plan. He darted through the yin corpses' legs and suddenly knocked into the stone wall of the hallway.    
   
Hong––
The structure of the tomb trembled as though assaulted by a monumental weight.
“...” Xue Xian was stunned. That was me?!
   
Indeed, it was normally possible for the golden marble to have that much power. But the impressive part was that, after zig-zagging all across the ground, by the time Xue Xian had actually managed to hit the wall, it had been a weak hit. He had planned to knock into the wall several times in succession and slowly build up his power. If he’d unleashed his full power all in one go, then never mind this tomb, he would have destroyed ten tombs in a row.
But if that wasn't him, then who was it?
   
Xue Xian stopped thinking about it and knocked into the wall twice more.
Hong––
Another great tremor. Fine pebbles began to spray down from the ceiling, covering Xue Xian's face in dust.
   
Although he did not have a physical mouth, he still instinctively went "Pei!" in an attempt to spit out the dust. Then he rolled in a circle and turned to look at Xuanmin –– if the knocking hadn't been Xue Xian, then the only other force that could affect the walls of the tomb so powerfully was the bald donkey.
   
Indeed, from this point of view Xue Xian could see past the tangle of yin corpses' claws. He could see that Xuanmin held up a bleeding finger, which he had used to draw something on the copper coin pendant, covering the five coins in a fresh layer of blood.
And Xue Xian wasn't sure if it was a trick of the light, but he thought he saw Xuanmin's five dull, dirty copper coins emit an oily glow, as though awakened by the drops of blood.
   
Next, Xue Xian watched as Xuanmin pressed his bleeding finger into one of the coins. A jet of blood sprayed out, drenching the pendant again.
Hong––
This time, the whole hallway shook as though caught in an earthquake. The stone floor trembled and rocked Xue Xian back and forth. Unable to stop his own rolling, he felt that he may begin to vomit again.
   
Xuanmin had one hand on the pendant and the other holding the talismanic flame close to his chest, as though performing a Buddhist salute amidst the torrent of blood. His eyelids fluttered shut and his lips began to move without a sound.
All of a sudden, another huge noise erupted within the hallway, sending broken pieces of stone into the air, and the ground vanished from beneath their feet.
   
Next, ice-cold river water began to pour in from the stone cracks and quickly submerged them all.
Though the water was dark and freezing, it was different from the water that had tried to drown them before –– it brought a fresh, chilled air with it, like the first north wind in the winter.
This was actual water from the river!
   
As Xue Xian fell into the water once more, he thought, This bald donkey stole my idea! He really did blow up the whole place...
Before he'd even finished his complaint, Xue Xian realised that Xuanmin had not only blown up the tomb, but that the entirety of Gravestone Island was coming down too...
Boulders were cascading down onto them, dragging with them soil and broken trees. Combined with that groaning horde of yin corpses, the noise was overwhelming.
   
Just when Xue Xian was beginning to feel a little exasperated, he felt the river water beneath him begin to churn.
The collapse of the mausoleum and the destruction of the ‘Hundred Soldiers Push the Flow’ array had disturbed the river itself and created another massive whirlpool. Smaller spirals seemed also to be coming at them from all sides.
   
Along with the debris from the island and the hundreds of yin corpses, the group was dragged around and around by the relentless spiral of water until they all became too dizzy to know left from right.
As he floated in and out of consciousness, Xue Xian began to feel furious. And as he did, the final part of that thing he'd absorbed in the soil locked into the marble, and the digestion was complete. With that, the swell of heat that had been leaking out of Xuanmin's hip and boiling Xue Xian suddenly wanted to leave the marble. An agonising force began to push at the very skin of the marble, as though wanting to disembowel him entirely.
   
In that instant, black clouds gathered rapidly in the sky above the river. A divine white light flashed, and the thunder that followed was louder than the gallop of ten thousand horses leaping out of the heavens and crashing into the river.
Thick drops of rain began to pour down and the mist as they splashed against the river surface turned the entire scene into a smear of white, so that not even human figures could be seen anymore.
   
Next, a bright whistling sound came from beneath the water, and a colossal shadow slithered out, emerging into the dense mist above.
As it arched its long body, the whirlpool obediently sank to the bottom of the river, taking with it the countless corpses and all the debris, all of it sinking rapidly away in a spiral form.
   
The burial of one body required six chi of yellow earth; who knew if the sixty zhang of mud at the bottom of the river was enough to bury those three hundred hellish souls. [g]

Somewhere on the riverbank, a child sat in a courtyard, playing with a plum tree branch, refusing to shelter from the storm. Stunned, he suddenly pointed at the sky above the river and said to his parents, "Dragon––"
The couple idly looked to where their child was pointing and saw that long shadow snake its way across the dense mist, climbing the clouds like a spiral staircase before turning and diving back into the churning, hungry river waters. "Heavens, it really is a dragon..."

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[a] 扶乩 (fu2 ji1), also known as “planchette writing” or “spirit writing”, is the traditional Chinese method of fortune telling that Lu Shijiu uses, where a stick is guided to write over dust, sand, or ashes. This technique, which is present in both vernacular practices and Daoist tradition, became popular around the Song dynasty, when Copper Coins is set. However, pre-Ming dynasty, it was actually called 扶箕 (fu2 ji1) rather than 扶乩 due to a difference in the instruments used. (Wikipedia).
[b] Bo: see glossary.
[c] 大娘 (da4 niang2), literally “great/big mom”, is here used as a polite, but colloquial, form of address toward an older woman. In my original TL I translated this as “Auntie”.
[d] Technically this is an “array”, but Musuli literally uses the word “circle” here to describe the look of the array, so I kept that.
[e] Musuli uses the phrase 阴尸 (yin1 shi1) here, literally “yin corpses”.
[f] Musuli uses the phrase 寿命 (shou4 ming4), which combines 寿 meaning lifespan/age and 命 meaning destiny/fate. Together, this refers to life expectancy or destined lifespan, meaning, in Xue Xian’s case, that his almost-immortal lifespan had been decided when he’d first been created, and so even if he were to experience great suffering (such as when he was maimed), he can’t die before his time.
[g] Musuli uses 黄泉 (huang2 quan2) here. It literally means “yellow springs” and is a term for the underworld or hell in Chinese folklore.