COPPER COINS

Chapter 39: Theatre Troupe (IV)

The weather was humid and dark in these parts, so the snow didn't build up as fast as it might elsewhere. There was only a thin layer of white along the mountain path, and, as groups of people traversed it over the course of the day, some parts had turned to sleet and then hardened into ice. The path was therefore dangerously slippery. The horse at the front of the train was still snorting and whinnying endlessly, and only moved when struck by the whip, hurtling between starting and stopping.
But no matter how slowly they were going, they would only have to go a little bit further to come upon that pile of fallen boulders.
   
"They really have... no idea at all?" Jiang Shining asked, his neck stiff and his face contorting with fear as he waited for Xuanmin or Xue Xian to respond.
Xue Xian said, "I wouldn't say they have no idea at all. If you look at them––" He jutted his chin in the general direction of the other carriages–– "That horse has been terrified this whole time. And earlier, when we were at the bridge, both the scarred man and Lao-Li seemed really reluctant to come here, too. There's something in them that's telling them to avoid this route."
When humans got the sense that something bad was coming up, of course they wanted to avoid it.
   
Despite not having use of his legs, this zuzong was not one to sit quietly. Unable to stand up and bend over to look out the window, he had instead managed to get his entire body to lean horizontally on the bench and hang his chin on the windowsill. Xuanmin had no choice but to scoot to the very edge of the bench in order to give Xue Xian the space he needed. Earlier, allowing this zuzong to use Xuanmin’s hand to cool down seemed to have helped him achieve balance again, and he now had the strength to move his upper body this way and that.
Initially, all Xuanmin had done was come across a couple of yao and scoop them up with some scrap metal. But here they all were. How had they ended up like this?
   
As Jiang Shining sat on his side of the carriage, the shaking hand that fidgeted with his robe betrayed his anxiety.
Lu Nianqi happened to accidentally graze him with his knee, and could feel Jiang Shining’s nervousness. Lu Nianqi couldn't help but glance at Jiang Shining with his half-blind eyes and say, "I've never seen a ghost scared of ghosts."
“...” Jiang Shining shot back, "Remember when you were screaming and crying for your parents back in the tomb?"

Hurt by Jiang Shining's comment, Lu Nianqi clicked his tongue and turned away, no longer in the mood to mock him.
Lu Nianqi was young and not all that courageous –– just extremely stubborn and deathly attached to his pride. He tried to pretend to be brave as much as he could, but what had happened at Gravestone Island had been beyond his limits, so his true feelings had been exposed.
In contrast, Lu Shijiu had begun seeing things that normal people could not see from a very young age, and, being used to encountering all sorts of strange and ghostly [a] things, he naturally had never been afraid of them.
It was only now that Lu Nianqi had absorbed some of Shijiu’s personality that he could truly feel a bit calmer.
   
Lu Nianqi quieted down, and Jiang Shining had been chastised by his comment –– but now it was Stone Zhang’s turn to begin acting up.
Learning for the first time that Jiang Shining was a ghost, Stone Zhang began to feel very unwell. His mung-bean eyes swivelled around the carriage, taking in his companions. Out of the five ‘people’ here, apart from him, all the others were deeply abnormal... and in the carriage in front of him, and the carriage in front of that, and even the animals drawing the carriages... none of them were alive...
Dear mama, what in the world is going on?!
Stone Zhang wanted to cry. He clutched the heater closer and pressed back into the carriage wall, as though he could use sheer will to turn his potbellied frame flat. He was trying to make sure no one else noticed him.
   
"A bit more––" Xue Xian said, staring out the window. "Wait for the horse to take a couple more steps."
The train had advanced by a huge chunk. The path wound down the steep mountain, and the pile of rocks was further ahead. While they previously had had to crane their necks to see the rocks in the distance, that pile was now downhill, almost beneath their feet. As the carriage eked closer to the pile, all the theatre troupe members had to do was look directly down the side of the mountain at the next curve of the road, and see the crushed carriage below.
And the closer they got to the pile, the more the horses were agitated. This was obvious just from the sounds of the scarred man trying every trick in the book to get the horses to obey him. And maybe it was because the atmosphere in the group was so high-strung, but the scarred man's voice sounded increasingly panicked, and voices had begun to emerge from the carriages in the front as the troupe members murmured amongst each other.

It was a highly stressful environment.   
"…Do you think they'll look out of the window and see it?" Jiang Shining couldn't help but ask.
"No," Xuanmin said matter-of-factly.
Xuanmin hated to speak, and even when he had to explain something, he made sure he only said what was important. This categorical and straightforward approach was highly reassuring, because it left no room for anyone to suspect that he had left something out.
Jiang Shining felt better. But Stone Zhang asked, "How are you so sure?"
   
"Because they're scared too! Stop asking so many questions," Xue Xian snapped. He was still facing out of the window and did not bother to look at Stone Zhang before adding, "Your tongue seems to be the only lean meat across your entire body. I should cut it off and use it to make wine."
Make wine...
“...” Xuanmin frowned.
The niezhang being argumentative was one thing, but did he really have to conjure up such disgusting images?
   
Xuanmin scanned the outside, then lifted his other hand and patted Xue Xian on the shoulder. "I'm going out."
Stunned, Xue Xian turned to him. "You?"
"Mn." It was either that, or sit around here listening to certain people say all kinds of creepy nonsense. Xuanmin feared that if he listened to too much of it, he’d lose my appetite for the next ten days.
   
"Can you do it?" Xue Xian squinted. "The carriage is going to get there really soon. Can you make it in time?"
Xuanmin nudged Xue Xian’s shoulder, silently asking him to get away from the window and sit back properly on his seat. Then, Xuanmin unhooked the copper coin pendant from his hip and stepped over Xue Xian's head.
He was too tall for the tiny carriage, and had to half-bend. One of his hands was still being gripped by Xue Xian, so Xuanmin used that leverage to help push himself out of the carriage door. His white monk's robe was like the wind and snow blowing past them all –– in one flurry, he was gone.
   
Seeing this, Stone Zhang was dumbfounded. He rushed to the window and saw that that snow-white shadow had already flipped down to the next stretch of road below. Xuanmin made no noise –– not a single pebble had been disturbed by his descent.
The group inside the carriage seemed struck by the elegant manner in which Xuanmin had departed –– all except Xue Xian...
He snorted. It was so-so, he thought. Still not as good as me.
   
Despite this, Xue Xian still nudged himself across the bench so that he now sat where Xuanmin had been. With one hand pressed on the heavy curtain, he stared out and watched as Xuanmin made his way across the mountain road.
   
Xuanmin stood steadily atop the pile of fallen rocks. Although his feet rested on tiny rocks the size of fists, he did not allow himself to teeter even slightly. Raising his head, Xuanmin looked at the side of the mountain –– between the uphill part of the path, where the carriage train currently was, and the downhill part, where he was now, there was an enormous chunk of rock missing. Because of this, even the uphill section looked fragile, as though any further weight would send everything sliding down again.
   
That missing chunk was the part of the mountain that had fallen, turning into the pile on which Xuanmin now stood. The biggest of these rocks were boulders around half his height –– with a landslide that violent, never mind wooden carriages, even metal carriages were sure to have been flattened.
Apart from the corner of a carriage that they had spied from afar and a blue cloth curtain, everything else remained buried tightly underneath the pile of rocks. The corpses probably did not even look human anymore. Even if they were unearthed one day, they would probably have been torn to pieces, limbs strewn all across the path.
Xuanmin thought for a while, then had an idea.
   
Xue Xian was not the only one monitoring all of Xuanmin's movements –– Stone Zhang and Jiang Shining were also jostling for space at the window, and even Lu Nianqi could not help but peer out.
"What are you craning your neck for?" Xue Xian snapped at the kid. "You took a few days’ nap, and now your eyes can see normally again?"
   
Neutrally, Lu Nianqi replied, "Thank you for your concern. Unfortunately, my vision is actually even blurrier."
The blurrier his vision, the blinder he was becoming, and the more qi he could see. Naturally, qi silhouettes were not crystal clear.
   
Actually, Xue Xian was quite curious. As a divine creature, his vision was of course far sharper than that of humans, and he could hardly imagine what Lu Shijiu’s... and now Lu Nianqi's... world looked like.
"Just looking at you from this distance, I can't tell if you're human or beast," Lu Nianqi said, describing his perspective.
But...
That did not sound right at all –– it sounded much more like the boy was mocking him.
   
"That means you're getting better at seeing qi," Xue Xian said. Then, miffed, he went back to looking at Xuanmin outside.
From his angle, Xue Xian could see everything that Xuanmin was doing.
   
They say that swords, especially those yao-swords in legends, need to be awakened with fresh blood –– only blood could unlock their true potential, and then they were able to slice through wind and chop through water. And although Xuanmin's copper coin pendant had neither cutting edge nor sharp point, for some reason, they seemed to require being awakened by blood, too.
Xue Xian watched as Xuanmin cut another gash across his fingertip and rubbed his blood onto the surface of the coins.
With a weng–– sound, the coins seemed to come to life. They began to lightly quiver, emitting a lugubrious ringing sound that echoed out faintly and hollowly into the howling snowstorm. As Xue Xian heard this noise, something in his ear felt uncomfortable, and he frowned.
   
Xuanmin arranged the five coins of the pendant into five positions on his palm –– north, south, east, west, and center. He took out some talismanic paper from his chest pocket, but the talismans were empty, with nothing inscribed on them at all.
Xuanmin folded the yellow sheets of paper and bent down to arrange them in the four cardinal directions by his feet, each paper weighed down by rocks. Next, the fingers of his right hand hovered over the copper coins in his left hand, and his pale lips parted, as though reciting a prayer.
But it didn't seem like a full prayer –– more like a short, fragmented phrase.
   
And with that, the copper coins that had previously been resting on Xuanmin's palm now raised themselves into the air and began to slowly spin.
As Xuanmin uttered his Buddhist chant-like phrase and brushed the east-facing coin, the east-facing talisman, quivering beneath its rock, suddenly began to show a thin stream of blood, as though an invisible hand had dipped a brush in crimson ink and was steadily inscribing talismanic text onto it.
When the complicated text had been written, Xuanmin spun the hovering ring of coins in his hand for another half-circle, then put away that invisible brush.
   
Next was south;
Then north;
And finally west...
   
In the instant that the four talismans were completed, an enormous gust of wind appeared.  It sounded like the roar of a tiger or the howl of a wolf. This wind was so powerful that even the heavy curtain of the group’s own carriage flapped violently, slapping against Stone Zhang's head with a pili pala sound.
“...” Stone Zhang felt that he was the unluckiest man in the world. He pawed at his stinging face, then reached out and tore the entire curtain away from the window. The carriage was now completely vulnerable to the wind, and a chilling winter air blasted inside, carrying a thin stream of snow.
   
The snow was cold and bristling, and blew so hard against their faces that Stone Zhang and Jiang Shining could barely keep their eyes open.
They blinked hard, and lifted a hand to shield their foreheads –– only then could they open their eyes and look out at the scene on the mountain again.
   
"Huh––" Stone Zhang gasped.
The wind that Xuanmin had summoned came hurtling towards the pile of rocks and slithered beneath them. In that instant, the boulders, as well as the carriages crushed below, began to float in the air, entirely lifted by that savage wind, and slowly glided away from the path.
As the mass of earth and debris hung in the air, Xuanmin, still standing on two small blocks of stone, lifted his left foot and nonchalantly kicked it.
And as though dragged by a thousand-jin weight, everything beneath Xuanmin's feet instantly ejected themselves into the gap of the valley below.
   
Soon, a faint, muffled long–– long–– sound emerged from the valley.
"Is he going to blow up the mountain?" Stone Zhang asked idiotically.
"Then he should throw you into the explosion too," Xue Xian spat, then he explained: "He probably buried it."
   
Just as Xue Xian had guessed, the falling rocks' impact could not be underestimated. Even before they had fully fallen to the valley floor, the wet, soft mud of the valley had caved into a deep crater, into which the carcasses of the troupe's members and horses, as well as the debris from their carriages, fell. Everything was swiftly buried beneath the pile of stone, which gently arranged itself into a burial mound.
The falling snow began to stick to those shattered boulders and lingered, so that, by the time the dust settled and the roaring wind vanished, there was only a thin layer of white peeking out from the valley, as though the burial mound had been covered with a smatter of joss paper money.
This was how Xuanmin had performed a simple set of funeral rites...
   
Xuanmin rubbed the blood away from his copper coin pendant and hooked it back onto his hip. Then he turned to the grave and made a Buddhist greeting with his hand.
His cloudlike monk's robe billowed in the wind, and with a light sweep of the hemp cloth, he disappeared into the thick forest of the valley.
   
To Xuanmin, leaping back up the steep side of the mountain was just as easy as leaping down from it. Within a few light steps, he had already bounded up to the part of the mountain path where the pile of rocks had originally been. Above him, the theatre troupe's carriages finally turned that last corner of the winding mountain path and were now coming directly his way. He could hear the shouts of the scarred man, and soon that stubborn horse's muzzle would come into view, too.
In order to avoid being seen by the scarred man, Xuanmin tapped the ground with his foot and used the momentum to leap higher up onto the mountain. He planned to wait for the carriage train to pass below him and to rejoin from the back without being seen. Just as Xuanmin intended to return to Xue Xian and the others, he suddenly noticed that, in an area slightly removed from the path proper, there remained a small pile of rocks –– and that beneath those rocks were two anonymous corpses.
That pile had just happened to have been concealed by the jagged surface of the mountain, and, from the point at which Xuanmin had first landed onto the path, he had not been able to see it.
It seemed that, when the landslide had crushed the main train, two people had been able to extricate themselves and escape, only to be killed by a second stream of falling rocks.
   
The carriage train was going to appear any instant now, but Xuanmin did not have the time to sweep down and lay his talismans again.
But just before the imminent disaster, the long silhouette of a black dragon emerged from behind the mountain.
Xue Xian!
This zuzong insisted on doing everything with excessive flair. Xuanmin watched as two bolts of lightning struck down onto the boulders that had crushed the two theatre troupe members. Following this, the boulders dutifully erupted into uncountable tiny pieces. The black dragon wordlessly approached, wrapped in a torrent of wind, and, with a nod of the dragon’s head, the wind swept up the two bodies and the rock dust, sending them tumbling down the side of the mountain. Everything disappeared into that thick forest in the valley.
Hu–––
   
The wind settled again, and the trees stopped shaking too.
Those two bodies fell to the valley floor and were swiftly covered by the dense mass of dust. Not a patch of skin peeped out.

"Hu––!" Alarmed by the wind, the scarred man had pulled at his reins and the carriage train had scuttled to a stop. Now that the wind seemed to have gone away, the man cracked his whip again.
The terrified horses saw the fateful patch of mountain road ahead of them and, seeing that the area was empty, suddenly calmed down. Now, the clipping trots of the horses advanced, gliding smoothly past the spot, and came toward the jagged part of the mountain.
   
Xue Xian could not move the bottom half of his body, nor could he feel it. He used only his upper body to fly up the side of the mountain and managed to haul himself onto the uphill part of the mountain path, narrowly avoiding the scarred man's line of sight.
But his tail missed its landing. In the precise moment that the scarred man was turning the corner with the carriages, that unfortunate tail fell with a xiu–– and swung limply down the side of the mountain –– right in front of the scarred man.
   
The scarred man: “...”
Xue Xian: “...”

Xuanmin, who stood hiding on the same uphill part of the path as Xue Xian, was speechless with exasperation. Silently, he crept down to the zuzong’s tail, grabbed it, and yanked it away from the path…