COPPER COINS

Chapter 65: Tongshou Spider (V)

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The wound made by the fucking Tongshou Spider had left no trace at all, so how the hell was Xue Xian supposed to explain?!
It didn’t matter what Xue Xian said. With Xuanmin’s personality, Xuanmin would definitely show no reaction at all. Perhaps, keeping in mind Xue Xian's poor dignity, he might simply turn away and pretend that nothing had happened. As for what the bald donkey was really thinking, Xue Xian had no idea.
   
When you looked at it this way, there was very little difference between explaining and not explaining.
Besides... The bald donkey had experienced his own hallucinations while trapped in the Heart Demons array. What was there to explain? So Xue Xian gave him a hickey. It wasn't like he could take it back, so who cares!!
   
A series of complex emotions crossed Xue Xian's face. In the end, he decided to throw away the last shreds of his dignity and pretend that nothing had happened at all. He sat up and glared suspiciously at Xuanmin. "What are you looking at?" he demanded.
   
Xuanmin's body was still hot with fever, which made that cold, damp part of his neck especially obvious. Although Xuanmin had not been awake to see the process, as his hand shot to his neck, he immediately found the mark that Xue Xian had made. Xue Xian didn’t want to see the look that was about to cross Xuanmin’s face, so he turned away with guilt and forced himself to act neutral. Then Xue Xian looked at the man still curled up on the floor and sneered, "Didn't you say you'd succeeded? How does it feel? How is it that no matter how hard I look, you don't seem to have come back to life at all?"
   
The man muttered manically, "I'm alive, I really can live... I can live now... Look, I can even curl my fingers..."
As he said this, he made a fist with his hand. He really did seem stronger than before.
But Xue Xian beat him down in one sentence.
"Stop showing off those chicken claws of yours. Where do you think that strength comes from? The Tongshou Spider?" He laughed coldly, then added, "It's just that I had some more questions for you, so I'm keeping you lucid in order to torture you better. Look––"
   
Xue Xian tugged lightly at Xuanmin's collar and said, "That blood stain of yours is gone. Spider's legs? In your dreams. If you'd really succeeded, you would not be sprawled on the floor like that.”
At first, the man seemed not to believe Xue Xian, but with that final line, the man had no choice but to accept the fact.
Indeed, if he'd really succeeded, would there be such a difference between his physical state and Xuanmin’s?
   
The man stared at the floor rigidly, stunned. He had truly fallen apart.
"Looks like your spider isn't even as effective as me twitching one of my fingers," Xue Xian said coldly.
   
Hearing this, the man suddenly stopped sobbing and seemed to see things clearly again. He hurriedly crawled over to the table and clutched Xue Xian's ankles, saying, "Save me, I'm begging you. Save me... I can't die. I shouldn't die! I... I should get merit. [a] I deserve to live. How can I die?"
Xue Xian was revolted at the thought of being touched by such a lowlife, but he had no feeling in his legs, and could not even kick the man away.
   
"Bald donkey, could you––" Xue Xian paused to correct himself and say Xuanmin instead. But he suddenly remembered that he was still supposed to be feeling embarrassed, so decided to simply shut up.
Grimacing, Xue Xian decided to tolerate the man. At this moment, Xuanmin made a move.
   
He raised his hand and waved it at the man. Suddenly, a powerful force swatted the man away from Xue Xian's legs. The man skittered about a zhang away, and then, another invisible force grabbed hold of Xue Xian's swinging legs and arranged them onto the desk.

Xue Xian stared at his own legs, stunned, then realised: I can do that too. Why did I forget that at the key moment? Am I dumb?
He decided that his momentary stupidity had been caused by the confusion from the Heart Demons, which had harmed his brain.
   
But this wasn't the time to think about such things -– there were urgent matters at hand. Xue Xian gestured at the man on the floor with his chin and asked, "What did you say just now? You have merit? Why don't you ask those dog tags if they agree? You trapped three hundred innocent souls at the bottom of a tomb, and because of you, they can never transcend. How dare you speak of merit?"
   
"You… Daren [b], you don't know the whole story––" In order to survive, the man who had just tried to murder them all was now addressing Xue Xian as Daren. It gave Xue Xian a headache. "You don't know the whole story. The part of the river that belongs to Wolong County has not been peaceful for recent years. Great waves and whirlpools would not stop appearing, which made it difficult for boats to manoeuvre. We feared that one day a flood would come and submerge both sides of the river, killing hundreds of people. I found out that a terrible catastrophe would soon visit Wolong, so I cast a 'Hundred Soldiers Push the Flow' design in order to avert the disaster."
   
Then the man raised his head to look into Xue Xian's eyes and patted his own chest. "I saved a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand people. That is a huge act of kindness. Does that not make merit? I shouldn't die. I should live. If I live, I can save even more lives. How can I die? How can I die when all the worthless people that I saved out there get to survive?"
   
As the group listened to the man ramble, they fell into silence. Xuanmin's eyes moved slightly, as though he had suddenly remembered something, but he quickly settled his face and gazed back at the remorseless man on the ground.
Xue Xian fell deep in thought too, then finally snorted out a cold, nasal laugh. "Why should you die?" he repeated. "Let me ask you this. Did the great flood ever occur?"
"I-it's coming, in spring or summer of next year," the man said. "The fortune-teller who told me this was a highly powerful master. [c] He has never been wrong."
   
The man had thought that Xue Xian had been asking whether the prediction was accurate, so had begun to refute this. But Xue Xian interrupted him and snapped, "I don't care if it was accurate. I'm asking you: Did the flood occur? Did thousands of people die?"
"Not yet," the man said, shaking his head. "But––"
   
"But people have already died." Xue Xian held up three fingers. "Three hundred people. The flood never came, but three hundred souls died under your hand. Not only did you disallow them leading peaceful, long lives, but even after death, you wouldn't leave them alone. Did you ever ask them what they wanted? Did they ever agree to be part of your 'Hundred Soldiers Push the Flow' array?"

"There's always a price to pay when you change fate. Three hundred lives for the lives of tens of thousands––"
"And that makes the bargain fair?" Xue Xian said coldly. "Are humans like melons and dates to you? You can measure them by the jin and the liang?"

"…I-I understand." The man seemed to think that what he’d done had been kind. "I deliberated for a long time. In the end, I chose people like beggars and retired soldiers. All beggars do is sit by the street and beg for food. With the extreme weather in winter and summer, they frequently die after just one night. To most people, they're just eyesores. As for the soldiers, they only had half a life anyway. They'd already wasted their lives on the battlefield, and had only retired because they were now missing arms or legs. Even if they had returned home, they would only have become burdens."
   
Xue Xian laughed in loathing. "I think you're the burden. Look at you now –– a piece of rotting meat that can't even move. You're on the verge of death. Hear me out here: I want to create a feng shui design. It doesn’t require much sacrifice, only one life. Will you let me use yours? Perhaps eighty years later, you'd be able to help save hundreds of thousands of people."
The man: “...”
   
Xue Xian did not have the extra heart to save the life of such a man as this, let alone help him transcend after death. So why was he wasting his time talking to the man? Because... to die without admitting any of your mistakes was basically another way of getting away with it scot free. Xue Xian wanted the man to die with regret, and the knowledge that he could never make up for his sins.
But before the man died, Xue Xian still had questions.
"Let me ask you this: the dragon bones you buried beneath the tomb. Where did you get them from?" Xue Xian said.
"A master [c] gifted them to me. He said the dragon bones could multiply the magical effect of the array," the man said uneasily.
Xue Xian was getting impatient. "I hate people who can't get to the point! Why don't I send you to meet Yama in hell right now?"
   
"No, no, no! I'll tell you... The master is a geomancer… [d] I was his follower for many years. I was born with affinity. [e] The blood that flows out of me is more effective for spells than normal human blood. The master taught me a lot... I followed him from the age of eight or nine, and studied with him for more than ten years. He was my shifu, but he wouldn't let me call him that. He gave me an ornament made of peach wood to hang on my hip, which signified that I'd been his disciple. Even after I left his care, we kept in touch. He was the one who told me about the great disaster coming to the Wolong river, and he hired men to help me cast the 'Hundred Soldiers Push the Flow' design."

Geomancer? Another geomancer?
Xue Xian couldn't help but recall the geomancer that Liu-shiye had mentioned. Now it seemed that these two may be the same person, since he’d provided parts of Xue Xian’s dragon body to both Liu-shiye and this man. It was likely that this geomancer was the person Xue Xian was looking for!
   
Xue Xian said, "You wanted to create an array, so you killed three hundred people. You wanted to carve tomb guardians, so you kidnapped a stonemason. You wanted the design to be more effective, so you buried a dragon bone... It seems that you and your shifu are the same. You’re both despicable." He laughed coldly. "What is your shifu's name?"
"I-if you can let me live a few more years––" the man stammered. He had realised that Xue Xian's true target was his shifu, and thought that he could use this fact to bargain for his own life.
   
But before the man could finish his sentence, Xue Xian swept his arm and a strong wind knocked the man back into the wall. "So don't tell me,” Xue Xian said. “I can find him even without knowing his name!"
The man screamed, "Songyun! His Daoist name is Songyun!" [f]
   
Now Xue Xian had finished asking the questions he'd needed to ask. He wanted to kill the man, but Xuanmin pushed his hand away before he could act.
"What is it?" Xue Xian asked.
"I have questions," Xuanmin replied.
   
Xuanmin looked down at the man and asked, "Have you seen me before?"
Hearing this, Stone Zhang, Lu Nianqi, and even Xue Xian held their breaths.
   
The man had had the wind knocked out of him by Xue Xian's strike, and was shaking with terror on the floor. He stared up at Xuanmin for a long time until he could clearly see Xuanmin’s face, then finally shook his head and said, "N-no."
Xuanmin frowned. "Then why would you come here to hide?"
The man said, "My shifu divined that I would soon die. He said that if I came in this direction to hide, I would be able to find a way to reverse my fortune. As I stood outside the fog, I heard a crow's cry inside the forest, so I took an antidote pill and came inside. A black bird saw that I was covered in blood, and brought me here.
Xue Xian: “...” This bald donkey's bird needs to learn about stranger danger… [g]
   
One thing was fortunate. Having heard the man's explanation, Xue Xian could finally relax: the man and Xuanmin were not acquaintances.
And as Xue Xian relaxed, another thought occurred to him. He glanced at the side of Xuanmin's neck and said, "Your Tongshou Spider. Where did you get it from? Also your geomancer shifu?"
   
The man could not predict Xue Xian's mood, so stopped trying to bargain. Obediently, he replied, "Indeed... He said he got it in Langzhou."
"Langzhou..." Xue Xian repeated. Suddenly, he picked up the book that Xuanmin had put on the desk and began to flip through it until he found the annotation that Xuanmin had pointed out –– Xia Mountain, Langzhou. Besides, this book wasn't the first place they’d encountered that place name. When they'd had their conversation back in the inn, Xuanmin had told Xue Xian that when he'd woken up, it had been on a mountain in Langzhou.
   
Could it be that, before he'd lost his memory, Xuanmin had discovered the Tongshou Spider bite, as well as some way of breaking the spell, and the clues had led him to Langzhou?
   
Xue Xian was glad to know that they hadn't come all this way to Boji Mountain for nothing. Before, all the clues they had had been in bits and pieces, but now things were coming together. Every single clue pointed to a single person –– the geomancer. And everything to do with Xuanmin pointed to one place –– Langzhou.
   
Now that he knew this, Xue Xian didn't see a reason to delay. He raised his hand and curled his fingers into a fist in the direction of the man. The resentful souls bound to the dog tags began to surround the man again.
"Ahhh–––" the man screamed.
   
Xue Xian watched him, expressionless, then hooked one finger. A wisp of white smoke escaped from the man's forehead as the lucidity that Xue Xian had granted him earlier dissipated. The man sobbed as he felt the energy leave his body and felt himself be heaved closer to death.

As the resentful soldiers consumed him and the man felt the last of his life fade away, he continued to wail: half with regret, half with bitterness. He opened his mouth and used the last of his breath to croak, "If it were you, you would... You would..."
His words had no head nor tail, and were barely louder than a whisper, but Xue Xian heard him –– and he understood exactly what he meant.
   
If it were you, knowing that a great disaster would come, what would you do? After all, if you wanted to change fate, you had to pay a price...
Xue Xian glared at the man. He'd intended to respond, but a man such as this walked a fundamentally different path to Xue Xian. Even if Xue Xian did tell him what he thought, the man wouldn't understand. It was a waste of breath.
   
So Xue Xian said nothing, even as the man died. Afterwards, all he did was summon the dog tags from the cold body back into his hands and tuck them into his sleeve once more. Then he turned to Xuanmin and extended his arms. "Can you ask your bird to flap again, and lift us up from here?"
The gesture Xue Xian was making had only one meaning –– Carry me. Yet his tone and attitude was that of someone demanding the repayment of a debt.
   
Xuanmin looked at Xue Xian silently. For some reason, he seemed to falter. Then he walked over and took Xue Xian into his arms, lifting him from the table.
At first, Xue Xian was puzzled. Up until now, the bald donkey had carried him as nonchalantly as if he'd been carrying a sack of food, to the point where even Xue Xian had become used to this treatment. Why had Xuanmin suddenly hesitated? Had something happened in Xuanmin’s Heart Demons vision to make him dislike Xue Xian now?
   
But as soon as he found himself in Xuanmin's arms again, Xue Xian realised what was wrong––
Xuanmin's body temperature was even hotter than before, and the sweltering heat made even Xue Xian uncomfortable. Xuanmin's palms, which he had previously been able to keep cold, were now burning up too.
And why was this? Because when Xue Xian had sucked on Xuanmin's neck, he had given him yet another dose of dragon spit.
Xue Xian: “...” How are we supposed to go on like this?
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