Chapter 5

Georgy Apollonovich Gapon was a famous rat in the St. Petersburg Police Department. He was well-known on YouTube because he was caught on surveillance scaring a police officer.

Xie Yuchen was quite eager to meet this rat. Even though he knew that there was a high probability that it was just a symbolic mascot, it had been several years since Georgy Apollonovich Gapon had been caught on camera. Winter in St. Petersburg was very harsh, so he may have already died inside of a heating vent. (1)

The deaths in the church would take a long time to record and the Russian public service system’s efficiency was already very low. As a result, he had already prepared himself to stay in Russia for a long time. Now, he was sitting in an interrogation room, telling the interrogator a somewhat true story.

Fortunately, surveillance systems were developed now, so he and Black Glasses probably wouldn’t be sent to prison.

This story eventually spread throughout the country, but the version wasn’t quite what they had imagined. People had been expecting the story to be intense and exciting after they entered the church—it was within the boundaries of the Orthodox Church, after all; one of the most aesthetically complex churches out there—but in fact, the story was very depressing and horrible.

If he or Black Glasses had entered that building alone, they definitely wouldn’t have made it out.

The two of them had extremely toxic residue on their bodies. Black Glasses fell into a deep coma after he carried Xie Yuchen out, so Xie Yuchen used the last of his strength to crawl a kilometer in the snow until he found the old man who had been spreading salt earlier. After that, the two of them were saved.

This one-kilometer trail through the snow was full of blood. If he had crawled even just a little bit slower, Black Glasses would have frozen to death in the cold wind. According to the old man’s statement, when he saw a man crawling towards him at an alarming speed, he didn’t know that the other person had been badly poisoned.

The end of this story didn’t have a sense of beauty to it at all. If anything, it was all about exact calculations: Black Glasses’ physical strength, Xie Yuchen’s physical strength, and how much they were willing to gamble. All in all, there weren’t any miscalculations.

Fortunately, both of them had survived. He heard that Black Glasses had woken up and could start making his statement right away. By this point, Xie Yuchen had already phoned his family’s contacts in Russia and had them working to settle this matter as soon as possible.

The autopsy results showed that all of the Russians in the church had died from severe poisoning. The poison turned out to be a powder on the cicadas’ wings. After they started reacting to the poison, they immediately covered their noses and mouths with their clothes so as to slow down their intake.

The floating Taoist corpse had actually been hung from the top of the dome and wasn’t levitating in the air at all. The body was full of these poisonous cicadas, which had all hatched and started crawling on the body. It was a very shocking scene. In order to drive away the cicadas and get a clear view of the corpse, the Russian priests had turned on the heaters near the dome. The ensuing wind caused the corpse’s neck to break and the whole body fell off.

The whole chapel was instantly full of cicadas. At that time, Black Glasses had been investigating the basement. Xie Yuchen had covered his nose and mouth and beat the cicadas away with his glass marbles, but was still poisoned in the end. Black Glasses carried the coffin up and covered the body so that the remaining cicadas couldn’t get out. After that, Black Glasses was also poisoned.

Black Glasses told him that there was another body in the basement, so Xie Yuchen went down to check on it. But when he saw the body, he knew that it had been a deliberate design. After he disposed of the female corpse using a particularly thrilling method, the toxins on the cicadas outside lost their toxicity, which seemed to indicate that this poison was born from resentment.

At this time, however, the damage to his body was extremely serious and he started to hallucinate.

He saw clusters of flowers everywhere, which made for a magical experience. As Black Glasses carried him out, he saw beautiful flowers were blooming everywhere on the murals, marble, and even the snow.

But he didn’t lie about the back story. Indeed, this had been a very disappointed woman. The figure hanging from the dome wasn’t a real body, but a pigskin figurine made to look like one.

To Xie Yuchen, the use of this pigskin was the last straw. Not only did that man lie to a twenty-year-old woman, tell her to practice transforming into an immortal—which was practically impossible—and let her die early, but he also made her so-called fellow practitioner a pigskin image of himself.

This was an extreme kind of contempt.

It almost sounded like an extremely vicious hoax.

But it must’ve taken a lot of effort to transport a female corpse and pigskin figurine to Russia and hide them in the secret graveyard of such an important church.

Was this the work of one person, or were there actually two people? Did one harm this woman while the other took advantage of her resentment to make a harmful feng shui array?

Also, why put the newspaper in the coffin so that the church would contact him?

**

Two days later, Xie Yuchen visited Black Glasses in the hospital under the guard of three policemen.

Black Glasses handed him a newspaper.

There was a high-ranking Russian official who had died suddenly. He was suspected of suddenly falling seriously ill, because many parts of his body became cancerous and his organs started to fail.

He was one of the important patrons of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral. He had been under the highest level of protection, so there weren’t any problems with his food or air. In fact, he had been very healthy before.

“He was one of the bosses of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral. He grew up in the church and had been there since before he was ten years old. Later, he left the church and started to make a fortune. The church is regarded as his ancestral home. In fact, their whole family has followed this tradition for two hundred years. Someone wanted to use the female corpse and pigskin figurine to break the feng shui of his ancestral home. And they were willing to use a very vicious method to do it.”

“You mean, someone was ready to break this church’s good fortune sixty years ago and draw out their family’s vitality?”

“Not necessarily sixty years ago. You just think it was that time because of the newspaper,” Black Glasses said. “This scheme wasn’t set up that long ago. In fact, it was probably only laid out in the past few years. Someone accurately calculated the time when the cicadas would hatch, so this must be a skilled Chinese feng shui master who is providing his services to help in Russia’s political struggles.”

“So—”

“So, the force backing both sides is very big. That would explain why it was possible to transport the corpse here so easily. They even used this newspaper to call us in and clean up the situation. Once the feng shui array had killed the relevant people, it would continue to harm others if no one came to take care of it. This feng shui master definitely isn’t willing to clean up his mess, so he left us to deal with it.”

“Oh.”

“And it’s not for you, it’s for me,” Black Glasses said.

When Xie Yuchen remained silent, Black Glasses asked, “Why don’t you ask me why?”

“If that’s the case, then you should bear the cost yourself,” Xie Yuchen said.

“I saved your life.”

“I saved your life, too.”

“Ok, ok, let’s not fight. It’s all up to you. You’re the one who gets to decide whether someone is coming for you or for me.” At this time, Black Glasses saw a Chinese person at the door and knew why Xie Yuchen had stopped discussing the matter further. So, he played along and talked nonsense with him..

The person who came in shook hands with the nearby policemen, said a few words in Russian, and then showed them some documents. Then, he smiled at the two of them and said, “You’re free to go. The embassy would like to invite you to a dinner tonight that the ambassador has prepared.”

“You’ve got quite the connections,” Black Glasses said.

“I didn’t arrange it,” Xie Yuchen said while looking the Chinese man over. Even though the other party was wearing a suit, he looked like a soldier.

<Chapter 4><Table of Contents><Chapter 6>

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TN Notes:

(1) You can thank Yvette for helping with these 2 paragraphs. Georgy Apollonovich Gapon was a real guy. He was a Russian Orthodox priest who was murdered in 1905 because he was a police informant. Naming a rat in a police station after him… I’m sure you all get it.

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Pic added 4/15/2023 (fan translation courtesy of me)