Chapter 30 Traveling Notes

When I suddenly opened my eyes, I was already in Agui’s house, surrounded by Agui and a group of people from the village health clinic. As soon as Fatty saw me open my eyes, his whole body suddenly went limp as if he had been very nervous.

I was very weak, and the memory of what happened just now quickly started to disappear from my mind. I gathered the last of my strength and said to Fatty, “I think I saw Pan Zi.”

Fatty said something to me, but I still couldn’t seem to hear him.

I quickly fell asleep, and when I woke up again, it was already noon on the third day. Poker-Face was watching me from the side.

I tried to move a little bit and found that all of my muscles hurt more than they usually did when I came back from a trip to the mountains.

When I came down for lunch, I could see that Fatty was relieved to see that I was awake. I wanted to ask about what happened, but Fatty told me not to bother and to focus on eating first. A-Gong and A-Mu had started laying eggs. These eggs were originally supposed to hatch chicks, but Fatty decided to cook them for me first so that I could get some nourishment.

I looked at the scrambled eggs with green peppers on the table and took a few bites. It was really delicious. Agui also went to some of the nearby villages and bought me a lot of local herbal tea, saying that I might have suffered from heatstroke. The room where the ritual took place was very hot after all, so I must have fainted.

These herbal teas were slightly sweet, but they definitely did help me feel a lot better. When I asked Fatty what happened during the ritual, he said that he successfully saw Yun Cai’s Yuanchen Palace, and it was exactly the same as what Agui had built in the attic.

Masters from all over the world had their own opinions and theories about Yuanchen Palaces, such as what kind of Bodhisattva was worshipped, and whether you should repair your palace or not. But Fatty checked through the information and found that there were very, very few palaces like Yun Cai’s. The master also couldn’t explain what was going on, and only said that every time he went down to the underworld, he couldn’t see anyone in this Yuanchen Palace. According to him, there was only one possible explanation for this situation— the person wasn’t dead.

Another possibility was that the birthdate given to him for the ritual was wrong. But even if it was wrong, the Yuanchen Palace wouldn’t appear at all.

When they came back from the underworld, they found that I couldn’t wake up and my body temperature was very low. After they moved me back to Agui’s house, I woke up once and then fell into a deep coma. Later, Poker-Face went out and found some herbs for me to eat, and only then did I stabilize.

When I told Fatty what I saw, he asked me, “Did you see Pan Zi, too?”

“You also saw him?”

“Yes. When I came out of the water, I saw him at the intersection. There was a stream on the other side of the pond. We walked along it. The master said that I met a heavenly official. Did Pan Zi become an official down in the underworld?

“Did you get to talk to him? I told him that you came as well, and asked him to give you a surprise later. But as soon as he heard that you were coming, he suddenly disappeared. I walked to the end of the road and came to a village, where there was a fair going on at the market. I followed the master’s instructions and found Yun Cai’s palace.”

I touched my chin in thought. Fatty asked me what happened, but I just shook my head and immediately went to the town hospital for a blood test. The equipment here couldn’t detect anything, but they could still freeze it for me. I planned to send the blood sample to Beijing since Xiao Hua knew some people that could help test it for me.

As Fatty and I squatted and smoked by the hospital entrance, Fatty asked me what I thought of the whole thing. “I heard my uncle say that when he was in Vietnam, the Vietnamese were at war with Burma and Cambodia,” I said to him. “At that time, they would use an herbal medicine to make people enter an intense passive state of mind and then use suggestions to make those people see things.”

“Do you think that master used that kind of thing on us?”

“I think so, but there are two other problems regarding this matter.”

Fatty didn’t understand, “Mr. Naïve, are you still not well? Your speech is full of mistakes.”

That was because of the mixture of local dialects here. I took a puff of my cigarette. This short-term stimulation instantly returned me to the moment when my brain was running at high speed, which actually made me feel very happy.

“The master is one problem; that Buddha statue is another,” I said. “The master didn’t have to harm me, but in my hallucination, that Buddha statue wanted to hurt me. Pan Zi was the one who dragged me back.”

“Don’t you think you’re overthinking it? What we saw must’ve been hallucinations, because when we talk about going to the underworld, we’ll both definitely think of meeting Pan Zi. As a result, we both must’ve had a collective conscious.”

“There’s something wrong with that Buddha statue,” I said to him. “I don’t know what the specific problem is yet, but give me some time and I’ll look into it.”

On the way back, I used my cell phone to draw the corridor I saw before, and then started searching online, comparing my drawing with photos of old buildings in various places to see if there were any similarities.

It was going to take some time.

“What do you think about the master?” Fatty asked me. “How could he tell that Little Brother is different?”

“It’s not that hard. I thought he was strange when I first saw him,” I said.

“But it’s not to the point where you’d go up and kowtow to him,” Fatty said. “The first time you met Little Brother, did you kowtow to him? Wouldn’t you say this master is a little capable?”

“I don’t believe in any of this stuff, but if he really does know, then there must be something that told him.”

Although I didn’t believe in magic, if something said that this Buddha statue was evil in nature and could relay some kind of information to the master, then I would totally believe it. But I felt that the master’s sixth sense was actually quite sensitive.

After all, he did say, “I don’t know what you are.”

The amount of information revealed in this short sentence was very large, because it showed that he could sense that Poker-Face was different from ordinary people. If he was just a run-of-the-mill superstitious person, he would have said, “I don’t know which god you are.”

But what he said was, “I don’t know what you are.”

I don’t want to dwell on my whole reasoning process, but my conclusion was that I figured Poker-Face had a similar aura to that Buddha statue. The master must have been able to sense the unusual state of the Buddha statue before, but he didn’t expect to sense this same state in a living person so that was why he was so panicked.

<Chapter 29><Table of Contents><Chapter 31>

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Dang, that Pan Zi sighting had me motivated like no other and it was all for nothing. Enjoy the two-chapter upload today lol.

Pic added 1/3/2023 (fan translation courtesy of me).