Chapter 33 Traveling Notes

The reason why Fatty said to let loose was probably because he thought I may not be able to make it through the night, so I should eat whatever I wanted, drink whatever I wanted, and smoke without any scruples.

Cigarettes were a very important prop for us. I remembered that the reason why I became so addicted to them was because they had many uses. For example, the smoke could be used to test the airflow when opening coffins. They could also be used as lead wires for homemade detonators, and in some sensitive cases, you could use the floating smoke to see things that were normally invisible to the naked eye.

I lit a cigarette and leaned back against the headboard.

If I were this evil god, what would I be thinking right now?

Probably something along the lines of: this person isn’t very normal. There’s no fear in his heart, and he’s very eager to see a terrifying scene.

Could this evil god see through my heart? If it could, then that meant that it could see my whole plan. After carefully studying it, this god would find that my plan was impeccable and difficult to deal with, so it should take the initiative to back down.

If it couldn’t, then it would soon wonder why evil gods were hunted by humans.

Come on, come on.

Let something show up.

I sat there in a trance as these thoughts quickly flew through my mind. But right as I came back to my senses, I suddenly saw the shadow of a person standing there in the darkness next to the bed.

The person had their back to me, but I could tell that they were holding a pair of shoes by the door.

The shadow didn’t move and just stood there motionless.

The light switch for the old incandescent lamp in the room was on the wall next to the bed. I quickly stretched my hand out and turned it on, only to find that in the lamp’s yellow light, that figure turned out to be Agui.

That’s odd, I thought to myself. Isn’t he supposed to be out drinking with the others? Why did he come back?

“Agui?” I tentatively called out.

He seemed a little dazed as he looked back at me and then at the Buddha statue.

“I saw the master,” Agui suddenly said.

“Say what?”

“On the way back. I saw the master standing at the top of a telephone pole, but the trees were blocking his face,” Agui explained to me. “He told me that he saw the Bodhisattva. His Yuanchen Palace is huge and spacious, and there are three Buddhas in it. The first one is that Buddha with a scaled body.”

I looked at Agui and then asked him, “What were you doing just now?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on, so I came back.”

“Is the master here to show off his wealth to you?”

“He wants you to go down and find him,” Agui answered. “He said that you have to go down and meet his master. His master will take you to him. If you don’t go, he’ll kill someone.”

“But if I go down to find him, won’t he kill me?”

“He wants to take you to see the Bodhisattva so that you can personally atone for your sins,” Agui said. “If you sacrifice yourself, we’ll all be fine.”

“Generally, in this kind of situation, he’ll definitely do something to make you feel that what he said is true. So, he must be planning to do something to me.”

Agui suddenly looked at me and said, “There are times when he doesn’t even have to do anything to you and you’ll still do as he says.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, but that’s what he told me,” Agui said.

At this time, my cell phone suddenly rang. I looked down at the caller ID and saw that the incoming call was a strange Vietnamese number.

I picked it up and suddenly heard a child crying on the other end of the line.

“Who is this?” I asked.

The other party said something in Vietnamese, which I couldn’t understand, so I tried communicating in English. To my surprise, the other person could actually speak English. As it turned out, they were a kindergarten in Vietnam. When they bathed the children earlier in the evening, they found number-shaped rashes on many of the children’s backs. The string of numbers was obviously a phone number, and thinking that it was a prank, they decided to call and check.

The person also told me that they had called the police. Since the kindergarten was located on the border, they called the police on both sides, thinking that I had used some malicious tricks to leave my phone number on those children.

I told them that I didn’t know anything about it, and asked them to take a photo and send it to me.

I soon received more than a dozen photos, each as shocking as the last. The rashes on those children were very severe and definitely in the shape of numbers. Moreover, their arrangement really did turn out to be my phone number. It almost looked like someone had picked it out with their fingers.

<Chapter 32><Table of Contents><Chapter 34>

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Pic added 1/8/2023 (fan translation courtesy of me).