Chapter 35 Traveling Notes

I waited about two or three seconds before picking up the phone. At the exact moment I answered, an intense wave of anxiety suddenly swept through my whole body.

I heard the female teacher crying on the phone. As soon as the call connected, she couldn’t control her emotions and kept crying nonstop. There was nothing I could do but comfort her as I asked her what was wrong.

“Something strange happened, so strange,” she said. “They all stopped talking and just stared at me.”

“Can you be more specific?” I couldn’t understand what she was talking about.

“The children were all looking at me but wouldn’t speak. I talked to them, but no one responded,” the female teacher explained. “When I asked them what was wrong, they kept looking behind me and telling me not to speak. But, but, I didn’t get it then, and—”

The more she spoke, the more unclear it became. This in turn made me more anxious, but I kept my temper in check as I said, “Don’t worry. Take a deep breath and try to calm down. I can only help you if you explain things clearly.”

She tried taking a few deep breaths, and slowly, her breathing calmed down. “Try explaining now,” I said to her.

But she didn’t speak. “Try explaining now,” I repeated.

She still didn’t speak, but I knew that she was still on the phone because I heard her trying to open her mouth several times.

I figured she must have seen something or encountered something.

Then, the call suddenly disconnected and all I could hear was a busy dial tone.

I got up from the bed and put on my clothes, but Fatty quickly grabbed me, “You can’t go there; you’ll be shot and killed. It’s not like this is no man’s land.”

After thinking it over, I sat down in frustration, but then I suddenly remembered what Jiang Bai had said.

I immediately understood the potential meaning behind his words. He wanted to tell me that in many cases, things wouldn’t necessarily happen to me, but to others.

Those things could be really troublesome if they happened to someone you cared about, or someone you felt responsible for. In fact, they might be more troublesome than if they happened to you.

But because the person involved wasn’t you, and people all acted differently, you couldn’t predict what they would do.

After pondering over it for a while, I called Agui’s eldest daughter and asked her for help. She went to contact the Vietnamese police, so we were left with nothing to do but wait.

After about half an hour, she called me back and said, “That female teacher is dead.”

She didn’t have any photos of the scene or any information to give me. The kindergarten was now closed. “Go away,” she said to me. “Every time you come here, people die.”⁽¹⁾

I sat on the steps of the guest house and smoked. Fatty, who was accompanying me, asked me what I was thinking about. I blew out a mouthful of smoke and said, “Tomorrow, go see if there’s a Guan Luo Yin master here. I’m going down to meet him.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

“No, but now I have no other choice but to follow the other party’s line of thought and adapt to the situation.”

Fatty also seemed to be lost in thought. I glanced over and saw that the cigarette butt in his hand had burned down to the point that it was about to burn his fingers.

“I think, if this thing is really evil, then it may want you. It seems to be very interested in you,” Fatty said. “Otherwise, why are you the only one suffering these mishaps?”

It didn’t matter. From the very beginning, everyone was only ever interested in me. I was used to it.

At this time, my cell phone suddenly vibrated. I picked it up and saw that it was a call from our side of the border. They must have found something. When the call connected, I heard Wang Meng’s voice.

“Do it like usual?”

“Yep.”

“I’ll finish dictating as soon as possible. You can stop me at any time if you don’t understand,” Wang Meng said. “This is a very new religion, which has only recently emerged in Vietnam. It originally came from an ancient temple, which should be deep in the mountains somewhere in Cambodia. The things inside this temple were later moved to Vietnam. The main body of the scaled Buddha was discovered from a clay Buddha statue during the relocation process.”

“Give me a little more detail.”

“There was a clay Buddha statue in that ancient temple that was just a normal Buddha statue. When it was being transported, the outer shell cracked, and the workers found that there was another Buddha statue inside of it. That was the scaled Buddha. The scales on the Buddha’s body consisted of all kinds of scales, including fish and snake scales. The Buddha statue was also taller. It wasn’t small like the one you sent me.”

I pondered over this new information. If that were true, then this Buddha had actually been hidden in the body of the real Buddha and worshipped for a long time.

“The locals thought this thing was magical, so they started worshipping it. It’s said to be very spiritual, and will give you whatever you ask for,” Wang Meng continued explaining. “That smaller Buddha statue was made by the monks later, and would only be given to believers after being kept with the big Buddha for about half a year. Rumor had it that more and more snakes appeared on the mountain where the ancient temple was located, so the Vietnamese government closed the temple down. It later became a hidden place.”

“Are there any outside theories or inside information from the believers?”

“A research group said that this Buddha wasn’t actually a Buddha, but a deity of another religion in Cambodia at that time. The legend of this deity is also very strange. Unlike what we usually encounter, this deity can harm people. And the way it harms people is related to the victims themselves.”

<Chapter 34><Table of Contents><Chapter 36>

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TN Notes:

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Pic added 1/6/2023 (fan translation courtesy of me)