Chapter 18 Real or Fake?

I remembered that when we first entered the crevice, Fatty said that he saw Yun Cai when he was keeping watch, and she gave him a bullet.

At that time, I felt that Fatty was holding something back. He didn’t tell me everything he saw; he just told me that I might encounter a similar situation in the future so I had to pay attention and not be soft-hearted.

I didn’t know what he meant at that time, but Fatty would never cause me harm. If he didn’t say it, then that meant that he thought it was meaningless to mention it. It also might have been more of a personal matter for him so I didn’t bother asking.

Then those series of events happened afterward and I was too busy dealing with them so I ended up forgetting all about this incident.

At that time, however, I did actually have a theory: Was there a mysterious force in this gap that enabled us to see the dead?

Now that I thought about it, Fatty’s experience at that time was very similar to my current situation. In fact, the most similar thing was that he got a bullet, which was a real bullet and not a hallucination.

I also got a real sutra, which was right next to my head and most definitely not an illusion.

But Yun Cai was dead and couldn’t come back to life, and it was absolutely impossible for the monster just now to appear in reality.

I looked at the crevice in front of me, but there was still no sound on the other side. I bit my nails as my mind started racing.

Yun Cai was Fatty’s beloved, and this underground crevice enabled him to see her again. Whether this place had some kind of magic or not, it at least had to have some logic to it.

But what the hell was that thing I saw? Was it my true love? Was my beloved actually a creature with sharp teeth and strangely long fingers like a dead branch? If so, then it must be an inhuman thing.

And this thing had given me a sutra.

I knew very well what that bullet meant to Yun Cai, but what about the sutra?

Was there anyone around me who had died, and their death was caused by that sutra?

Was I Ning Caicheng, and the thing on the other side was that half-male, half-female Tree Demoness?⁽¹⁾

I went to look at the sutra again and saw that it had fragmented even more. But it wasn’t like I could understand a word of the Sanskrit-like ancient Tibetan characters on it anyways.

There was no correlation between what I encountered and what Fatty encountered, which showed that the logic behind these phenomena had nothing to do with true love. So, it wasn’t because the other party was the love of my life that this strange and magical situation occurred.

Plus, Fatty had told me not to be soft-hearted when I encountered such a situation in the future. What did he mean?

Was it possible that Fatty saw Yun Cai that day, and he knew that it wasn’t really her so he killed the monster that had taken on her appearance?

I looked at the crevice, straining my brain as I kept thinking about the connection between Fatty and Yun Cai, and what was on the other side of this stone. My mind was a mess, but one idea kept hovering at the forefront.

In any case, the relationship between Fatty and Yun Cai could be considered very close.

Moreover, all the people around me who were close to me were human; there weren’t any monsters at all.

Was it possible that this mysterious force was implying that among the humans who had a close relationship to me, there was someone who wasn’t actually human?

Maybe this person wasn’t dead, so the force couldn’t find them among the dead.

Long fingers…could it be Poker-Face? No, not all of his fingers were long. And the teeth were sharp, which meant that they had to be ground down like that.

At this time, I suddenly thought of someone.

Chen Pi Ah Si. Grandpa Si.

Before he died, he was very close to this state. Did he die because of the sutra? I wasn’t there when he died so I didn’t know; I only saw what he looked like after he was dead.

What were the similarities between Fatty and Yun Cai and me and Chen Pi Ah Si?

<Chapter 17><Table of Contents><Chapter 19>

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TN Notes:

(1) Per Seph: A reference to “A Chinese Ghost Story”, a Hong Kong film from 1987 that is loosely based on one of the stories in “Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio” where a scholar, Ning Caichen, was going to Beijing to take a civil service examination when Nie Xiaoqian (a beautiful female ghost who was coerced into participating in ritual murders for a demon) attempts to prey upon him. But he resists her and takes her from her haunt. They end up marrying and having a kid after Ning Caichen’s wife dies.