Chapter 29 Differences

Ever since I was young, I didn’t like nonsense. In fact, my previous advantage was that I was very good at listening. Now, however, my habit was to take the initiative. Sometimes I didn’t like this kind of behavior since I was afraid such subjectiveness could cause me to miss important information.

I definitely wouldn’t leave him behind, so without bothering to address his words, I said, “If I take a corpse with me every time I go out, I shouldn’t be affected by the heavenly gift. But I’ve been affected every time, which means I must have encountered something along the way. With my personality, I’m definitely not the kind of person who would circle around mindlessly. I must be trying to figure out a way, right?”

“You do it differently every time,” the herdsman said. “You have so many fucking cunning ideas, many of which I never would have thought of. For example, you broke all the hands off these corpses, tied them to your back so you looked like a thousand-armed Guanyin,⁽¹⁾ and then went out. You also put these hands at intervals, saying that you would build a road.”

“And it was all useless?” I looked at these ancient corpses and found that many of them really didn’t have any hands. “But you still haven’t answered my question. If I kept going out with a corpse, it would make sense that there would only be one body here as I carried one out and brought one back. But the number of corpses here is increasing, which shows that I didn’t bring a corpse with me when I went out, but I kept coming back with one. What’s going on?”

I definitely wouldn’t go out without taking one of those ancient corpses with me. If I went out, I’d be affected by the heavenly gift, so I definitely had to use a corpse to protect myself. In that case, the situation here didn’t make any sense.

“You think about this problem every time,” the herdsman said. “Shall I tell you the conclusion? You come to the same one every time.”

“What is it?”

“The ancient corpses don’t prevent you from being affected by the heavenly gift,” the herdsman said. “The reason why you come back to your senses while being affected is unknown, but it’s not because of these ancient corpses. You think it’s the corpses every time, so you carry one back with you, but you’ll realize during our conversation that that’s not the case.”

“If it wasn’t for these ancient corpses, then wouldn’t we be affected by the heavenly gift any moment now?” I asked. “Why are we fine?”

“There are other mechanisms,” the herdsman said. “You told me that there were other mechanisms, but every time you finished speaking, you went straight out without telling me what it was.”

“Every time I discuss this with you, I suddenly have an epiphany, go out, get affected by the heavenly gift, and then come back with a corpse on my back?”

“That’s right.”

“Then what do I rely on every time I have an epiphany? When does it happen?” I asked.

“Now. You’ll have your epiphany while talking to me here.” The herdsman looked at me.

I looked at him and he looked at me, the two of us waiting for my epiphany to come.

But nothing happened.

He kept looking at me and I kept looking at him. “Did you have your epiphany?” He eventually asked.

“I didn’t.”

“Impossible. The past few times, you suddenly had an epiphany at this point in time, as if you suddenly realized something.”

I continued to look at him, then licked my brain (licking it with my mental tongue to see if there were any new ideas in there) but it was empty.⁽²⁾

“Anything?”

I shook my head, “No.”

I didn’t have an epiphany this time. I patted my head to confirm there really wasn’t one before saying, “Don’t worry. This may not be a bad thing, because I’m different from the previous cycles.”

<Chapter 28><Table of Contents><Chapter 30>

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TN Notes:

(1) Buddhist bodhisattva associated with compassion. Info here. Info on Guanyin here.

(2) Super weird expression but that’s what the author had and Seph confirmed.

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Hmmm so maybe the heavenly gift was really responsible for the sudden epiphany and used it to dupe him into leaving? Wonder what he did differently.