Chapter 53 Qimen Eight Calculations Method

I glanced back at Black Glasses, but he just shook his head at me, “This is what it’s like here—everywhere is abnormal.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know. But if you’re someone who focuses on logic, you simply won’t be able to last until the moment you discover the logic behind this place.” He pointed his flashlight at the mummy, “You’ll go crazy.”

I also had this strong feeling when I was in the hallucination before.

“The more logical people are, the faster they’ll die here,” Black Glasses said. “I’m afraid Boss Xie may not be in a good mental state right now. He’s too logical.”

“Should I stop thinking?”

“It won’t work, you’ll still die,” he said. He rarely spoke this seriously, which showed that the situation here had long been beyond his control. He couldn’t behave too extraneously, even if only a little bit, because it could lead to distraction, or result in us understanding the situation differently, which might cause us to die.

I looked at the mummy and fell silent. I knew that something must have moved it here. If this was the past, I would have definitely started analyzing the purpose of this thing. For example, was there some sentient being with a child-like consciousness that was playing a prank, or was this something similar to feeding? Just like when you catch something and raise it, but you don’t know what it eats, so you try giving it all kinds of food.

The two of us looked at each other and then continued crawling forward. “Will there be an end to this matter?” I asked.

“What matter?”

“If no one is guarding the door, then the thing behind that door will come out. What exactly did Ba Ye predict?⁽¹⁾ If it’s just that kind of soft-bodied thing—”

“It’s not. What Ba Ye predicted is very unusual.” When Black Glasses said this, he stopped and looked back at where the mummy was, but it didn’t seem to be following us. “If there’s another person in this world who knows what the Ultimate is, it must be Ba Ye.”

I paused and looked at him, “You mean, what Ba Ye predicted is related to the situation behind the door?”

Black Glasses nodded and then started crawling forward again, “Yes. He didn’t tell anyone, but he knew.”

I thought for a moment, “So all the preparations now are related to whatever’s behind the door?”

“In a sense. It’s an absolute secret that only you can know; it’s not something you can tell others,” Black Glasses said. “But you and I… it’s not our fate to know.”

“Why didn’t I think of using divination to learn what it is?” I asked. “If I had, I could’ve asked Jin Wantang to use Qimen Dunjia to tell me what was behind the door.”

“According to the rules, this kind of thing can’t be divined.”

I suddenly remembered that Jin Wantang had mentioned these rules before, but I forgot what they entailed.⁽²⁾

“So, it’s not that easy to put an end to this matter.”

“No,” he replied, “it will be over soon.”

As Black Glasses continued crawling forward, I asked him, “Have you done the calculations? Don’t you know some of the necessary skills?”

He paused, and I could clearly feel his body come to a stop before he said, “I’m not interested.”

I didn’t pursue the matter any further, and the two of us fell silent for a while. We crawled for about two hours and then turned around, but we didn’t see any signs that the corpse was following us.

That was just how it was here. There may be a strange situation where that thing appears for a moment and then doesn’t appear, or it may keep appearing all the time, without any rhyme or reason.

For me, the dark space behind me was actually more terrifying than the mummy.

The two of us took a short break, and I continued to ask, “Our current plan of action is to meet up with Xiao Hua and Little Brother, right?”

“Maybe.” He smiled at me, his look seeming to say that it would be nice to have a can of beer at this time.

“Give me a sense of security, will you? What do you mean ‘maybe’?”

“You’ve been following me because you think I know where we’re going, right?”

“Is that not the case?” I looked at him, my eyes widening in surprise.

“How can I possibly know where they are?” He continued to smile, “I obviously don’t know.”

I looked at the passage. Then why have we been crawling the past two hours?

“Then tell me this: what are we doing?”

Black Glasses smiled at me and said, “Although I don’t know where they are, I can figure it out by doing some calculations.”

“The Qimen Eight Calculations method can tell you where they are?” I looked at him. Wasn’t that too easy? Even though I had been through so much, I still didn’t believe in doing divination calculations on people.

“Trapped in brambles and in a precarious position.”⁽³⁾ Black Glasses said, looking ahead. “Ba Ye, I’m counting on you.”

<Chapter 52><Table of Contents><Chapter 54>

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TN Notes:

(1) This is referencing Ba Ye’s prediction/divination mentioned in Chapter 50 of “Ten Thousand Mountains”.

(2) Referencing Chapter 1 of “Sea of Lights”. There are three things you’re not supposed to look for: no-trace corpses, yinshen ghosts, or immeasurable calamities.

(3) Feng shui mumbo jumbo from the “Book of Changes”. Characters are “困于葛藟，于臲卼” (pinyin is kun yu gelei, yu niewu). Hexagram 47 is named 困 (kùn), which can mean “confining” or “oppression (exhaustion)” or “entangled”. Sounds like people on Baidu say the meaning is something along the lines of: if you take action, you’ll regret it, but if you repent, it’s still auspicious to move forward.