Chapter 70 Horrible Situation

At this point in the story, I looked at Black Glasses again. He had obviously increased the speed of his narration just now, which had me tentatively wondering if he could sense that we were approaching our destination.

Based on what I knew about him, his purpose for telling me this story could be very complicated. For example, it may contain far-reaching elements of foreshadowing, there may be amusing elements that he was using to tease me, or he may have simply wanted to shut me up in order to prevent me from constantly distracting him with my worries.

Listening up to this point in the story, I felt like I hadn’t heard what the key point was. All I gathered was that the woman with those scars on her face reminiscent of a sunset should also be a legend. But based on the amount of time Black Glasses spent talking about her, this woman must have had some unexpected developments with Grandpa Si in the future.

At the same time, I got the sense from Black Glasses’ narrative that his impression of that woman was good.

At this point, we had been crawling for a long time. He stopped again and asked me to turn off the flashlight. I knew that he was going to use his eyes to look at things I couldn’t see, so I quickly did as he said. As he lay there and looked for a long time, I kept checking to see if I could feel his breath, lest he secretly ditch me and run away.

When he used to train me, he often pulled this kind of shit when we were in caves.

Fortunately, he didn’t run away. When the flashlight was turned on again, he didn’t explain anything and just went back to talking about the story, “That big battle was very exciting, but when Grandpa Si’s men talked about it later, it was hard to believe that it was true. As for what kind of scene it was, you’ll have to try and imagine it yourself; I’m not going to describe that ten-thousand-word battle.”

“It’s still a fucking abridged version,” I said angrily.

“After that, they finally managed to burn Ah Xi alive,” Black Glasses said. “His burnt body split in two, and when the two segments broke apart, some people felt that Ah Xi was like those dragons used for dragon dancing⁽¹⁾— the hollowed body was attached to the dragon head, except in this case, the dragon’s head was attached to Ah Xi’s body.”

I tried my best to imagine it and said, “There was something in Ah Xi’s body controlling his movements.”

Black Glasses nodded, “Yes, they all thought so at that time. They figured it might be a bug or a snake or something, but if that were the case, I wouldn’t be telling you this story.”

I looked at him and thought to myself, that’s true. If that’s the case, there’s no point in telling this story. After all, I’ve already experienced the same kind of thing more than once or twice myself. So, I asked him, “If that’s not the case, then what was wrong with Ah Xi?”

“I won’t tell you his reasoning process, but when Grandpa Si found Ba Ye, he actually had an answer of his own. This answer was so unbelievably outrageous that he couldn’t comprehend it and ended up going crazy.” As Black Glasses spoke, he looked into the darkness again, “At that time, they were still hanging under the bridge, and the burnt pieces of Ah Xi’s body were falling into the abyss. They had nowhere to go, so the only thing they could do was keep discussing it. Based on the current situation, everyone believed that if they went up to the bridge deck, they’d most likely encounter a few bugs or snakes at most. Grandpa Si naturally wasn’t afraid of such things and made a move to go up, but as soon as he did, Jiwei stopped him and said, ‘Something’s wrong!’ With her mind working in overtime just now, she used Xinyi⁽²⁾ and came to a strange conclusion.”

This so-called “Xinyi” occurred when the idea of divination⁽³⁾ suddenly came to mind. It was God urging her to use the eight trigrams to make a divination. She immediately did so and performed a Xinyi on the present situation.

The process is very complicated. Unlike the Qimen Eight Calculations method, Xinyi is a divination method that is relatively well-known in the business, but is also impossible to explain in words. Instead of using props, you can get the result with a single move of your heart.

Since Jiwei was a female Taoist priest and the others in the team were also involved in this business, they all believed in this kind of thing, but the result of Jiwei’s divination really surprised her.

The question she had asked was: what was going on in this ancient tomb?

But the hexagrams said that there wasn’t a situation; this was just an ordinary tomb.

There was no danger.

This answer was obviously inconsistent with what just happened.

Ordinary people would naturally think that Jiwei didn’t learn the craft well, or that divination was just mere superstition, but Jiwei’s fellow disciples all showed extremely puzzled expressions.

Because Jiwei’s talent was in Xinyi; it was said that her Xinyi predictions were never wrong.

Chen Pi Ah Si was naturally too lazy to care. In the whole world, Qi Tiezui was the only divination master he was wary of. But even though he didn’t feel that same sense of wariness here, he still observed the others’ body language to try and discern what they were thinking. He found that the other disciples’ complexions around him didn’t look too good.

Surprisingly enough, he didn’t make a move.

After thinking for a long time, Jiwei looked up and said to everyone, “The problem is not with this place.”

At that time, no one reacted—neither Chen Pi Ah Si nor any of her fellow disciples—but Jiwei’s expression was already very ugly.

This was actually enough to show that Jiwei was an extremely intelligent woman, and her logic surpassed all the people present.

If the problem wasn’t here…

But something strange did happen here before: a man turned into something that looked like a monster.

If it wasn’t a problem with this ancient tomb, then what was different this time compared to all the other times?

This was an ordinary tomb.

So, this time, it was actually a problem with Ah Xi.

Ah Xi wasn’t human.

Ah Xi, who had been in Grandpa Si’s team all this time, had never been human.

It entered this ordinary ancient tomb, encountered something, and revealed its real body just now.

<Chapter 69><Table of Contents><Chapter 71>

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TN Notes:

(1) Dragon dance is a form of traditional dance and performance in Chinese culture. Like the lion dance, it’s most often seen during festive celebrations. The dance is performed by a team of experienced dancers who manipulate a long flexible giant puppet of a dragon using poles positioned at regular intervals along the length of the dragon.

(2) Xinyi was mentioned in Chapter 18 of “Flowery Night”. It’s a high-level prediction method for Zhou Yi (“The Book of Changes” stuff) predictors to master the internal response when breaking hexagrams. Baidu info. In essence, it focused on the belief that the world was relaying all information to you without reservation, but you needed to have a heart that could believe and observe the hints.

(3) Just to note, basically all the mentions of “divination” in this chapter are referring to “divination using the eight trigrams” (卜卦) but that doesn’t really flow in this context so I’m sticking with divination.

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Decision has been made. Next chapter (chapter 71) will be our stopping point til NPSS cranks more chapters out. I’ll probably do that tomorrow and then switch to Heavenly Palace. Those chapters are like twice as long as these so updates MIGHT be every 2 days (don’t quote me on that). I’ll try my best to keep it daily but yeah, no promises.