Chapter 272: The Sinner

My heart skipped a violent beat.

Lu Ling spoke slowly. “The outsider Master Jiyun saved all those years ago was the first ancestor of our Lu Clan. Our ancestor was originally an ordinary hunter. While gathering herbs on the mountain, he was bitten by a venomous snake. His life hung by a thread until Master Jiyun fed him a piece of Houtu Blood, bringing him back from the brink of death.”

This was a story from the distant past. I didn’t interrupt Lu Ling, letting her continue.

“Our ancestor escaped death once, only to fall victim to the malice of human hearts. He was nearly killed three times after being mistaken for a monster, and on the fourth occasion, Master Jiyun saved him once again. Seeing a karmic bond between them, Master Jiyun taught him the arts of the Eight Trigrams and divination so he could survive. With his extraordinary intuition and a few pointers from Master Jiyun, our ancestor began to prosper. Eventually, he attained high office and a generous salary, becoming a lord over hundreds of households. That was the beginning of the Lu Clan.”

Lu Ling seemed quite proud as she spoke. If the records were accurate, that was undoubtedly the Lu Clan’s most glorious era. The descendants of the Lu Clan must have survived generation after generation based on the mere scraps of knowledge Master Jiyun had passed down to their ancestor.

“And this Phoebe zhennan coffin?” I asked.

Lu Ling took a breath and said, “Master Jiyun and our ancestor were the closest of friends. After parting ways with our ancestor, Master Jiyun somehow learned of the existence of the Lingshanmi tribe. He made up his mind to destroy all the Houtu Blood in his possession. But luck was not on his side. The Lingshanmi pressed him at every turn. In his desperation, Master Jiyun could only hide the remaining Houtu Blood he hadn’t managed to destroy across various tombs.”

“And then?”

Lu Ling stroked the Phoebe zhennan coffin and looked up. “After hiding the Houtu Blood, the leader of the Lingshanmi drove Master Jiyun into a corner. Master Jiyun was forced to take his own life. Suspecting that Master Jiyun had swallowed the Houtu Blood before he died, the Lingshanmi ordered his body cut open and his internal organs hollowed out. Once they confirmed there was no Houtu Blood in his entrails, they used extremely cruel preservation methods to sew Master Jiyun’s body back together, turning him into a skin-cased hanging corpse. He was hung inside the head of an undersea Tomb-guarding Beast.”

The description made my skin crawl. Scenes from my previous dream flashed through my mind. There was no doubt now that the skin-cased corpse hanging inside the Tomb-guarding Beast was Master Jiyun. A sharp pang of sympathy hit my chest; the methods used were simply too inhumane.

“By the time our ancestor received the news and rushed there, the corpse-doll had already been submerged in seawater inside the Tomb-guarding Beast for four full days. Our ancestor was consumed by guilt. To provide a proper burial for Master Jiyun, he used his ingenuity to integrate the undersea Ship-Burial Coffins, perfecting an Overlapping Tomb on the foundation of the original burial site. He also created the legendary Yin-Yang Thirteen Palaces, the true and false coffins, and the Deformed Child Cross-Path as anti-theft measures,” Lu Ling said.

Realization finally dawned on me. I asked, “Wasn’t that Phoebe zhennan coffin supposed to have been taken by the archaeological team that excavated the site first? How did it end up here with you?”

Lu Ling replied, “The archaeological team back then lacked experience. Our ancestor had set up three layers of true and false coffin traps. The team realized there were traps, but they didn’t know there were three layers. What they took was precisely the second layer’s false coffin. The fluid inside that coffin had a powerful hallucinogenic effect. Almost every member of that team fell victim to it. Afterward, the project was halted as an emergency, and the research institute was abandoned.”

“Your family is certainly ruthless enough. That Deformed Child Cross-Path nearly killed us in there,” I couldn’t help but grumble.

Lu Ling shot me a sidelong glance. “Our ancestor’s final wish was that Master Jiyun’s remains never be disturbed by anyone again. Moreover, our ancestor exhausted his entire fortune to build that mausoleum, which led to the Lu Clan’s decline. When Master Jiyun was reburied, there was nothing in the coffin but his body, with no gold, silver, or treasures. Those traps were only meant to deter outsiders; they weren’t intended to cause actual harm.”

I scratched my arm, thinking to myself, Bullshit! Doesn’t psychological trauma count as harm? And those two giant pythons! They almost killed your current Clan Head, don’t you know? Crawling through that Deformed Child Cross-Path with those blood-red murals everywhere scared the life out of me. Even thinking about it now makes my heart race.

I walked around the coffin and began inspecting the memorial tablets. “So you secretly found someone to move the coffin here because you didn’t want Master Jiyun’s body to be disturbed by the outside world anymore?”

As I spoke, my voice gradually trailed off. My gaze had stopped on a wooden memorial tablet in front of me. The characters carved into it made my smile freeze completely. I stared at the words for a long time, unable to process them: To the Clan Head Lu Ayao, in the year 1982.

I pointed at the tablet in a hurry and turned to Lu Ling. “Did you make a mistake? Why is there a memorial tablet for a living person here?”

Lu Ling didn’t react as strongly as I did. She walked slowly over from the side of the Phoebe zhennan coffin and stood before me. “There is no mistake. This tablet has been enshrined here since 1982. Letting you see this tablet is the exact reason I brought you here.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Lu Ling reached out and took the wooden tablet, which was carved with Lu Ayao’s birth details, out of the stone groove. She wiped away the dust with her handkerchief. “You should know about the porcelain shards on his face. When he was five, he followed Lu Xiaosu on his first training mission to Southern Xiang. He crawled into a corpse cave. Seven days later, during a raging thunderstorm, lightning struck. Lu Xiaosu saved him, but lightning hit the old locust tree in front of the cave, and he fell into a coma.”

She glanced at me and continued, “To save the Master, Lu Xiaosu spent money to buy the birth details of a young boy in the village who had died that same year. She swapped their birth details and used the porcelain shards the Master had brought out of the corpse cave to stitch his face. That is the only reason the Master has survived to this day. This tablet enshrines the birth details the Master had before he was five. Later, I heard that a deeply resentful ghost-immortal lived in that corpse cave. To prevent the ghost-immortal from causing trouble, the villagers covered the inner stone walls with red talismans and lined the cave entrance with ghost-suppressing dolls.”

I asked in confusion, “Is that ‘borrowing a life’?”

“In a way,” Lu Ling said flatly. “But no one can live a full lifespan on a borrowed life. They offended the ghost-immortal in that cave. I heard that within a few years, dozens of people in that village died one after another for various reasons. They believed it was the ghost-immortal’s curse. The elderly passed away, and the young people moved away one by one. Eventually, it became a deserted village in every sense of the word.”

“Are those young people who fled the village still alive?” I pressed immediately.

Lu Ling shook her head silently. “From what we know, most of them passed away from illness in their thirties.”

After Lu Ling finished speaking, she set the memorial tablet back in place and added oil to the lamps. “The talismans on the Master’s face weren’t drawn there by us,” she said. “They appeared suddenly after the porcelain shards were sewn in. It’s said that those patterns appeared on the faces of the villagers before they died, but once they passed away, the patterns vanished.”

I listened, stunned. “Does such a thing as a curse really exist?”

“I’m not sure, but this is a matter of life and death,” Lu Ling said. “Just in case, we have no choice but to treat it as real.”

“We’ve been searching everywhere for a solution all these years, but we haven’t found a thing. For the entire Lu Clan, the age of forty is a massive hurdle that few can clear. Even the ancestor who consumed the Houtu Blood still died at thirty-six. Even though the Master’s original surname wasn’t Lu and he didn’t belong to the Lu Clan, he still met with this calamity. Perhaps this truly is heaven’s punishment for us peering into the secrets of fate.” Lu Ling let out a sigh.

If it had been the old me, I certainly would have dismissed this as nonsense and lectured her for it. But hearing this now, a deep sense of powerlessness rose in my heart: a desire to do something, yet having no way to do it. I couldn’t even control my own destiny; how could I save anyone else?

“So, you brought me here just to persuade me to go back?” I looked up.

Lu Ling surveyed the flickering candles, her gaze finally coming to rest on me. She gave me a small smile and said, “No. You can continue to stay here. I believe that in another half a month, even if I try to stop him, the Master won’t be able to resist helping you. But what I want you to know is that the Lingshanmi have been hidden for a thousand years. We are in the light while they are in the dark. They forced Master Jiyun to take his own life, and even the Lu Clan ancestors were unable to contend with them back then. Your desire for revenge is almost equivalent to throwing an egg against a stone.”

I knew there was a subtext to her words, but I didn’t want to play guessing games. I asked her solemnly, “What exactly are you trying to say?”

Lu Ling continued to smile. “You must have already experienced the pain of losing friends, family, and subordinates. Surely you don’t want to experience that kind of pain again?”

Her words made my brow twitch. I sneered, “Then how do you know I’ll definitely lose?”

“And how do you know you’ll definitely win? Did your Fourth Brother win?” Lu Ling countered.

I opened my mouth, but no words came out.

“In a process of constant struggle, casualties are inevitable. The result is that both sides suffer. To put it more bluntly, Lu Ayao doesn’t care about the few years he has left of his wretched life, but can you really be so indifferent as to drag him into the whirlpool again? Don’t you think that doing so is a bit too selfish?” Lu Ling took a step toward me.

These words forced me into deep reflection. I had never considered such things before, or perhaps I was born without the chance to face a problem like the Lu Clan’s inability to live past forty. I posed a very sharp question to myself: If you only had seven or eight years to live, would you choose to spend every day and night in fear, or would you choose to live in seclusion, spending the rest of your days in peace with the flowers and birds?

I thought that if it were me, I would also choose the latter.

Lu Ling said to me, “I hope you can consider others as well. However, if Lu Ayao agrees to your request, the Lamp Keepers will begin considering the various matters of preparing and selecting a new Clan Head, just in case of an accident.”

I looked at her, but Lu Ling’s face was devoid of any expression. She spoke as if she were explaining an utterly ordinary matter. Once she finished, she walked back toward the stone bridge as if nothing had happened. I heard the sound of the stone door falling once more, and the entire ancestral hall returned to a deathly silence.

I held my head, feeling a splitting headache. Facing the thousands of memorial tablets, I sat down on the prayer mat in front of the altar. I didn’t want to involve anyone else, and I didn’t want to go through what I had experienced before. I didn’t care about my own life or death, but I didn’t want anyone other than myself to die anymore.

It could be said that among everyone who had died, the person who least deserved to be alive right now was me.

I looked up at the tablets above me, thinking back to what Bai Shenxian had once said, and then to the fates of Fourth Brother and the others. It seemed he was right; my decisions really would drag those around me into danger, especially people who had nothing to do with any of this.

So if I left, could Lu Ayao live out the rest of his life here in peace?