Chapter 72: Headless Bodhisattva

If one day I become the leader of the Five Masters, the very first rule I’d hammer into the handbook of their descendants—right on the first page, bolded and centered with an exclamation mark—would be: “Speak clearly and finish your damn sentences!”

From what I’ve seen of the Five Masters’ descendants so far, not a single one can properly explain anything. I honestly start to wonder if they all flunked language class as kids. Is it really that hard to say a complete sentence with a subject?

When Lu A’yao shoved something into my hand at the end, I instinctively slipped it into my pocket. Just from the shape and feel of it, I didn’t even need to look—I knew it had to be his half of the Blood Jade.

Before I could examine it further, the girl had already run up to me. I lowered Lu A’yao from my back, intending to lean him against the stone wall, but then I saw the headless statue above.

I immediately changed my mind, sat down cross-legged, and let him rest against me instead. The girl gave me a puzzled look—probably thought I’d lost my mind.

The group had stopped moving. Fourth Brother came back from the front and asked, “What were you yelling about just now?”

Lu A’yao hadn’t said much earlier, so I sat there and repeated his words to Fourth Brother exactly as he’d said them. As soon as he heard it, Fourth Brother frowned. From his expression, I could tell he wasn’t taking it as a joke. I hadn’t spoken loudly—only the girl and Fourth Brother could’ve heard me. After a moment of thought, Fourth Brother waved Old Luo over.

“Old Luo, we might be in serious trouble,” he said, turning to speak quietly to him. Their voices dropped lower and lower until I couldn’t hear them anymore. Clearly, they didn’t want me listening in.

I turned Lu A’yao’s words over in my mind again and again. There were a lot of ways to interpret them.

First, he said someone had taken something. Short and to the point. He must’ve meant that someone in our group had taken something from the cave. That person wouldn’t be able to leave. But the word “taken” could mean a lot here—was it stolen, or openly carried out? He didn’t say. Judging from the tone, though, it was probably the former.

Either way, I knew it wasn’t me, so I set that part aside for now.

The second point: Lu A’yao said the treasures behind that door weren’t meant for ordinary people. The way he said it was firm, like he’d been through that door himself. He was certain there were priceless treasures inside, but they were also extremely dangerous—definitely not to be touched.

And finally, the last point: why were those Owl-faced Birds so afraid of the shrine?

With that thought, I stood up and told one of the guys nearby to help the girl support Lu A’yao. Then I slowly walked toward the recessed shrine in the wall.

I’d grown up following my grandfather around, often reading all sorts of books about gods and ghosts with him. Whatever he read, I read too. One of those books was about ancient religious statues. We didn’t worship any of that stuff at home, and I wasn’t interested either. I’d only skimmed it during math class to kill time. But I remembered one section about damaged statues.

These kinds of incomplete statues could be enshrined, but not repaired. In ancient belief, that was a serious taboo. Especially when the heads of these statues looked like they’d been deliberately chopped off. The cuts were clean and uniform—only the heads were removed, while the bodies remained intact.

What kind of idiot would worship statues like this? Even if you were offering to ghosts or wild spirits, there was no tradition this bizarre. Were they trying to curse future generations to be maimed and incomplete?

I reached out and gently lifted the bronze brazier in front of the Headless Bodhisattva. I peered inside—it was still empty.

As I was looking, Fourth Brother appeared out of nowhere again. He took the brazier from my hands, turned it slowly in his palm, and said, “This is for offerings to ghosts. You didn’t pay your respects just now, did you?”

I shook my head. Fourth Brother was more of an expert than me. He was examining the brazier’s design and the statue’s posture. His words confirmed my earlier suspicion—this was more “ghost than god.” A lucky guess on my part, but still.

But then I started to wonder—these things had to have been here for at least a few thousand years. The first brazier I saw on that copper pillar had four burned-out incense marks. Could incense really leave marks that lasted thousands of years? That sounded like nonsense.

But if not, then who had come here in recent times to make offerings to these statues?

These shrines were built in a place like this, surrounding ghostly copper pillars, with tens of thousands of human sacrifices. Even the stone passage was lined with traces of these Headless Bodhisattvas. In ancient times, this wouldn’t just have been a massive construction project—it would’ve been considered a grand-scale heretical ritual.

Anyone with even a little knowledge knows you shouldn’t offer prayers blindly in places like this. These aren’t for blessings—they’re for feeding ghosts with incense. If someone had recently made offerings to this Headless Bodhisattva, what happened after they lit the incense? Did their wish come true?

The thought made me suddenly want to light a stick of incense myself, just to see what would happen. Surely it wouldn’t summon some monster to eat me, right?

“There’s something behind the statue. Move it and take a closer look,” Fourth Brother said after staring at the Bodhisattva for a long time.

Old Luo shoved me aside, stretched his arms into the pitch-black shrine, and braced the base of the statue. Then he pulled the whole thing out from the depths of the niche.

I shone my flashlight into the dark recess, and instantly locked eyes with something blood-red. It looked like an eye. Startled, my hand jerked, and I nearly dropped the flashlight on the spot. I stumbled back a step, instinctively retreating behind the others.

“I thought it was some creepy supernatural thing, but turns out it’s just a mural. A bit too red, that’s all,” one of the workers chuckled as he leaned in for a closer look.

I froze for a second, then mustered up the courage to step forward. What I saw inside the shrine wasn’t some human eye embedded in the wall, but a mural painted with pigments. It depicted a single, wide-open, glaring eye. The brushwork was crude, but the paint had held up remarkably well over time, with no signs of flaking.

Fourth Brother checked it over and found nothing unusual. Then he ordered the workers to remove the Headless Bodhisattvas from the other shrines one by one. Each shrine contained a similar eye, all roughly the same in appearance. There were no hidden mechanisms or traps. After inspecting them all, Fourth Brother finally seemed to relax a little.

But from the look on his face, I could tell he was determined to open that stone door. We’d come this far, and there was no way we were climbing back up the copper pillars. The only way forward was through that door.

The girl in our team gave Lu A’yao a quick shot of antibiotics. Then I stepped forward and lifted him onto my back again. The moment I did, it felt like I was carrying a blazing furnace. Was his fever really that high?

Just as I stood up, I heard the girl say to Fourth Brother, “We need to get out of here quickly. He’s burning up. If it’s a bacterial infection, we need to treat it as soon as possible.”

Fourth Brother gave her a pat on the shoulder, his expression calm. I heard him say, “Don’t worry, Xiao Qi. Once we get what we came for, we’ll be out of here soon.”

Get what they came for? What did that mean? Was Fourth Brother here looking for something?

The group only paused for fifteen minutes before setting off again. This time, I made sure to stay near the front instead of falling behind. There were too many things about Fourth Brother that I didn’t understand. Lu A’yao had said that whoever took the item wouldn’t be able to leave. I couldn’t help but wonder if that had something to do with what Fourth Brother was after.

It wasn’t long before I noticed the path ahead had changed. The ground became noticeably smoother, and the stone walls on either side were more finely carved. Occasionally, we saw gilded patterns etched into the stone. Then, when we came upon rows of reinforced demon-head stone pillars, we all came to a halt.

Ahead of us stood two neat rows of stone lantern-bearer statues, each with a smiling face. The two closest to the stone door were the largest, sculpted in a bowing posture, their heads tilted and grinning as they stared straight at us.

Hou Jinshan, supporting his aching back, was being helped forward by Xiao Qi. At this point, he actually moved faster than the rest of us. Xiao Qi, being just a girl, couldn’t hold him back, so she let him go. He broke into a half-run, muttering to himself as he went, “Ghost Market! It’s the Ghost Market! I found the Ghost Market! I finally found the Ghost Market!”

No one knew what kind of trap might be set behind that stone door. I wanted to rush forward and stop him, but Fourth Brother grabbed my arm from behind and silently shook his head.

All I could do was stand there and watch Hou Jinshan dash past the stone statues like a madman, charging straight at the tightly shut stone door. It was hard to believe, but somehow, he managed to crash into it headfirst and force it open. I heard a dull thud, and the door creaked ajar.

Hou Jinshan was the first to step over the threshold. Fourth Brother’s team waited in place for a full two minutes, watching carefully. When nothing seemed to happen, they cautiously moved forward, pushing the slightly open door wider. Inside was pitch black. Then, as if triggered by something Hou Jinshan had touched, a clattering sound echoed—the fall of a Fire Pearl.

In the next instant, all the lantern-bearing stone statues inside lit up.

Suddenly, I realized that the ground beneath my feet, the space around me, even the air itself, was filled with a dazzling golden glow. Piles of gold and jewels were scattered everywhere, even the stone statues were dusted with a layer of gold powder that couldn’t be brushed off. The brilliance was so intense it hurt my eyes. All around me, people gasped in awe.

I stood at the doorway, lifted my head, and looked around. In that moment, everything opened up before me.

Could this be what they meant by “Look up and see all beings”?