Chapter 39: Theatre Troupe (IV)
The weather was humid and dark in these parts, so the snow didn't build up as fast as it might elsewhere. There was only a thin layer of white along the mountain path, and, as groups of people traversed it over the course of the day, some parts had turned to sleet and then hardened into ice. It was dangerously slippery. The horse at the front of the train was still snorting and whinnying endlessly, and only moved when struck by the whip, hurtling between starting and stopping.
But no matter how slowly they were going, they would only have to go a little bit further to come upon that pile of fallen boulders.
"They really have... no idea at all?" Jiang Shining asked, his neck stiff and his face contorting with fear as he waited for Xuanmin or Xue Xian to respond.
Xue Xian said, "I wouldn't say they have no idea at all. If you look at them––" He jutted his chin in the general direction of the other carriages–– "That horse has been terrified this whole time. And earlier, when we were at the bridge, both the scarred man and Old Li seemed really reluctant to come here, too. There's something in them that's telling them to avoid this route."
When humans got the sense that something bad was coming up, of course they wanted to avoid it.
Despite not having use of his legs, the dragon was not one to sit quietly. Unable to stand up and bend over to look out the window, he had instead managed to get his entire body to lean horizontally on the bench and hang his head on the windowsill. Xuanmin had no choice but to scoot to the very edge in order to give Xue Xian the space he needed. When he had given the dragon his hand earlier, it seemed to have balanced him out, and he now had the strength to move his upper body this way and that again.
All this had started out with Xuanmin coming across a couple of demons and capturing them with the intention of sending them out of the living realm. How had they ended up like this?
As Jiang Shining sat on his side of the carriage, the shaking hand that fidgeted with his robe betrayed his anxiety.
Twenty-Seven happened to accidentally graze him with his knee, and could feel the emotion on the scholar. He couldn't help but glance at Jiang Shining with his half-blind eyes and say, "I've never seen a ghost so scared of ghosts."
Jiang Shining shot back, "Remember when you were screaming and crying for your parents back in the tomb?"
Hurt by Jiang Shining's comment, Twenty-Seven made an irritated tsk noise and turned away, no longer in the mood to mock him.
He was young and not all that courageous –– just extremely stubborn and deathly attached to his pride. He tried to pretend to be brave as much as he could, but what had happened at Gravestone Island had been beyond his limits, so his true feelings had been exposed.
In contrast, Lu Nineteen had begun seeing things that normal people could not see from a very young age, and, being used to encountering all sorts of strange and magical things, he naturally had never been afraid of them.
It was only now that Twenty-Seven had absorbed some of Nineteen's personality that he could truly feel a bit calmer.
Twenty-Seven calmed down, and Jiang Shining had been chastised by his comment –– but now Stone Zhang began acting up.
When he heard that Jiang Shining was a ghost, he began to feel very unwell. His mung-bean eyes swivelled around the carriage, taking in his companions. Out of the five "people" here, apart from him, all the others were deeply abnormal... and in the carriage in front of him, and the carriage in front of that, and even the animals drawing the carriages... none of them were alive...
Dear god, what in the world was going on!
Stone Zhang wanted to cry. He clutched the heater closer and pressed back into the carriage wall, as though he could use his sheer will and cowardice to turn his potbellied frame flat, and disappear.
"A bit more––" Xue Xian said, staring out the window. "Wait for the horse to take a couple more steps."
The train had advanced by a huge chunk. The pile of rocks on the bend of the winding path below, which they previously had to crane their necks to see in the distance, was now almost beneath their feet. As the carriage eked closer to the pile, all people had to do was look directly down the side of the mountain at the next curve of the road, and see the crushed carriage.
And the closer they got to the pile, the more the horses were agitated. It was obvious just from the sounds of the scarred man trying every trick in the book to get the horses to obey him. And maybe it was because the atmosphere in the group was so high-strung, but the scarred man's voice sounded increasingly panicked, and voices had begun to emerge from the carriages in the front as the troupe members murmured amongst each other.
It was a highly stressful environment.
"Do you think they'll look out of the window and see it?" Jiang Shining couldn't help but ask.
"No," Xuanmin said matter-of-factly.
He hated to speak, and even when he had to explain something, he only discussed the most vital details. This categorical and straightforward approach could be highly reassuring, because it left no room for anyone to suspect that he had left something out.
Jiang Shining felt better. But Stone Zhang asked, "How are you so sure?"
"Because they're scared too! Stop asking so many questions," Xue Xian snapped. He was still facing out of the window and did not bother to look at Stone Zhang before saying, "Your tongue seems to be the only lean meat across your entire body. I should cut it off and use it to make wine."
Make wine...
Xuanmin frowned, but said nothing.
The dragon being argumentative was one thing, but did he really have to conjure up such disgusting images?
Xuanmin scanned the outside, then lifted his second hand and patted Xue Xian on the shoulder. "I'm going out."
Stunned, Xue Xian turned to him. "You?"
"Yes." It's that, or sit around in here listening to certain people say all kinds of creepy nonsense. If I listen to too much of it, I'll lose my appetite for the next ten days.
"Can you do it?" Xue Xian squinted. "The carriage is going to reach it really soon. Can you make it in time?"
Xuanmin nudged his shoulder, silently asking him to get away from the window and sit back properly on his seat. Then, he unhooked the copper coin pendant from his hip and stepped over Xue Xian's head.
He was too tall for the tiny carriage, and had to half-bend. One of his hands was still being gripped by Xue Xian, and he used that to help push himself out of the carriage door. His white monk's robe was like the wind and snow blowing past them all –– in one flurry, he was gone.
Seeing this, Stone Zhang was dumbfounded. Then, he rushed to the window, and saw that that snow-white shadow had already flipped down to the next stretch of road below. Xuanmin made no noise –– not a single pebble was disturbed.
The group inside the carriage seemed struck by the elegant manner in which Xuanmin had departed –– all except Xue Xian...
He snorted. It was so-so, he thought. Still not as good as me.
Despite this, he still nudged himself across the bench so that he now sat where Xuanmin had been. With one hand pressed on the heavy curtain, he stared out and watched as Xuanmin made his way across the mountain road.
Xuanmin stood steadily on top of the boulder pile. Although his feet rested on tiny rocks the size of fists, he did not allow them to teeter even slightly. Raising his head, Xuanmin looked at the side of the mountain –– between the uphill part of the path and the downhill part, there was an enormous chunk of rock missing, so that even the uphill section looked fragile, as though any further weight would send everything sliding down again.
That missing chunk was the pile on which Xuanmin stood. Some of these boulders were around half his height –– with a landslide that violent, never mind wooden carriages, even metal carriages would be flattened.
Apart from the corner of a carriage that they had spied from afar, and a blue cloth curtain, everything else was buried tightly underneath the pile of rocks, and the corpses probably did not even look human anymore. Even if they were one day unearthed, they would probably be shattered in pieces and strewn all over.
Xuanmin thought for a while, then had an idea.
Xue Xian was not the only one monitoring all of Xuanmin's movements –– Stone Zhang and Jiang Shining were both jostling for space at the window, and even Twenty-Seven could not help but peer out.
"What are you craning your neck for?" Xue Xian snapped at the boy. "You were out for seven days, and now your eyes can see normally again?"
Neutrally, Twenty-Seven replied, "Thank you for your concern. Unfortunately, my vision is actually even blurrier."
The blurrier his vision, the blinder he was becoming, and the more qi he could see, and naturally qi silhouettes were not crystal clear.
Actually, Xue Xian was quite curious. As a mythical beast, his vision was of course far sharper than that of normal humans, and he could hardly imagine what Lu Nineteen's... and now Lu Twenty-Seven's worlds looked like.
"Just looking at you from this distance, I can't tell if you're human or beast," Twenty-Seven said, describing his perspective.
But...
That did not sound right at all –– it sounded much more like the boy was needling him.
"That means you're getting better at seeing qi," Xue Xian said. Then, miffed, he went back to looking at Xuanmin outside.
From his angle, he could see everything that Xuanmin was doing.
They say that swords, especially those magical swords in legends, need to be awakened by fresh blood –– only the blood can unlock their true potential, and then they're able to slice through wind and chop through water. And although Xuanmin's copper coin pendant had neither cutting edge nor sharp point, for some reason, they needed to be awakened by blood, too.
Xue Xian watched as Xuanmin cut another gash across his fingertip and rubbed his blood onto the surface of the coins.
And then that weng–– sound came back and the coins seemed to come to life. They began to lightly quiver, emitting a lugubrious cry that echoed out faintly into the howling snowstorm. As Xue Xian heard this noise, something in his ear felt uncomfortable, and he frowned.
Xuanmin arranged the five coins of the pendant in five positions on his palm –– north, south, east, west, and center. Then, he took out some talismanic paper from his chest pocket –- but the talismans were empty, with no spell inscribed on them at all.
He folded the yellow sheets and bent down to arrange them in the four cardinal directions, weighed down by rocks. Next, the fingers of his right hand hovered over the copper coins in his left hand, and his pale lips parted, as though reciting a prayer.
But it didn't seem like a full prayer –– more like a short, fragmented phrase.
And with that, the copper coins that had previously been resting on Xuanmin's palm now hovered above and began to spin slowly around.
As Xuanmin uttered what appeared to be a Buddhist chant and brushed the east-facing coin, the east-facing talisman, quivering beneath its rock, suddenly began to spew a thin stream of blood, as though an invisible hand had dipped a brush in crimson ink and were steadily inscribing talismanic text.
When the text had been written, Xuanmin spun the hovering ring of coins in his hand for another half-circle, then put away that invisible brush.
Next was south;
Then north;
And finally west...
In the instant that the four talismans had been completed, an enormous gust of wind picked up –– it sounded like the roar of a tiger and the howl of a wolf. Blown by the wind, the heavy curtain of the carriage flapped violently against Stone Zhang's head.
Stone Zhang felt that he was the unluckiest man in the world. He stroked his stinging face, then reached out and tore the entire curtain away from the window –– the carriage was now completely vulnerable to the wind, and a chilling winter air blasted inside, carrying a thin stream of snow.
The snow was cold and bristling, and blew so hard against their faces that Stone Zhang and Jiang Shining shut their eyes as they could.
They blinked hard, and lifted a hand to block their foreheads –– only then could they open their eyes and look out at the scene on the mountain again.
"Ah––" Stone Zhang gasped.
The wind that Xuanmin had summoned had lifted the entire ground from the mountain road –– the boulders and the carriages crushed below were now floating in the air, entirely lifted by that savage wind, and slowly gliding away from the path.
As the mass of earth and debris hung in the air, Xuanmin, still standing on two small blocks of stone, lifted his left foot and nonchalantly kicked it.
And as though dragged by a thousand-jin weight, everything beneath Xuanmin's feet instantly ejected themselves into the gap of the valley below.
Soon, a faint, muffled long–– long–– drumming sound emerged from the valley.
"Is he going to blow up the mountain?" Stone Zhang asked idiotically.
"Then he should throw you into the explosion," Xue Xian spat, then added, "He probably buried it."
Just as Xue Xian had guessed, the falling rocks' impact could not be underestimated. Even before they had fully fallen to the ground, the wet, soft mud of the valley below had caved into a deep crater, into which the carcasses of the troupe's members and horses, as well as the debris from their carriages, fell, swiftly buried beneath the pile of stone, which gently arranged itself into a grave.
The falling snow began to stick to those shattered boulders and lingered, so that, by the time the dust settled and the roaring wind vanished, there was only a thin layer of white peeking out from the valley, as though the grave had been covered with a smatter of joss paper money.
Thus, Xuanmin had performed a simple set of funeral rites...
Xuanmin rubbed the blood away from his copper coin pendant and hooked it back onto his hip. Then he turned to the grave and bowed in a Buddhist greeting.
Then, his cloudlike monk's robe billowed in the wind, and with a light sweep of the hemp cloth, he disappeared into the thick forest of the valley.
To Xuanmin, leaping back up the steep side of the mountain was not actually more difficult than leaping down from it. Within a few light steps, he had already bounded up to the part of the mountain path where the pile of rocks had previously been. The theatre troupe's carriages finally turned that last corner and were coming directly his way. He could hear the shouts of the scarred man, and soon that stubborn horse's muzzle would come into view, too.
In order to avoid being seen by the scarred man, Xuanmin kicked the earth and used the momentum to leap higher up onto the mountain, planning to approach the carriage from above. Just as he made to return to Xue Xian and the others, he suddenly noticed that, in an area slightly removed from the path, there remained a small pile of rock, and that beneath those rocks were two anonymous bodies.
That pile had just happened to have been concealed by the jaggedness of the mountain, and, from the point at which Xuanmin had first landed onto the path, he had not been able to see it.
It seemed that, when the landslide had crushed the main train, two people had been able to extricate themselves and escape, only to be killed by a second stream of falling rocks.
The carriage was going to appear any instant now, but Xuanmin did not at all have the time to sweep down and lay his talismans again.
And just before the imminent disaster, the long silhouette of a black dragon emerged from behind the mountain.
Xue Xian!
This beast insisted on doing everything with excessive flair. Two bolts of lightning struck down onto the boulders that had crushed the two performers, and the boulders dutifully erupted into a million tiny pieces. The dragon wordlessly approached, wrapped in a torrent of wind, and, with a nod of his head, the wind swept up the two bodies and the rock dust, and sent them tumbling down the side of the mountain. They disappeared into that thick forest in the valley.
Hu–––
The wind settled again, and the trees stopped shaking too.
Those two bodies fell to the ground and were swiftly covered by the dense mass of dust. Not a patch of skin peeped out.
"Hu––" Alarmed by the wind, the scarred man had pulled at his reins and the carriage had scuttled to a stop. Now that it seemed to have dissipated, he cracked his whip again.
The terrified horses came upon the deadly patch of mountain road and, seeing that the area was empty, suddenly calmed down, too. Now, the clipping trots of the horses advanced, gliding smoothly past the spot, and came toward the jagged part.
Xue Xian could not move the bottom half of his body, nor could he feel it. He used only his upper body to ascend up the side of the mountain and managed to haul himself onto the uphill mountain path, narrowly avoiding the scarred man's eyeline.
But his tail missed its landing, and in the precise moment that the scarred man was turning the corner with the carriages, the unfortunate tail fell with a xiu–– and swung limply down the side of the mountain so that it hung right in front of the scarred man.
The scarred man gaped.
Xuanmin, who stood on the same uphill part of the path as Xue Xian, sighed with exasperation. Surreptitiously, he crept down to the beast's tail, and yanked it away from the path.
---
Chapter 39: Theatre Troupe (IV)
The weather was humid and dark in these parts, so the snow didn't build up as fast as it might elsewhere. There was only a thin layer of white along the mountain path, and, as groups of people traversed it over the course of the day, some parts had turned to sleet and then hardened into ice. It was dangerously slippery. The horse at the front of the train was still snorting and whinnying endlessly, and only moved when struck by the whip, hurtling between starting and stopping.
But no matter how slowly they were going, they would only have to go a little bit further to come upon that pile of fallen boulders.
"They really have... no idea at all?" Jiang Shining asked, his neck stiff and his face contorting with fear as he waited for Xuanmin or Xue Xian to respond.
Xue Xian said, "I wouldn't say they have no idea at all. If you look at them––" He jutted his chin in the general direction of the other carriages–– "That horse has been terrified this whole time. And earlier, when we were at the bridge, both the scarred man and Old Li seemed really reluctant to come here, too. There's something in them that's telling them to avoid this route."
When humans got the sense that something bad was coming up, of course they wanted to avoid it.
Despite not having use of his legs, the dragon was not one to sit quietly. Unable to stand up and bend over to look out the window, he had instead managed to get his entire body to lean horizontally on the bench and hang his head on the windowsill. Xuanmin had no choice but to scoot to the very edge in order to give Xue Xian the space he needed. When he had given the dragon his hand earlier, it seemed to have balanced him out, and he now had the strength to move his upper body this way and that again.
All this had started out with Xuanmin coming across a couple of demons and capturing them with the intention of sending them out of the living realm. How had they ended up like this?
As Jiang Shining sat on his side of the carriage, the shaking hand that fidgeted with his robe betrayed his anxiety.
Twenty-Seven happened to accidentally graze him with his knee, and could feel the emotion on the scholar. He couldn't help but glance at Jiang Shining with his half-blind eyes and say, "I've never seen a ghost so scared of ghosts."
Jiang Shining shot back, "Remember when you were screaming and crying for your parents back in the tomb?"
Hurt by Jiang Shining's comment, Twenty-Seven made an irritated tsk noise and turned away, no longer in the mood to mock him.
He was young and not all that courageous –– just extremely stubborn and deathly attached to his pride. He tried to pretend to be brave as much as he could, but what had happened at Gravestone Island had been beyond his limits, so his true feelings had been exposed.
In contrast, Lu Nineteen had begun seeing things that normal people could not see from a very young age, and, being used to encountering all sorts of strange and magical things, he naturally had never been afraid of them.
It was only now that Twenty-Seven had absorbed some of Nineteen's personality that he could truly feel a bit calmer.
Twenty-Seven calmed down, and Jiang Shining had been chastised by his comment –– but now Stone Zhang began acting up.
When he heard that Jiang Shining was a ghost, he began to feel very unwell. His mung-bean eyes swivelled around the carriage, taking in his companions. Out of the five "people" here, apart from him, all the others were deeply abnormal... and in the carriage in front of him, and the carriage in front of that, and even the animals drawing the carriages... none of them were alive...
Dear god, what in the world was going on!
Stone Zhang wanted to cry. He clutched the heater closer and pressed back into the carriage wall, as though he could use his sheer will and cowardice to turn his potbellied frame flat, and disappear.
"A bit more––" Xue Xian said, staring out the window. "Wait for the horse to take a couple more steps."
The train had advanced by a huge chunk. The pile of rocks on the bend of the winding path below, which they previously had to crane their necks to see in the distance, was now almost beneath their feet. As the carriage eked closer to the pile, all people had to do was look directly down the side of the mountain at the next curve of the road, and see the crushed carriage.
And the closer they got to the pile, the more the horses were agitated. It was obvious just from the sounds of the scarred man trying every trick in the book to get the horses to obey him. And maybe it was because the atmosphere in the group was so high-strung, but the scarred man's voice sounded increasingly panicked, and voices had begun to emerge from the carriages in the front as the troupe members murmured amongst each other.
It was a highly stressful environment.
"Do you think they'll look out of the window and see it?" Jiang Shining couldn't help but ask.
"No," Xuanmin said matter-of-factly.
He hated to speak, and even when he had to explain something, he only discussed the most vital details. This categorical and straightforward approach could be highly reassuring, because it left no room for anyone to suspect that he had left something out.
Jiang Shining felt better. But Stone Zhang asked, "How are you so sure?"
"Because they're scared too! Stop asking so many questions," Xue Xian snapped. He was still facing out of the window and did not bother to look at Stone Zhang before saying, "Your tongue seems to be the only lean meat across your entire body. I should cut it off and use it to make wine."
Make wine...
Xuanmin frowned, but said nothing.
The dragon being argumentative was one thing, but did he really have to conjure up such disgusting images?
Xuanmin scanned the outside, then lifted his second hand and patted Xue Xian on the shoulder. "I'm going out."
Stunned, Xue Xian turned to him. "You?"
"Yes." It's that, or sit around in here listening to certain people say all kinds of creepy nonsense. If I listen to too much of it, I'll lose my appetite for the next ten days.
"Can you do it?" Xue Xian squinted. "The carriage is going to reach it really soon. Can you make it in time?"
Xuanmin nudged his shoulder, silently asking him to get away from the window and sit back properly on his seat. Then, he unhooked the copper coin pendant from his hip and stepped over Xue Xian's head.
He was too tall for the tiny carriage, and had to half-bend. One of his hands was still being gripped by Xue Xian, and he used that to help push himself out of the carriage door. His white monk's robe was like the wind and snow blowing past them all –– in one flurry, he was gone.
Seeing this, Stone Zhang was dumbfounded. Then, he rushed to the window, and saw that that snow-white shadow had already flipped down to the next stretch of road below. Xuanmin made no noise –– not a single pebble was disturbed.
The group inside the carriage seemed struck by the elegant manner in which Xuanmin had departed –– all except Xue Xian...
He snorted. It was so-so, he thought. Still not as good as me.
Despite this, he still nudged himself across the bench so that he now sat where Xuanmin had been. With one hand pressed on the heavy curtain, he stared out and watched as Xuanmin made his way across the mountain road.
Xuanmin stood steadily on top of the boulder pile. Although his feet rested on tiny rocks the size of fists, he did not allow them to teeter even slightly. Raising his head, Xuanmin looked at the side of the mountain –– between the uphill part of the path and the downhill part, there was an enormous chunk of rock missing, so that even the uphill section looked fragile, as though any further weight would send everything sliding down again.
That missing chunk was the pile on which Xuanmin stood. Some of these boulders were around half his height –– with a landslide that violent, never mind wooden carriages, even metal carriages would be flattened.
Apart from the corner of a carriage that they had spied from afar, and a blue cloth curtain, everything else was buried tightly underneath the pile of rocks, and the corpses probably did not even look human anymore. Even if they were one day unearthed, they would probably be shattered in pieces and strewn all over.
Xuanmin thought for a while, then had an idea.
Xue Xian was not the only one monitoring all of Xuanmin's movements –– Stone Zhang and Jiang Shining were both jostling for space at the window, and even Twenty-Seven could not help but peer out.
"What are you craning your neck for?" Xue Xian snapped at the boy. "You were out for seven days, and now your eyes can see normally again?"
Neutrally, Twenty-Seven replied, "Thank you for your concern. Unfortunately, my vision is actually even blurrier."
The blurrier his vision, the blinder he was becoming, and the more qi he could see, and naturally qi silhouettes were not crystal clear.
Actually, Xue Xian was quite curious. As a mythical beast, his vision was of course far sharper than that of normal humans, and he could hardly imagine what Lu Nineteen's... and now Lu Twenty-Seven's worlds looked like.
"Just looking at you from this distance, I can't tell if you're human or beast," Twenty-Seven said, describing his perspective.
But...
That did not sound right at all –– it sounded much more like the boy was needling him.
"That means you're getting better at seeing qi," Xue Xian said. Then, miffed, he went back to looking at Xuanmin outside.
From his angle, he could see everything that Xuanmin was doing.
They say that swords, especially those magical swords in legends, need to be awakened by fresh blood –– only the blood can unlock their true potential, and then they're able to slice through wind and chop through water. And although Xuanmin's copper coin pendant had neither cutting edge nor sharp point, for some reason, they needed to be awakened by blood, too.
Xue Xian watched as Xuanmin cut another gash across his fingertip and rubbed his blood onto the surface of the coins.
And then that weng–– sound came back and the coins seemed to come to life. They began to lightly quiver, emitting a lugubrious cry that echoed out faintly into the howling snowstorm. As Xue Xian heard this noise, something in his ear felt uncomfortable, and he frowned.
Xuanmin arranged the five coins of the pendant in five positions on his palm –– north, south, east, west, and center. Then, he took out some talismanic paper from his chest pocket –- but the talismans were empty, with no spell inscribed on them at all.
He folded the yellow sheets and bent down to arrange them in the four cardinal directions, weighed down by rocks. Next, the fingers of his right hand hovered over the copper coins in his left hand, and his pale lips parted, as though reciting a prayer.
But it didn't seem like a full prayer –– more like a short, fragmented phrase.
And with that, the copper coins that had previously been resting on Xuanmin's palm now hovered above and began to spin slowly around.
As Xuanmin uttered what appeared to be a Buddhist chant and brushed the east-facing coin, the east-facing talisman, quivering beneath its rock, suddenly began to spew a thin stream of blood, as though an invisible hand had dipped a brush in crimson ink and were steadily inscribing talismanic text.
When the text had been written, Xuanmin spun the hovering ring of coins in his hand for another half-circle, then put away that invisible brush.
Next was south;
Then north;
And finally west...
In the instant that the four talismans had been completed, an enormous gust of wind picked up –– it sounded like the roar of a tiger and the howl of a wolf. Blown by the wind, the heavy curtain of the carriage flapped violently against Stone Zhang's head.
Stone Zhang felt that he was the unluckiest man in the world. He stroked his stinging face, then reached out and tore the entire curtain away from the window –– the carriage was now completely vulnerable to the wind, and a chilling winter air blasted inside, carrying a thin stream of snow.
The snow was cold and bristling, and blew so hard against their faces that Stone Zhang and Jiang Shining shut their eyes as they could.
They blinked hard, and lifted a hand to block their foreheads –– only then could they open their eyes and look out at the scene on the mountain again.
"Ah––" Stone Zhang gasped.
The wind that Xuanmin had summoned had lifted the entire ground from the mountain road –– the boulders and the carriages crushed below were now floating in the air, entirely lifted by that savage wind, and slowly gliding away from the path.
As the mass of earth and debris hung in the air, Xuanmin, still standing on two small blocks of stone, lifted his left foot and nonchalantly kicked it.
And as though dragged by a thousand-jin weight, everything beneath Xuanmin's feet instantly ejected themselves into the gap of the valley below.
Soon, a faint, muffled long–– long–– drumming sound emerged from the valley.
"Is he going to blow up the mountain?" Stone Zhang asked idiotically.
"Then he should throw you into the explosion," Xue Xian spat, then added, "He probably buried it."
Just as Xue Xian had guessed, the falling rocks' impact could not be underestimated. Even before they had fully fallen to the ground, the wet, soft mud of the valley below had caved into a deep crater, into which the carcasses of the troupe's members and horses, as well as the debris from their carriages, fell, swiftly buried beneath the pile of stone, which gently arranged itself into a grave.
The falling snow began to stick to those shattered boulders and lingered, so that, by the time the dust settled and the roaring wind vanished, there was only a thin layer of white peeking out from the valley, as though the grave had been covered with a smatter of joss paper money.
Thus, Xuanmin had performed a simple set of funeral rites...
Xuanmin rubbed the blood away from his copper coin pendant and hooked it back onto his hip. Then he turned to the grave and bowed in a Buddhist greeting.
Then, his cloudlike monk's robe billowed in the wind, and with a light sweep of the hemp cloth, he disappeared into the thick forest of the valley.
To Xuanmin, leaping back up the steep side of the mountain was not actually more difficult than leaping down from it. Within a few light steps, he had already bounded up to the part of the mountain path where the pile of rocks had previously been. The theatre troupe's carriages finally turned that last corner and were coming directly his way. He could hear the shouts of the scarred man, and soon that stubborn horse's muzzle would come into view, too.
In order to avoid being seen by the scarred man, Xuanmin kicked the earth and used the momentum to leap higher up onto the mountain, planning to approach the carriage from above. Just as he made to return to Xue Xian and the others, he suddenly noticed that, in an area slightly removed from the path, there remained a small pile of rock, and that beneath those rocks were two anonymous bodies.
That pile had just happened to have been concealed by the jaggedness of the mountain, and, from the point at which Xuanmin had first landed onto the path, he had not been able to see it.
It seemed that, when the landslide had crushed the main train, two people had been able to extricate themselves and escape, only to be killed by a second stream of falling rocks.
The carriage was going to appear any instant now, but Xuanmin did not at all have the time to sweep down and lay his talismans again.
And just before the imminent disaster, the long silhouette of a black dragon emerged from behind the mountain.
Xue Xian!
This beast insisted on doing everything with excessive flair. Two bolts of lightning struck down onto the boulders that had crushed the two performers, and the boulders dutifully erupted into a million tiny pieces. The dragon wordlessly approached, wrapped in a torrent of wind, and, with a nod of his head, the wind swept up the two bodies and the rock dust, and sent them tumbling down the side of the mountain. They disappeared into that thick forest in the valley.
Hu–––
The wind settled again, and the trees stopped shaking too.
Those two bodies fell to the ground and were swiftly covered by the dense mass of dust. Not a patch of skin peeped out.
"Hu––" Alarmed by the wind, the scarred man had pulled at his reins and the carriage had scuttled to a stop. Now that it seemed to have dissipated, he cracked his whip again.
The terrified horses came upon the deadly patch of mountain road and, seeing that the area was empty, suddenly calmed down, too. Now, the clipping trots of the horses advanced, gliding smoothly past the spot, and came toward the jagged part.
Xue Xian could not move the bottom half of his body, nor could he feel it. He used only his upper body to ascend up the side of the mountain and managed to haul himself onto the uphill mountain path, narrowly avoiding the scarred man's eyeline.
But his tail missed its landing, and in the precise moment that the scarred man was turning the corner with the carriages, the unfortunate tail fell with a xiu–– and swung limply down the side of the mountain so that it hung right in front of the scarred man.
The scarred man gaped.
Xuanmin, who stood on the same uphill part of the path as Xue Xian, sighed with exasperation. Surreptitiously, he crept down to the beast's tail, and yanked it away from the path.
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