"At midnight, something beneath this stone slab will come out!"
Those were the words Li Lao Er, the "current Temple Master" of Willow Forest Temple, had spoken before going down the mountain.
Lin Xiaosu did not believe a single punctuation mark of it.
He was a college graduate with higher education. He had also taken the civil service exam once and was currently a "prospective" civil servant preparing for his second attempt. How could he believe that something would crawl out from inside an entire slab of bluestone?
But what could he do?
He had promised Li Lao Er that he would guard Willow Forest Temple for one night!
The whole thing began because Li Lao Er's wife had fallen ill. Whenever this auntie had an episode, she would go crying to Lin Xiaosu's mother. Once she started, she could not stop. Even twenty years later, she could tearfully recount how Li Lao Er had peeked at Widow Feng bathing when he was young.
Out of consideration for their being neighbors, for all the tasty food this second auntie had given him, and of course because her daughter Hu Ya had played naked with him since childhood, Lin Xiaosu had come to find his second uncle and bring him down the mountain.
Who could have imagined that he had come up just fine, only to be unable to leave?
His second uncle said that today was an "Astrological Shift Day," and someone had to remain at the temple to suppress the "Mystic Gate." Otherwise, something would crawl out from beneath it at midnight.
It was not as if Lin Xiaosu had not objected, but the old man was stubborn as hell.
Thinking of Hu Ya's increasingly ample chest, Lin Xiaosu finally got carried away and slapped his chest. "Second Uncle, stop agonizing over it. I'll help you guard the temple, all right?"
The moment he made that promise, his second uncle happily went home to comfort his wife over her trauma from twenty years ago, leaving Lin Xiaosu alone on the windy mountaintop in complete disarray...
Fortunately, his second uncle had a daughter.
He had barely gone down the mountain when his daughter came up.
Carrying a basket, she brought Lin Xiaosu dinner.
Lin Xiaosu used to have psychological trauma whenever it came to Hu Ya's cooking. Why?
That girl was a real oddball. She caught rabbits in the mountains, felt for frogs in the fields, dragged huge snakes out of rock crevices by their tails, and poked wild boars in the ass with enormous sticks. She poked the sows until they avoided her like a ghost, and poked the boars until they were too ashamed to show their faces...
Without exception, all that game ended up in her pot. Lin Xiaosu had been tricked into eating who knew how much of it. Every time he ate her food, he had developed the habit of checking the bones first, to see whether what he was eating was anything respectable.
Today's chicken should have been fairly respectable.
But Hu Ya was currently lying on the bluestone slab, sprawled on her back with her limbs spread wide, her clothes half-open. Was that sleeping posture respectable?
That was hard to say.
Lin Xiaosu glanced at the time on his phone again...
There was one final minute until midnight.
He turned off his phone and looked at Hu Ya, who was sprawled on the ground. He told himself, Once midnight passes, I'll have fulfilled Second Uncle's request. I'll carry her to the bed in the back to sleep. The ground is cold...
Midnight arrived!
The mountain did not shake, and the ground did not move.
Second Uncle really had spun a load of nonsense with a straight face!
Just as Lin Xiaosu inwardly confirmed that "of course"...
A faint glimmer flashed past.
It was exceedingly weak, like starlight in the sky, or perhaps a firefly that had flown into the temple.
It came from the bluestone slab beneath his butt.
Lin Xiaosu took three steps forward, stopped above the point of light, and lay down. Pressing one eye against the glimmer, he tried to see what exactly was inside the stone.
The instant he looked, his entire body froze into stone!
The utterly unremarkable rock from daytime seemed to have opened a skylight at that moment...
Through that "skylight"...
Inside the stone lay an endless river of stars.
Within the starry river stood an ancient stone stele.
On the stele was a bare little tree with only one branch. More than ten leaves grew from that branch, every leaf radiating seven-colored light. They were extraordinarily strange, as though each were a miniature universe.
Beneath the stele rested a crystal coffin, with clouds and rosy mist drifting inside it.
The moment Lin Xiaosu's gaze fell into the coffin, his mind shook violently. There was someone inside—a female corpse lying quietly within.
Clouds and rosy mist covered everything beneath her neck, leaving only her face exposed. Yet even that face alone gave Lin Xiaosu the greatest shock.
Descriptions like "fish sank and geese fell, the moon hid and flowers blushed" were probably not enough to describe her...
She did not seem dead.
She seemed to be quietly asleep beneath this vast starry sky.
The beauty of her sleeping posture was beyond the ability of any painter in the world to capture.
At some unknown moment, Lin Xiaosu felt his consciousness shift. He became a tiny silver fish, swimming above that exquisite face and silently gazing at the sleeping fairy.
Suddenly, a leaf atop the stone stele twitched, and a drop of dew fell.
The dew glimmered with seven-colored light, as though it had crossed endless time and space before falling downward.
It was about to land on the female corpse's eyelid.
Lin Xiaosu was startled and instinctively blocked it.
The instant he did, an icy sensation pierced his bones within his sea of consciousness. A mysterious message entered his mind: Heavenly Dao Insightful Eye, perceive the smallest details, Time Reversal...
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