The First Trial

After noon, A Chan locked the door and went to the West Market.

The West Market had goods from all over the country, and was very comprehensive, but the things she needed were hard to buy all in one place.

She found a shop with a "Hunt" sign. The shop was small and had no goods inside, only an old man in a gray robe sitting lazily behind the counter.

Seeing a young and beautiful young lady walk into the shop, the old man raised his eyelids. "Young lady, did you come to the wrong place?"

"I want to find some things," A Chan said directly.

Hearing her words, the old man straightened up. "What does the young lady want to find?"

"Black water earth lichen over thirty years old, soil from a century-old grave, fresh, and a section of hollow locust tree trunk at least fifty years old."

The old man quickly recorded with a pen. After A Chan finished speaking, he had written two sheets of paper.

"These three items are not worth much, but they are a bit troublesome to find. The price is fifty taels of silver, with a deposit of fifteen taels. Can the young lady accept?"

"Yes." A Chan took out two silver ingots and pushed them to the old man.

The old man weighed the silver, then took out a square seal and stamped it on the two sheets of paper. He then took out a thumb-length wooden token from under the counter, engraved with the character "Hunt".

He pushed one stamped sheet of paper and the wooden token to A Chan, and said to her, "This is our Hunt Shop's token. Three days later, the young lady can come here with the remaining money and this token to collect the items."

A Chan put away the paper and the wooden token, nodded slightly at the old man, and turned to leave the shop.

The Hunt Shop was a relatively formal organization under official supervision, otherwise, they wouldn't have opened a shop so openly in the West Market.

They would find special items according to the customer's needs. Although the price was not cheap, the goods were genuine.

If there was a problem with the goods, or if the people from the shop ran away, A Chan could report them to the government office with the Hunt Shop's token, and it would be accepted.

After A Chan left, the old man shook the paper listing the three items and shouted to the back, "Doggy, we have a job."

A moment later, the cloth curtain hanging on the back door was lifted, and a burly man about two meters tall bent his waist and walked in.

"Old man, what's the job this time?"

The old man handed the paper to the burly man. "It's a small job. The lichen shop happens to have some left. We can go to Yi County for the grave soil. There are many century-old graves there. It'll take a day to go and come back."

Doggy nodded. "I'll have Er Gou go later. What about the hollow locust tree?"

"The locust tree, we'll have to go into Black Mountain. There's a locust grove there, but that place isn't clean. You have to go during the day. You'll have to go yourself."

"Understood." Doggy readily agreed, then asked curiously, "Old man, what are these three things for?"

The old man shook his head. "They are all things with strong yin energy. I've never seen this combination before."

As the shopkeeper of the Hunt Shop, his knowledge was naturally extensive. He could infer what the customer wanted to do from the items they requested.

But of the three things the customer wanted, only the lichen was common. The other two had never been requested by anyone before.

A Chan left the shop and did not go straight home.

She detoured to the stall selling ironware and bought a hammer and a chisel, then went to the incense stall and bought a mortar and a syringe.

Finally, she went to the jade stall that had been investigated by the Mingjing Division before.

The unforgettable fat shopkeeper was currently recommending a jade tea set to a customer at his stall. The customer seemed very satisfied and readily paid with silver notes. The fat shopkeeper skillfully packed the tea set into a brocade box and presented it to the customer.

After sending the customer away with a smile, the fat shopkeeper turned and saw A Chan, who had been standing there watching for a while.

"Young lady, are you here to buy jade?"

A Chan thought about how to say it without sounding abrupt, and finally decided to be direct.

"When your stall had trouble that day, I happened to be there too."

The fat shopkeeper was stunned for a moment, but did not change his expression. He listened to her continue.

"I wanted to ask, shopkeeper, do you still have the jade that had problems at your stall?"

"They're still here, but they turn to powder with a little force. I'm afraid they can't be used anymore." The fat shopkeeper was honest. He didn't want to throw them away, but he felt it was a loss to throw them all away.

The broken jade items combined could fill almost half a pocket, which made him heartache just thinking about it.

"To be honest, shopkeeper, I need jade powder for making scented pills recently, so I wanted to buy some."

"Is that so..." The fat shopkeeper pondered for a moment. "If the young lady can take all of them, ten taels of silver will be fine."

He didn't lack ten taels of silver, but being able to sell a pile of useless things for this price could barely buy him some peace of mind.

"Okay, I'll take them." A Chan agreed.

The shopkeeper asked A Chan to wait a moment and had a young apprentice fetch the bag of broken jade.

When the items were delivered, A Chan opened the bag and casually flipped through it. The broken jade inside had indeed been inhabited by Snow Needle Snakes.

She patted the jade powder off her hands, tied up the bag, and took out a ten-tael silver ingot from her sleeve pocket and handed it to the shopkeeper.

This time, the things A Chan bought were quite heavy for her. Unfortunately, no one could help her carry them, so she had to walk a bit and rest. It took her over an hour to finally get home.

Upon arriving home, she casually placed the bag of jade by the door. She hadn't lied to the shopkeeper; this jade powder, apart from being used for incense, really had no other use.

This jade was tainted with the breath of Snow Needle Snakes, and was very effective in driving away ordinary snakes, insects, rats, and ants. If it weren't for Lady Xiao Lin's sudden accident, A Chan would have bought them long ago.

Of course, the jade powder was just a casual purchase. Today, besides sending people to find the three materials, she went to the West Market to buy tools.

She took out the hammer and chisel, and also brought out the Yin Willow wooden stake she had bought earlier in the West Market.

A Chan had only seen others do handicrafts before; doing it herself was a different feeling.

She wanted to carve a bowl shape out of the Yin Willow, but she underestimated the wood's hardness. From dawn until the sun set in the west, she finally finished.

When she put down the chisel, her hands were already blistered.

A Chan ignored her hands. She glanced at the sky and carried the willow wood, which now had a hollowed-out groove, to the backyard.

The next day, the willow wood was only slightly damp. Three days later, the groove carved into the willow wood was actually filled with water.

Exactly three days had passed, and A Chan retrieved the items she had bought from the West Market, then moved the willow wood back inside.

As the sun set, she closed the doors and windows, leaving only an oil lamp lit inside.

She took out the three materials she had spent fifty taels of silver to acquire.

The hollow part of the locust wood was used. The wood was dark inside, with black tree knots. A Chan knocked off each knot, ground them into powder with a mortar, and set them aside.

Then, she also ground the Black Water Earth Clothes into pieces and poured them with the tree knot powder into the Yin Willow groove.

A Chan got to work, mixing the two powders with the water in the groove. She kneaded them like dough, and finally sprinkled sifted Grave White Soil on top to bind them.

She divided the kneaded dough into eight portions, put them into syringes, and squeezed out thin incense sticks.

At first, A Chan's hands trembled, and the incense sticks she squeezed out were wavy. Later, she gradually got the hang of it.

The materials in her hands only made less than a hundred incense sticks. These incense sticks needed to be air-dried for three days to be completed.

Three days later, A Chan obtained ninety-two finished incense sticks; the rest had broken.

She divided the incense into two portions and stored them in wooden boxes.

One portion contained forty-nine incense sticks, and the remaining portion was put away.

That night, at midnight, A Chan, who usually went to bed early, went downstairs fully dressed. She came to the wooden table, where only the wooden box containing the incense sticks and a bowl filled with rice were placed. A yellow paper with Lady Xiao Lin's name and birthdate was pressed under the bowl.

This was what A Chan had asked Mama Sun for before she left.

She sat on the wooden stool, took an incense stick from the box, lit it with a tinderbox, and then inserted it into the bowl.

That night, she sat by the table the entire time, lighting a total of seven incense sticks. The last incense stick only finished burning at the fifth watch.

The room was quiet, and nothing happened.

A Chan didn't mind. She closed the box and went upstairs to catch up on sleep.

The next day, the third day... the sixth day were the same.

These days, A Chan went downstairs to light incense punctually at midnight every night. After staying up for seven consecutive nights, today, only seven incense sticks remained in the wooden box.

She lit an incense stick and sat on the wooden stool, propping her chin with one hand, staring at the small red glow on the incense stick.

Unknowingly, the originally pitch-black room suddenly lit up.

The room hadn't changed, and the incense in the bowl was still burning, but the one sitting on the stool was no longer a person, but a snow-white fox.

This was A Chan's appearance before she seized a body.

The fox was bound by six black chains. The chains connected to the void, with no end in sight.

As A Chan tried to move her hand, the fox moved its front paws. She vaguely realized that she might be in an inner vision.

It was said that people had an inner landscape within their bodies, which was usually impossible to glimpse. Today, for some reason, she was able to enter it?

Before A Chan could figure out the reason, a black shadow shrouded in smoke appeared out of thin air.

"Why, am, I, here?"

The voice was intermittent, but it was familiar – Lady Xiao Lin's voice.

After lighting the Soul-Guiding Incense for seven consecutive days, she had finally managed to forcibly summon Lady Xiao Lin's sealed soul.