Faceless

After another half hour, Li Yunxin finally digested all that prayer power and let out a long breath.

He slowly uncrossed his legs, waiting until the numbness and pain had faded before getting down bit by bit. He stripped off his clothes, which had been soaked through and then dried stiff, lifted the large redwood chest trimmed with brass, and found a clean set to put on.

He and Liu Laodao were about the same height and build. Liu Laodao's Daoist robes fit him well enough.

No lamp had been lit in the room; only the faint crescent moonlight shone through. But cultivators' bodies had been tempered by spiritual power, and most possessed keen eyes and ears. Thus, Li Yunxin could see clearly even without a lamp. Besides, lamps were not particularly bright, and the room still reeked of smoke and scorching fire—a smell he had yet to get used to.

He poured himself another cup of cold tea and drank it. It did not quench his thirst, so he picked up the teapot and tilted his head back to drink straight from it.

The moment he looked up, he saw the window.

A mouthful of water went down the wrong pipe and into his lungs. The teapot shattered on the floor with a crack, and he shuddered from head to toe in fright—what the hell kind of ghost was that?!

He was not afraid of ghosts. But no matter how bold a person was, they could not help being startled by suddenly seeing such a sight—

Because the room was dark, the shadow outside the window stood out with particular clarity. A figure was clinging to the window, head down and body raised! Long hair hung down and swayed faintly.

The shadow was fainter than an ordinary shadow, almost translucent. Yet Li Yunxin could still make out its movements—it was scratching at the window paper, as if trying to get inside.

"Fuck..." Li Yunxin steadied himself, his eyes wide as he stared fixedly at the thing.

He knew it might be a ghost.

Setting aside the illusion created by the little cat demon in the woods, this was the first ghost he had ever actually seen. He had encountered ghosts before, but he could only sense them as yin spirits, much like the cat demon. Seeing one with his own eyes was a first.

For cultivators, the existence of ghosts was beyond doubt. Naturally, there were ways to see them—use special medicines, or cultivate a certain divine ability and open one's heavenly eye. But who would go looking for trouble and do something like that for no reason?

Cultivators could already sense and locate them with spiritual power. No one would be so foolish as to insist on seeing them—seeing every miserable form frozen at the moment of death.

Yet right now, Li Yunxin felt that he truly was seeing one.

This was a temple! It even had Incense and Fire Prayer Power!

Never mind why he could suddenly see ghosts—what kind of ghost had a death wish so badly that it would run into a temple?!

He stood stunned for a while before walking to the door and opening it. When he pushed it open and glanced to the side, the female ghost happened to turn her head and look at him too.

There were no features on her face. Her body was covered in blood. With her neck stretched out at an extremely bizarre angle, she examined him closely.

Li Yunxin looked into the courtyard again and saw Liu Laodao lying on the ground. Ignoring the ghost, he hurried to Liu Laodao's side, crouched down, picked up his hand, and took his pulse.

Liu Laodao was fifty-four this year. In this age, he ought to have been an old man with great-grandchildren. Had an ordinary person his age suffered such a fright, he might have fallen ill beyond recovery and breathed his last. Fortunately, though he was merely a worldly painter, he had cultivated some qi-refining methods, and his body was far sturdier than most.

His pulse was fine. He was merely unconscious.

Only then did Li Yunxin notice the oil-paper packet by his hand. He opened it and found braised beef inside.

A strange feeling rose in his heart, because he knew it was probably for him.

Aside from his parents in this world... was Liu Laodao the third person to treat him "well"?

For a moment, he was somewhat dazed. Because of certain experiences in his previous life, Li Yunxin could not truly understand something like "kindness." In this life, he could sense it and accept it, but to go a step further... was indeed difficult.

After all, in his previous life, it had been...

Remembering those things made irritation surge in his chest, so he stopped thinking about them.

Holding the oil-paper packet in his left hand, he stood up, picked up a slice of beef, and chewed it slowly. Then he looked up at the ghost and asked, "What do you want with me?"

The ghost was still clinging to the window.

Only, her neck had twisted to a grotesque angle, keeping that featureless face turned toward him as she swayed faintly, seeming to inspect him over and over, as though confirming something.

Li Yunxin grew a little impatient. He had plenty of ways to deal with this kind of ghost—even if this one was somewhat unusual.

After people died, their souls would be taken away by the Black-and-White Yamas. The two Yamas possessed boundless divine abilities; creating millions upon millions of incarnations was no difficult task for them. Yet under certain special circumstances, ghosts would temporarily fail to enter reincarnation and instead linger in the world.

Generally speaking, ghosts retained the appearance they had at the moment of death. But if, after death, their corpses were occupied by something else, they became Faceless Ghosts.

He could now use a little spiritual power. Though he could not fully display the strength of the Transformation Realm, as the properly trained Danqing Daoist of the Artistic Realm or Void Realm, he was still far beyond the worldly painters of the Artistic Realm and Void Realm.

He brought two fingers together and traced lightly through the air, constructing a restraint with spiritual power. With a flick of his wrist, he could make this ghost suffer properly.

Ghosts were not people. No matter how shrewd and seasoned they had been in life, once they became ghosts, they turned muddleheaded. Living people possessed divine souls, and part of those divine souls was hidden within their innate fleshly bodies. Once the body was gone, the divine soul was damaged, and much of their intelligence naturally vanished as well. Thus, to communicate pleasantly with ghosts, most of the time one first had to make them suffer a little, as if taming wild beasts, before they would obediently speak.

But just as his fingers were about to flick out, Li Yunxin noticed the Faceless Ghost's forehead—

There was a spot of red.

His heart skipped a beat, and he thought of how Qiao Jiaxin had died that night.

A swordsman had touched her forehead with the tip of his sword. w.ａnｓh.ｍ

And the blood on her body... was it not a bloody mark across her abdomen?

It was... Qiao Jiaxin's ghost.

That day had not been some random dream after all. He truly had met the Black-and-White Yamas in his dream. The two Yamas had said he resembled someone who had "fought his way into the Hall of Senluo" a thousand years ago, then hurriedly departed. They had also said that souls connected to him would not be bound by the rules.

So they truly were not bound by them.

He quickly dispersed the simple restraint between his fingers. "You are... Qiao Jiaxin? Are you Qiao Jiaxin?"

But after he asked that, the ghost suddenly froze. Then her head snapped up, and she looked northward. Immediately afterward, using both hands and feet, she crawled behind the house at a speed so fast it made one's hair stand on end.

Li Yunxin hurriedly shouted, "Wait!"

He gathered spiritual power and leaped onto the roof in a single bound. But when he looked behind the house, there were only three or four plots of early spring vegetables. The ghost was nowhere to be seen.

Though cities in this age were large, they could not compare to the "big cities" of his former world. The weather had been rather dry recently, and without pollution, visibility was excellent. Combined with his exceptionally sharp eyesight from cultivation, when he stood on the roof and glanced in the direction the ghost had just been looking, he discovered pinpricks of firelight outside the city.

The firelight was extremely faint, so it should have been far away. It was probably in the outskirts, where farmers lived.

Someone had lit torches on such a night. Perhaps something had happened—someone's household might have suffered a death, or perhaps thieves had come calling.

Li Yunxin did not know whether those lights had anything to do with the ghost's departure. He sighed softly and jumped down from the roof.

Perhaps she'll come again, he thought.