Past the little vegetable garden, the medicinal herb field lay on the slope ahead.
As he walked, Chi Ke frowned.
Hunter, walking ahead of him, was not following the furrows. He was stepping on the raised beds...
In an instant, a chill shot from the soles of his feet up his spine and straight to the crown of his head. His limbs went weak, and he could barely stand.
He drew his hand crossbow and gritted his teeth, forcing his arm up. Aiming at Hunter's back, he pulled the trigger!
Hunter vanished the moment the bolt struck him, accompanied by a sizzling sound like burning charcoal falling into water. The bolt flew straight on into the grass.
In the blink of an eye, everything around him turned pitch-black. The bright daylight vanished without a trace. It was still the dead of night. Dawn had never come.
This is bad, Chi Ke thought. He really had run into a ghost.
His feet stood on the soft soil of the vegetable patch. He could barely make out the nearby trees and the outline of the Thatched Hut, and could not tell whether he was trapped in a dream or really standing at the bottom of the valley. Forcing himself to stay calm, he hurriedly took out a spare bolt, but his hands shook so badly that he could not fit it into the groove. Steeling himself, he simply gripped it like a short spear.
Suddenly, an inexplicable chill approached, like a gust of cold wind.
Instinctively, he swung his hand hard into the empty air behind him.
The chill abruptly retreated. In the pitch darkness, he could not see what had been there.
A sharp pain came from his finger. In his panic, he had accidentally cut himself on the arrowhead. Since it hurt, this was no dream.
Then things were even worse...
There was no time to wonder how he had ended up down the mountain. His most pressing need was light. He remembered that the Thatched Hut had all sorts of supplies, including dry firewood and flint kept ready year-round.
He turned and ran, only to trip over a vegetable trellis.
Who cared about dignity now? He scrambled and crawled toward the Thatched Hut. Fortunately, he often tended the garden to soothe his spirit and knew it well.
Stumbling along, he finally felt his way to the fence.
Following it to the courtyard gate, he felt that chill approach again and hurriedly swung the bolt to defend himself.
A jumble of voices wormed into his ears. Rustling whispers spoke of how rare spirit medicine was, mingled with stern reprimands from his Lineage elders and even the gentle calls of his late mother.
Chi Ke knew they were all false, but he desperately wanted to turn around and look, to hear his mother's loving reminders once more...
Suppressing the urge to turn, he rammed the courtyard gate open and hurried forward, silently counting his steps.
"Eight, nine, ten..."
When he stopped and raised his hand, it touched the door exactly where he expected. He pulled away the wooden stick serving as a lock, went inside, slammed the door, and secured the bar. Fighting the nausea brought on by his frantic breathing, he felt through the even darker room from memory, finding the moxa and then the flint.
The wind rose outside.
Squeezing through the narrow gap in the door, it made a wheezing sound like air leaking from a dying person's throat...
His hand shook, and the moxa he had finally found fell to the floor. He could see nothing in the darkness. Kneeling, he groped desperately with trembling hands until he finally gathered the dry moxa again.
Gripping the fire striker and flint, he struck them hard.
After several attempts, he finally knocked loose a few fleeting sparks that flashed for the briefest instant in the darkness.
Those tiny, insignificant points of light gave the nearly despairing Chi Ke a sliver of hope. His head felt dizzy. He struggled to keep his imagination from running wild. The more he thought, the easier it would be to fall under an evil influence. These uncanny things were truly targeting the human heart.
Scrape... crack...
He struck again and again, until more sparks finally scattered onto the moxa.
Steady. I have to stay steady!
Forcing his rapid breathing under control, he leaned close to the moxa and blew carefully. The tiny spark spread, and the moxa finally caught.
He took a handful of dry grass and gently laid it on top. The light grew brighter.
As warm flames rose, Chi Ke let out a long breath from deep in his chest.
Trembling, he placed the burning grass in the fire basin. Quietly reciting the Sages' Writings he had studied so often, he brought over a wooden stool and slowly sat before the fire, striving to control his still-frantic breathing.
The firelight danced, illuminating both him and the door ahead, where the wind leaked through with a whimper.
When his fear reached its limit, he suddenly ceased to be afraid. He even felt a faint stirring of anger.
Once he calmed down, the whispers, affectionate calls, and temptations instantly changed. Shrill, venomous voices poured through the door, cursing, roaring, and hurling abuse without disguise, brimming with malice.
Outside, the gale tore at the leaves with a rushing roar. The dried vegetables hanging beneath the eaves were swept to the ground, and the door creaked and shook, unable to bear the strain.
The wooden doorframe had probably long since been hollowed out by insects.
Bang!
The door gave way and fell to the ground. Cold, sinister wind poured in, making the flames gutter and flatten.
He raised the hand crossbow and pulled the trigger into the darkness beyond the doorway. As the bolt flew out, another sizzling sound rose, like charcoal falling into water.
The chaotic curses and furious abuse outside abruptly rose in pitch, turning frenzied.
Chi Ke took out another bolt. It took him two attempts to draw the bowstring taut.
He felt on the verge of breaking down. The wait until daylight seemed despairingly long. He could not understand why these uncanny things had singled him out.
Brother Snake, Fox, where are you...?
He added branches to the fire basin, then weighed them down with several pieces of dry, slow-burning wood. As he did, he grabbed some insect-repelling realgar powder and tossed it in.
Twisted figures began appearing in the darkness outside, each with a different shape.
They crowded and shoved one another beyond the flames, staring fixedly into the hut as though harboring an enmity that could not share the same sky. Their expressions were contorted with rage, as if they had suffered cruel torture.
The flames in the basin rapidly dwindled. Chi Ke added great handfuls of grass, but the dry blades curled and blackened unnaturally, refusing to burn. It was as though some power were suppressing all light and heat. He could not tell whether dampness was to blame.
Chi Ke knew he could not hold out much longer.
How pitiful. I, Chi Ke, have yet to attain the Immortal Dao, and now I'm about to die at the hands of vicious ghosts.
You'll never believe why I moved to... Kaohsiung
My life in emojis: ️, , , ️
MeetSingles
You'll never believe why I moved to... Kaohsiung
My life in emojis: ️, , , ️
MeetSingles
Looking for someone in Kaohsiung today
Willing to lie about how we met
Singleflirt
Looking for someone in Kaohsiung tod
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Willing to lie about how we met
Singleflirt
A thought bitter beyond measure crushed its way through his heart. If only he had a genuine immortal dao inheritance, he would never have fallen into such a wretched plight.
In the depths of despair, Chi Ke suddenly felt a familiar warm breeze carrying the scent of the mountain wilds.
He seemed to see a warm, steady orange-red flame deep in the darkness. It danced nimbly, driving away the sinister chill.
But when he looked closely, the flame was gone.
A pair of bright eyes came hurtling toward the Thatched Hut at an astonishing speed!
Warm wind blew into the Thatched Hut. Fox darted inside like lightning, and the dying fire in the basin flared back to life with a whoosh, illuminating the room.
At that moment, Chi Ke's nose stung, and hot tears nearly spilled from his eyes.
Fox gave Chi Ke two soft cries, then turned to face the darkness outside. The fur along Fox's back, tail, and neck bristled. Fox lifted an upper lip to bare sharp fangs, shifted weight backward, lowered the forelegs, and issued an uncompromising warning from deep in the throat!
The shadowy figures were forced back, but still refused to give up.
Chi Ke rubbed his eyes in disbelief.
Just now, he had clearly seen two tails behind Fox. When he looked again, there was only one. He could not tell whether his vision had blurred or he had imagined it.
Fox suddenly lunged through the doorway, slashing with sharp claws and leaving several afterimages in the air. A few brief sizzling sounds rang out, and the struck apparitions dissolved. Without lingering in battle, Fox deftly retreated behind the threshold and resumed a guarded stance.
Chi Ke's hands clenched involuntarily, his nails digging deep into his palms, then loosened helplessly.
The apparition wearing his mother's face silently dispersed. He knew it was false, the cruelest trick of an evil spirit, but it had looked so much like her...
The uncanny creatures refused to retreat. Light and darkness remained locked in a taut confrontation.
Amid that drawn-swords-and-bent-bows stalemate, Fox found a moment to give a loud cry toward the outside.
At the summit.
Black Snake heard Fox's cry from the valley floor and detected something unusual in it, but had no intention of descending the mountain. Though the rain had stopped, the mist remained thick and pure. Black Snake was unwilling to abandon the wonderful nourishment at hand.
Such simple intelligence could not unravel anything complicated. The complex cry for help exceeded what Black Snake could interpret.
After several cries failed to summon Black Snake, Fox's eyes darted about, and Fox tried another approach.
Previously, when following Black Snake on hunts, Fox would sometimes give a vocal signal upon discovering suitable prey. After several repetitions, Black Snake had remembered the connection between that sound and the appearance of prey. Fox could try using it to summon Black Snake.
And so Fox switched to that particular cry.
This time, when Black Snake picked up Fox's distinctive cry, the reaction was entirely different.
Prey. That simple, clear thought surfaced in Black Snake's mind, followed by an instinctive movement downhill toward the sound...
Black Snake, who had occupied the summit for an entire rainy season, slid down along the wet rocks.
The descent was extremely fast-quite literally a slide.
Halfway down the mountain, Black Snake sensed something wrong. The wind carried a rotten, bloody stench, and every bird and beast had vanished. Switching to heat-sensing perception, Black Snake saw the Thatched Hut at the valley bottom packed with apparitions. There were two heat sources inside.
The warm one, with lively energy, was Fox. Judging by the outline, the other was "Brother Snake."
Black Snake stopped, struggling to understand what had happened.
Nearby, several apparitions were tangled in a brawl, scratching and biting madly in a fierce, silent struggle. On a dead stump beside them, the fat weasel waved small paws.
Another short, urgent cry from Fox came from the valley floor.
Black Snake abruptly accelerated toward the hunt, crushing through the shrubs like a black torrent and heading straight for the Thatched Hut, raising a tremendous commotion in the woods.