After Huang Chang took the medicine, he regained his senses for a while and could even return to work as normal. But before long, his madness flared up again. This time, even the medicine was useless, and Xiao Xiuying had no choice but to lock him inside their home.
To save her husband, she tried every method she could think of, even seeking out several highly respected traditional Chinese medicine doctors. But they were either frauds trading on undeserved reputations or genuinely knowledgeable doctors who still had no idea where to begin. All they could offer were conservative prescriptions to stabilize his condition and keep it from worsening.
With neither traditional Chinese nor Western medicine able to help, Xiao Xiuying could only grasp at straws and turn to the supernatural. Through endless pleading and every connection she knew, she finally managed to get in touch with that businessman, Bai Ning.
"Couldn't you ask your child to come help?" After hearing her story, Shoichi Kano offered a perfectly reasonable suggestion. "You have to look after your husband all by yourself, and work on top of that. Surely it's too much to handle?"
Xiao Xiuying shook her head with a bitter smile. "I stopped working a long time ago. These days, I basically devote all my time to looking after him at home. My son works in a big city, and he's always so busy. I don't have the heart to bother him. Whenever he calls, I tell him everything's fine at home. Sometimes, when my husband's lucid, he helps me keep up the lie."
At that, Shoichi Kano felt a sting in his nose, as though he were looking at a mirror image of himself. The lies Xiao Xiuying told over the phone were just like the white lies that had filled his own earlier call to Takeshi Kano.
"Then how do you support yourselves...?"
"My son sends us one or two thousand yuan every month. If we scrimp a little, the two of us can get by. If things get really tight, I can collect bottles on the streets. That should bring in another eighty or a hundred yuan a month." Xiao Xiuying still wore a forced, carefree smile, as though she didn't want to show her vulnerability to strangers.
Only after saying that did she realize she had strayed from the subject, so she tried to steer the conversation back. "Um... anyway, please go take a look at my husband. He should be asleep now. As long as you're quiet and don't wake him, it'll be fine."
The two nodded and inched toward the bedroom door, keeping their footsteps almost silent.
Only then did Kano place his hand on the doorknob. Rather than twist it sharply, he divided its full turn into many tiny increments, moving it one increment each second. It took him nearly ten seconds to open the door completely.
As a result, they made almost no sound.
The man lying on the bed-if he could even be called a man anymore-left Shoichi Kano stunned. Across two lifetimes, he had never seen anyone in such a wretched state:
Although the sheets and bedding looked clean and tidy, probably because Xiao Xiuying washed and changed them often, every word in the world for weakness and exhaustion combined could not have captured even a ten-thousandth of the condition of the person lying there.
He was little more than skin stretched over a skeleton. The flesh of his face was withered and sallow, his skin pulled tight enough to outline the bones beneath.
As for his breathing... it was impossibly faint, there one moment and gone the next.
There was something else deeply unpleasant about the room: its smell. The scent of herbal decoctions mingled with human waste and the stench of slowly rotting protein. Three utterly different odors blended into an "olfactory feast" so thick it seemed almost tangible.
Covering his nose, Shoichi Kano studied the man on the bed. At first, he thought the fellow had a rather particular hairstyle: his head was shaved bare, but a pig-tail-like braid remained at the back, as though he were cosplaying someone from the Qing dynasty.
Only after staring for a while did he realize something was wrong. Why was that braid giving off cursed energy?
"There's a cursed spirit on his head," the Slit-Mouthed Woman said, getting straight to the point. "Its cursed energy is roughly Grade 2."
Shoichi Kano looked closely and finally realized it was no pigtail at all. It was a leech-shaped cursed spirit, its sucker attached directly to the bald scalp at the back of Huang Chang's head.
"I suppose once cracks appeared in Tengen's barrier, cursed spirits stopped being limited to Japan," Shoichi Kano guessed. "Now, wherever you are, I imagine a cursed spirit will form as long as the concentration of negative emotions and cursed energy meets the conditions."
"You're pretty clever, sweetheart." The Slit-Mouthed Woman raised her eyebrows. "Your knowledge of barrier techniques is a complete mess, but your reasoning is surprisingly good."
Shoichi Kano spread his hands and stuck out his tongue, pulling a face like one Kenjaku had made in the original story. It lacked Kenjaku's bizarre flair, though. At best, it was a poor imitation.
Outside the bedroom, Xiao Xiuying waited for the experts Boss Bai had found to give her a reassuring answer, so she automatically ignored their conversation in Japanese. She couldn't understand it anyway.
Shoichi Kano casually flicked out a small clump of sticky cursed-energy threads, gently sealing Huang Chang's mouth so that he could still breathe normally but couldn't make a sound.
"What are you going to do with it? Exorcise it?" the Slit-Mouthed Woman asked.
Shoichi Kano flexed his wrist, preparing to pull the thing off. "As long as you don't mind me killing one of your own kind in front of you, Mom."
"If it's too stupid to have developed intelligence," the Slit-Mouthed Woman said indifferently, "then I refuse to acknowledge it as one of my kind."
Pop! By then, Shoichi Kano had seized the slippery, sticky thing and found the right angle to pull. He gave it a hard yank!
The leech cursed spirit writhed in Shoichi Kano's hand, seemingly resisting separation from its host. But Shoichi Kano was far stronger, and he soon tore it off completely.
"Mmph! Mmph! Mmph!" Huang Chang felt a ripping agony in his scalp, but with his mouth sealed by Kano's threads, he couldn't cry out no matter how hard he tried. The pain was unbearable.
Shoichi Kano waved the "pigtail" in his hand at him, trying to show him that this thing had caused his madness. But Huang Chang's eyes held nothing but confusion and fear. He had no idea what was happening!
"Basically, your wife asked us to help you, and you should be better now," Kano explained succinctly.
"If you understand what I'm saying, nod."
Huang Chang nodded repeatedly.
By now, the thing that looked half like a pigtail and half like a leech was writhing even harder in Kano's hand.
He simply threw it to the floor, and the Slit-Mouthed Woman promptly pinned it beneath her foot.
"Can you talk?" she asked. "Can you understand what I'm saying?"
The leech cursed spirit squealed beneath her sneaker, struggling and squirming without pause, but still couldn't escape.
At last, it spoke. But what came out wasn't normal human language. It sounded a little like the way Hanami spoke.
Except Hanami's speech was Japanese played backward, while this creature spoke Chinese played backward, rather like turning "fuck your mother" into "rehtom ruoy kcuf."
Fortunately, its words carried cursed energy, so Kano and the Slit-Mouthed Woman only needed to sense it with their own cursed energy to understand what it was saying.
"Our... Khan... will soon be born..."
"Outsiders... submit... or die..."
"What does that mean?" Even the Slit-Mouthed Woman was baffled.
Shoichi Kano asked, half joking, "Isn't it one of your kind, Mom? How come you don't understand it either?"
Taking advantage of her greater height, the Slit-Mouthed Woman raised a hand and thumped Kano on the head.
She had intended to say, "Who says that thing is one of my kind?" But after thinking it through, she realized the argument didn't hold up at all. So she said nothing and simply thumped Kano instead.
They tried probing it with a few more questions, only to discover that it was incapable of communicating. It could only repeat the same tired lines, showing that it hadn't developed intelligence.
So the Slit-Mouthed Woman made a scissor gesture, gently bringing her index and middle fingers together and cutting the bug in two.
The two halves of the leech cursed spirit dissolved into the air, leaving nothing behind.
Shoichi Kano waved a hand, dispelling the sticky spider silk sealing Huang Chang's mouth. "All right. Something unclean had latched onto you. We've taken care of it."
Before you continue