The Fuji Divination Ritual

At Xiao Qing's words, Meng Yifan and I both went a little pale.

"Master Xiao Qing, what do you mean..."

"You have the traces of more than one spirit on you."

Xiao Qing spoke bluntly. "These two presences harbor resentment toward each other. When we summon one of the spirits later, she might lose control if she senses that resentment. Do you understand what I mean?"

We hurriedly nodded.

In other words, the girl who knocked on the door resented Li Xiumei, and Li Xiumei resented the girl who knocked on the door.

If we summoned Li Xiumei later and she sensed the presence of the girl who knocked, she might lose control and do something to harm Meng Yifan and me.

"These two jade pendants aren't worth much, but I've soaked them in my menstrual blood. A spirit medium's aura can mask those two traces of resentment," Xiao Qing added.

Menstrual blood...

Wasn't that the blood women shed during their periods...

It was a little off-putting, but we couldn't afford to worry about that. We hurriedly tucked them into our pockets and thanked Xiao Qing again.

We really had met a good person.

I hoped Heaven would bless Xiao Qing, who had suffered so much, with a few more years of life.

Next, the Seventh Master explained some precautions for Fuji Divination. He warned us that we had to follow every rule without exception. If we broke one, at best the divination would fail; at worst, something terrible could happen.

Meng Yifan and I were both mature adults, so naturally we listened and wouldn't mess around.

Once he finished explaining the precautions, we entered the residential complex together.

While we were waiting for the elevator downstairs in Building Three, I spotted an Old Lady in the distance.

I had seen the Old Lady before. She was the one who had told me the apartment had been sold once before.

The Old Lady saw us too. She seemed to be taking a stroll downstairs, but the moment she spotted us, she hurried away as though we were harbingers of disaster.

I was in a hurry to get down to business, so I didn't go over to greet her.

But I felt the Old Lady might know something about the apartment and simply didn't want to talk.

When I had time, I would have to visit her and ask about it.

The elevator soon arrived. We got in and went straight to the fifth floor.

Back inside the apartment, Meng Yifan and I were extremely nervous.

The apartment had been temporarily sealed off, and we weren't supposed to enter, so we didn't dare make much noise. Once inside, we first shut all the doors and windows.

Since Li Xiumei had died in the master bedroom, the Seventh Master said we should perform the Fuji Divination ritual there.

But the master bedroom was too small, so we could only perform the divination in the living room, leaving the master bedroom door open.

Once the preparations were done, the Seventh Master set down his backpack and began arranging the formation.

The formation had no name. The Seventh Master said it hadn't been part of the original Fuji Divination ritual. As the practice was passed down among ordinary people, earlier practitioners had refined it based on their experience to ensure safety during the ritual.

Some modern divination rituals, such as summoning pen spirits or saucer spirits, had actually evolved from ancient Fuji Divination. They were simplified versions, with relatively low success rates and a high risk of trouble even when they succeeded.

Meng Yifan and I didn't understand the intricacies. We simply watched as the Seventh Master took eight ritual flags of different colors from his backpack, planted them in eight directions, then connected them with a red cord.

Xiao Qing explained that the positions of the eight flags represented the directions of the Later Heaven Eight Trigrams.

The Eight Trigrams held an extremely important place in the occult arts.

Besides that, the Seventh Master lit sixty-four white candles around the flags, eight of them right beside the eight flags.

These sixty-four white candles were said to represent King Wen's sixty-four hexagrams, which in turn represented the sum of all the forms and manifestations of existence.

The formation could therefore be considered a holographic miniature universe, isolating the inside from the outside to prevent any mishap after the spirit was summoned from harming innocent people.

Put simply, we would send the spirit back the same way we summoned her. The formation served as a safeguard and also helped us communicate with the spirit.

The formation was soon complete, and Meng Yifan, Xiao Qing, and I all sat cross-legged inside it.

Even our seating positions mattered. Xiao Qing sat in the Kun position of the Eight Trigrams, to the southwest.

Among the Eight Trigrams, Kun represented the mother and yin. Xiao Qing was a woman, so she was also yin.

Meng Yifan and I sat in the Li position, due south. Li represented fire and was also classified as yin in the Later Heaven Eight Trigrams.

Both were yin, so they did not repel each other.

Moreover, Li belonged to fire among the Five Elements, while Kun belonged to earth.

In the generative cycle of the Five Elements, fire generated earth, signifying that one's energy flowed into the other. In plain terms, it meant, "I want to please you," expressing our sincerity.

Once everything was ready, the Seventh Master walked back and forth outside the formation, constantly shaking a bronze bell.

The bronze bell was called the Three Purities Bell. Its sound rang clear in our ears, and although it was loud, it didn't feel grating at all.

The Seventh Master said the ringing was meant to prevent the spirit from beguiling us and keep our minds clear.

Along with ringing the bell, he chanted scriptures we couldn't understand. I didn't know which religion they belonged to.

Meng Yifan and I sat inside the formation with a brazier in front of us.

Inside the brazier was the yellow paper we kept tossing in.

According to the Seventh Master, we had to keep burning this yellow paper until we sent the summoned spirit back, so we couldn't stop midway.

Next, we began the actual spirit-summoning procedure.

"Heavenly net and earthly baleful forces, the maiden Li Xiumei lived twenty-three years and met an unnatural death at twenty-three, entering the City of the Wrongfully Dead. We beseech a guiding light to lead Li Xiumei back..."

We recited the spirit-summoning invocation the Seventh Master had taught us.

If all went well, Li Xiumei's spirit would soon possess the medium.

Strangely, however, even after Meng Yifan and I recited it several times in succession, Xiao Qing, our medium, showed no reaction at all.

She sat upright, her head lowered and her long hair hanging loose. Although no ghost had possessed her yet, in the candlelight she looked like a female ghost herself...

Seeing that it hadn't worked, Meng Yifan and I hurriedly looked at the Seventh Master.

I was just about to call out "Seventh Master" when I suddenly remembered his earlier instructions and hastily corrected myself. "Yanzu, it didn't work..."

The Seventh Master was puzzled too. He stopped chanting, thought for a moment, then asked us, "How many names did she have?"

I froze for a moment, then suddenly remembered that Li Xiumei's original name was Li Yujiao. She had only changed it to Li Xiumei after getting into trouble, and she had died not long after taking that name.

So Meng Yifan and I recited the spirit-summoning invocation again, replacing Li Xiumei's name with Li Yujiao.

This time, we only recited it once before the entire living room suddenly changed.

To my horror, I discovered that Meng Yifan's shadow and mine seemed to have vanished...