"Little Mother!"
Seeing Ninth Concubine on the bed in the secret chamber, Xiuzhu grew even more excited than Seventh Master and I did.
After all, apart from her own mother, she was the only person who had treated her well.
She ran straight inside, went up to Ninth Concubine, and kept shaking her, trying to wake her.
"Little Mother, it's me, Xiuzhu."
"Little Mother, I missed you so much!"
Seventh Master and I went inside too and approached Ninth Concubine for a closer look.
She lay on the bed with both hands resting flat on her chest, her complexion rosy. She looked asleep, not dead at all.
"Seventh Master, why do I feel like she's just asleep...?"
With her feigned death looking like this, how had Master Luo believed Ninth Concubine was dead?
Could he not tell the dead from the living?
But when I reached out to check Ninth Concubine's breathing, there really was no breath coming from her nostrils, nor did her chest rise or fall.
"In the days when esoteric arts flourished, techniques for feigning death weren't uncommon."
Seventh Master said, "Wudang's Turtle-Breathing Skill, the Meishan Lineage's Breath-Holding Art, Daoism's Soul-Separation Art, and certain folk medicines could all put someone into a state of apparent death."
I could only marvel. With thousands of years of accumulated culture, there truly was nothing that didn't exist, only things you hadn't thought of. Our predecessors had developed every kind of esoteric art.
Xiuzhu was still calling out to Ninth Concubine. I took hold of her and said, "Xiuzhu, the Little Mother you see isn't real. Everything here is an illusion created by a magnetic field. Your Little Mother might not have died at all..."
At that point, I didn't know how to explain it to her either. Ninth Concubine might