Xiangguo Temple (3)

The closer he got to the Buddhist halls open to the public, the more lay pilgrims and believers there were, and the more bizarre and eerie the sights before Tan Yangzi's eyes became. A group of fleshy lumps with seemingly melted bodies squirmed past him, their limbs and facial features growing in completely wrong places, yet judging by their voices, they were several young masters from noble families laughing and talking loudly. In the distance, there were also many frog-like humanoid figures squirming on the praying mats. Every time they kowtowed, another pustule sprouted on their backs, indicating that what they were praying for were evil wishes to satisfy their own greed at the expense of others. Not far away, the "Daoist priests" sitting by the fortune-telling stalls had tongues dragging all the way to the ground, covered in crawling maggots. And the young lady from a noble family, surrounded by her maidservants, possessed a Life Soul that was a skeleton with rotting flesh all over its body and only a head of pitch-black long hair.

However, beneath the four giant statues of heavenly gods in the Hall of Heavenly Kings, a young man stood alone amidst the demons and monsters. He looked about eighteen or nineteen years old, dressed in a red robe, holding a long, plain-colored oiled paper umbrella, but three copper bells were tied to its handle. He was tall and straight, with raven hair reaching his lower back, loosely tied up from his temples, which made his skin look even more coldly white, like snow and jade.

Yan Fei, the stray boy Tan Yangzi had taken in ten years ago. So far, he was the only human whose true Life Soul form he could not see.

Seeing him, Yan Fei smiled, revealing a sharp canine tooth at the corner of his mouth. It added a touch of innocence to his eerie and glamorous aura that was already beginning to take shape.

"Master!"

Tan Yangzi stepped forward and yanked Yan Fei aside to a deserted area. His usually composed and calm face suddenly became animated, his sword-like eyebrows shooting up as he scolded, "What are you doing here? Why did you even bring the Calamity-Crossing Umbrella?!"

"I'm here to help you!" Yan Fei's smile was bright and gorgeous, drawing several passing young ladies to cast extra glances, secretly fantasizing about how wonderful it would be if that smile were directed at them.

But Tan Yangzi, on the receiving end of the smile, only felt a headache coming on. He scolded in a low voice, "How many times have I told you, I don't need helpers!"

"There should always be a Red Impermanence beside a Green Impermanence, right?" Yan Fei argued stubbornly. "Just like the Black and White Impermanences always act together, you've never seen a Black Impermanence reaping souls by himself all day long, have you? I've been learning very fast lately. In case you encounter danger, I can lend a hand."

Tan Yangzi let out a long breath, seemingly forcing down the irritation in his heart, and said word by word, "First, I haven't needed a Red Impermanence for three hundred years, and I won't need one in the future. Second, even if I wanted to find a Red Impermanence, it couldn't be a human, let alone a brat like you! Hurry up and go home!" His voice was low and suppressed, unfeeling, and grew increasingly stern towards the end. If an ordinary person heard this, they would probably have long been filled with fear and obediently complied.

But Yan Fei had grown up with him for ten years, after all, and was used to it long ago. Not only was he not afraid, but he deliberately furrowed his brows and looked up at Tan Yangzi from beneath his eyelashes. His pupils were naturally large and black, and doing this made him look even more like a puppy watching its owner eat delicious food without sharing.

The corner of Tan Yangzi's mouth twitched imperceptibly, and he said coldly, "Don't pretend to be pitiful."

"..."

"You go home first, I'll return tomorrow."

"..."

Tan Yangzi sighed, his expression softening slightly. Lowering his voice and softening his tone, he offered, "I'll bring you back some crisp cheese from the Zhang family."

"..."

To think that even crisp cheese couldn't buy him off anymore. This little brat was getting harder and harder to coax... Tan Yangzi couldn't help but miss that nine-year-old porcelain doll from ten years ago, who would beam with joy just from being given a piece of candy, and was so obedient... Sigh...

"There's no place for you to stay here. Come back at the third watch of the night and wait for me by the east wall." Tan Yangzi finally said in a tone of near resignation, "Just this once."

Yan Fei immediately beamed with joy, his eyes shining. "Then I'll come tonight!"

Tan Yangzi waved his hand, shooing him away like a sheep. "Go on."

Yan Fei turned and took a couple of steps outward, then looked back uneasily and asked, "Master, you're not tricking me and just leaving me waiting there in vain, are you?"

A faint flush of embarrassment from having his thoughts seen through brushed the base of Tan Yangzi's ears, but he quickly put on a stern face and scolded, "Am I that kind of person?!"

Yan Fei then gave another bright smile, a smile that grew increasingly alluring and bewitching like a poppy. Despite being a man, he increasingly showed the signs of being a femme fatale; it was hard to tell if this was a blessing or a curse.

Watching Yan Fei walk away, Tan Yangzi let out a breath of relief. He turned around to look at the little monk waiting for him in the distance, only to find that the little monk, whose state of mind was still unsettled, was staring blankly at Yan Fei's retreating back; it seemed he had become fixated. Now that the Corpse Candle Array was gradually losing its effect, half of the little monk's face had reverted to human form, while the other half remained that of a pig. His dumbfounded expression looked somewhat comical.

Tan Yangzi walked up to him and coughed heavily to pull the little monk's wandering thoughts back. He hurriedly asked, "Is your distinguished disciple not staying?"

"I told him to go home. He's not a monk, so it's not fitting for him to stay here. Besides, I have already intruded enough," Tan Yangzi said flatly. "Thank you for leading the way, Master. My unworthy disciple is ignorant; please forgive him if he has caused any offense."

"It's nothing, it's nothing. Your distinguished disciple is truly a person of striking appearance!"

"..."

Tan Yangzi returned to his room and meditated with his eyes closed for a while. It wasn't until it was almost time for the evening chanting that he picked up a black candle and lit it. This candle was different from ordinary ones; it was made by taking human corpses that had rotted for months in damp and suffocating places, scraping the corpse wax from the surface as a raw material, and then mixing it with the flesh of Karma Worms and ordinary wax. It was called a Corpse Candle. The manufacturing process was cumbersome, and although they were uniformly distributed, he couldn't be too wasteful in using them.

It was already the time of the setting sun, but the rain had stopped. The setting sun revealed half of its face from behind the clouds, and a crimson radiance filtered in through the paper windows, casting long shadows of the window lattices onto the floor.

As the black candle burned, a faint, fishy-smelling dark fragrance dispersed, gradually filling the entire room. With that fragrance, the originally warm slanting sunlight condensed little by little, turning into a gloomy, pale light. The fog thickened, blurring the scenery ten steps away, and the toon tree in front of the door condensed into an ostentatious and bizarre silhouette. There were even more Karma Worms than before, leaving almost no place to step. Accidentally stepping on one or two of their bodies felt like stepping on a puddle of fat scraped off a dead pig; the sensation was exceptionally disgusting and sticky.

Tan Yangzi took the bronze sword and went straight to the outside of the Mahavira Hall. Separated by a long courtyard, the sight before him was astonishing. As far as the eye could see, Karma Worms blotted out the sky and covered the earth. They were of various lengths and thicknesses, tangled into lumps and hanging from the eaves of the originally solemn Mahavira Hall, coiling between the several vermilion-lacquered pillars. The ground could no longer be seen at all, leaving only a densely packed layer of constantly squirming flesh-colored worms, looking like tapeworms magnified many times over, tangling and devouring each other. The air was filled with a nauseating stench, several times stronger than before. The trees had begun to wither, and the vermilion paint on the doors and windows of the Buddhist hall was peeling off in large patches. It was entirely unlike the magnificent and resplendent appearance in the eyes of the world, but rather a broken and dilapidated facade that could collapse at any moment.

Even Tan Yangzi, who was accustomed to seeing Karma Worms, couldn't help but feel his scalp tingle upon seeing so many at once. He hesitated briefly, then leaped up, floating like a drifting azure feather onto the ancient locust tree in front of the hall, which had slightly fewer Karma Worms. Pausing for a moment, he listened to the resonant and distant sounds of the monks chanting scriptures echoing from the hall. It was as grand and solemn as ever, which contrasted bizarrely with the decaying and collapsing scene in Tan Yangzi's eyes. In just a short month, the pure and holy aura in the precious Buddhist temple had been ruined to such a degree. The ghost this time was probably even stronger than he had imagined.

Stepping onto a thick long branch, amidst the rustling of the twigs, he landed silently on the Karma Worm-infested roof of the Mahavira Hall. The original glazed tiles had been corroded by the mucus secreted by the Karma Worms' bodies until they lost their color, becoming incredibly fragile. When he took a step, they squeaked, seemingly ready to break at any moment. Tan Yangzi kicked away a few Karma Worms, fumbled around on the eaves tiles, and after trying a few times, found a few broken and loose tiles. He carefully uncovered them one by one and looked down into the hall.

The main hall was brightly lit, wreathed in clouds of incense. The monks were lined up on both sides, bowing to the gold-painted statue of Sakyamuni Buddha directly in front of them to the sound of a chime. The abbot, Guan Yun, stood at the very front, while Guan Yi, acting as the precentor, struck the bronze chime at a low table beside the incense altar. It was supposed to be a solemn and sacred scene, but because all Tan Yangzi saw was the appearance of the Eighth Consciousness after stripping away the human form, the monks, although less deformed than ordinary people outside the temple, looked very strange in their pseudo-human states. Therefore, rather than being sacred, it was somewhat terrifying.

Tan Yangzi's initial guess was that the ghost was attached to Guan Yun. When he had observed the monks' dormitories earlier, he found that the closer they were to the elder monks' dormitories, the denser the Karma Worms became. And that Guan Yun seemed to have a habit of being prone to anger. Additionally, the people in the temple seemed to like Master Guan Yi more, while they dared to be angry but didn't dare to speak out against Guan Yun, which might make him feel even more unfair. If the resentment in one's heart was suppressed too much, it was easy to attract a ghost with common characteristics to possess them.

But to his surprise, Guan Yun's appearance was unexpectedly close to his original human form; it was just that due to his angry habits, two long fangs grew out of his mouth. Looking around, he was actually the person with the lightest evil karma in the entire temple. There was even a faint milky-white layer of flowing light enveloping his body, a light that only cultivators with profound cultivation would have.

What surprised Tan Yangzi even more was Master Guan Yi.

The eminent monk Guan Yi, whom all the monks described as kind and amiable, and more suitable to be the abbot than Guan Yun, had now solidified into a pitch-black, thin, and hunched shadow. Countless slender arms grew densely all over his body, like dead branches of a tree, dancing wildly in the air above the entire main hall. The ends of those arms each grew a small hand, and the hands had nine withered fingers that opened and closed in the air as if grasping for something. Looking closely, one would find that arms even grew out of his face, squeezing his facial features into twisted distortions. Those arms swayed over the heads of certain specific monks who were more severely deformed, their slender, siphon-like fingers inserting into the brains of those monks through their ears, noses, and even eye sockets.

From a distance, Master Guan Yi was no longer human at all, but rather a giant caterpillar covered entirely in dense black spikes. Just looking at it was enough to make one's whole body itch and scalp tingle.

So the ghost was actually possessing Master Guan Yi...

This ghost was a Thorn-Heart Ghost that had escaped from the Avici Hell. It was reincarnated into Hell solely because it was attracted by the karma of jealousy, hatred, and even harming others.

Hell and the Mortal Realm were almost completely overlapping, but due to the limitations of the physical abilities of their respective sentient beings, they could only see and live in their own worlds. The environment in the Hell Realm was harsh and unspeakably miserable, but unfortunately, the ghosts all had very long lifespans. Occasionally, some who attained cultivation would always find ways to escape Hell from places where the barrier between the two realms was weak and infiltrate the Mortal Realm. This Thorn-Heart Ghost was just like that. They would choose to possess people with karma similar to their own in an attempt to use human aura to evade the pursuit of Underworld Emissaries.

And the ones responsible for hunting down these evil ghosts that escaped from Hell were the Green and Red Impermanences. Speaking of the soul-reaping envoys, the Lords of Impermanence, everyone knew the Black and White Impermanences. When a person's life came to an end, they would appear, guide the soul onto the Yellow Springs Path, drink the Meng Po Soup, cross the Naihe Bridge, and be reborn into the Six Realms. Attracted by the karma of their own Eighth Consciousness, they would become humans, beasts, or evil ghosts of Hell.

But few people in the world knew that Impermanence was not just Black and White; there was also a type of Impermanence that wore green clothes, and another that wore red clothes. They did not walk the Yellow Springs Road, but could travel back and forth between Hell and the Mortal Realm. Like the Black and White Impermanences, the Green and Red Impermanences usually appeared together. The Green Impermanence wielded the Karma-Gathering Sword, and the Red Impermanence held the Calamity-Crossing Umbrella. Before they arrived, one could hear the Soul-Crossing Bell on the handle of the Red Impermanence's umbrella; upon hearing it, demons and monsters would scatter in terror.

Tan Yangzi, whose name in Hell was Qiannamara, was a solitary Green Impermanence. His partner, a Red Impermanence, had died three hundred years ago while hunting a Rakshasa Ghost. Underworld Emissaries fundamentally lacked an Eighth Consciousness that could be reincarnated. Once they died, it was like a lamp running out of oil; in the heavens or on the earth, they could never be found again. The higher-ups had once wanted to assign him a new Red Impermanence, but he refused. Fortunately, his skills were very good, and he hadn't made any mistakes in three hundred years, so the higher-ups no longer brought the matter up.

Tan Yangzi let out a low snort. Although this Thorn-Heart Ghost hadn't caused any loss of life yet, he was too greedy, actually attempting to plant the root of his karma into this blessed land, so that he could tear the opening between the Mortal Realm and Hell even wider. Presumably, those branch-like withered hands searching around at night had influenced quite a few monks whose willpower wasn't strong enough and who inherently had some suppressed evil thoughts in their hearts. This was why relations among the monks had been tense and disputes had frequently arisen over the past month.

Only, he didn't know why it had actually possessed Master Guan Yi.

At this moment, there were too many people in the hall, making it hard to act. Tan Yangzi silently placed the tiles back, and in the next instant, he was gone.

Walking as swiftly as the wind, his entire body blurred into a mass of azure shadow. He crossed the roofs of the precious halls one by one, his robe sleeves spreading out behind him like wings. He went all the way to the monks' dormitories, placing a yellow paper talisman on the roof ridge of each house at an extremely fast speed, and finally arrived in front of Master Guan Yun's door. By this time, the efficacy of the Corpse Candle had receded again, revealing the ordinary appearance of the dormitories: black tiles and white walls. The walls seemed to have been newly painted recently; they were clean, orderly, and neat.

Tan Yangzi pondered for a moment, then hid two spell talismans under a few broken stone steps in front of Guan Yun's dormitory. Then he walked to Guan Yi's door and took a careful look. Black tiles and white walls. The paper pasting the windows was already torn, and the door and the doorframe seemed slightly misaligned, so much so that the door couldn't be closed tightly. It looked even more dilapidated than Master Guan Yun's dormitory, but it was kept extremely tidy. There wasn't even a single fallen leaf on the steps, nor was there any dust on the window frames.

This austere, almost shabby dormitory gave off a faint feeling of being deliberate. Since window paper wasn't a rare item, and a grand temple like Xiangguo Temple received not only donations from pilgrims but also funds for repairs allocated by the imperial court every year. Even after deducting all expenses and adding in extensive charity distributions, there would still be plenty of surplus money. There was truly no need to save such a minuscule amount that wouldn't even count as a fraction of their wealth. If one were to say he didn't care about his living space and thus let it fall into ruin, he ironically kept it spotlessly clean, without even any weeds on the roof.

He remembered Yuan Heng's description of Guan Yi: kind, forbearing, diligent, and unadorned. He was so perfect that it was as if he filled in everything the abbot lacked. Even the dormitory before him seemed to be an alternative form of comparison and one-upmanship.

Tan Yangzi suddenly understood why the Thorn-Heart Ghost had possessed Guan Yi. It was only because deep down in his heart, Guan Yi had actually always been intensely jealous of and hateful towards Guan Yun.

Perhaps it was because he had always worked so hard and was the senior disciple. His master's mantle clearly should have been passed to him, yet for such an unexpectedly ridiculous reason, he lost to his junior brother. Perhaps it was because he thought he was more outstanding than his junior brother, but ironically had to bow and scrape to a junior brother who was inferior to him in every way. Perhaps it was because he clearly hated his junior brother so much, yet still had to hand over everything on a silver platter to maintain his own kindly and non-contentious image. This resentment, accumulating little by little over the years, had finally attracted the Thorn-Heart Ghost.

Tan Yangzi remembered catching another Thorn-Heart Ghost fifteen years ago. This kind of ghost fed on jealousy and hatred, so it would always choose to possess those who suppressed dark envy in their hearts. The longer the time, the stronger its influence. Not only the possessed person, but the suppressed malice in the hearts of the people around them would also permeate out little by little. That time, they had discovered it too late. The scholars in the entire academy suddenly started hacking each other to death. When he arrived, the ground was covered with severed limbs and fresh blood. Organs spilled out from their abdominal cavities, and their eyes bulged out like fish on twisted faces. The scene was tragic and gruesome.

Currently, this Thorn-Heart Ghost had only been possessing its host for a month. If more time passed, he feared that sooner or later, a tragedy of monks slaughtering each other would occur.