Chapter 126: Chapter 44: A Story from a Thousand Years Ago
"It’s a story from a thousand years ago. It’s a bit long, so I hope you’ll be patient."
Gao Tian:
"That’s fine. This has already been the longest night of my life."
Yu Sheng:
"My mother pushed past her physical limits. After knocking on the great gates of Longshu Temple and placing me in the abbot’s hands, she collapsed and died on the spot. She passed away without being able to utter a single word.
"It was as if that three-day, three-night journey over mountains and through rivers had consumed every last ounce of strength she had. All just to get me to the temple.
"If it weren’t for the Celestial Eye, looking back from that perspective, for a helpless orphan like me whose entire clan had been wiped out, being sent to a temple to have my head shaved and become a monk was the best way to survive in a feudal society. I wouldn’t become rich or famous, but at least I’d always have a bowl of rice to eat for the rest of my life.
"The temple’s abbot, who would later become my master, Master Jingming, didn’t say anything when he saw this. He had my mother buried, then shaved my head, administered my vows, and I became a young monk.
"The days at the temple passed quickly, and I slowly began to emerge from the grief of losing my mother. I attended morning and evening scripture readings with my senior brothers, meditated, cleaned the temple, and received pilgrims. Life was good, and I gradually adapted to my new identity.
"That was the second most carefree time of my life. The only thing was, I would occasionally miss my mother at night. I’d sneak to her grave on the back mountain to see her. Although this was against the rules, my senior brothers and my master probably knew. But I was still young, and it’s only natural for a child to miss his mother, so no one at the temple said anything.
"Looking back now, I often find myself reminiscing about that time. If I could, I’d truly wish to return to a thousand years ago and remain forever the most mediocre of young monks."
Here, Yu Sheng knew he had lost his composure. He slowly bowed his head and chanted scriptures to calm himself.
After regaining his composure, he continued.
"Vengeful ghosts causing trouble, a resurgence of the supernatural... this isn’t something that only started in your 21st century. Back in the Tang and Song dynasties, the undead were already haunting and killing people.
"It’s just that back then, supernatural incidents were far from modern ones in terms of their scope and the speed at which they killed. Under normal circumstances, some Daoist priests and monks could barely manage to handle the weaker ghosts, relying on their ancestral traditions.
"When they ran into a powerful ghost, even the great monks and high priests could only turn tail and run for their lives. After all, they were just trying to make a living. If they couldn’t solve a supernatural case and a few people died, so be it. Even the Government Office couldn’t do anything about it. Information traveled slowly back then, and it was common for many people to die in a natural disaster or a border conflict. For the common folk of that era, it wasn’t something they couldn’t live with."
Gao Tian already knew this.
Master Yunshan from the Altar of the Future also had his entire estate wiped out by a vengeful ghost.
He had mastered martial arts, but his entire martial arts Sect was annihilated. Only then did he turn to the Daoist path.
"Outside of his monastic duties, Master Jingming would also help the nearby townspeople deal with malicious ghosts. He didn’t do it for money, but out of compassion. My master’s lineage was unknown, but he was incredibly skilled. He had mastered the use of many Supernatural Artifacts and understood some of the fundamental rules governing vengeful ghosts. Back then, those things were called Magical Artifacts and Buddhist miracles.
"Among all the senior brothers, my intelligence and talent quickly became apparent. Even though I was the last to join, I made rapid progress in everything I studied, learning it almost instantly.
"Around this time, for some reason, the number of supernatural incidents in the towns near Longshu Temple began to increase. My master couldn’t handle it all by himself and needed an assistant. Though my senior brothers were willing to help, my master found them too dull-witted. In a supernatural incident, one wrong step could get everyone killed. So, despite being the youngest, my quick-wittedness made me my master’s assistant, and I helped him deal with many of the dead.
"It was also during that time that I was personally taught, through hands-on experience, many methods for dealing with those unclean things. He also gave me my own Magical Artifacts. That’s why, a thousand years later, after I left Longshu Temple, I was able to survive by sheer luck until the seventh green-text mission in the ’apartment for the living’."
The vengeful ghosts of this era were simply faster at spreading and killed more people in denser patterns.
In the past, a memetic-type ghost might rely on horse-drawn carriages and messengers to infect its victims. It might not even spread beyond a single county. By the time it had killed everyone in the county and was discovered ten or fifteen days later, the chain of transmission would have long been broken.
Modern vengeful ghosts, however, use telephones, the internet, and videos to spread. They can completely infect a megalopolis in just a few days. Cutting off the source is nearly impossible.
Although the difficulty of dealing with them had certainly increased, for Yu Sheng, it was merely a return to his old profession. His experience and his artifacts gave him an overwhelming advantage over the other residents of the apartment—it was like a higher-dimensional being attacking a lower one.
Yu Sheng continued.
"My master, Master Jingming, was a very strange person. In his spare time, he would often sit alone on the Observatory outside, gazing at the stars in the night sky and recording something on charts. This was the work of the Observatory in the capital; for a monk to be so interested in the stars was truly rare.
"I stayed by my master’s side, learning about Buddhism and supernatural lore. Sometimes I would also help him carry equipment to set up on the Observatory.
"I remember very clearly back then, my master would occasionally say strange things. For example, that there were more stars in the sky, and that some stars had disappeared. He said the new ones weren’t ’stars’ at all, but filthy things that shouldn’t be there. They were as ’unclean’ as the vengeful ghosts on earth who refused to rest in peace.
"Sometimes, my master would also test me, asking where the vengeful ghosts of the dead came from. At the time, I didn’t understand his intentions and answered according to Buddhist teachings: that they were people who had done evil in life and were unwilling to descend into the eight great Hells after death to accept their punishment, thus being unable to enter the Six Paths of Reincarnation to be reborn.
"At those times, my master would just remain silent, gazing at the stars. I didn’t know what he was sighing about. Was something wrong with my answer?"
Yu Sheng spoke calmly, and Gao Tian listened calmly.
The story had still not reached the main point. But that was fine. Yu Sheng had waited a thousand years. Tonight might be his last, so why couldn’t Gao Tian stay with him a little longer?
"As I mentioned, even though I had been at Longshu Temple for a long time and had grown accustomed to the life of a monk, I still couldn’t help but secretly miss my mother. It’s only human.
"The bandits who had wiped out my entire village were later captured by the Government Office, paraded through Kyoto, and executed by slow slicing. The sliver of hatred that had secretly sustained me vanished after hearing this news. My longing for my mother only grew stronger.
"It was then that I made a terrible mistake, an irreversible one.
’If people can become vengeful ghosts after they die,’ I thought, ’then souls must be real. There must be a way to bring the dead back to life. So-called vengeful ghosts are just the result of summoning a soul the wrong way.’
"Unable to bear my longing for my mother, I did something that broke a major precept. It led to a drastic change in all of Longshu Temple.
"I am a sinner. A sinner! After I die, I will surely descend to the deepest of the eighteen levels of Hell and suffer endless torment. But I am still alive, so I must atone for my sins in this life."
As he said this, blood began to slowly trickle from Yu Sheng’s eye sockets.
At this moment, one half of his handsome, peaceful face was covered in malformed flesh, and with blood now streaming from his eyes, he looked both hideous and bizarre—truly like a vengeful ghost returned from Hell.
His voice remained calm:
"I grew greedy. I knew that in one of my master’s locked pavilions, there were many forbidden volumes of the Daoist Canon hidden away. They contained Secret Techniques that shouldn’t exist in this world, techniques that allowed one to converse with the stars.
"My master had sternly warned us never to touch the Daoist Canon in that pavilion. Any senior brother who even got close would be punished lightly or expelled from the order for a serious offense.
"I knew it was because this Daoist Canon could make the stars in the sky notice the people on earth. I didn’t know how it worked, exactly, but my master once let it slip that those extra things in the night sky were the opened eyes of certain beings. When they gazed upon the great sphere beneath our feet, the people on the sphere could also see the ’stars’ in the sky.
"Yes, you heard me right. My master called the flat ground we stood on ’a great sphere.’ Of course, I didn’t understand back then. It wasn’t until I traveled a thousand years into the future and assimilated the knowledge of your era that I realized he was talking about the Earth."
Yu Sheng:
"I had lost my mind by then. I knew that some of the Secret Techniques hidden in the pavilion could allow me to make a wish to the stars—to use some ancient, unknowable power to resurrect my mother from her grave.
"After wrestling with myself day and night, my impure senses finally lost to the demon in my heart. I didn’t want wealth or long life. I just wanted my mother back, even if only for a single glance.
"Stealing the key to the pavilion was simple. My master doted on me and trusted me. Sometimes, when he was on the Observatory and needed something, he found it too troublesome to go himself, and his trust in me grew by the day. At first, he would have two senior brothers accompany me to open the pavilion. But later, he simply gave me the key, allowing me to open it freely to fetch the instruments and books he wanted.
"On a dark and windy night, I unlocked the pavilion and took the ’book’ I needed from inside.
"Following its instructions, and with my photographic memory, I quickly mastered a certain Secret Technique. And, following the ritual described in the book, I made a wish to one of the extra stars in the sky.
"Let my mother return. Let her climb out of the earth.
"Let her return as she was in life.
"I won’t tell you the process of the Secret Technique. After what happened, my master burned the pavilion to the ground. No one will ever know that method again.
"The star heard my wish. My mother... returned.
"At the time, I was naive enough to think that the worst that could happen was that I would summon another vengeful ghost. I had dealt with that kind of situation before. I had suppressed many vengeful ghosts on my own, without my master’s help."
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