Chapter 127: Chapter 45: Mother
"After all that, I snuck to the mass grave on the back mountain, wanting to dig up my mother’s body.
"Looking back now, I was so stupid, so wicked, and so pitiful. My mother’s body had been buried for seven or eight years; it must have rotted away, leaving only a skeleton. What was the use in digging it up? Back then, my mind was possessed, like I had become a beast driven by greed, with no sanity left to speak of.
"After I reached the desolate gravesite, something happened that filled me with both fear and anticipation. A large chunk of earth had been violently overturned, leaving a void in the ground roughly the size of an adult woman. It was obvious something had broken out from within.
"To my horror, I realized the secret tome from the library pavilion was real. That extra star in the sky had heard my plea and responded.
"Of course, you modern people have studied physics. You can calculate the terrifying amount of force required for a human to climb out from two meters underground. Is that even human? Even though I didn’t know the formula back then, I still felt a vague sense of unease.
"Staring at the deep pit where the earth was overturned, I saw a line of footprints, some deep and some shallow, leading toward Longshu Temple. Filled with a mix of excitement and fear, I followed them back. I felt like a naughty child who had secretly stolen money from his parents’ bookshelf to buy an expensive Transformer without permission.
"I’ll never forget that sinful feeling for the rest of my life."
Gao Tian thought, ’You give me too much credit. As a born-and-bred modern man who went through twelve years of schooling, I have no idea how to calculate the force needed for a person to climb out of a two-meter-deep pit either.’
Of course, he didn’t say this out loud, just listened quietly as Yu Sheng continued.
Yu Sheng:
"When I got to the entrance of Longshu Temple, I knew something was wrong. Peeking over the outer wall, I could see the red maple trees inside swaying violently, as if a burly man was under each one, shaking them with all his might.
"The pair of dirt-caked footprints led right to the temple gate and crossed the threshold. My scalp went numb, but I could only push the gate open, walk into the temple, and face the wish I had so desperately longed for.
"What came into view was the face of a middle-aged peasant woman, her body still covered in dirt. It was obvious she had just climbed out of her grave. It was my mother, the one I saw every night in my dreams.
"In that moment, tears blurred my vision, and I couldn’t see a thing. Mother gave me a faint smile and opened her blood-soaked hands, beckoning me over just like she did when she came back from working in the fields when I was a child. I rushed forward and threw myself into her arms, completely oblivious to the earth-shattering changes that had occurred throughout Longshu Temple."
Years later, when Yu Sheng returned to the supernatural grounds of Longshu Temple, he relived that terrifying scene.
Countless blood-stained corpses of Monks in gray robes hung from rows of trees, swaying in the gentle breeze. Those corpse-trees, with human bodies for leaves, swayed joyfully from side to side.
So many bodies. The thick, nauseating stench of blood filled the air. The blood-red fallen leaves I stepped on, upon closer inspection, turned out to be severed limbs. (See Volume 1, Chapter 69)
Yu Sheng:
"My mother, my gentle mother, had slaughtered most of the Monks in Longshu Temple with such casual ease.
"Of the remaining Monks, some went mad, some became hysterical, and others were maimed.
"Some knelt on the ground, mumbling the demon-quelling, evil-suppressing Great Brightness Mantra. They hoped the Buddha would protect them, that the Great Brightness would descend upon the world and expel the evil fiend.
"Some were scared out of their wits. They violated Buddhist precepts by crawling into the dark hole behind the largest Buddha statue in the main hall, hiding inside the Great Buddha’s belly. Like ostriches, they hoped this would save them.
"And my other brothers..."
On Yu Sheng’s grotesque face, a viscous fluid rolled down from his eye sockets. For a moment, it was impossible to tell if it was tears or blood.
"Even in death, they never knew that I was the one who lured the monster that wiped out half of Longshu Temple.
"My master was always away, suppressing powerful ghosts. My brothers simply assumed ’this woman’ was some unclean evil spirit from one of those incidents, something that hadn’t been dealt with properly and had come to Longshu Temple for revenge.
"My mother had died ten years prior and had only met many of the Monks in the temple once. Of course they wouldn’t recognize this woman’s face.
"Several of my brothers saw ’Mother’ call me over and then embrace me. They must have thought the ghoul had used some soul-stealing sorcery to control my body. They roared in anger and charged forward, brandishing their Supernatural Artifacts and yelling for me to run.
"’Mother’ heard the commotion behind her. She just slowly turned her head, her neck twisting a full 180 degrees. She glanced back at them.
"Then, she opened her mouth. Her jaw tore open at an impossible angle, stretching wider than her entire face, revealing rows upon rows of mismatched, interlocking teeth: human incisors, a carnivore’s fangs, a herbivore’s molars."
That scene, which lasted less than five seconds, was seared into Yu Sheng’s heart for a whole thousand years. Later, after entering modern society and studying dentistry, he could even accurately recall the different classifications of teeth inside his "mother’s" mouth.
"Then, she let out a sound—a mixture of a wolf’s howl, a lion’s roar, a tiger’s snarl, and the screams of human rage and terror.
"The sounds were too jumbled; it was impossible to tell which animal she was mimicking. But if you heard it from a distance, the deep rumble mixed with unidentifiable sharp cries... it sounded a bit like... a bear’s roar."
A bear’s roar.
Gao Tian felt as if his blood had turned to ice.
Nothing that happened at Longshu Temple was without reason.
All the inexplicable puzzle pieces were slowly forming a vast, bizarre, and indescribable picture.
Yu Sheng:
"After that terrifying wave of sound, every living person in Longshu Temple was dead. Except for me.
"I don’t know why that thing... that thing that looked just like my mother when she was alive... spared only me. Perhaps because it was created in my real mother’s image, it retained a sliver of her love for me. Or perhaps it was simply because the star in the sky kept its promise and fulfilled my wish as best it could.
"Death came so quickly. Many of the Monks didn’t even know they were dead. Those who had been sitting and chanting sutras continued to mouth the words meaninglessly even after they became corpses. Years later, maggots crawled in and out of their mouths as they still mumbled Buddhist scriptures.
"Even after my master carried their bodies out of Longshu Temple and buried them, you could still hear their indistinct murmurs back at the temple, their spirits lingering on.
"The Monks who had hidden inside the Great Buddha in a panic, even after dying in there, stubbornly refused to come out, believing the statue possessed a divine power that would protect them.
"Not that there was anything left to protect. They were already ghosts."
After hearing Yu Sheng’s account, Gao Tian understood a small detail.
The starving ghost Monks inside the Buddha statue had been dead from the very beginning, not died after entering the time loop.
But it didn’t matter. A minor mistake like that hadn’t stopped the four-person team from finding a way out of the temple and surviving past ten o’clock.
Yu Sheng continued:
"After killing everyone else, the monster that looked like my mother continued to hold me gently, gesturing for me to leave with her.
"I was filled with regret. I knew that the one who came back was not my mother at all. I was scared witless, my legs were numb, and I just followed her, step by step, away from a Longshu Temple littered with the dead.
"Not long after, my master, who had been in a nearby town exorcising demons, returned. I don’t know if it was fortunate or unfortunate, but he didn’t run into ’Mother’ when she first appeared.
"I didn’t witness what happened next firsthand. I’ve pieced it together from speculation and by corroborating it with conversations I had with my master.
"Upon entering the temple, Master Jingming was devastated, knowing the century-old temple had suffered a great catastrophe. At the time, he hadn’t yet realized the full severity of the situation. He thought some supernatural incident he had previously suppressed hadn’t been dealt with cleanly, and some foul thing had been released to come back for revenge. He was still blaming himself.
"Seeing the corpses of the Monks still chanting, he dragged them to the graveyard, burned them, and buried the ashes. While this couldn’t completely free his disciples who had turned into vengeful spirits, it could at least ease their suffering a little.
"As for the Monks trapped in the Great Buddha, Master knew that releasing them would just trigger another supernatural event. He could only comfort them, telling them he was leaving the temple for a while and that they absolutely must not come out while he was gone. He used this method to keep them stable.
"Of course, that was just a stopgap measure at the time. He never expected that this one trip would keep him away for a whole thousand years. And so the ’brothers’ waiting in the Buddha’s belly have also been waiting, since that very day, for a thousand years.
"But my master had something even more important to do.
"It wasn’t just about tracking down the powerful ghost that had slaughtered everyone in Longshu Temple to prevent it from descending the mountain and harming others. More importantly, while taking count of the bodies of all his disciples in the temple, he discovered that only one was missing: mine.
"Perhaps, in that moment, my master had already vaguely guessed the truth and begun to realize the gravity of the situation. He didn’t blame me. He just hastily gathered all the Supernatural Artifacts he had accumulated in his lifetime and followed the footprints outside Longshu Temple in pursuit.
"At the Observatory in the wilderness, I, ’Mother,’ and my master finally met.
"By then, ’Mother’ had me by her side. She brought me to the Observatory, pointed to the sky, and told me that up there, among the stars, were many, many more good friends just like her. She said I was the one who woke her up and brought her to this place. She was very grateful, and now she wanted me to keep making wishes, to bring more stars down—
"That way, the entire village that was slaughtered by bandits all those years ago—my father, my sister, my uncle, Wang Dahuhu the butcher at the village entrance, Chunhua and Zhuzi from next door, Er’gou—all of them could come back to life. We could live happily together, forever and ever.
"Isn’t this what I always wanted?
"If the scene at Longshu Temple had never happened, I might have been tempted by her offer. But after seeing ’Mother’s’ true face, I knew she wasn’t my real mother at all. She was a monster, a fiend cloaked in a bloody human guise.
"But I didn’t dare defy the monster’s gentle request. Just as I was trying to stall for time, a roar like a crack of thunder exploded from behind me. My master had arrived in a hurry."
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