Chapter Nine: Sheepskin Bag [4K]
The layout inside the Small Taoist Temple, as seen from the outside, is quite simple. The main hall is separated from the entrance by a courtyard, and curiously, despite it being a Taoist temple, there are no deities enshrined in the main hall.
On the doorpost near the entrance that faces the courtyard are carved horizontal lines, seemingly recording the heights of children. The deeper the marks go upwards, the shallower they become, and by the time you reach the topmost mark, it has become blurred and unclear.
This is likely due to the elderly Taoists recording the heights with diminishing strength over many years, compounded by the weathering of a hundred years or more.
In the courtyard, next to a large water tank with a gaping hole, lies a rotting wooden horse. Looking at the crudely made wooden horse, Luxianbei recalls a picture of Qing Ji, dressed in a red bellyband and sporting two sky-high pigtails, swaying as she sits atop it.
“Seems a bit cute? That kind of ancestor, if I were to punch down, would definitely cry for a long time. Thinking about it, I’m a bit eager to try!,” Luxianbei thinks.
On both sides of the courtyard are several small rooms where people once lived; three of them have already collapsed, and the remaining one is teetering in the wind, the beams creaking softly.
The Small Taoist Temple isn’t very large, and the number of intact areas is even fewer. Luxianbei spent about fifteen minutes exploring the entire temple.
This was done while he tried hard to suppress the urge to kick cans, smash wooden boxes, and pull wild grass, in an effort to maintain the temple’s original appearance. After his exploration, he finally found a large locked wooden box in the room that had not yet collapsed.
The reason he noticed this box was that he sensed a faint spirit energy fluctuation coming from it.
“Treasure Chest Monster? Even if it is a Treasure Chest Monster, it shouldn’t be a big problem, right?”
“With this armor of mine, carrying ten or eight Treasure Chest Monsters is no big deal.”
Luxianbei silently complains, bending down to pick up the wooden box and move it to the center of the courtyard, examining it closely in the moonlight.
After a hundred years, if not more, the box’s original color is indistinguishable, its surface covered in wormholes and traces of various fungi. The antique pillow lock has rusted, and with a slight tug, it breaks with a “crack.”
After unlocking it, Luxianbei waits quietly for a moment; seeing nothing happening, he opens the lid.
As the lid creaks open, a faint scent of camphor wood wafts out, faintly mixed with a smell of earth. Focusing on the inside of the box, Luxianbei is momentarily stunned.
Unlike the severely decayed exterior of the box, the interior is much better preserved, with smooth and even walls.
A protective layer made of natural plant oils acts like a barrier, preventing the items inside from decaying significantly, looking as if they hadn’t been stored for over a hundred years.
On the top layer of the box lie some children’s clothes and toys.
Perhaps due to the abundant water systems and humid climate around Zhenwu Mountain, the clothes and toys, although not severely decayed, have accumulated numerous mold spots and emit a noxious odor, making them unusable—somewhat regrettable.
Luxianbei picks up a small cotton jacket and holds it up to examine it. Upon seeing the sleeves of different lengths and the polygonal hem, a complicated look flashes in his eyes.
“Alright, although it’s a bit ugly, it really is hard to ask four elderly men near their sixties to do needlework.”
“And these toys that are abstract and resemble evil god statues, now I understand where the frightening artistry of that ancestor came from.”
“It must be said, to rot to such a degree, you really need to start with children!”
Talking to himself, Luxianbei begins to take out Qing Ji’s childhood clothes and toys one by one from the wooden box, placing them on the already detached lid, and finally discovers something at the bottom of the box.
It’s a simple sheepskin drawstring bag, embroidered with the characters “Long Clan” on one side, looking like the kind of pouch or money bag commonly seen in ancient costume dramas.
Inside the whole wooden box are mostly Qing Ji’s childhood things, but this sheepskin bag seems to belong to those four elderly Taoists.
The faint spirit energy fluctuation Luxianbei sensed is emanating from the sheepskin bag.
He stares at the sheepskin bag, tilts his head, thinks for a moment, and reaches out to pick it up.
The sheepskin bag feels thick and heavy; he has no idea what is inside. “Squeak!”
He loosens the drawstring and rope, takes a glance at the contents, and a look of surprise flashes in his eyes. The sheepskin bag contains half a bag of yellow sand.
“This yellow sand looks fine, like that kind of fine sand from a desert or beach?” Luxianbei examines the yellow sand, murmuring to himself.
“Perhaps it was brought back by the ancestor’s masters from their homeland?”
This act is not merely a nostalgia for the homeland; from a perspective of spirit energy, it makes a certain sense.
The soil of a land, even just a handful, contains a small amount of earth vein energy; though it’s just a tiny bit, it serves a similar purpose to a talisman.
Thus, in the past, people often liked to carry a bit of soil from their homeland when they left, believing that the spirits of their homeland could bring them good luck.
However, the actual effect isn’t very significant.
As the king of urban legends in Huacheng, Luxianbei feels that even if he sensed a call from someone far away in Huacheng through the faint earth vein energy contained in the soil, he wouldn’t be able to help that person.
At most, he could say, “You can do it! Hang in there!”
Luxianbei thought, continuing to search inside the sheepskin bag. Soon he found two more items apart from the yellow sand: a piece of silk and a token.
The milky-white silk is light and soft, the size of a handkerchief, with a line of scarlet writing that reads, “The Exiled, Ultimately Return to Their Homeland.”
The characters are twisted and grotesque, as if written in bl**d; just looking at it gives Luxianbei an uncomfortable feeling, as if he might be influenced by the intense negative emotions contained within those words.
An image flashes in his mind, of a person with an unrecognizable face, writing these words with bloodied hands on this silk.
Although returning home is a deeply ingrained belief among most people in Z Country, it seems strange as if it implies grabbing someone and burying them alive back in their homeland.
It appears that these masters of various Taoist paths have hidden some unknown secrets!
Luxianbei thought, shifting his gaze away from the discomforting silk and placing it back into the sheepskin bag, then reaching for the pitch-black token.
The next moment, as soon as his fingertip touched the token, his pupils quivered slightly, and his hand pulled back rapidly as if it had been electrocuted.
“What’s going on?”
Through the gap in his helmet, Luxianbei looks uncertainly at his right hand.
The sturdy armor is still intact, tightly enveloping his right hand, as if he could catch a chainsaw barehanded with no problem. But just earlier, when he touched the token, it felt as if the armor covering his hand had suddenly vanished, and his fingertips felt like they were touching tiny hot grains as if under the scorching sun.
Even the Ling Tai Purification can’t block this?
However, when he tried to pick it up just now, it was only a strange feeling, but the spirit energy fluctuation didn’t show any obvious changes—seems like there’s no danger.
Should I try again?
Furrowing his brow, Luxianbei hesitated for a moment, then bravely extended his hand and grasped the token tightly, pulling it out from the sheepskin bag.
Upon gripping the token, the strange sensation returned to his palm, and for a brief moment, he even felt as if the token was going to turn into a handful of ungraspable flowing sand.
Then—
Just as Luxianbei thought the token was about to slip through his fingers, everything returned to normal, as if the strange sensations before were simply an illusion. Only the token remained tangible in his palm.
The token is made from some kind of black jade stone, radiating a faint spirit energy fluctuation, with a peculiar shape resembling a big fish with a dragon head.
Luxianbei thinks, “This shape resembles the Chiwen, one of the legendary nine offspring of dragons. But aren’t Chiwen generally carved on roofs?”
Surprisingly, there’s a token styled like this?
Thinking of this, Luxianbei flips the token over, and on its flat belly, three gilded characters are inscribed: “General Summons”, apart from the three gilded characters, small illegible words are also carved amidst the scales of the big fish.
“Is this some sort of special ancient script? This should be of interest to Professor Ma; I’ll ask him for help to identify it when I return to Huacheng.”
Luxianbei toyed with and examined the token for a while. Failing to find anything particularly special, he put it along with the piece of silk back into the sheepskin bag and tucked the bag into his embrace, using the familiar seal to store it away safely beneath his coat.
After securing the sheepskin bag, Luxianbei stood up, crossed his arms over his chest, tilted his head, and glanced at the remaining childhood items of Qing Ji within the wooden box. After a moment of contemplation, he picked up the grotesque tiger head hat and turned to leave the Small Taoist Temple.
Those clothes and toys had varying degrees of mold and decay, and from certain perspectives, they could already be considered as household waste. The fact they had been preserved until now was likely due to the high-quality wooden box.
“”
It wasn’t really necessary to take everything, just bringing one back for a keepsake is enough.
Luxianbei thought, picking a tiger head hat and placing all the remaining clothes and toys back into the wooden box.
He figured that this grotesque tiger head hat, scary enough to make a child cry, is a good choice—if he has kids in the future, he could use it to scare them a bit, or share the horror with other children as well.
———
After putting the wooden box back in its original place, Luxianbei cast a few simple spell formulas to ward off water and insects before finally leaving the Small Taoist Temple. Walking down the pebble path in front of it, he thanked the Shuishu Beast waiting at the end of the path, as he prepared to begin summoning Zhang Shuo with the materials and items he had collected.
Standing at the end of the pebble path, he glanced around before walking towards a small basin— the furthest empty space from the Small Taoist Temple.
He didn’t dare to summon a spirit near the temple; he was a bit afraid that an accidental mistake might awaken the four masters of his ancestor from their graves.
At that time, his ancestor might not mind, but experiencing the pain of losing close relatives over a hundred years later, would not be ideal. Although it had already been over a hundred years, theoretically, their lingering thoughts would have long dissipated, but what if? One must be cautious!
Upon reaching the empty space, Luxianbei began to get busy.
Originally, he planned to summon Zhang Shuo directly, and then hurriedly go to find Zhang Hainan for the sword without delay but hadn’t expected to arrive at Qing Ji’s former residence, which had delayed him for over half an hour.
The current situation felt as if he were about to go on a date with his girlfriend, but decided to drop by to see his ex-girlfriend who had been in an accident, only to unexpectedly run into a former ex-girlfriend he thought was dead.
To avoid being discovered by his girlfriend, he had to speed things up a bit.
Once he summons Zhang Shuo’s lingering thoughts, he thought it might be better not to go through any process of confessing and cooperating. Instead, he might as well torture him severely to forcibly extract everything he wanted to know.
After all, he had already summoned spirits. Why should he bother acting humane?
Besides, I’m not even human!
While pondering this, he set up the incense table and offerings, placing a few items left by Zhang Shuo in position. Luxianbei focused, approached the incense table, and spread out the spirit energy fluctuations, enveloping the entire incense table, silently chanting.
“Thank you, youth, the bright day, the spring atmosphere, all things in haste. Underworld and wandering, the soul shall not escape. Soul, return! No distance! Soul, return! No east, no west, no south, no north!”
With the chanting of the spell, his voice and intention gradually solidified into invisible threads extending in all directions, infiltrating the void. Soon, that familiar sensation, of being watched by countless eerie gazes, quietly emerged around him.
Then—
Luxianbei softly called out Zhang Shuo’s name, “Zhang Shuo, does the soul return?!”
After the first call, there was no response from the extended thoughts.
This is strange; having witnessed Zhang Shuo’s sudden demise, Luxianbei even began to doubt if that guy was like Hu Chuan, having never truly died but instead changed identities and was hiding somewhere.
Could it be that someone completely eroded and corrupted by the Pink Fluffy Rabbit, doesn’t even leave behind the last trace of their lingering thoughts on objects they once used? Luxianbei wondered.
“Zhang Shuo, does the soul return?!””Zhang Shuo, does the soul return?!”
Luxianbei called out two more times, yet the threads of thought remain unresponsive.
It seems that someone completely eroded and corrupted by the Pink Fluffy Rabbit indeed wouldn’t leave any lingering thoughts behind, Luxianbei thought.
Even though he had long anticipated such an outcome, he still felt a bit disappointed.
The next moment, just as he was preparing to dissolve the spell ritual and give up on summoning Zhang Shuo, the thoughts extending into the void suddenly convulsed violently.
The terrifying tremor caused the mental threads to pull erratically, throwing his mind into chaos.
That sensation was even more frightening than mistakenly triggering the hidden powers within Oujinbang during his prior soul summoning.
If the previous incident with Oujinbang felt like catching a big crocodile while fishing in a small stream, this time, it was as if he had absurdly hooked a deep-sea monster!
In an instant, the hunter became the hunted.
d*mn it, what deadly thing did I just summon?
An unsettling emotion surged within Luxianbei as he hurriedly tried to cease his spirit energy operation, planning to abort the spell. However, it was already too late.
The intense tremors surged again from the mental threads that he hadn’t yet severed, momentarily flooding his mind with countless frantic thoughts, and Luxianbei’s consciousness briefly slipped into blankness.
In a daze, a black mist spread before his eyes, and he “saw” a dark, chaotic space.
A sun deeper and darker than the void emerged, pouring forth endless, frenzied blackness all around.
