Chapter 591: Journey to Kunlun (4)

Guided by Bungsain, the building they arrived at—set at the very center of the Eight Immortals Palace—was the Spirit Wheel Hall.

Kunlun’s Spirit Wheel lineage is for all intents and purposes broken, but its records are immensely useful to alchemy—and, quietly, rather fun.

So the alchemy Daoists had taken on much of the work as a hobby; among them, a Daoist called Master Danlun was the sharpest hand.

Sure enough, Master Danlun had already taken his seat inside the Spirit Wheel Hall, transcribing a rotted book by hand and rebinding it anew.

As this was a private consult, the rest of the party had already been shown to the guest quarters to rest, and even Bungsain withdrew, saying he would bathe and purify himself before viewing the Sword-Cut Wall.

Master Danlun proved to be a middle-aged man with mismatched eyes, one larger than the other—making Qing wonder, surely he wasn’t “Danlun” because he had only one eye?

Of course not; Kunlun’s first-generation disciples all share the “Dan-” generation name.

When Qing offered greetings, he waved a hand.

When she asked if she might sit opposite, he dipped his chin.

Once she sat, he kept flattening pages and working the binding press—terse as stone.

Qing tossed out a small question first.

“Mm—what book is that?”

“A sorcery text called the Kunlun Western Palace Canon. As a fellow Daoist you should know: Kunlun, the mountain where immortals dwell. The Western Palace is the Queen Mother of the West’s abode—so this is a text of borrowing-strength.”

“Ooh— a sorcery text.”

An old memory flickered through her mind.

Come to think of it—Taiping Magical Arts?—something she’d seen posted by Attack-Text Left Seat...

If she touched this, would something pop?

“May I take a look?”

“Gently. Though the copy is done, the original codex always has value.”

Qing reached out with care.

But the martial window did not flare—hmm. So this wasn’t it.

Her interest waned; she covered with a polite line.

“In that case, it’s too precious to fuss with. I won’t handle it.”

“Good.”

Master Danlun nestled the original Western Palace Canon into a small book chest, closed the lid, and sealed it tight by smearing on a brown substance from a bowl.

Qing felt a small pang.

Mm. She’d thought it was rice syrup.

Apparently not for dipping snacks.

As she stared with lingering hunger at the sealing paste, Master Danlun—having finished his meticulous stowing—at last looked at her.

“Well then—what have you come to ask, little seal-bearer?”

“Ah—yes. I wondered if you’d heard of something called the Corpse-Blood Poisoner.”

“I have not.”

The answer came without a breath of hesitation.

What? Even if nothing came to mind, didn’t people at least pretend to think?

Seeing Qing’s blank face, Master Danlun shook his head lightly.

“Sorcery is immensely ambiguous. The same art, by region and era, splits and twists—words of sorcery hold power in themselves—so derivative schools arise. If you ask, by name alone, ‘Which art is this?’ no one but a holder of that exact lineage could know. Go around asking like that and you’ll wind up hunting the few in the Central Plains who kept a secret line by mouth alone—you’ll never find it.”

What’s this? He’s getting talkative. A good sign.

“Then how?”

“Describe what the Corpse-Blood Poisoner produces. Only then can we search our history for similar notions, compare them, and infer a source. So—what is this Corpse-Blood Poisoner? Ah—wait. Don’t answer. Let me think. ‘Corpse-blood’—dead blood. ‘Poisoner’—here ‘poison’ along with corpse... rot, yes, putrefaction. If we take ‘poisoner’ as ‘one who is rotten,’ that’s a metaphor for a corpse. But they didn’t say ‘corpse’; they said ‘person.’ So—‘a person like a corpse,’ ‘a living person in whom dead blood runs’—something of that sort. How’s that?”

“Oh—yes. That sounds right.”

“Then ‘corpse-blood’—dead blood, fouled blood. In the sorcerous path—dead blood... hm. Hm. I don’t know. So—what exactly is this Corpse-Blood Poisoner?”

“Mm. Poison has no effect whatsoever—and nothing harmful at all occurs in the body—”

“Ah! Hence ‘dead blood.’ That fits. Yes—gisa-ja—a walking corpse. Already dead.”

“You know—?”

Qing couldn’t hide the spark of relief, and moved to press him—but Danlun raised a hand and stopped her.

“Wait. Yes. I see it. The Hwan-Hon Self-Walking primary rite. The Great Root-Restoring Canon of Ancestral Offerings. Yes. I see. So that’s what it was. So it is. I understand now.”

If you understand, share it, perhaps?

Why is he the only one who knows while I remain in the dark?

Just as Qing felt as if she’d swallowed ten sweet potatoes—no, a thousand—Master Danlun sprang up and vanished at a brisk trot into the forests of desks.

Left with nothing to do, Qing glanced around, then dabbed a fingertip in the brown sealing liquid for a taste—ack, bitter. Tree sap.

She dawdled some more, then flopped forward with both heavy breasts set on the desk like twin paperweights.

If her master caught her, a strategic nuclear strike would be inbound; but what can you do—it’s comfortable.

And honestly, of all people, her master should sympathize; if anyone would, she would.

Whatever the impulse, she dipped deep again and flicked her tongue.

Ugh. That woody stink. Truly vile.

Not food. She’d eaten tree bark often enough in the past.

Those bastards—“the trees will die”—beating people even for peeling bark to eat.

And yet—dip, lick; dip, lick.

Still vile. The bitterness, the unbearable green stink—truly foul.

If someone saw her, they’d ask why she kept licking while grimacing if it tasted so bad.

Footsteps approached; Qing straightened as if nothing had happened.

Master Danlun returned with several books tucked under one arm. As he sat, his eyes narrowed at the seal bowl—its level slightly lower than before.

Qing feigned ignorance and spoke first.

“Did you find the records?”

“Yes. I did. ‘Corpse-Blood Poisoner’—a gruesome, evil name—no wonder I couldn’t connect the dots. The primary rite is Hwan-Hon Self-Walking. Hwan-Hon means ‘returning the soul’; self-walking means ‘walking on one’s own.’ And ‘primary rite’—the greatest of offerings—so it means ‘the great rite to restore the dead.’”

“A resurrection ceremony?”

“Indeed. Here—look.”

He flipped through a book.

She’d found him copying when she arrived; this one was already bound—fresh, clean pages he handled without fuss.

He opened to a passage—

What? In this mood, isn’t he supposed to show me?

Why set it before himself and read it alone?

“A rite pleading with the Lady of the Western Grotto-Heaven, the Queen Mother of the West who returns spirits to the Mountain of Turtles and Snakes, to send back a soul already dead. It relies solely on human sincerity to move the mistress of the Western Palace; if even a single hair’s worth of falsehood is mixed in, calamity and heavenly punishment descend—an exceedingly perilous rite...”

But man consists of hun and po—soul and vital essence.

Even if the Queen Mother mercifully returns the soul, if the body has already died, no rite avails.

Thus the first task is to keep the body from dying once the soul has departed.

A soulless body does not breathe on its own; the living must attend at its side and blow breath three hundred times each minute into its mouth.

Its vital energy will leak away, so elixirs must be administered continually.

For forty-nine days breath must be maintained, and of course feeding must be managed.

“Mm? Isn’t something off? The Queen Mother ruling the Western Palace is a pre-Zhou Daoist schema. But the forty-nine-day passage is a Buddhist road to the afterlife, much later, no?”

Before Buddhism took root in the Central Plains, the dead went to the Western Palace—the Jade Peak of the Kunlun Range.

But once Buddhism took root, Daoism adopted elements of the Buddhist cosmos and rearranged the ranks of immortals; the Buddhist afterworld was subcontracted to the managers of death in the celestial bureaucracy.

And the Queen Mother, once the mistress of death, rose vastly in station—standing tall as the female leader overseeing all Daoist immortals.

Master Danlun’s stiffness eased a little.

“Quite so. For one of the moderns, you’ve studied the sources well. These days the youth know nothing of the Queen Mother of the West in Heavenly Annals and Five Mistakes.”

Because a cudgel is the strongest motivation to learn, of course.

“But sorcery is always like this—a jumble, mixed to taste. In any case, if the living keep the dead alive for forty-nine days, what sincerity that must be. The Queen Mother would surely be moved.”

On the forty-eighth day a great offering is made to beg the soul’s return; the rite must end at the forty-ninth day at precisely the hour of death.

If it ends too early, the soul is still under Yama’s jurisdiction—even the Queen Mother cannot take it.

If it ends too late, the soul has passed through the Gate of Rebirth, memories washed away, embarking on the next life.

Thus, if the rite succeeds, the dead will rise and walk on their own.

“Yet the already-dead—the walking corpse—though it speaks and thinks and walks, is still dead. The dead do not die again; and the living memory halts at the moment of death. Therefore a walking corpse is ageless and undying—it does not age, nor does it die.”

“Eh? Ageless and undying?”

“Not truly immortal, of course. There is more.”

A dead thing cannot die—

but it can be killed.

Punish the corpse—dragging out a dead body to execute it again—exists precisely for this.

“By your account, the Corpse-Blood Poisoner shares much with the walking corpse. Poison has no effect; nothing harmful occurs—poison is useless to what is already dead. The only way to kill the already-dead is to hew it down.”

“Mm. Then—is it possible an entirely different soul was nested into the body?”

Danlun snapped his fingers.

“Ah. Indeed—that would explain the name. No wonder it sounded so vile. Restoring one’s own dead is a deed against the Way, but it rests on human feeling—love and longing—the realm of compassion. The Queen Mother moves at such hearts.”

He nodded.

“But as you say, that is another matter. What reason to insert another’s soul to fashion an ageless, undying monster? Two possibilities.”

One: the owner of the soul seeks undying life, turning his own death into immortality.

Two: someone seeks to command an undying monster and thus inserts a soul he can control.

Either way, the intent is consummately evil—and evil sorcery will not function without an evil name.

“A truly horrible art. Where in heaven did you see such a thing? If it exists, the orthodox world must not leave such monsters be.”

A twinge inside—sharp as a blade.

Qing forced a smile over the lurch in her heart.

“Mm. The Corpse-Puppet adepts.”

“Ah—the apostates of Spirit Wheel arts. Then it is plausible. The corpse puppet began as a basic art of Spirit Wheel Daoists—wholesome—returning a body to its family. But over time, selfish minds put corpses to their own use. Hence we singled them out as ‘corpse-puppet adepts’ to mark them for caution.”

“Oh—right. And about corpse puppets—”

“But this is a fearsome art indeed. The human soul is hun 魂 and po 魄—and the character common to both is gui 鬼, ‘spirit.’ That gui is the anima; hun and po are fundamentally one—only differing in that hun belongs to heaven and po to earth.”

She’d thought this from before: Master Danlun truly lives as he pleases.

“Thus the truth etched in the characters cannot be altered by mere incantation. In other words, a soul nesting in a human body cannot be other than its own.”

But Qing lived with a mental parasite lodged somewhere inside.

If the Heavenly Demon Soul could do it, why not another?

“Is it wholly impossible?”

“In sorcery nothing is impossible. But to alter truth engraved in the script itself—that takes a sorcerer of the Half-Immortal Realm; among warriors, that is the Life-and-Death Boundary. In all antiquity there were only two of such stature: Master Right Sage and Master Zuozi.”

“They’re from way back.”

“Since then, martial studies advanced—and sorcery declined. In this age, no sorcerer can reach Half-Immortal; therefore I said it is impossible.”

Except that Qing had one inside her now.

To say it was impossible—ah, and then the Empress’s words flashed back:

—I should never have entrusted you to the witches of India. I should never have trusted them.

“Ah! India! What if it were the witches of India?”

“You said corpse-puppet adepts. How would I know India’s affairs? Perhaps an Indian sorcerer could. But if such a sorcerer exists, why would he keep an undying puppet as a subordinate, against the grain of heaven?”

One who can shake the earth, call floods, bring drought—who can rock the world with calamity—wouldn’t need to defy heaven just to make a walking corpse.

“Eh. Maybe he just felt like it.”

“Did Senior Heavenly Martial Emperor—with all his martial might—write letters urging his enemies to kill themselves? No—he went and cut them down. When you kill an enemy, do you set down your sword to pick up a pen and request their suicide? By your account, the Corpse-Blood Poisoner is that letter. Even if it is ‘undying,’ a man with a blade can kill it—so why?”

“Well—you never know. Maybe he was bored? Maybe it was to brag—‘I can do this, too.’”

“That, too, could be.”

In any case, it was a great gain.

Qing had learned that her existence could be explained within this primitive, ancient martial world’s own methods.

Not some cosmic entity’s meddling, not a sliver of some prewritten simulation.

That alone brought a deep easing in her heart.

Also—hm.

Am I... not aging? Hm. Surely not?

Qing had not felt any aging.

Mirrors are hard to come by here—and even if they were everywhere, people rarely notice their own faces changing.

Besides, true masters age slowly to begin with—so, nah. Surely not.