Chapter 38

“That’s clearly someone who can’t stand seeing others happy, a total pervert.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, she felt a sudden sensation of weightlessness. Li Daoxuan had abruptly employed his qinggong, carrying her as he leapt through the treetops. This immediately stirred memories from her previous life.
Back then, the youth had been hot-blooded and easily provoked, carrying her as they bounded across layered, winding rooftops. Unfortunately, by that time her body had already been affected by some unknown poison, her five senses would intermittently vanish, and she could never fully hear what he said.
Shen Qing’s thoughts drifted. The hand clutching the scripture banner unconsciously tightened, but recalling the decayed state of the ruined temple, a trace of distaste welled up inside her. She switched to pinching the cloth between two fingers instead, subtly wiping her palm several times against his shoulder, trying to rub away the dust that had clung to the banner.
“Still scared?” Li Daoxuan suddenly asked.
Shen Qing’s hand stilled mid-wipe. A beat later, she replied, “What?”
Li Daoxuan fell silent.
Only after a moment did Shen Qing realize what he had meant, he was asking whether she was still afraid of the forest.
She lifted her gaze. Night had fully fallen, cool wind brushing her face. Moonlight draped over the clustered treetops like a layer of silver frost.
“Not anymore,” she said.
…
When they finally exited the forest and spotted a familiar structure, the two of them realized in shock that this was Mount Li. The well-known Springview Terrace stood clearly before them.
After the incident with the vengeful ghost at the Quijiang Banquet, the Emperor, fearful that evil remnants might remain, had ordered Mount Li sealed, dispatching disciples from Dongshan Temple to clean up and eliminate any lingering threats.
As a result, Mount Li was now completely deserted. The vast Springview Terrace stood alone in the endless darkness.
By the time Li Daoxuan stopped there, Shen Qing on his back had already lost consciousness.
He casually chose a side room, pushed the door open, and laid her on the bed. Then he rummaged through the room, turning things over until he finally found a fire striker hidden in a concealed compartment.
Afraid that firelight might draw unwanted attention, Li Daoxuan lit only two oil lamps. Only the area beside Shen Qing’s bed was illuminated. By the faint glow, he noticed that something was still clenched in her hand. He tried to pry it free, but failed.
Seeing this, he simply gave up, brushed off his sleeves, and stepped outside.
When Shen Qing woke again, it was already the latter half of the night. Her wound had been properly bandaged with clean wrapping. The two oil lamps were barely holding on, their flames flickering weakly.
She tried to sit up, only to feel her body burning hot, as if she’d been rolled through boiling oil. Her mouth was parched; the moment she opened it, her throat felt as though it were smoking with pain.
Dazed, Shen Qing sat up, suddenly remembering she was still holding something. She no longer bothered looking for water.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw several unlit oil lamps on a low cabinet. She poured the remaining oil into two of them and used a wooden stick to adjust the wicks. In no time, the flames flared up, giving her enough light to examine the patterns on the scripture banner.
Suddenly recalling something, Shen Qing swept her gaze around the room, and sure enough, she spotted a familiar figure resting against a low table.
When she saw that the two braided pigtails at the back of Li Daoxuan’s head had been replaced with neatly tied-up hair, a flicker of disappointment passed through her heart.
Earlier in the underground palace, Shen Qing had deliberately played a prank, braiding his long hair into two small plaits and even adding two pink bell-shaped bows at the ends for extra mischief.
She had fully intended to let him return to Chang’an with that ridiculous hairstyle and embarrass himself. Who would have thought he’d noticed something was wrong and fixed it anyway?
Shen Qing pouted and shifted her gaze back to the scripture banner.
At one look, she realized something was off.
Normally, scripture banners hanging in temples bore auspicious patterns. But this one was densely carved with incantations.
Shen Qing wasn’t well-versed in talismans and spells, but she could still recognize that part of these incantations were meant to suppress and expel evil spirits. Recalling the scene inside the temple, she felt that the temple and the Bai Shuisha’s underground palace were closely connected.
After that trip through the underground palace, Shen Qing was certain that the Bai Shuisha had been, at the very least, the family member of an official ranked third grade or higher in life. Judging by his appearance, he couldn’t have been older than twenty. To die so young with such deep resentment, and then transform into the fearsome Bai Shuisha, was proof enough of how dark and vicious his heart must have been in life.
A strong premonition rose within Shen Qing. If she could uncover the Bai Shuisha’s identity before death, then the reason he targeted the Shen family would finally become clear, like clouds parting to reveal the sky.
The most urgent task now was to figure out the meaning of the incantations on this scripture banner.
She decided to ask Li Daoxuan first and see if he recognized them.
Unfortunately, she overestimated her own body.
The moment she stepped off the bed, the world spun violently. Shen Qing felt dizzy and disoriented, and in the next instant, she crashed heavily to the floor with a loud bang.
No matter how deeply someone slept, such a noise would wake them. Li Daoxuan opened his eyes to see someone sprawled beneath the bed.
He sighed, stepped forward, scooped up the person clutching her head, and tossed her back onto the bed.
“Shen You’an, you really are hard to kill,” he said with mixed feelings.
Suppressing the urge to vomit, Shen Qing closed her eyes and endured the wave of dizziness. The moment she heard Li Daoxuan’s infuriating voice, she instinctively retorted, “I didn’t expect the bed to be this high either. It’s your fault for choosing such a tall one.” The moment the words left her mouth, she regretted them, she still needed his help.
Li Daoxuan laughed in anger. “So I’ve gone and helped an ungrateful wretch.”
Shen Qing guiltily pinched the scripture banner in her hand, lowered her head, and changed the subject. “Hey, help me take a look at this, will you?”
Li Daoxuan shot her a sidelong glance, his expression inscrutable. He suddenly bent down, leaning close to her, and in the softest voice delivered the most punchable words: “I can look, but you have to beg me.”
He’d expected her to bare her teeth in fury. Instead, Shen Qing’s expression relaxed. She suddenly hugged his arm and said softly, “Li Daoxuan, please.”
Her voice was like honey, sweet enough to melt hearts.
Li Daoxuan immediately felt chills race across his body, goosebumps erupting everywhere.
Shen Qing fanned the flames further. “Pretty please? Just take a look for me, one glance is enough.” Before he could react, she stuffed the scripture banner straight into his palm.
Only then did Li Daoxuan snap out of it. He yanked his arm free and staggered backward, as if he wanted to retreat ten li in a single step.
A glint of cunning flashed through Shen Qing’s eyes. Seeing the banner held firmly in his hand, she knew,
This round, she had won.
Li Daoxuan stared at the banner, his expression as ugly as if he’d swallowed something foul. “I truly am curious, what exactly is your so-called backbone made of, for it to be this soft?”
Shen Qing raised a finger and waved it in front of him. “Backbone? I’m just a fragile young girl, where would I get the kind of backbone you’re talking about? Your Highness should honor his word and help me take a look.”
When it came to her family’s safety, Shen Qing never played games. Besides, she had long since perfected the art of acting cute in front of her senior brother. A bit of coaxing and softening now, no matter who the target was, cost her nothing at all.
Li Daoxuan knew he’d lost this round. No matter how annoyed he felt, he could only obediently examine it for her.
But the moment he laid eyes on the incantations carved into the scripture banner, a trace of gravity crept onto his face as well.
Seeing the change in his expression, Shen Qing leaned closer, trying to discern something from the prayer banners.
Li Daoxuan suddenly said, “Yansheng sorcery.”
Shen Qing froze. “Yansheng sorcery?”
She had long heard of this technique. If one traced matters back ten years, before Xiangyao was executed, the Li dynasty had been rife with practitioners, Daoist schools flourished like a hundred flowers in bloom. Yet where there was abundance, impurities were inevitable. Among them, yansheng sorcery had once risen sharply.
Yansheng sorcery employed various curses to harm others. It included spells meant to doom someone to loneliness, misfortune day after day, and worse still, darker practices involving soul suppression. Through such spells, a person’s living soul would be forcibly bound, unable to reincarnate, trapped in a single place and subjected to endless torment.
Those who used such curses almost always bore overwhelming hatred toward their victims.
In the past, the former Crown Prince had used this very art to cruelly harm the current Crown Prince’s birth mother, ultimately meeting a tragic end, torn apart by five horses.
From then on, the Emperor issued a strict edict forbidding the existence of yansheng sorcery among the people. Anyone found connected to it would have their entire clan exterminated on the spot. This alone showed how deeply the Emperor detested such arts.
And yet now, within Mount Li, where the royal family retreated every year to escape the summer heat, inside a small, dilapidated temple, such an evil technique had appeared. Even more astonishing was that the tomb of the Bai Shuisha stretched all the way from beneath Chang’an to Mount Li itself.
Right under the Son of Heaven’s nose, someone had dared to construct such a tomb so brazenly. The audacity was staggering.
Shen Qing asked, “Which category of yansheng sorcery is this?”
“Soul-binding,” Li Daoxuan replied.
That is, suppressing a living soul so it could never reincarnate, forced to endure endless suffering day after day.
Shen Qing truly could not understand the purpose behind it.
If the person hated the Bai Shuisha, then why build such a massive tomb, laden with deadly mechanisms, for him? Yet if they favored him, why place yansheng sorcery at a critical point within the tomb to suppress his soul?
Still, it did explain why the Bai Shuisha had become what he was.
Imagine living a miserable life, then dying an unnatural death, only to have one’s soul bound by evil sorcery, trapped in a narrow coffin, enduring constant agony as if being fried in oil, unable even to turn over or struggle. How could such a spirit not harbor resentment?
If Shen Qing were in his place, her resentment would likely be even greater than the Bai Shuisha’s.
It was only because he had become the Bai Shuisha and broken free of the place confining him that he could move freely at all. Even so, the pain in his body had not lessened in the slightest.
Now that she understood the purpose of the prayer banners, Shen Qing also knew where to investigate next.
The Bai Shuisha appeared young. Since his status in life had been high and his death accidental, records concerning his demise were almost certainly filed with the Court of Judicial Review.
She only needed to search for cases involving the drowning deaths of officials or family members around twenty years old, ranked third grade or above. His identity would soon surface.
And once the Bai Shuisha’s identity was confirmed, the identity of the Funeral Demon would not be far off either. She wanted to see exactly what kind of blood feud they had with the Shen family, one so deep that even death could not sever it.
Shen Qing lifted her gaze, violent intent surging uncontrollably in her eyes. Her heart pounded fiercely; she wished she could fly back to Chang’an this very moment and head straight for the Court of Judicial Review.
But she knew that outsiders could not enter the Court so easily. This matter required careful planning.
Shen Qing slowly sat up, wanting to check the time of day.
Seeing her movement, Li Daoxuan instinctively thought she was about to cause trouble again. His feet carried him forward before he could stop himself. “What are you doing?”
Shen Qing said, “What time is it? I want to go home. Father and Mother must be worried.” She lowered her eyes slightly, her thoughts drifting to her parents, wondering how anxious they must be.
Li Daoxuan replied, “It’s still early. Go back to sleep.”
If not for Chang’an’s curfew, where after the evening drum all ward gates closed, even the city gates shut, Shen Qing would have already returned home by now, and Li Daoxuan would not still be here wasting time with her.
Though her head throbbed and her thoughts were muddled, Shen Qing felt no sleepiness at all.
Still, she obediently lay back down and reached a hand toward Li Daoxuan.
Without a word, Li Daoxuan rolled up the prayer banners and tucked them into his tattered sleeve. “What, reaching out for me to coax you? You’re already grown, are you afraid of the dark?”
Shen Qing snapped angrily, “The prayer banners! Give them back to me!”
Li Daoxuan calmly changed the subject. “What do you want them for?”
“Naturally, to give them to my senior brother so he can deal with the Bai Shuisha!” Shen Qing said. “What, are you planning to pocket the credit for yourself? Shameless! If you want it, go get it yourself!”
At this point, Li Daoxuan’s skin was thicker than the city walls. “The Bai Shuisha is far more dangerous than ordinary demons. As a disciple of Dongshan Temple, I must take this seriously. Your senior brother runs himself ragged exterminating demons day in and day out, how could he devote himself fully to dealing with the Bai Shuisha?”
“I’m different,” he added. “I have time. Plenty of time to deal with that thing.”
Seeing that he truly intended to take over the matter, Shen Qing felt a surge of delight in her heart, though she kept her face composed and pretended to be angry. “Shameless!”
Fine, investigate all you want. When the Funeral Demon and the Bai Shuisha both show up, you’ll learn your lesson.