Chapter 44: Midnight Mirror (Part 7)

“Drag it out with her.”

Jiang Sheng’s entire body stiffened. A voice suddenly echoed in his mind, a voice he knew all too well. These days they had been together almost day and night, their souls and flesh intertwined and coexisting.

“Make her give you a little more time. Just say you need to think it over properly.”

Jiang Sheng’s pupils dilated for a moment. When he raised his head again, he had already regained clarity.

He maintained his depressed demeanor and said: “Give me a little more time, okay? Just for the sake of… for the sake of us both being human. Fellow countryman, is that alright?”

Chen Jiu: “…”

Using her own words to block her own mouth. However she heard it, it felt unpleasant.

How did this kid suddenly become so cunning?

“I can only give you one night.” Chen Jiu looked into his eyes: “I’m doing this for your girlfriend’s sake. Don’t play tricks under my nose. Going against me won’t do you any good. Understand?”

Jiang Sheng averted his gaze: “I understand.”

Chen Jiu stood still for a moment, watching him leave. Then, still uneasy, she pinched out a paper figure, snapped her fingers, and the paper figure went clickety clack chasing after him.

This was no joke. It concerned her friends’ lives. One night was still too long. She wasn’t at ease letting Jiang Sheng be brainwashed by that evil spirit for another whole night. If she let it go, tomorrow when she opened her eyes, Jiang Sheng might either run away or force an upgrade. Neither would do her any good.

Both sides were playing tricks. So the moment Jiang Sheng entered his home, the Buddha statue emitted a low murmuring curse.

Jiang Sheng’s vision swam. He covered his ears, knelt in pain, then collapsed, curling up.

“Fool… You’ve brought her pathfinding envoy back again. Before her true body arrives, run quickly.” The voice carried some anger, circling around his ear.

Jiang Sheng panted: “I understand.”

Who would have thought that just as he was struggling to prop his body up, the already flimsy door panel was suddenly kicked open from outside with a violent blow. Jiang Sheng was caught completely off guard. The force of the kick sent him tumbling forward, falling back to the ground. Stars swam before his eyes for a moment.

Jiang Sheng: “…”

His face bruised and swollen, he silently spat out a mouthful of blood, turned his head to look at Chen Jiu, not even having the strength to curse her anymore.

The black mist saw who had come and instantly erupted in a genderless scream, darting around the cramped room, crashing headlessly into the Buddha statue.

Chen Jiu slammed the door shut behind her with a bang. The ceiling immediately shook, dropping a bit of mud and dust. At the same time, she crossed her hands, sending out several talisman papers flying. Golden light flashed, sealing off all escape routes in every direction!

“Who told you to move so slowly… If you had listened to me earlier… How did it come to this…”

In the chaos, a pair of scarlet eyes slowly opened within the black mist, carrying malice and the calm before a storm, the voice sinking bit by bit.

“Now there is no other way. Hand over your body. Together we will eliminate this obstacle…”

Jiang Sheng watched Chen Jiu approach, supporting his body, slowly retreating. He asked in his mind: “You want to kill her? You want to use my hands to kill her?”

“If you don’t eliminate her, she will destroy the fruits of our dozens of days of labor in one go.”

That voice recovered the bewitching tone from their first meeting: “I have no physical form. I cannot unleash even one tenth of my power. We only need to join forces…”

“I agree to you.” Jiang Sheng finished speaking in his mind, then spat out another mouthful of bloody saliva. With some subtle hatred, he looked at Chen Jiu: “You forced my hand, friend.”

Chen Jiu frowned at him, then slapped a talisman paper on his forehead as well. She walked toward the Buddha niche where three white candles were still burning, extending her hand toward that strange Buddha statue.

Black mist suddenly surged out from its mouth, sweeping past Chen Jiu’s side like a violent wind passing through, drilling into Jiang Sheng’s seven orifices, instantly filling his entire body.

The bones throughout Jiang Sheng’s body crackled several times, twisting and convulsing as if reorganizing, like a zombie escaping its cage. He threw his head back and emitted a strange heh heh sound. In just a moment, his pupils also took on a strange scarlet glow. He smiled wickedly at Chen Jiu.

“We meet again, little Daoist.” Jiang Sheng tensed all his muscles, his hands forming claws, pressing down fiercely.

The black mist instantly surged like tidal waves in all directions, constantly battering against the golden light runes flashing in the room, attempting to destroy them one by one.

How could Chen Jiu let him have his way? She immediately pressed her palms together, pointed her fingers, and began chanting at extreme speed.

“Thousand gods and ten thousand saints, protect my true spirit. Five heavens and demon ghosts, perish body and destroy form! With urgent haste as an order!”

The golden light instantly exploded into burning flames, roaring as they resisted.

For a time the two sides were evenly matched, difficult to distinguish superiority, each restraining the other.

Chen Jiu finally saw its true form. She shouted angrily: “It was actually you?! Daring to wreak havoc upon the mortal realm again, seeking death!”

This thing was nothing other than the Empty Form Demon that had fled halfway, the one that often worried Chen Jiu!

Anger layered upon anger. Chen Jiu pressed again. The Empty Form Demon refused to show weakness. It roared wildly. Instantly both sides could no longer sustain it, exploding apart in an instant. The vibration caused the glass to show spiderweb like cracks, then with a crack shattered into pieces, glass shards scattering across the floor.

The landlord upstairs heard the commotion. Soon the sound of footsteps thumping down the stairs rang out. Jiang Sheng realized the situation was bad. He leaped out through the window. Chen Jiu followed closely behind. Before long they heard a woman’s pounding on the door and cursing.

“…” Chen Jiu landed steadily on a rooftop and said: “Jiang Sheng, don’t persist in your delusions. The longer it parasitizes your body, the more it consumes your vital essence. Drag it out a few more days and you probably won’t have the life left to wait for your girlfriend to return.”

Jiang Sheng’s soul was squeezed into the smallest space within his body, chaotic: “The one hindering me… is you… Please… show mercy…”

Immediately his eyes flashed red. The Empty Form Demon regained control of this body. He landed on the other end of the rooftop, facing Chen Jiu from afar.

“Do you know that humans have no fundamental form?” it asked in a muffled voice.

Chen Jiu couldn’t be bothered to listen to its nonsense. But Jiang Sheng at this moment was equivalent to voluntarily being held hostage by an evil spirit, willingly acting as a hostage. As a member of the Daoist sect, she still had to put people first, striving to stabilize the other party’s emotions first.

“I don’t know. Please enlighten me.” She clicked her tongue, perfunctorily raising a hand, while secretly calculating a way to satisfy both sides in her mind.

To heavily wound the Empty Form Demon without harming Jiang Sheng, she would need to coax him into voluntarily taking back the initiative of his body.

The Empty Form Demon stood with hands behind its back, speaking in a ghostly manner: “Everything in the world is fundamentally empty. How do you know you are real? He is real? She is real? The heavens are real? In truth all things are like flowers in water, flowers in a mirror, shattering at the slightest touch. The outward appearance seems solid, but the inside is completely empty. Little Daoist, how do you know you are not in someone’s dream? In someone’s book? When you look in the mirror, how do you know which side of you is the real one?”

Chen Jiu’s head ached from listening to this. What was this old thing rambling on about real and not real?

The Empty Form Demon itself was formed from the condensation and transformation of extreme obsessions and desires, the incarnation of emptiness and distortion. Those with unsteady minds were most easily bewitched by it.

But it just so happened that every word it spoke pinched at this sore spot. Every day she only worried about whether Chen Han and Chen Xiao Xuan’s excrement and urine were normal, only cared about whether she would win or lose after starting a game, only wanted to earn piles of money every day, then take care of the entire sect properly.

She had no time to ponder what was empty or real, true or false. Even if they talked until the heavens cracked open, the things she ate into her stomach were always real, right?

In a flash of thought, Chen Jiu suddenly understood something. She raised her peach wood sword, pointing it toward Jiang Sheng from afar: “Jiang Sheng, your love is real, isn’t it?”

The night wind seemed to still for an instant.

Jiang Sheng’s pupils contracted violently. Memories surged uncontrollably, overwhelming his brain in an instant.

The Empty Form Demon knew his conviction had begun to waver. It immediately began frantically fighting with him for control of the body. For a moment Jiang Sheng’s body trembled and convulsed like a short circuited robot, wrestling against itself.

Jiang Sheng’s eyes looked toward Chen Jiu. His soul whispered a plea: “Help me…”

In the next instant, talisman light flew from between Chen Jiu’s fingers. Golden light shot like a sharp arrow toward the space between Jiang Sheng’s brows.

In the final instant before death, the world, the wind was still, the heart was still. Jiang Sheng fell backward from the tall building. His eyes wide open, he saw his girlfriend.

Before Jiang Sheng appeared, no one loved Yu Yin Yin.

She was the low cost trial run before her younger brother’s birth, an extra member of the happy family, the surplus of her parents’ affection, the scraps of society from the small family to the large society.

No one loved her. Even more, no one provided the soil for her to grow.

She lived so hard, so bitterly, expending so much energy, with great difficulty propping herself up to age 16. She had experienced much malice, from her parents, from neighbors, from classmates, from strangers. Finally in the year she turned 16, she decided to escape.

She ran to a strange city, renting a place, working, doing odd jobs, also bringing a slightly deeper pain to everything. In her spare time she devoured books. This was her lowest cost entertainment. Words brought her comfort, and also gave her the valve to cut off a deeper layer of pain.

On some ordinary and quiet late night, she curled alone in the hot and humid little rental room, scrolling through her phone screen one item at a time, encountering that new concept term that would soon bind itself to her: depression.

She murmured it, her expression vacant, slowly checking off those somatic symptoms one by one. Every single one matched her own.

Reading to the end, she smiled.

I’m not sick at all, she thought secretly.

At the same time her heart felt bitter. So what if she was? She had no money. People without money are not allowed to get sick.

Every night Yu Yin Yin would gently embrace herself, imitating the tender tone her mother had never shown her, imitating the expression her father used when coaxing her crying younger brother to sleep, over and over again, then falling into a sound sleep.

Fortunately fate had not been cruel enough to treat her harshly forever.

On some cold afternoon, Jiang Sheng appeared. He held his guitar and sang on the street, approaching Yu Yin Yin like a prank. When he reached the end of the song, he pulled out a rose like a magic trick.

“Miss Unhappy, may I have the honor of seeing your smile?”