Thriller Night Talk

Chapter 38: Before the three incense sticks burn, you must wake me up

Translator-Rhapsodite

Editor-PerpetualMreow, Proofreader-Ghostie

Friday, June 4, at 7:30 in the evening.

Bei Quan, Wei Fuyuan and Tian Jia Xin returned to the houses where the missing people had lived.

There was no water or electricity in the abandoned village, and they could only eat the dry food and water they’d brought for dinner.

Wei Fuyuan couldn’t even boil some water or heat up the canned food because Bei Quan wouldn’t allow a fire to be made in a deserted village. He could only dryly swallow bread slices and compressed biscuits with mineral water.

Bei Quan, on the other hand, didn’t even eat a mouthful of this simple and crude dinner.

At first, Young Master Wei thought that Bei Quan disliked the food, but when he proposed to prepare something else for Bei Quan, he was resolutely rejected by the other party.

Bei Quan waved and replied, “I just don’t want to eat.”

“You don’t have to worry about him.”

Tian Jia Xin said from beside him, “He’s going to use soul separation tonight. It’s normal for him not to eat before doing so.”

As a Tianqi doll, Tian Jia Xin only needed to eat the wind, drink dew and the essence of the sun and moon to live well. Naturally, he also didn’t have to eat at night.

But now he couldn’t boil water and couldn’t soak his beloved Dahongpao. The whole person looked wilted and listless.

Wei Fuyuan naturally didn’t know what soul separation was, but Bei Quan had mentioned that this kind of technique could only be used at midnight, the time when the Yin Qi was at its heaviest.

Since he was not in a hurry now, he simply stopped asking questions and waited until the time came.

The night in the deserted village was surprisingly quiet.

All sounds were silent, not even birds or insects could be heard. Only the rustling sound of the south wind blowing through the trees could prove that time was still flowing.

The closer it got to midnight, Wei Fuyuan began feeling more and more anxious.

When he could no longer hold back his uneasiness, he began berating Bei Quan with questions on what he was going to do and what the so-called “soul separation” was.

Bei Quan, however, looked very calm.

He’d been lazily reclining in an old armchair all night, flipping through the pages of a book he was reading with an oil lamp while dealing with Wei Fuyuan’s nagging wordlessly.

When there was about twenty minutes left until 11 p.m., it started raining.

The houses had been abandoned for many years, and the tiles that had not been repaired had long gone missing in the eastern rooms. The corners of the tiles were also broken in the western rooms. The rain outside the house was getting heavier and heavier, and there was some leakage in the house.

Bei Quan’s chair was situated in the leaking corner of the room, so he had to get up.

“It’s almost time.”

Bei Quan looked down at his watch and waved to Wei Fuyuan and Tian Jia Xin, “Let’s get ready to begin.”

The three moved from the West Wing room to the main hall of the room.

The main hall had been cleared by them in advance. All the debris that could be moved had been moved to a corner in the yard. Now there were only four broken walls and one broken door in the whole space.

Bei Quan opened the gate to the main hall.

The night wind rushed into the house, and the cool rain came in with the unique smell of forest vegetation, wetting the threshold and entrance.

“Almost.”

Bei Quan looked out with his probe.

Tonight was the 24th day of the lunar calendar.

The dark clouds in the sky covered the stars and the moon, and there was no light source in the mountains and forests.

“Let’s get ready to start.” He said as he turned towards them.

“Bei Quan, wait a minute.”

Tian Jia Xin obviously didn’t like the idea of Bei Quan taking this risk.

“Originally, the Feng Shui in this village was not quite right, and now it’s raining. The Yin is too heavy…”

He lifted his eyelids and looked at Bei Quan with worry reflected in his eyes, “I am worried that you will not be able to come back if you ‘go out’.”

Without saying a word, Bei Quan picked up the short Tianqi doll, circled it in his arms, and rubbed it. He kneaded the Tianqi doll until it screamed, and then said with a smile, “Don’t worry, can’t you trust in my ability?”

He blinked:

“It’s just a soul separation technique. As far as I am concerned, it is but a mere trifle, nothing more.”

Tian Jia Xin stopped talking, and his lips pursed together, still looking angry.

Although Wei Fuyuan didn’t know what Bei Quan was thinking about doing, Tian Jia Xin’s response was enough for him to guess that whatever it was, it had to be quite dangerous.

“Bei Quan.”

He reached out and grabbed Bei Quan’s arm. His voice unconsciously increased by an octave. His tone was very strict, “What are you planning to do?”

Bei Quan held Tian Jia Xin in one hand, and Wei Fuyuan firmly held onto his other arm. There was no spare hand to appease his little assistant.

“Hey, hey, don’t worry.”

Bei Quan struggled to free himself from Wei Fuyuan’s grip but couldn’t break free, so he simply let Wei Fuyuan clutch it. “What I’m going to do is no different from what you’ve done before.”

He explained it with a smile.

Wei Fuyuan was stunned and immediately understood what Bei Quan meant, “You mean… Like the people, I’ve seen… Uh, ghost memories?”

“Smart.”

Bei Quan nodded in appreciation, “It’s hard for us to find the entrance to fragmented space now. We can’t even be sure whether there actually is such a place.”

He tilted his head to the side and smiled, “I want to find evidence of the existence of this fragmented space.”

According to Bei Quan’s explanation, the essence of the “soul separation technique,” he was about to use was an advanced version of one he once used on Wei Fuyuan. It’s something akin to what people commonly refer to as “a trip to the Underworld.”

It’s just that, this time, Bei Quan was not going to the Underworld in the ordinary sense, but in the form of an out-of-body experience, following the traces left by the missing people to see what happened to them.

Most people who were good at traveling to the Underworld have peculiar horoscopes, or they have had the out-of-body experience by coincidence.

Bei Quan’s cultivation base was, originally, strong enough to perform the soul separation technique, and it shouldn’t have made Tian Jia Xin so worried.

But Tian Jia Xin had been around Bei Quan for more than half a year, and he had managed to guess a couple things.

He’d watched Bei Quan’s partners come and go with his own eyes. He walked three times back and forth. There was no one available. Only then did he pick up a work-study student who didn’t know anything as an assistant.

Bei Quan, himself, was a very special existence.

It was so special that he couldn’t even simply judge his abnormalities with the weight of eight characters and the theory of Yin and Yang.

Therefore, Tian Jia Xin was worried that once Bei Quan’s soul separated from his body, if one didn’t follow the right missing person, and slipped into the wrong fragmented space, he might never come back.

——He was worried, in particular, that at such a critical juncture, Bei Quan had chosen Wei Fuyuan as his “guide.”

Just when Tian Jia Xin was beginning to panic, Bei Quan started preparing for his spell casting.

He set up a small altar table in the empty main hall, put an incense burner on the table, lit a white candle on each side, and then placed a small white porcelain plate in front of the incense burner and put a blank, yellow symbol upright.

Then he took out a mineral water bottle he had picked up and poured some water on the plate.

Wei Fuyuan came over, “What are you doing?”

“This water was drunk by one of the missing teachers and students.”

Bei Quan replied with a smile, “I’ll use it as a guide.”

Then he put the ring finger of his left hand on his lips and bit down.

Blood dripped into the white porcelain plate and spread in circles, dyeing the transparent and colorless mineral water a light pink.

“Well, I’m starting.” Bei Quan said.

When Wei Fuyuan heard his words, he unconsciously clenched his fist and dug his fingernails into his palm. He was so nervous that he didn’t even dare to take a breath.

When he saw that Bei Quan’s wrist had turned over, he had a purple gold Langhao brush in his hand. It was his original magic weapon, the Qianguang Vientiane Brush.

Then Bei Quan dipped the tip of his brush in the porcelain dish mixed with his blood, concentrated and breathed, and quickly drew a symbol on the blank symbol paper.

Bei Quan waited quietly for a moment.

The watermark dried out quickly. The amount of blood was very small, and the light from the oil lamp around was very dim. There were almost no traces of written characters on the yellow symbols.

“Take this.”

Bei Quan handed the “written” Rune paper to Wei Fuyuan.

Then he lit three slender incense sticks, inserted them into the incense burner, laid down flat on the spot, and went to sleep on the cement floor in front of the incense table.

“Stick the symbol paper on my chest in a bit.”

Bei Quan patted his chest, over the position of his heart.

“And remember one thing.”

His chestnut-colored eyes bore into Wei Fuyuan for a moment as he explained word by word, “Before the three sticks of incense are burned, you must wake me up.”

—————————

In accordance with Bei Quan’s instructions, Wei Fuyuan pasted the rune paper on his boss’s chest.

To his surprise, after the water stains dried out, a layer of golden red light appeared on the talisman paper that was invisible, and it faintly formed a crisscross pattern of charms.

The red and gold runes climbed and grew like vines, quickly “climbing” out of the rune paper before “sinking” into Bei Quan’s chest.

Wei Fuyuan felt a strange but strong uneasiness for no reason.

He hurried to look at Bei Quan’s face.

Under the dim yellow light of oil lamps and candles, he saw that Bei Quan had just closed his eyes, and was breathing steadily, looking very calm, as if he had merely fallen into a dreamless sleep.

When in fact, his three souls and seven spirits had left the body under the guidance of the spell, floating and following the residual breath of “someone” who had drunk water.

Bei Quan hadn’t experienced the dual experience of being out of the body and empathizing with another person for a long time.

To be honest, it didn’t feel good.

Because at this time, Bei Quan felt like a string puppet completely out of control. He was clearly in it, but he could only be a helpless bystander.

It was a girl who had drunk that bottle of mineral water.

Bei Quan did not know which of the three missing female students she was, only that the girl must be very panicked and scared now.

The girl was in the middle of the crowd, with a fast-flowing river in front of her, and an excited crowd around her.

She was looking around in fear, probably wanting to find her teachers and classmates.

But all the villagers who crowded next to her were dressed in the costumes of the Republic of China, shouting in a dialect she couldn’t understand. No matter how much the poor girl shouted, her voice would immediately be engulfed by the roars of the river and the hustle and bustle of people.

Bei Quan’s vision blurred, and he felt warm water droplets on his cheeks.

He knew it was because he was feeling what the girl was feeling, and the person crying was the girl, frightened by everything in front of her.