chapter 21
The one who always wanted to swap lives with me was Aunt Lan.
Everyone else was fake.
The people in the livestream were fake, Master Qingyun was fake, and everything that happened afterward was fake.
Aunt Lan put a sufficient dose of sedative in tonight’s dinner.
By the time I left the house, my mind was already muddled, unable to distinguish reality from illusion.
They did all that.
Staged such a grand performance.
Just to make me believe it all, to make me willingly drip my blood, to make me willingly extinguish the Blood Candle.
All appearances are illusory.
All conditioned phenomena are like dreams, like illusions.
If I believe, I am caught in the scheme; if I do not, everything is empty.
As they say: belief makes it real, disbelief makes it nothing.
To make me fully believe in the Blood Sacrifice, to make me a player in their game.
They acted out this play together.
Half a year ago.
After work, I saw a familiar figure in the garden downstairs.
She sat alone on a bench, head buried, crying for a long time.
The person sobbing with her head down was my next-door neighbor, Shen Ru. I hurried over to comfort her.
It was only that day that I learned her mother, Zhao Xiaofang, had cancer.
But after falling ill, her mother refused to go to the hospital, instead believing the words of a strange Taoist Priest.
It was as if she was possessed. She said she had to dance, tie a Red String around her waist, and drink Five Red Soup.
That way, her body would get better.
Ruru found it odd and searched through literature everywhere, only to discover that this was a Heretical Canon.
Its purpose was Body Snatching, or in other words, seizing another’s body.
And the body to be snatched was her own daughter.
Sacrificing the flesh and blood of one’s closest kin-once successful, the decaying soul could enter a new body and begin anew.
At first, Ruru didn’t believe it, but her mother’s increasingly cold gaze, her ruthless insistence that she drink the soup, the cancer cells from the CT scan that had invaded her brain and spread throughout her body, her mother dancing at midnight despite a massive tumor, and her own deteriorating health-all forced her to believe.
In the end, she told me one more thing.
“Shengsheng, be careful. Your mom already knows and is asking my mom about the Blood Sacrifice.”
Thinking of the soup I started drinking a few days ago, I felt a chill all over.
For forty-nine days,
Every day I tested her, hoping she would repent, hoping she would stop.
If she had regretted for even an instant, a minute, a second,
Things wouldn’t have come to this.
She never intended to stop.
She only grew more extreme.
Her plan with Master Qingyun,
I knew it all.
So I played along.
Started that livestream.
I had already searched through ancient texts and many documents, and found a way to break the Blood Sacrifice.
As long as the caster sincerely extinguishes the Blood Candle soaked in her own blood,
The Blood Sacrifice turns into a Blood Curse.
Then the caster will be doomed for eternity.
“Mom, do you regret it?” I looked into her eyes and asked.
Her eyes
Were filled with fear.
But what are you afraid of?
Isn’t this all your own doing?