Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Song Feifei and Hua Yuling both leaned in to take a look. Song Feifei gave a very fair assessment.

“He does look like him, especially around the brow. We both have a mole there. My brother’s is more obvious.”

Song Feifei pointed at the photo and said a couple more words, then her expression changed dramatically.

My heart gave a heavy thud too.

The Song Tianming we’d just interacted with had no mole between his brows.

The few of us looked at one another, our faces grim.

A perfectly normal person’s mole couldn’t just vanish from the center of his brow. There was definitely something wrong with the Song Tianming before us.

But I had natural-born Yin-Yang Eyes, and Lu Lingzhu’s five senses were far beyond ordinary. The two of us had been in close contact with Song Tianming for so long, yet we hadn’t sensed any evil or sinister aura on him at all.

Who on earth was he?

After discussing it with Lu Lingzhu, we decided to split up and probe the depths of this temple.

Just in case, Hua Yuling left tracking gu insects on both Lingzhu and Feifei.

Hua Yuling and I left the room and headed straight for the row of meditation rooms on the west side.

One of the rooms still had a light on.

The room’s window faced the corridor. It was a traditional wooden lattice window, pasted over with pale yellow paper, and it had been pushed open just a crack.

I gestured to Hua Yuling. The two of us bent down and slowly edged beneath the window, peering through the gap.

The moment I lifted my head, I nearly jumped out of my skin.

Because I was staring straight into a pair of eyes.

They were long, narrow phoenix eyes, the outer corners slightly upturned. The pupils were black and bright, and below the center of his brow was a very obvious black mole.

I froze. The person inside clearly hadn’t expected someone to be outside the window either. He immediately raised a finger to his lips, signaling for silence.

Someone in the room called to him, “Song Tianming, what are you dawdling for? Hurry up and go to sleep. We have to get up early tomorrow.”

“Coming!”

Song Tianming turned his head and called back, winked at me, then turned around and climbed onto the bed.

There were no lights on in the room, and there was no moon tonight either. The temple was pitch-black inside and out; saying you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face wouldn’t be an exaggeration.

Logically speaking, I shouldn’t have been able to see anything.

But for some reason, the scene inside the room appeared before my eyes with perfect clarity.

It was as if I wasn’t seeing it with my eyes, but as if it were being projected directly into my mind.

I saw a large communal bed along one side of the room, packed with people.

A rough count put them at more than a dozen at the very least, all of them men. It seemed the men and women in this temple had been split into two separate rooms.

Song Tianming’s spot was right on the outer edge, close to the window. After lying down, he rolled over so he was facing the window, his eyes still fixed firmly on me.

The people in the room chatted on and off. Most of it was about tomorrow’s morning lesson, or discussions of the Buddhist teachings from today. They sounded mystical and devout, and honestly, pretty convincing.

About ten minutes later, the room finally fell completely silent. I stayed crouched outside the window in the same position as before, my legs almost going numb.

Just as I was about to lose patience, a bizarre scene unfolded.

One of the men suddenly sat up.

The bed ran along the wall, and everyone was sleeping with their heads against it. After sitting up, the man turned around and crawled toward the wall.

When he reached the corner, he didn’t stop. He pressed both hands against the wall and kept climbing upward, his palms sticking to it like suction cups. He climbed all the way up to the ceiling and hung upside down above them.

The man had shoulder-length hair. Because of gravity, it all hung downward, covering his face. Paired with his eerie movements, the sight was terrifying.

Once he reached the ceiling, he moved extremely fast, crawling rapidly toward the window.

I immediately reached out and gripped the Thunderstruck Wood Talisman in my pocket.

Song Tianming stared at me in utter terror, his mouth opening and closing as if he were saying, Help me.

I was hesitating over whether to break through the window and go in to save him when he suddenly closed his eyes.

The man’s legs stuck firmly to the ceiling as his entire body hung upside down. His face was almost touching the tip of Song Tianming’s nose as he stared at him for several seconds.

“Hee hee-”

The man let out an eerie laugh. With a twist of his waist, his upper body snapped back. His hands braced against the ceiling again, and he crawled back to his original sleeping spot, pulled the blanket over himself, and lay down.

A little while later, the man began breathing evenly in sleep.

Song Tianming opened his eyes and let out a long sigh of relief.