Chapter 10

Chapter 10

I followed Aunt Wang into the house, and the sight of Uncle Cheng curled up on the heated brick bed made my heart clench.

In just one short year, Uncle Cheng had wasted away. His cheeks had sunken in, and his arms, covered in burn scars, were nearly nothing but skin and bone.

Right now, he was wrapped in a quilt, his whole body trembling nonstop.

“Uncle Cheng, what’s wrong?”

I rushed over and held him. Only then did I hear the weak words spilling from his quivering lips. “Cold… I’m so cold… so cold…”

But autumn hadn’t even arrived yet. The room was hot and stuffy. How could he be cold?

I touched Uncle Cheng’s forehead. There was no sign of a fever.

Aunt Wang’s eyes were red as she brought over another quilt.

“Aunt Wang, what on earth is going on? Is Uncle Cheng sick? Why haven’t you taken him to the hospital?”

Aunt Wang said hoarsely, “We went to the hospital long ago, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with him. The doctor insisted it was a mental issue.”

“He got injections, took medicine, even stayed in the hospital, but he kept getting better one moment and worse the next. Your Uncle Cheng refused to stay no matter what. He insisted on coming home.”

As she was speaking, I suddenly felt Uncle Cheng stop shaking.

I looked down at him and saw his eyes fly wide open. He pointed toward the door and shouted, “Get out! Get out! I’ll have Big Black bite you to death! Get out-”

Big Black was the same large black dog that had dragged me down from the highway guardrail back then. He was a mountain patrol dog Uncle Cheng had trained, and he had been incredibly smart.

But last winter, Big Black had reached the age of twenty-one. In the end, he died of old age, and Uncle Cheng had grieved for a long time.

Uncle Cheng’s screams grew sharper and sharper. His neck suddenly arched back, his pupils widening as if the breath had gone out of him all at once.

Aunt Wang cried out and rushed forward in a panic, trying to press the philtrum beneath Uncle Cheng’s nose.

I raised a hand to stop her, pulled the Soul-Whip from my waist, and cracked it three times through the air-snap, snap, snap.

Uncle Cheng groaned, then abruptly began coughing.

Aunt Wang hurriedly held him and patted his back. Only when his breathing gradually steadied did she finally let out a faint sigh of relief.

My Soul-Whip was given to me by an old Daoist priest when I was a child.

I had saved him from a drainage ditch. After looking me up and down, he said I had “the face of an Asura and the heart of a Bodhisattva,” and that I was destined in this life to make my living between yin and yang.

As it turned out, he had been right. Now in my thirties, I never seemed to be too far from matters of Chongsha and exorcising evil.

In this half a lifetime of mine, especially over the past two years, I had seen far too many strange things.

Uncle Cheng’s current condition was probably not just an ordinary illness after all.