Chapter 96
Chapter 96
Song Xunian, Song Mingxuan?
I immediately took out my phone, opened Song Ruoqing’s painting, and compared it carefully.
Yes.
The names on the backs of that pair of boy-girl twins’ necks in the painting were exactly those two!
Was it a coincidence, or…
I didn’t dare think any further. A sheen of cold sweat broke out across my back.
What message was Song Ruoqing trying to send me?
Why were the names in her painting identical to this pair of twins from Tafeng Village?
Had Song Ruoqing seen them before?
No.
Something still felt wrong.
In the photo my mom had taken, the twins looked only about four years old, but Song Ruoqing had been abroad for more than six years.
After returning to the country, she had stayed with the Song Family the whole time preparing for her art exhibition. How could she possibly have met this pair of twins from Tafeng Village?
So it really was just a coincidence?
Just as I was about to convince myself of that, something else suddenly flashed through my mind.
The year the Song Family broke ground on the mountain, a pair of boy-girl twins had died.
Later, the Song Family buried those twins in Wangting Mountain.
Twins. Again with the twins!
And they all had the surname Song!
Could there be some connection here?
“Tongtong, if you don’t come back to Tafeng Village with us today, I’ll take your little brother and sister and kneel here in this Pawnshop until we die.” My mom threatened me through tears and snot.
I was so angry I almost laughed. “After all these years, you never learned anything good, but you sure mastered Grandma’s tricks for throwing tantrums and making a scene.”
The moment I finished speaking, my dad, who had been sitting off to the side doing nothing, suddenly stubbed out his cigarette and stood up.
One of his feet was lame, but that didn’t stop him from yanking the belt from his waist with a whoosh and swinging it straight down at my head. “You’ve really turned against us!”
Li Qingying and I reacted at the same time, but we were still a step too late.
Liu Junyan suddenly appeared. He grabbed the belt, gave it a hard tug, and my dad was thrown heavily to the floor with a muffled groan.
He really had appeared out of thin air. My mom saw it clearly and was so frightened that she dropped to her knees, trembling all over.
After a long while, she suddenly began kowtowing frantically to Liu Junyan. “Immortal, please don’t be angry! We didn’t mean to offend the Pawnshop. I take back what I said. We’ll leave right now.”
As she spoke, she pulled my dad up. The two of them picked up Xinxin and Ah Bao and fled as if running for their lives.
I let out a cold snort.
For hundreds of years, Tafeng Village had worshiped the Qilin Deity. They were absolutely convinced that gods existed in this world.
Their reverence for the divine had nearly reached the point of madness.
Of course, that reverence was built on the fact that all the children in Tafeng Village really had been prayed for at Qilin Temple.
Tafeng Village was a very strange place.
At some unknown point in time, a Qilin Temple had been built on the mountain behind the village. Enshrined inside was a Qilin Statue with a hundred children on its back and a golden phoenix beneath its hooves.
The qilin delivers children, arriving as it treads upon the phoenix.
Every year, the village held a ceremony to pray for children. Every girl of suitable age could take part.
It was said that whoever offered the first incense would have the Qilin Deity enter her dreams that very night and bestow new life upon her.
So where exactly did all these children the Qilin Deity bestowed upon the villagers of Tafeng Village come from?
Did it have anything to do with the Qilin Statue in Song Ruoqing’s painting?
Countless pieces of information flooded into my head all at once, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t sort them out.
Not until Liu Junyan pressed his fingers to my temples and gently massaged them. “Xiao Jiu, empty your mind. Let yourself calm down first.”
His tone was calm, and the pleasant scent of aloeswood wrapped around me. Sure enough, I quickly settled down.
Only then did Liu Junyan ask, “What were you thinking about just now?”
I shook my head. “It’s a mess. I don’t know where to start.”
Liu Junyan asked again, “Then do you want to save your younger brother and sister?”
I hesitated for a moment, but in the end, I told him the truth. “I do. Of course I want to save them. But they might want me to trade my life for theirs.”
Liu Junyan’s brows drew together.
Then I remembered something and went on, “Oh, right. My grandma also said that the Qilin Deity appeared to the villagers in a dream and said that disaster fell upon them because I took something that belonged to the deity.”
“Heh. The deity’s wrath,” Liu Junyan said with a laugh. “What a fine Qilin Deity. Looks like it’s time we paid him a visit.”
Liu Junyan immediately took me with him, got into that Mercedes G-Class, and set off for Tafeng Village.
When the car drove into Tafeng Village, we were surprised to find the entire village eerily quiet. We did not see a single villager along the way.
Liu Junyan and I went up the mountain, only to find all the villagers of Tafeng Village gathered at the entrance of Qilin Temple.
They were assembled in front of Qilin Temple, holding the suffering children in their arms, kneeling and worshiping something while murmuring thanks over and over.
When we reached the entrance and saw the girl standing inside Qilin Temple, handing out medicinal broth to the villagers, both of us froze.
The girl wore a red-and-black archery outfit, and there was a feather mark between her brows. Who else could she be but Fake Ah Li?
At that moment, she was administering medicine.
The villagers held bowls in their hands. After receiving the medicinal broth from her, they fed it to the children.
Once the children drank it, they began vomiting uncontrollably. But after coughing up several mouthfuls of black blood, they all regained consciousness one by one. The burn marks on their bodies also faded and healed at a speed visible to the naked eye.
The girl spotted Liu Junyan at a glance and immediately came over with a smile.
As if she had not seen me at all, she said intimately to Liu Junyan, “Ah Yan, did you also sense that a great calamity had befallen this place and come to save all living beings?”
“I’ve checked it over. It isn’t anything serious.”
“This place should have been balanced by the harmony of Yin-Yang, free of disaster and suffering. But at some point, for some reason, a Pure Yang object went missing from one of the formation points, causing Yin-Yang to fall out of balance. That was why the villagers suffered.”
As she spoke, she reached out to take Liu Junyan’s hand. “Ah Yan, come see if I handled it correctly.”
Liu Junyan avoided her hand, his vertical pupils narrowing, his eyes filled with warning.
The girl did not seem to care. She turned and pointed toward the Wutong Tree.
Only then did I see that the towering Wutong Tree I had regarded as my lucky tree-the Wutong Tree from which I had retrieved Fengwu-was now reduced to only half its original height.
And that remaining half was charred black, faint wisps of smoke still rising from it.
On the trunk of the Wutong Tree was a Thunder Summoning Talisman drawn in Cinnabar!
She had actually used a Thunder Summoning Talisman to draw down heavenly lightning and split open the Wutong Tree!
The Wutong Tree had survived the lightning strike, its heartwood scorched, turning it into true thunderstruck wood.
Although cases of Wutong becoming thunderstruck wood were exceedingly rare, they did exist.
Thunderstruck wood was Extreme Yang.
This was indeed a flawless way to correct the imbalance of Yin-Yang.
So why did my heart hurt so much?
The girl looked at Liu Junyan with sparkling eyes and said playfully, “Ah Yan, aren’t I capable? Hurry and praise me.”
She was too natural, her tone carrying an undisguised hint of coquettishness, as if she and Liu Junyan had interacted like this for centuries.
The next instant, Liu Junyan suddenly struck. He seized her by the throat, wind howling around him, and drove her forward until he slammed her against the Wutong Tree trunk. In an icy voice, he demanded, “Talk. Who exactly is the master behind you?”