Fu Sang has been looking for Zhuge Lin for many years.
Perhaps because he was aware that their master-disciple relationship was one where either he or Fu Sang would die, and because he understood his disciple’s vengeful and crazed nature too well, not long after Fu Sang was expelled from the family, Zhuge Lin also packed up and left the Xuangu Mountains. From then on, there has been no news of him.
He was very wise to run.
Because when Fu Sang left the Zhuge family back then, he did indeed consider the idea of dying together with them.
For his entire life, ever since he could remember, he had stayed by Zhuge Lin’s side. He had faced only him, and before the age of twelve, he had never left the Xuangu Mountain, not even stepping outside the main family grounds.
Zhuge Lin had indeed taught him many things: feng shui, destiny calculation, incantations… But apart from those, nothing else.
Zhuge Lin had extremely high expectations of him. He probably regarded him as some kind of computer tool that could unzip everything with one click. Zhuge Lin would always stuff huge amounts of things into his head all at once, forcing him to learn and master them. Occasionally, whenever he failed to meet Zhuge Lin’s expectations, he would be locked up for anywhere from several hours to several days.
He would be locked in a small room without windows, his hands and feet restrained, given neither food nor water, and made to reflect on his mistakes. Then, after the agonizing confinement period was over, Zhuge Lin would walk in and ask one question: “Have you figured out what you should do?”
For Fu Sang, hating Zhuge Lin was extremely easy.
He had heard long ago that Zhuge Lin and the family head didn’t get along. In terms of both character and ability, the family head had always suppressed Zhuge Lin in every way. He even took the position of family head from Zhuge Lin.
So perhaps Zhuge Lin wanted to watch his disciple become a dragon, hoping his disciple would take back everything he had lost from the family head?
Fu Sang didn’t know.
Nor was he interested in knowing.
He only knew that under Zhuge Lin’s paranoid and authoritarian “guidance,” he had lived for twelve years, seven of which had been spent completely deprived of freedom, locked in a gloomy little house behind high walls.
Zhuge Lin hoped that he would become a legendary figure capable of dominating the very top of the pyramid of the Nether Path. For this, he poured in a great deal of effort and used many ruthless methods. Unfortunately, it was only when Fu Sang was twelve that Zhuge Lin discovered he couldn’t see underworld spirits at all.
If he couldn’t see underworld spirits, naturally he couldn’t become a Nether Path spirit master.
So Zhuge Lin casually expelled him from the sect with a single sentence, drove him out of the Zhuge family, and returned all his freedom to him.
How ridiculous.
It was as if the first twelve years of his life had merely been one big misunderstanding, and all the oppression and torment he had suffered were simply erased unilaterally, cleared with one click.
No, not just twelve years. His entire life seemed to have lost all meaning as well.
After leaving the Zhuge family, he was forced to leave the Xuangu Mountains and enter society. But how was someone who had been completely disconnected from society from birth until the age of twelve supposed to reconcile himself with a life that had been intruded upon by outsiders, forcibly altered, and utterly destroyed?
Anyway, Fu Sang couldn’t reconcile himself with it.
He hated Zhuge Lin, and because of that, he also hated everyone in the Xuangu Mountains with the surname Zhuge.
He had always been good at collective punishment.
He didn’t want some new life. He didn’t want to continue learning how to be a normal person. He had already been forced to learn more than enough during those twelve years.
Now that he had left the cage, he felt no joy at finally escaping his suffering.
He only wanted those people dead.
Dead clean.
Dead until not even a dog was left.
So, after deciding what he wanted to do, he climbed alone to the highest mountain in the Xuangu Mountains. Using his soul and body as the sacrifice, he stabbed himself three times in the abdomen and used the blood flowing from his body to draw a huge curse formation. Those cursed included Zhuge Lin’s paternal clan of four generations, maternal clan of three generations, and wife’s clan of two generations, nine clans in total. The curse would make them die unnatural deaths within seven years in this lifetime, and from then on, in every lifetime, their fate would be extremely ominous and evil, forcing them to suffer miserable torment without ever being released.
However, the curse failed.
Because Huo Wei noticed that something was wrong with him and followed him all the way to the mountaintop. When she saw him stab himself without a word, white blade entering and red blade emerging, blood soaking through his clothes and trousers.
Realizing what he was doing, Huo Wei ran over crying, smearing the talismans he had drawn and grabbing his arm while crying. She begged him not to die, begged him not to give up, and begged him to live well.
At that time, Huo Wei was still only a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl. She cried very sadly, her features scrunched into one ugly mess.
She cried for a very long time, crying as if her heart and intestines had been torn apart, causing Fu Sang to become momentarily dazed for once.
He always thought this girl was strange.
When he was locked in the small room by Zhuge Lin, he could only see two people most of the time. Zhuge Lin was the first, and Huo Wei was the second.
Because of Zhuge Lin, Fu Sang hated everyone in the Zhuge family, so when he first met Huo Wei, he didn’t give her a pleasant expression.
But this girl was so strange. No matter how much he cursed at her or threw things at her, he couldn’t drive her away. Not only did she refuse to leave, she became even more enthusiastic, almost sneaking through the dog hole every day to see this strange person, telling him countless things and trying to get a response from him. Even if she didn’t get one, it didn’t matter. She would continue again the next time.
At first, Fu Sang would curse at her, telling her to get lost and go die. Later, when he realized that cursing was useless, he simply treated her like air.
Huo Wei, however, acted as if she had made a major breakthrough and began sharing even more interesting stories with him.
From Andersen to Edison, from Grimm to Yilin, from Shanghai to the Mediterranean… She knew all kinds of strange anecdotes, customs, and gossip from every corner of the world.
Once Huo Wei started talking, she couldn’t stop. Most of the time, Fu Sang let it go in one ear and out the other, but occasionally he would become briefly absorbed.
Because what Huo Wei described was a world he had never seen at all.
There were no high walls, gloomy little rooms, or chains restricting freedom. Instead, there was an endless sky, vast grasslands, and brilliant, bright light.
Fu Sang never imagined that the outside world could look like this.
Just as he had never imagined that although he was the one who was injured, someone beside him who couldn’t feel the pain would cry for him.
She was clearly just a talkative little girl who didn’t know how to read people’s expressions. Clearly, ever since he had met her, he had spoken no more than five sentences to her. So why would someone who could be considered “completely unrelated” to him be so heartbroken over his departure?
That day, Huo Wei carried him all the way down the mountain.
Such a thin and weak girl carried an equally thin and weak boy and ran toward the foot of the mountain as fast as she could.
The mountain road was bumpy. Fu Sang vomited blood onto Huo Wei, which made Huo Wei cry even louder. While crying and shouting, “I really can’t carry you anymore, so for the sake of how hard I’m trying, can you please try your hardest to stay alive too?” She gritted her teeth and tried her best to keep every step steady.
Fu Sang thought she was meddlesome.
But the blood rising in his throat was so hot that it seemed to warm his heart, which had been cold and hard for years, just a little.
He had probably lost too much blood and fell unconscious. Fu Sang didn’t remember what happened afterward. He only knew that when he woke up, he was lying in a pure white hospital room, with many cold instruments attached to his body. The wound in his abdomen had been stitched up, and waves of pain spread through it, like the “tide” Huo Wei had once mentioned.
And Huo Wei was guarding him beside his hospital bed, her eyes swollen like walnuts. When she saw him wake up, she held his hand and began crying again.
She didn’t say anything new while crying. It all boiled down to the same principles about cherishing life and living well.
Actually, Fu Sang hadn’t really listened to much of it either.
He only remembered that it was a brilliantly sunny day. The glass window of the hospital room had been wiped so clean and bright that he could clearly see the deep blue sky outside, the glaring sunlight, and the treetops swaying slightly in the wind.
Pale golden light had dyed the white hospital room the same color.
It was completely different from the light he could only glimpse through a hole in the curtains.
And the wounds on his body hurt very much.
But, unexpectedly, it put him in a good mood.
It seems like, maybe, he probably liked this feeling.
So, showing great mercy and letting those scumbags live for a few more years might not be such a bad thing.
It could be said that every difficult step Fu Sang took afterward to integrate into society was led by Huo Wei.
Huo Wei has been kind since childhood and couldn’t stand seeing people suffer. Her parents valued this precious quality in their daughter very much, so whenever she proposed something, as long as her intentions were good, she would receive strong support from her family.
That was why little Huo Wei was able to help little Fu Sang live in the world outside the Xuangu Mountains, hiring tutors for him, registering his household, taking him on buses, subways, high-speed trains, and airplanes, and taking him to experience, one thing at a time, the little pieces of life that had once existed only in her descriptions.
In order to keep a close eye on Fu Sang and be ready to intervene at any time, Huo Wei went to the same middle school as him, and then worked hard to attend the same high school. Of course, they couldn’t attend the same university, because Fu Sang had a very terrifying talent for anything he learned. Even dry classical Chinese and mathematics problems were as easy as walking on flat ground to him, and he was admitted to one of the best universities with a ranking among the top few in the entire city.
Huo Wei went to an art academy and focused on artistic creation. After graduating from university, Fu Sang continued into graduate school while “starting a business,” whereas Huo Wei opened a small studio and spent her days loafing around. Whenever she had nothing to do, she would go hang around Fu Sang and check on his progress in socialization.
In Huo Wei’s words, integrating Zhuge Fusang into society was a lifelong project. Since she had provoked this person in the first place, she couldn’t give up halfway. She had to shoulder her responsibility and couldn’t relax for even a moment.
Of course, she also said that if possible, she hoped that one day a kind, gentle, good-hearted philanthropist could help her share this burden, even though she felt that this was almost impossible.
Looking at the results now, Fu Sang had grown from an antisocial evil child who casually wanted to exterminate nine clans for generations into the emotionless, cold, foul-mouthed funeral director he was now. That was already quite an impressive achievement.
Huo Wei was proud of this, but at the same time, another matter was hidden in her heart like a time bomb, ready to explode at any moment and destroy all her efforts over the years.
That was Zhuge Lin.
Because she knew that Fu Sang had never truly “let Zhuge Lin and his nine clans go.”
It was “delayed judgment,” “we’ll talk about it later.”
Fu Sang simply didn’t possess the ability to lightly erase everything with a stroke of the brush.
After studying the nether path for so many years, what he was actually best at wasn’t incantations or feng shui and destiny calculation, but karma.
He knew how to resolve karma, how to cleverly avoid karma, and what kind of cause would demand what kind of effect.
Zhuge Lin had destroyed twelve years of his life. He wouldn’t bear that cause for nothing. Repayment was necessary. It was only a matter of how to repay it and how much room there was for human manipulation in between.
The plan to curse the nine clans back then hadn’t been worth it.
He was simply young and ignorant at the time. Now he had grown another twelve years, and looking back at this unpaid debt, he had many methods that were simpler and more brutal than cursing nine clans, while still allowing him to remain untouched.
Even Fu Sang himself felt that allowing him to grow up had been the greatest mistake of Zhuge Lin’s life.
Perhaps Zhuge Lin himself had a guilty conscience and was afraid of an evil ghost coming to collect his debt, so he had fled the Xuangu Mountains early and hidden himself.
To be fair, he really did have some ability when it came to hiding, to the point that after so many years, Fu Sang had tried more than a dozen methods and still hadn’t been able to find his exact location.
But now, things were a little different.
If what Zhuge Qianyi said was true, and this pendant was something Zhuge Lin had personally given her to conceal her whereabouts…
Fu Sang raised an eyebrow slightly, removed the pendant from the chain, and unfolded the talisman paper that had been folded into a triangle in two or three movements.
After unfolding it, there was the yellow paper and cinnabar-red writing commonly used by Nether Path spirit masters. Inside was an incantation that was very “Zhuge Lin”…the strokes were sloppy and wild, and even the handwriting was difficult to make out.
Fu Sang lowered his eyes and held the talisman paper beneath his nose, sniffing it lightly.
The cinnabar used to draw the talisman had been mixed with human blood.
His eyes narrowed very slightly.
The dangerous glint in his eyes became even more pronounced.
He unfolded the talisman paper and examined it carefully. After observing it for a moment, he took out a blank talisman paper from his pocket. There was no cinnabar nearby, so he simply bit his own finger and used his blood to draw on it.
He followed the movements of the completed talisman, but the spell he drew was subtly different from the original spell. Some of the strokes were even completely reversed.
Zhuge Qianyi’s professional ability was even worse than Huo Wei’s. She really couldn’t understand Fu Sang’s advanced operation and could only quietly ask Huo Wei, “What is he doing?”
“A reverse decryption talisman.” Huo Wei explained out of friendship:
“It’s Zhuge Fusang’s unique secret technique. Give him any talisman and let him look at it for a few moments, and he can break the talisman down into tiny individual trajectories, then rearrange and combine the trajectories and strokes to turn it into a new spell whose function is completely opposite to that of the original spell.”
“？” Zhuge Qianyi’s mouth fell open.
Having only ever known how to use prefabricated talismans since childhood, she had never even imagined such a possibility.
While the two of them were whispering, Fu Sang had already finished the reverse decryption talisman. After checking it once and confirming that there were no mistakes, he took out a compass from his bag, burned the reverse decryption talisman into ashes, finely ground the ashes with his fingertips, and smeared them onto the compass.
The compass needle slowly turned.
After a moment, it pointed southeast and did not move again.
Seeing this, Fu Sang closed his eyes and casually made two calculations with his fingers.
When he opened his eyes again, he tipped the paper ash off the compass and calmly said one word:
“Chuanning.”
