Ch. 006| The Gash No One Can See

After daybreak, Lin Que used the excuse of carrying medicine to the South Market for the Hundred Herbs, and went around to that broken hut at the far end of West Street.

By daylight the hut looked even more ruined. Half the earthen wall had collapsed; old cobwebs clung in the corners; a film of dust lay on the ground, trampled into a mess by the people who had come and gone hauling out the body. Lin Que found himself a spot out of the sun, crouched beside that neat scuffed mark in the innermost corner, lowered his eyes, and looked closely.

His left eye flushed hot.

This time he was near, and that "wrongness" came a little clearer—yet still not clear, not the way it was when he looked at a flaw in a pill, with the flaw-lines surfacing one after another, plain to see. He only felt that beneath that neat mark, something seemed to have once dragged itself flat along the ground, wiping away the dust and, with it, a thin layer of the ground itself. Wiped too clean—clean in a way nothing of this world could manage. An ordinary knife-cut, scorch, or water-scour would leave an edge, leave a trace; but this mark was a patch of ground that had simply gone, its edges so crisp it made his scalp crawl.

He reached out and felt at that clean patch of ground, and the moment his fingertip touched it, the dull ache in his chest surged heavier all at once, as if something cold were crawling up his finger. He snatched his hand back.

He crouched for the burning of a stick of incense and could see nothing more, so he had to back out. But the look of that mark was branded into him.

---

On the road back to the shop, Lin Que set out these few deaths in his mind, one by one.

Old Wu was the third. Who the first two were, and how they had died, he had pieced out slowly over several days, leaning on Lai San and Lame Yu, and spending a few copper coins besides.

One was a herb-seller in the South Market, surnamed Zhou, at the fourth layer of Qi Condensation, sharp as they came in his daily dealings, never one to take a losing trade; one was a porter who hauled grain at the North Granary, nameless, whom everyone just called Big Fellow, at the second layer of Qi Condensation, all brute strength. Add to them Old Wu, who hauled medicine on West Street.

3 men—one in the South Market, one at the North Granary, one on West Street—who in their daily lives had nothing whatever to do with one another. They practiced different arts; the shops they bought medicine from, the roads they walked, the people they dealt with, not a single thing overlapped. Even the hour they died and the place they died were each different.

By rights, 3 men who had nothing to do with each other had died in exactly the same way: no wounds on the body, meridians not burst, eyes wide open, dead clean through.

Shen Ningshuang had investigated for half a year and turned up no lead, and this was precisely where the difficulty lay—between the three men, there was no line to be found. To investigate a killing, you must first have a line, and only then does it follow through. Without a line, three deaths are three lonely strange things, and you could investigate till the end of time and never bring them together.

But Lin Que was used to tracking down the leads behind a mended pill. When a batch of pills backlashed, others took it for poor fire-control; he, though, would go and turn through three years of waste-pill registers, hunting for the line hidden underneath. Now he did not think about who the three men "knew"—he thought only about where they had "last been."

People do not necessarily intersect, but a place is a fixed thing.

After two days of asking around, one exceedingly fine line surfaced: before each of the 3 men met his end, he had gone to the west of the city.

West of the city, beyond the market town's wall, was a stretch of pauper's burial ground. In years past, those who died in the market with no one to claim their bodies, the rogue cultivators among them, were all buried out there. That place was evil; even by day, few went there.

Before the herb-seller Zhou met his end, someone had seen him walking toward the west of the city, said to be gathering a certain herb that grew only at the edge of the pauper's burial ground; before Big Fellow met his end, he had gambled away his money and gone to hide from his creditors in the west of the city; and the broken hut where Old Wu died sat right at the mouth of the road into the pauper's burial ground.

3 lines that had nothing to do with one another, when they reached the pauper's burial ground in the west of the city, twisted together into one.

---

Lin Que hesitated for a day.

To go was to send himself to the very place three dead men had been; not to go, and the rumor of "deadly pills costing lives" would sooner or later hound him to death—Black Wind Hall or the Xuanzhao Sect, either one could use that black charge to take his life.

On the afternoon of the third day, he went after all. He tucked away a handful of salt, a fire-starter, and half a portion of dry rations—he could not have said himself what he was guarding against, only that going empty-handed left him uneasy.

The pauper's burial ground was gloomy even in the afternoon. Earthen mounds rose and dipped, some caved in, baring the blackened, rotted wood beneath. The wild grass grew taller than a man, and when the wind passed, the grass billowed with a rushing roar, as if countless people were turning over beneath it.

Lin Que walked exceedingly slowly. Every few steps he would stop, and let that point of heat beneath his left eye draw him further in.

That heat grew hotter the deeper he went.

When he reached the deepest part of the pauper's burial ground, before a stretch of unusually open wasteland, the heat suddenly shot up, scalding his left eye into a stab of pain, and tears welled up on the spot.

He stopped.

That stretch of wasteland looked no different from anywhere else—the same wild grass, the same earth. But he could not say he "saw" anything; he only felt that the spot dead center in the wasteland was "wrong."

As if someone had lightly drawn a fingernail across a sheet of paper—and torn it open, revealing beneath it another layer he could not make sense of. The air there twisted faintly, and even the grass leaned, eerily, just a touch toward that one spot. The nearer he drew, the plainer that distortion became; look at it too long and a person would grow dizzy, would want to retch.

It was a gash. A gash split into being out of nowhere, one no one else could see.

All at once, Lin Que understood everything.

The herb-seller Zhou, Big Fellow, Old Wu—they had not been murdered by anyone. They had walked to the edge of this gash, had not seen it—ordinary people could not see it—and one misstep, and the gash had brushed close against them. Those who had been brushed bore no wound on the body, their meridians did not burst, and the person was simply, cleanly, gone—just like that scuffed mark wiped clean away.

The herb-seller Zhou had gone to gather herbs, Big Fellow to hide from creditors, Old Wu most likely just passing by. Not one of them had imagined that the spot they had set foot in was a place like this. Old Wu had died in the broken hut at the mouth of the road—most likely he had been brushed, had a breath left in him still, and dragged himself back to the hut before he breathed his last.

In the moment he understood, every hair on Lin Que's body stood on end. He instinctively backed away, several steps in a row, back to a spot he felt safe in, and only then stopped, gasping in great mouthfuls of air.

He had been no more than ten-odd steps from that gash just now.

If his eye had run hot a moment later, if he had walked a few steps further on—he would have been the fourth in the pauper's burial ground to die dead clean through, and not even Shen Ningshuang could have worked out how he died. The cold sweat on his back had soaked clear through his coarse cloth robe.

This was that "other kind of flaw."

This flaw, no human hand could make. It was heaven and earth themselves, split open here into a seam.

In all the years Lin Que had lived, he had never heard anyone in the market town speak of such a thing. Cultivators spoke of spirit veins, of secret realms, of pill formulas, of qi deviation, but no one had ever spoken of a man-eating, invisible gash that could split open out of flat ground from nothing. It had split open just so in the deepest part of the pauper's burial ground, had eaten three men, and no one knew, and no one could see it—except him.

These eyes of his, taken since childhood for a strange illness, that had gotten him chased from place to place—for the first time, they had let him see something not one other person in all the market town could see.

---

But just as fear made him want to turn and leave, his stabbing left eye, beyond his control, stole another glance into that gash.

In the depths of the gash, exceedingly faint, there was a single point of something.

Like the living breath within a pill, yet far thicker, far brighter than that. That single point was, toward these eyes of his, faintly… answering. One side heat, one side answer, like two things set far apart that yet knew each other.

As if it were calling to him.

Lin Que had never had this feeling before. Looking at the Death-Black Pill, looking at a broken formula, he was the one doing the "looking"; but facing that point of something in the depths of the gash, it was as if he were "being looked at"—recognized by it, faintly drawn along by it, with even a trace of an inexplicable closeness woven into that stab of pain. This closeness alarmed him more than the gash's eating of men. A thing that ate men just the same—by what right was it so close to these eyes of his?

Lin Que stood in the billowing grass of the pauper's burial ground, the man-eating gash ahead, Black Wind Hall and the Xuanzhao Sect behind. For the first time he knew, plainly and clearly: the thing he had stumbled into was far, far bigger than mended pills, than Hu Biao, than Old Wu's death.

He wiped the tears from his face, did not dare go near, and did not leave at once either.

Just then, the grass outside the pauper's burial ground rustled.

Lin Que's heart clenched, and crouching low, he slipped behind a caved-in earthen mound.

It was Shen Ningshuang. In a suit of green close-fitting garb, her hand resting on her sword hilt, her brow knit, she walked step by step inward, following a faint, barely-there tread-mark through the grass—she had traced it to the west of the city as well.

Lin Que's heart leapt into his throat. The direction she walked led straight toward that gash.

He almost cried out. But the words reached his lips and he forced them back down—by what right would he cry out? If he did, how would he explain to an enforcement disciple of the Xuanzhao Sect that he could see a gash no one else could see?

Fortunately, when Shen Ningshuang reached a spot still ten-odd steps from the gash, she stopped. She crouched down, looked at that neat, wiped-clean mark on the ground, then raised her head and looked all around, her brow knitting deeper.

She had traced it this far, traced it to that clean mark, but she could not see the gash. Ten-odd steps short, and she could see nothing.

Lin Que pressed himself behind the earthen mound, not daring to stir, while inside him a towering wave surged up—a thing even an enforcement disciple of the Xuanzhao Sect could not see, he could see. These eyes—just what was their origin?

Shen Ningshuang stood there for the burning of a stick of incense and in the end did not go further. She gave the clean mark one last look, turned, and left the pauper's burial ground.

Lin Que waited until she had gone far off before crawling out from behind the earthen mound, both his legs gone soft.

That the gash ate men, this he had now "seen" with his own eyes. But that thing in the depths of the gash that answered him—what was that? Was it calling him in to his death, or was there, inside, something only these eyes of his could draw out?

He had to find out.

Before he found out, he would not take another step toward that gash. But in his heart he knew, too, that sooner or later he would come back—that one point of answering, once felt, could never again be unfelt.

【Ch. 006 End · the pauper's burial ground west of the city】