Volume 5, Chapter 114 – Feathered Ascension

This village…

As they walked, Li Wenyu too began to notice how strange this place was.

At first glance, the buildings were all simple mud-and-tile houses. They were neatly and finely built, but otherwise ordinary enough.

Yet the worship of Buddha here had gone far beyond the acceptable. Not only did every household have a Buddhist shrine, complete with brass-cast Buddha statues for worship, even falling ill was treated as a joyous occasion, because it meant the sick person had a chance to “enter paradise early,” something worth holding a feast to celebrate.

Li Wenyu truly could not understand customs like these.

With an odd look on her face, she followed Bai Xiang through the village for a while, and along with Bai Xiang endured the scrutiny of many villagers.

The people here did not seem to welcome them.

Ordinarily speaking, Li Wenyu was far from unattractive, and her daughter… no, Emperor Xia—Emperor Xia was a beauty of heaven-defying grace. Not to mention men being unable to move after seeing her; women were not much better.

Yet not one of these villagers showed the slightest trace of admiration. On the contrary, every one of them looked as if they were facing a great enemy, regarding the two of them the way they would bandits, their gazes filled with wariness.

This was far too strange.

Could it be that the Buddhist doctrine passed down here treated female beauty as a supreme taboo?

That was not even talking about concrete actions. It was as though their very existence was not permitted. Li Wenyu had never heard of such an extreme Buddhist teaching…

As she was thinking this over, Li Wenyu suddenly noticed that every household here had a polished bronze mirror hanging above the center of the doorframe.

A demon-revealing mirror?

Some places did have such a custom, and it had already existed as far back as the Xuan Dynasty.

But this place was so sealed off, it should have had no contact with the outside world for years. Why would they hang something like that?

“Two female benefactors, please stop.”

An old man in hemp robes suddenly approached from ahead. His hair and beard were both white, and more than a dozen villagers followed behind him.

“Elder.” Bai Xiang ignored the villagers moving in to surround them and kept her gaze only on the man’s face. “…What is it?”

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The old man demanded, “May I ask where you two have come from?”

Bai Xiang answered frankly, “From the outside world.”

The old man widened his eyes. “The outside world?”

Bai Xiang pointed upward. “Beyond the firmament. There is a heaven beyond heaven.”

The moment she said that, the villagers exploded into commotion. Many of them gathered together and whispered among themselves, their expressions uncertain and alarmed.

“The outside world?”

“From the sky?”

“Are they ‘angels’?”

“They’re this good-looking, and nothing happened when they passed the doors. They must be ‘angels’!”

Just then, a dark, thickset man built like an ox strode over and spread his arms, drawing in a breath before roaring angrily, “Silence!”

“We have lived here in peace for a thousand years and have received only one ‘angel’ in all that time. How can we judge solely by outward beauty or ugliness? Do you not know that evil beings in transformed shape may also possess extraordinary beauty?”

“Erlang is right,” the old man said with a nod. “In my view, we should still ask Mirror Sir to examine them before reaching a conclusion.”

Then he lifted his head to look at Bai Xiang and said sincerely, “Please understand… there have indeed been similar disasters in the past. Without a definite answer, we cannot set our minds at ease.”

The two of them played off each other, speaking in ways that sounded difficult to follow. But both Bai Xiang and Li Wenyu were extremely familiar with human dealings, and they quickly understood what he meant.

All he was really saying was that although the two of them looked normal, even beautiful like “angels,” there had been cases in the past where monsters transformed into handsome men and beautiful women to deceive people, so their identities had to be verified before the villagers could feel safe receiving them.

They were just a bunch of deluded natives. Was there really any need to play along with them?

Li Wenyu asked Bai Xiang with her eyes.

In her view, the other woman was the ruler of a nation. There was no way she had the leisure to humor people like this. Most likely she would slash them all down with a few quick sword strokes, refine their souls, and continue westward.

But Bai Xiang showed no intention of using force. Instead, she agreed amiably to the request and let the old man in hemp robes lead the two of them into a side courtyard, where they were asked to wait in the front hall.

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After a while, another burst of noise sounded at the entrance. The dark, thickset man took the lead, carrying in his arms a huge bronze mirror as tall as a person, and set it down before the hall.

“Please, sir, make your judgment.”

The old man in hemp robes knelt before the bronze mirror.

“Please, sir, make your judgment.”

The dark, thickset man and the villagers who had followed him also dropped to their knees in a wave.

With interest, Bai Xiang looked toward the bronze mirror and saw that it moved like a living creature. Its four little legs shuffled rapidly, turning the mirror so that the reflective surface faced her directly.

At once, an image of Bai Xiang sitting in the wooden chair appeared within it.

The woman in the mirror had bright eyes and white teeth, beauty and heroic grace existing side by side. But when she met Bai Xiang’s gaze, her form began to change. Her clothing writhed and transformed, shifting from the dark black dragon robe into a pure white gauze dress, with a radiant kasaya draped over it.

“It’s an ‘angel’!”

Bai Xiang was not the only one who could see that scene; everyone else could see it as well. The crowd cried out in shock, then changed the direction of their kneeling and bowed toward Bai Xiang instead.

“We welcome the ‘angel’!”

Interesting.

Bai Xiang narrowed her eyes.

The reason she had not acted and still had the patience to watch their little performance was that she had vaguely sensed something. The Demon Pool-like influence behind this Buddha worship did not seem to come directly from the west. Its source was somewhere within this village itself.

And now, seeing the bronze mirror confirmed her intuition. The source was this thing.

This thing could absorb the divine thoughts she was releasing and independently form a new image upon its surface.

Moreover, Bai Xiang could feel that it was constantly trying to “pour” that image back into her body. Clearly, it wanted to use that method to make her convert and, from the bottom of her heart, accept this new self.

But what of it?

Her golden pupils flickered as Bai Xiang secretly increased the speed at which her spiritual sense spread outward.

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At once, large streams of “spirit,” each carrying her sword intent, were absorbed into the bronze mirror. The mirror surface immediately split with a crack, and the image of “Kasaya-clad Bai Xiang” shattered along with it.

“Ah!”

“Mirror Sir!”

The villagers cried out in alarm, but they were also confused.

They truly could not understand why the bronze mirror had suddenly cracked apart.

They had originally been about to instinctively question whether Bai Xiang was some kind of monster, but as the mirror was destroyed, the mental interference and alteration of consciousness it had produced also began to fade. Their faces filled with confusion, as if they had just awakened from a great dream and could not make sense of anything.

“Old sir, I have a few questions for you.”

Bai Xiang directly singled out the old man in hemp robes and pointed at the shattered corpse of the bronze mirror on the ground. “Where did you get this thing?”

“This… naturally it was sent by the previous ‘angel’?”

The old man answered blankly out of habit.

“And what is this ‘angel’?”

“An angel is… an angel, of course? A noble messenger who came from the sky…”

The bronze mirror’s influence still lingered, but Bai Xiang, too, was capable of conjuring an Illusory God.

The moment the old man’s eyes met those golden pupils, his soul all but left him, and he spilled everything he knew like beans from a bamboo tube.

According to him, this place was called Guo Family Village. Everyone in the village bore the surname Guo, and they had lived here for more than a thousand years.

Guo Family Village was extremely, extremely closed off. They married only among themselves. No one from the village had ever gone out, and they had never even entertained the thought of “going out.”

Li Wenyu could not hold back any longer. “Then how do you reproduce and sustain your population?”

However old-fashioned she might be, she still understood the harm of close-kin marriage.

This wretched village only had around a hundred people, barely more than thirty households. And with numbers like that, they still dared practice internal marriage?

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Wouldn’t they go extinct after a few generations?

“I don’t know?” The old man looked over at her, his face full of bewilderment.

“We’ve always gone on like this!”

Li Wenyu asked again, “Then do you have deformed children?”

“Yes!” The old man nodded.

“How are they dealt with?”

The old man beamed. “Naturally, they are given to the Buddha.”

“The Buddha will take them away.”

What was that supposed to mean?

Li Wenyu frowned.

She truly could not understand that sentence.

“Isn’t there a case in the village right now?” Bai Xiang said. “The household celebrating—is that Guo Erlang’s family?”

“Could you take us to see the child?”

With the lingering awe of a suspected “angel” and Bai Xiang’s Golden-Pupil Illusory God on top of that, these people did not dare refuse her in the slightest. They immediately led her to Guo Erlang’s home.

The gravely ill little boy was currently laid out on the altar table in the Buddhist shrine, while the family below knelt in devout worship.

The moment Li Wenyu saw this scene, she felt uncomfortable all over, with a kind of nausea rising in her mind.

But very soon, her eyes widened. She saw the brass Buddha statue above emit a beam of golden light that shone downward and wrapped itself perfectly around the child.

And the gravely ill child immediately began to undergo a horrifying transformation. All the flesh and blood on his body vaporized within the golden light, curling inward like a paper bundle burning in a fire. In the end, from the remains flew a tiny golden translucent figure with insect-like wings of light, rising straight upward and merging into the Buddha statue.