Chapter Eighty-Six: The Five Poisons Sorcery

The wails of the man-eating bird had risen from a solo into a trio.

Faced with the three beasts, Hua Sheng dared not advance. Even the talisman in his hand was beginning to fail him.

One claw swipe from those raptors could rip him open from throat to groin. One was hard enough to handle; three at once was another matter entirely.

He slowly backed away, and the blood from his wounded hand kept flowing, soaking the iron rod in scarlet. It dripped one bead at a time from the lowered end onto the deck below.

The blood made the rod somewhat tacky in his grip.

Then Hua Sheng had a sudden inspiration: this iron rod smeared with blood might prove to have an unexpected use.

At once he drew out several spirit talismans, and while retreating, wrapped them around both ends of the rod. The blood made the talismans stick fast to the iron, turning it into an improvised wand-like implement that could be used from either end.

He stuffed the remaining talismans into his pocket, then tore a strip from his sleeve and bound his right hand tightly to the rod so it would not slip free.

After that he roared, "Take this!" and thrust the rod at the nearest beast.

What Hua Sheng had hoped for came true. When the talisman-wrapped iron rod struck the creature's head, it was as though he had driven it into a wall weathered by a thousand years. A hole was punched through at once, and the beast howled as it toppled from the wall.

Hua Sheng whirled the rod and smashed it repeatedly into the creature. Each blow flashed with golden light, and in an instant the ferocious beast was battered beyond recognition. Then he turned on the other two with a furious shout, swinging the rod to strike again and again. Golden radiance blazed through the corridor of the ship’s hold, and in less than ten seconds another beast was reduced to fragments. The last one cried out and turned to flee.

Hua Sheng bellowed and yanked the iron rod free of the cloth binding around his right hand, then hurled it like a javelin at the beast's back.

The rod shot through the third creature like a steel needle, piercing it cleanly before slamming hard into the wall at the far end of the corridor. The beast fell at once, and in the blink of an eye dissolved into a pool of black sludge.

Hua Sheng walked over and picked up the rod, noticing that the bodies of the first two beasts had also turned into filth.

He had never imagined that this makeshift weapon fashioned from talismans would prove so overwhelmingly effective. His spirits lifted. By the look of it, even if there were other such creatures aboard, there was no need to fear them so long as he still had these talismans.

He gathered up the fallen rod and a few scattered talismans, dusted them off, and returned to the sisters’ side.

Hearing him approach, Xiao Qing asked, "Is the beast dead?"

Hua Sheng said, "I never expected the talismans to be so powerful. The moment the beast touched one, it turned into rotten mud."

"Then that's good, that's good!" Xiao Mei said. "As long as we have these talismans with us, we can be saved."

Hua Sheng said, "This bundle only looks to be a little over a hundred talismans, and I don't even know what else is out there besides those beasts."

Xiao Qing, still shaken, said, "The corridor is too dangerous. We don't know what other monsters may be there. Let's go into the room first."

Hua Sheng thought it sensible. The three of them went into the sisters’ cabin and quietly locked the door. Hua Sheng tried to switch on the light, but after several attempts the power was indeed out, just as expected. He then used his phone as a flashlight to rinse his wound in the bathroom, and by the dim glow searched the cabinet until he found an emergency torch.

Hua Sheng said to Xiao Mei, "Help me hold this."

He then found several clean towels in the bathroom, soaked them with water, and wiped the blood from Xiao Qing's face. "I'll take you to the hospital when the ship docks. Do you have any clean clothes? I can tear them up and bandage you."

Xiao Qing said, "There's clean clothing in our suitcase."

Hua Sheng took a white T-shirt from the suitcase and tore it into strips, using them to bandage Xiao Qing's injured eye.

Then, with Xiao Mei's help, he roughly bound the wound on his own arm and stopped the bleeding.

After that Hua Sheng set the paper bundle of talismans on the floor and opened it. Inside were nine stacks, each with a dozen or so talismans. As for the designs drawn upon them, he could not recognize a single one. Fortunately, each stack had a slip of white paper attached, on which was written a numeral and a name. They must have been the names of the spells.

First: Ritual-Opening Incantation. Second: Banner-Falling Incantation. Third: Underworld-Breaking Incantation. Fourth: Nine-Star Divine Incantation. Fifth: Mystical Spirit Incantation. Sixth: Pure Heart Divine Incantation. Seventh: Golden Light Divine Incantation. Eighth: Heaven-Melting Cold Hall Incantation. Ninth: Purifying Heaven and Earth Incantation.

What each of these talismans was for, Hua Sheng truly had no idea. But the spell he had just used on the beast had worked remarkably well, so the rest could hardly be ordinary either.

He found a bottle of glue and a few rubber bands in a drawer, smeared nine talismans onto each end of the iron rod, and bound them tight with the rubber bands. He thought this should last him for a while. Then he put the remaining talismans into a backpack and slung it over one shoulder.

"Now this ship is full of danger, so I'll keep this brief," Hua Sheng said after clearing his throat. "There's something I need to tell you first, and I hope you're prepared for it."

"What is it?" the two sisters said at once.

"I'm a friend of Brother Xu's. That is, a friend of Xu Xiaocheng. He passed away a few days ago."

"Brother Xu is dead?" Xiao Qing's expression changed violently. She covered her mouth and convulsed with sobs. "How could that be? No, that's impossible!" Perhaps tears had run into her wound, because she trembled in pain from head to foot.

Xiao Mei was equally stunned. "No wonder we couldn't get in touch with him these past few days. We thought he was busy with another project like before. He said he'd be coming aboard this time, but then even his phone stopped going through."

Hua Sheng patted Xiao Qing's back and comforted her. "I'm sorry for your loss. The dead cannot come back."

"How did Brother Xu die?" Xiao Qing asked through tears.

For a moment Hua Sheng did not know how to answer. Brother Xu's death had been inseparable from his own involvement. If he said that he himself had been the direct cause, he would not only fail to explain the truth in full, but also invite unnecessary trouble. All three of them were still in danger for their lives; it was safer not to tell everything.

"Do you know about the time his wife fell from the cliff?" Hua Sheng said. "Her fall was not an accident. Brother Xu pushed her off the cliff and caused her death."

"What?" both sisters cried out together.

Hua Sheng said, "The criminal police investigated and found that his business had failed and he was buried in debt, so he killed his wife in order to fake an insurance claim. With the police closing in, Brother Xu had nowhere to flee, and stabbed himself to death with a dagger."

Xiao Qing said blankly, "I never thought my brother would do such a thing."

Hua Sheng sensed there was more in her words and asked, "You noticed something strange before? Did he ever say anything to you?"

"Have you ever heard of being bewitched by an evil influence?"

"Bewitched?"

Xiao Qing thought for a moment, then said, "My brother once said that his wife started acting possessed about a year ago."

In the dim cabin of the cruise ship, Xu Xiaoqing began to tell the story of her brother Xu Xiaocheng's past year.

"After my brother and sister-in-law got married, they were always very happy together. Though we didn't meet often, whenever I saw them, both of them were beaming with happiness. They didn't have much saved up, but life went along smoothly enough as they supported each other. Then one day, my brother called and said he'd noticed that my sister-in-law had grown gloomy all the time, shutting herself away in her room, muttering to herself in a strange, absent-minded way."

At first, Xiao Qing said, Brother Xu thought it was just the pressure of life making her unhappy. But later he discovered that his wife had begun bringing home small earthen jars. At first he thought she was planning to store something in them, or perhaps use them like women who liked cooking, to pickle beef tongue, chicken wings, or other preserved foods. But that never happened.

Not long after, his wife traveled alone to Sichuan and Yunnan. When she came back, she brought a travel bag full of small bamboo jars. When he asked what they were, she always brushed him off, saying they were local specialties, gifts for friends she would send out in a few days.

Brother Xu said that in just a few days, his wife had changed from a smiling, radiant woman into someone with a darkened countenance and a dreamlike expression. More than once, while walking on the road, she would go expressionless and stiffly walk straight toward oncoming cars. Every time, it was only because Brother Xu pulled her back that she was not struck.

Before, Brother Xu had been busy making a living, coming and going early and late every day, and had neglected his wife. Later, when he began to observe carefully, he found that the jars in the house had suddenly disappeared. And every night when he slept, he would hear faint rustling sounds beneath the bed. At first he dimly thought it was hallucination, but one night he woke to find his wife crouched in the corner muttering to herself. He listened closely, and still could not understand what strange language she was speaking. It was enough to make one's hair stand on end.

So one day, while she was out, he searched beneath the bed and found that those missing jars were all there under it. The jars were of different shapes, and the lids over their mouths had all been sealed with mud. When he shook them, he found they were not full; instead, something inside was rolling back and forth with soft clattering sounds.

Brother Xu fetched a screwdriver and pried open the seal on one of the jars. At once, several thick centipedes, as thick as a thumb, crawled out, followed by scorpions, and at the bottom he even saw a patterned venomous snake that had been dead for a long time. There were also the remains of unknown insects lying at the bottom.

His wife was actually keeping snakes, scorpions, and venomous creatures in the house.

Faced with so many poisonous insects, Brother Xu suspected some manner of venom-cultivation sorcery. He specifically searched for information on it and learned that it originated in the Yunnan region. In earlier times, when the land was rife with poisonous creatures, Miao women who understood venom-craft would climb the mountains to catch all kinds of poisonous insects, place them in a small clay jar, and leave them in the dark without opening the lid for years. Inside, the insects would kill one another until only one remained. That surviving creature was the venom-curse.

When the jar was first opened, the Miao woman would inhale a foul vapor. That vapor would later work its evil on her again and again, driving her to release the curse in haste. Then, when the insects in the jar had died, she would take the dead creature and the excrement it left behind, grind them into powder, and whenever that same vapor took hold of her and she sought to raise the curse, she would put the fine powder into food or drink. Anyone who consumed it by mistake would be poisoned to death.

There were many kinds of such sorcery: snake curses, golden silkworm curses, centipede curses, hornet curses, insect curses, and more. Their methods were much the same. The purpose of making such venom was usually only one: to poison or curse and harm others.

The poison in those jars, if smeared on the rim of another person's bowl or on their food, would kill them quickly once swallowed. Judging by the cursed things kept at the sister-in-law's house, there was enough poison there to kill hundreds.

What was puzzling was this: if the intention had been to poison Brother Xu, then a single jar would have been enough to kill Xu Xiaocheng nearly a hundred times over. Why, then, had his wife kept so many poisonous creatures? Whom had she intended to poison? He could not sleep at night.

One day, Brother Xu passed a Taoist temple and was stopped at the temple gate by a middle-aged man reeking of alcohol. At first he thought he was just an ordinary drunkard or a street fraud who had started drinking in broad daylight, but the man said with perfect seriousness that Brother Xu's face was shrouded in blackness, and that he might recently have been haunted by spirits and apparitions. Thinking of the poisonous creatures at home, Brother Xu felt that something was indeed suspicious.

The middle-aged man's name was also odd. He called himself Lord Lan. In this day and age, even the younger sons of wealthy merchants and politicians would not be addressed as "young master."

This Lord Lan took three talismans from his breast pocket and gave them to Xu Xiaocheng, telling him to carry them on his person; if he met danger, they would protect him and preserve his life.

"Not long after that, we learned that my sister-in-law had died while traveling. About a month after the incident, my brother came to see us. He said that at the time, my sister-in-law had touched a talisman that had fallen out, been suddenly thrown back, lost her footing, and fallen into the cliff. We only took that then as delirious talk from a man overwhelmed by grief. But he said that while cleaning out his wife's belongings, he discovered she had written in a notebook about a plan to poison someone at a hospital, along with a date and a set of latitude and longitude coordinates somewhere in the East China Sea. Later, the man called Lord Lan cast a divination for him and said that my sister-in-law had indeed been controlled by evil sorcery. But he could not determine who had cast it, only that the sorcery originated somewhere in the East China Sea. And that place almost exactly overlapped with the coordinates my sister-in-law had left behind."

Xiao Qing continued, "After that, Brother Xu gave us this bundle of talismans, saying they had been given to him by Lord Lan. Brother Xu said he had discovered that the date left by my sister-in-law happened to coincide with the time a cruise ship would pass through those coordinates, and Lord Lan told him to bring the talismans aboard. Because he had creditors hounding him, if he failed to board the ship, then we were to use this bundle of talismans to set up a formation."

"Set up what formation?" In Hua Sheng's mind, formations belonged only to the battle chapters of history books. Without thousands upon thousands of troops, how could one even lay out a formation?

"Have you ever heard of the art of mystic gates and celestial earth?" Xiao Qing asked.

Hua Sheng suddenly understood. "I don't know much about it, but I've at least heard of it. The I Ching and trigrams and such are things everyone has some faint acquaintance with from childhood. But what is the purpose of setting up this formation?"

Xiao Qing said, "Lord Lan drew a formation diagram for Brother Xu and said these talismans could be used to set a trap."

Hua Sheng flipped through the bundle of talismans and indeed found a hand-drawn diagram of the formation tucked inside. He asked, "A trap? To catch what?"

Xiao Qing said, "According to that man calling himself Lord Lan, a star of disaster will descend at that coordinate and fall upon this cruise ship."

"A star of disaster descending? I'm getting more confused by the second. When do we reach those coordinates, and when is this star of disaster coming?" Hua Sheng felt as though he had fallen into a myth.

"Right now, in this storm and driving rain, the ship is reaching those sea coordinates tonight," Xiao Qing said. "I'm afraid this is the omen of the disaster star's descent."