Chapter 4: The Curse of Death by Five Horses

With a low rumble, the ground suddenly trembled.

"Huh? What's happening?" Old Zhu asked loudly.

"It feels like... an earthquake?" He Wuqiu echoed.

Two more rumbles came, the ground lurching twice in quick succession, only two or three seconds apart. Everyone felt that immense, jarring force—it did indeed feel like a magnitude-four earthquake had struck.

When the fourth rumble arrived, the overhead light flickered once, then suddenly went out.

Shi Miaoshou reacted quickly, immediately clicking on his flashlight and shining it up at the ceiling lamp.

The sudden darkness left everyone momentarily blinded. And with an intensely bright beam cutting through the deep gloom, all eyes naturally fixed on the ceiling light.

"Don't panic. Power outages are rare here, and the monastery has its own generator. Electricity will be restored soon," Shi Miaoshou said.

After that, the lamp flickered several times in succession, each time staying lit for three or four seconds before going dark again. Under these conditions, everyone instinctively lowered their heads and shut their eyes to avoid the repeated assault of harsh light.

This chaos lasted about ten minutes. Finally, the ceiling light steadied and shone once more, illuminating the crystal coffin.

"All right. My apologies for the disturbance. Let's continue—" Shi Miaoshou said.

Everyone suddenly realized something was wrong: Aunt Ge, who had been standing opposite the ice coffin, was gone.

"Where's Aunt Ge?" Shi Miaoshou demanded at once.

No one could provide an answer, because under those circumstances, if she had withdrawn up the stairs, at least there would have been footsteps. Moreover, without the host's permission, she would never have left on her own.

"Aunt Ge! Aunt Ge!" Shi Miaoshou called out loudly, but there was no response at all.

"Hey, what's going on? Really, she leaves without a word?" Uncle Zhu sounded annoyed.

Fang Qing raised her hand: "Uncle Shi, let me go look for her. Aunt Ge shouldn't have gone far."

Shi Miaoshou gave his assent, and Fang Qing stepped onto the stairs.

Ding Jun's mind stirred, and he immediately said: "Uncle Shi, I'll accompany Miss Fang upstairs."

The two emerged through the small door into the room above. It was completely empty—not a trace of Aunt Ge.

"The latrine is in the southeast corner of the small courtyard. If Aunt Ge went there, she'd be back within five minutes. But... but—" Fang Qing pointed to the tightly shut wooden doors.

To keep out unwanted interference, after everyone had entered, those two wooden doors had been barred by a thick square crossbeam. Without removing the beam from the inside, no one outside could possibly get in. Of course, if Aunt Ge had gone out alone, she also couldn't have barred the door from the outside.

"No one. Neither Aunt Ge nor anyone who could have helped her bar the door. Strange, isn't it?" Fang Qing asked.

In this room, apart from the rectangular wooden table and chairs and stools, the four walls were bare—no one could possibly be hiding here. Naturally, the only two small windows were also tightly shut, nailed crosswise with wooden slats.

Ding Jun said nothing, only surveying his surroundings intently until he was certain no one could have walked through the walls. Then he slowly reached his conclusion: "Aunt Ge never came up."

Fang Qing's shapely eyebrows shot up. "Never came up? But we also saw for ourselves—she's not down there either. And there are no side passages or hidden cavities on the staircase. So where did she go? Disappeared into thin air?"

Aunt Ge was a living, breathing person, and a seasoned wanderer with remarkable skills at that. Even if she'd been killed in an instant, she would have at least struggled or cried out—she wouldn't have died without a sound. Moreover, everyone in that cellar just now was an expert of the martial world. If someone beside them had been assassinated, it was impossible that no one would have noticed.

Ding Jun drew a deep breath, stepped forward two paces, dragged over a stool, and sat down.

"Truly bizarre!" Fang Qing also sat down.

"There are many things in this world that seem to have no answer, that seem impossible, when in fact they're extremely simple," Ding Jun said.

Fang Qing thought for a moment, then burst into laughter. "Mr. Ding, that statement of yours... essentially says nothing at all. We're trying to find Aunt Ge, and you offer a highly philosophical remark that does absolutely nothing to solve the problem."

Ding Jun smiled too. From the moment Shi Hai had died, his mind had been filled with doubts. Before one riddle was solved, others piled up on top of it, forming an interlocking knot of dead ends, and he didn't know where to begin unraveling it.

"Mr. Ding, have you ever heard of something called the Five Horses Dismemberment Curse?" Fang Qing changed the subject.

Ding Jun shook his head. "What is that?"

Fang Qing answered honestly: "I don't know either. But when I was serving tea to Master Chisang, I overheard him discussing it with Uncle Shi. At the time, all the photos you'd brought were spread out on the table. Uncle Shi said that Brother Hai might have died from this 'Five Horses Dismemberment Curse,' and that the Shi family had long ago been cursed by some immensely powerful force—that every member would die violently under this curse, their bodies torn apart by five horses. Do you understand what I mean?"

He had looked at those photos no fewer than a hundred times. Shi Hai's body had been pieced together by Ding Jun's own hands; the grisly sight was etched into his memory like a knife carving into stone.

"Please, go on," he responded softly.

"Master Chisang said that the Five Horses Dismemberment Curse was a type of ancient Persian mystery sorcery. In nearly a thousand years of Tibetan history, only the direct royal line of the Guge Kingdom had mastered this secret art, and it was never passed on to outsiders. When the Guge Kingdom vanished overnight, the secret art also disappeared without a trace. In other words, the appearance of the Five Horses Dismemberment Curse proves that the Guge Kingdom still exists," Fang Qing said.

She was only relaying the words of Shi Miaoshou and Chisang Gyatso, so she could only give the gist of it.

Regarding the Guge Kingdom, Tibetan archaeologists and historians had already reached an official conclusion: that once-glorious, proud kingdom had vanished in a most baffling manner, as if struck by a deadly curse. Overnight, its entire population disappeared, yet they took nothing with them—including every household's pots, pans, bowls, and daily utensils.

This disappearance was like that of Italy's most famous city, Pompeii, but the latter had been buried under volcanic ash. The ruins of the Guge Kingdom, on the other hand, clearly showed that no natural force could have produced such an outcome. The only explanation was to blame some sort of supernatural power.

"The military experts never reached any conclusion. They wrapped things up hastily, attributing Shi Hai's horrific death to some special ritual carried out by terrorists. But thinking back on it now, his death—I mean, that last operation of his before he died—was truly riddled with suspicious details," Ding Jun said with a frown.

These matters, he should have been discussing with Shi Miaoshou, not Fang Qing.

"And you still claim to be an outsider? No one who came here is an outsider." Fang Qing sighed softly. "You heard what Uncle Zhu said—the Guge Envoy and the Guge Silver-Eye Death Warrant are both connected to the 'Heart of the Holy Infant' gem that shocked the whole world. Legend has it that the gem is also linked to the world-famous 'Heavenly Kingdom Treasure'... You saw how Uncle Zhu and the others were burning with greed."

Ding Jun nodded. "I saw it. But at the very least, our focus isn't on treasure or profit."

Fang Qing smiled again. "I came to Toling Monastery to devote myself to Vajrayana practice. If Master Chisang Gyatso hadn't instructed me otherwise, I'd be in the sutra library reading scriptures right now."

Ding Jun was about to reply when he suddenly felt a prickling sensation at his back, like needles stabbing his spine. It was the sixth sense for danger he'd developed on the battlefields of Afghanistan—whenever there was an unstable element in his surroundings, he could detect it quickly.

"Someone's here." He quickly wrote a few characters on the table.

Fang Qing wrote back a question mark.

"I can feel it," Ding Jun continued writing.

"Ge?" Fang Qing asked again.

Ding Jun shook his head. He could sense that the person concealed in the shadows was barely even breathing—quiet and practiced as a gecko lying in ambush for insects.

"Let's go back down," Fang Qing suggested.

Ding Jun nodded, and the two rose simultaneously. But just then, the young man of the He family came striding out of the small door, carrying his gun case over his shoulder, and nodded casually at Fang Qing.

"Didn't you find the old woman?" the young man asked.

Fang Qing replied with a smile: "No. It seems she never came up."

The young man laughed loudly. "Well, that's strange. She didn't come up, and she's not down below either. An old woman that age—could a ghost have eaten her?"

He walked to the table, grabbed the teapot, and drank straight from the spout for a while. Then he suddenly stopped, smacking his lips hard. "This tea... tastes strange. Something's off?"

No sooner had he said those two sentences than he collapsed limply to the floor.

The tea had been brewed just before the meeting. It had gone cold by now, but it shouldn't have been enough to knock out a grown man.

"What's going on?" Fang Qing smiled wryly.

"I don't know. Things are getting stranger and stranger." Ding Jun gave a wry smile of his own. Aunt Ge's disappearance was already the strangest of strange, and now the He family's young man collapsing from tea made it even stranger.

They exchanged a glance and, as if by unspoken agreement, stepped back, putting more distance between themselves and the table.

"I think we'd better not touch anything. Let's go inform Uncle Shi to come up and sort this out. Under these circumstances, I truly admire your initial insistence on being an outsider. This is something you simply can't get mixed up in," Fang Qing said.

The moment her words died away, a shadow emerged from the darkness beneath the window. More precisely, it was an extremely thin man—so thin he looked like a shadow that a gust of wind could blow away—and his feet made not the slightest sound.

Fang Qing's arms immediately dropped to her sides, her hands resting on the slight bulge at her waist. She reacted with remarkable agility. However, when she noticed that Ding Jun had made no move at all, she disguised her hostility, pretending merely to brush a speck of dust from her clothes.

"Hey, hey! Don't be like that. I was only joking, and you'd unleash your poison gu on me? Is that any way to treat a person? Can't a young man take a joke?" The shadow reached the table, but instead of sitting down, he lightly leaped up, landed on the tabletop, and sat cross-legged.

"Ding Jun, Fang Qing—" And as the He family's young man picked himself up from the floor, the shadow continued: "People of the Five Poisons Sect's He family, aren't you?"

"Who are you?" the young man asked. His collapse beneath the table had apparently been nothing more than a ploy to lure the enemy out.

The shadow squinted his small eyes, a sly smile creeping across his ashen face: "Little one, put away your gu, and I'll tell you."

He stood no more than a hundred and sixty-five centimeters tall, like a half-grown child still developing, yet he bore a face weathered by the passage of years, with rat-like whiskers on either side of his philtrum hanging all the way down to his chin.

The young man raised his right hand, revealing a brass bullet pinched between his index and middle fingers. "Hey, don't be nervous. I haven't released any gu yet—just took it out to give you a scare. Besides, do you have any idea how long it takes to cultivate a single gu worm like this? Your life isn't worth that much."

The shadow's face changed color. He curled his lip: "How much is my life worth? I'll tell you, and it'll scare you to death—ten million. In US dollars, understand? Never mind. Kids who don't know any better—I can't be bothered to argue with you. Both of you from the Five Poisons Sect this time are unfamiliar faces, huh? Shi Miaoshou really has no face left. He goes to the Five Poisons Sect begging for reinforcements and comes back with three nameless nobodies..."

The young man's fingertip moved, effortlessly twisting open the bullet's tip and tapping it lightly against the tabletop. A tiny creature, like a miniature gecko, dropped onto the table.

"Ah?" The shadow started in fright and immediately backflipped through the air, landing on the chair at the far end of the long table.

The creature was only half an inch long, entirely blood-red. Its head, tail, and claws were exactly like a gecko's, except that its back was covered in raised, swollen bumps, making it look utterly repulsive.

"You know how to deploy the Fire God Gu? Who are you? Which of the Ten Physicians of the Five Poisons Sect are you apprenticed to?" the shadow shrieked.

The young man answered coldly: "At least you're sharp enough to dodge the moment you saw the Fire God Gu. The Ten Physicians? Who do they think they are? If I ever saw them, I'd spank their bottoms."

The shadow froze for a moment, then waved his hands frantically: "Enough, enough! Put the Fire God Gu away first. Let's talk this out. That thing is no joke—if it sprays its poison, we're all dead."