The Night Watcher of Great Jing - Chapter 52

Everything that happened outside could be heard clearly within the room.

The physician treating Song Hongjun immediately broke into a cold sweat.

He had merely made a house call. How had he been unlucky enough to become entangled in a matter like this?

When the voices outside gradually quieted, footsteps entered the room.

The physician caught sight of the newcomer’s Flying Fish Robe from the corner of his eye. He dropped to his knees, sweat pouring down his face.

Zhao Li covered her nose as she walked inside.

She had to see a case of conflicting bane between mother and child with her own eyes.

Song Xiu followed in a daze. Abruptly remembering something, he said, “Hundred-Household Commander Zhao, please wait. My son is unclothed.”

He hurried ahead, went behind the screen, and pulled a corner of the quilt over Song Hongjun’s waist.

When he raised his head, he saw tears covering his eldest son’s black-spotted face.

His eldest son had become this, his second son had been taken away, and there was no telling what would happen to the family.

Song Xiu’s heart clenched.

As father and son sat facing each other in tears, Zhao Li entered.

At a glance, she saw Song Hongjun lying among the bedding with charred-black skin, constantly secreting foul, blood-scented mucus.

Zhao Li disliked mollusks. Looking at Song Hongjun, who resembled a slug, gave her an irresistible urge to sprinkle salt over him.

She forcibly redirected her attention and addressed the kneeling physician.

“What characteristics has Young Master Song’s condition shown? What is his temperature? What is his pulse like?”

Zhao Li took out the small notebook she carried and recorded the symptoms of a patient suffering from a Mother-and-Child Bane conflict.

Only after asking what medicines the physician had used did she close the notebook and approach Song Hongjun to observe him.

In that brief interval, a fresh layer of rank mucus had already formed over the skin that had just been washed.

It enveloped Song Hongjun, and the brocade quilt was full of sticky fluid.

Based on her experience, Zhao Li estimated that he could survive another half month at the current rate.

After that, his bones and organs would rot.

Like a persimmon, he would become nothing more than a thin layer of skin holding liquid pulp.

Throughout the process, his mind would remain clear.

The amount of torment he would suffer was impossible to imagine.

Zhao Li did not know how this world’s White Lotus Sect had developed such a vicious art.

She frowned as she studied him.

Song Xiu practically held his breath while awaiting her decision.

“Bring two—no, three roosters. I also need yellow paper, straw, a carpenter’s ink line, and incense ash.”

Song Xiu had nearly fallen into despair when Zhao Li finally spoke.

“Prepare plenty of warm water using one spoonful of sugar, one spoonful of salt, and one bowl of water. Make him drink it, or he’ll dry up completely.”

After directing the servants, Zhao Li turned to the physician, who was still kneeling.

“Sir, rise. Prepare a calming decoction. There is no need to waste medicine on washing him. Water boiled with purifying mugwort will suffice.”

Marquis Ningsu’s Estate was vast. Everything was quickly assembled.

Zhao Li dismissed all the servants but left Song Xiu inside.

Given the estate’s current troubles, she did not want to remain alone with father and son and invite complications. She summoned Zheng Lian and Li Qing to assist.

“Move the screen aside.”

While Zheng Lian and Li Qing worked, Zhao Li arranged a small ritual altar beside Song Hongjun’s bed.

She sat on a stool and bound straw into a doll the length of her forearm.

Song Hongjun was currently suffering baleful energy entering his body. In folk terminology, a ghost was flaying his skin.

Until the Mother-and-Child Bane was resolved, he could only remain in this state, neither human nor ghost.

But Zhao Li was here now. As a civil servant of Great Jing, she could not simply watch him die.

Of the three roosters delivered, Zheng Lian held two by the wings and cut their throats.

All their blood was poured into the carpenter’s ink-line reel.

A carpenter’s ink line kept roof beams true and measured the righteous order of heaven and earth. Since ancient times, it had been an important tool for suppressing evil.

But Zhao Li did not intend to suppress or destroy a supernatural anomaly.

She wanted to hide Song Hongjun’s true body and let the straw doll temporarily bear the resentful bane in his place.

Once Zhao Li resolved the Mother-and-Child Bane, he would naturally recover.

A straw doll soon took shape in her hands.

She wound thread soaked in rooster blood several times around its limbs and neck, temporarily granting righteous yang energy to the lifeless doll.

The freshly killed roosters were cut open. Their hearts and bloody thigh bones were removed.

Zhao Li wrapped one heart in the red paper bearing Song Hongjun’s Eight Characters of Birth, then stuffed it into the doll’s incense-ash-filled belly.

Among all animals, roosters possessed the strongest yang energy after humans. Even a year after death, the yang energy in their blood and bones did not dissipate.

Zhao Li inserted the bloody leg bones into the doll’s four limbs.

The resulting straw doll looked extraordinarily eerie, yet overflowed with yang energy like a living person.

It was a method the psychic bureaus of later generations commonly used to deceive less intelligent supernatural anomalies.

Zhao Li had bound the doll quite well.

She even dotted two eyes onto its head with rooster blood and painted a broad smile.

The fresh blood spread before it could dry.

Song Xiu, Zheng Lian, and Li Qing stood inside the room and shivered involuntarily at the sight.

Zhao Li wiped the blood from her hands with yellow paper.

When she looked back, the three men stood in a neat row.

“What’s wrong?” she asked in confusion.

“N-nothing.”

Li Qing’s poor health made him more sensitive to such things. He distinctly felt as if the object in Zhao Li’s hands were a person.

It looked like a straw doll, yet his senses insisted it was a living human being.

The contradiction raised gooseflesh over his whole body and brought cold sweat to his brow.

Zheng Lian remained calmer.

Following the Mind’s Eye visualization method Zhao Li had taught them, he closed his eyes for a long time and laboriously opened the Mind’s Eye.

One glance frightened him back a step.

The straw doll in Zhao Li’s arms radiated intense red light like a living creature.

Song Hongjun, meanwhile, was shrouded in black-and-red mist.

The mist formed two figures, one large and one small. They clung to Song Hongjun with blood-red eyes open and released wave after wave of sobbing.

The cries were muffled and intermittent, yet they resembled a freezing needle slowly sliding down Zheng Lian’s ear canal and piercing his eardrum.

With a shout, Zheng Lian covered his ears and hurriedly closed the Mind’s Eye.

“I told you not to open the Mind’s Eye carelessly!”

Zhao Li picked up the half bowl of rooster blood remaining on the table and handed it to him.

“Drink it while it’s warm.”

The Mind’s Eye was a double-edged blade.

Zheng Lian lacked both spiritual strength and experience. Even baleful energy alone could harm him.

He gave a bitter smile and saluted, then tipped back his head and drained the entire bowl.

Warmth immediately rose through him and drove away the yin chill.

Li Qing no longer dared use the Mind’s Eye. He hurriedly asked Zheng Lian in a whisper what he had seen.

Zhao Li carried the straw doll to Song Hongjun’s bedside and stared for a long time.

Song Xiu approached anxiously.

“Hundred-Household Commander Zhao, do you require something else?”

Only then did Zhao Li frown at him.

“He’s too filthy. I don’t want to touch him. You do it.”

The sight of Song Hongjun still made her want to sprinkle salt over him.

In the end, Song Xiu personally used rooster-blood thread to connect the straw doll’s right hand to Song Hongjun’s right middle finger.

The moment he tied the knot, wind swept in through the window.

An ethereal woman’s laugh drifted within it.

The rooster-blood thread binding the straw doll suddenly pulled tight, and a spot the size of a sesame seed appeared on its body.

At the same moment, the tension visibly left Song Hongjun’s body.