Daomu Biji: The Mystic Nine

Qi Tiezui carefully rolled the cloth down to reveal the body underneath. As soon as the face appeared, Zhang Qishan realized that this was the man who had hanged himself on the train. At this time, all of his clothes had been stripped off, his eyes were still open, and the two small, weasel-like eyes looked especially muddy as they stared straight up at the ceiling.

At the moment Qi Tiezui lifted the cloth and exposed the face, the eyes suddenly turned and looked at the approaching Zhang Qishan.

Lieutenant Zhang was shocked and immediately stepped back and pulled out his gun: "Not dead."

"He's dead." Qi Tiezui sighed. "Lieutenant, you should know better."

Lieutenant looked into the corpse’s eyes coldly as Qi Tiezui removed the rest of the cloth from the body. There were dozens of places up and down the corpse’s body that had coffin nails sticking out of them, and a lot of symbols had been drawn around the wounds.

Zhang Qishan looked at the corpse without a hint of fear and then walked around to its other side. The eyes hesitated for a moment before immediately moving to follow him.

"This is the Qi family’s expert. I guess you can say he sacrificed his life to send the train here." Qi Tiezui sighed. "He’s got a total of twenty-seven nails in his body."

"For what purpose?"

"I really don't know. I’ve only heard that there are immortals in the Northeast who invite the four sacred spirits—fox, weasel, snake, and hedgehog—into their bodies. They’re commonly called ‘old immortals’. When they arrived in the Central Plains later and started doing bad deeds, feng shui masters placed coffin nails in their bodies to seal them. When these old immortals from the Northeast possess someone, they can only stay in the body for an hour at most. Once the expert figured out how long it would take to drive the train back, he must have asked the weasel spirit to help him. Once it entered his body, he used the coffin nails to seal it. This expert must have also suffered from moth disease and placed the spell while he was dying."

"Is there really a spell?" Zhang Qishan was skeptical.

"I’ll know when I take the nails out. But Fo Ye, you have to help me with something. If there really is a weasel spirit sealed in the body, then there’s actually another possibility." Qi Tiezui swallowed. "The weasel spirit is very evil and won't listen to reason. The expert might have sealed it because he was afraid it would harm others once it was released."

Zhang Qishan came from the northeast, so he had more or less heard of these kinds of things, but he still wasn’t interested. He was actually more intrigued by the Taoist symbols on the edge of the wounds. The strokes were connected with each other, and there were many dark red lines interwoven on the corpse’s skin.

It didn’t seem as simple as what Qi Tiezui had said.

"I’ve drawn three spells around the corpse. Since the Zhang family has a special constitution, I figure nothing will happen to you. If anything, the weasel spirit will likely enter my body. At that time, you can ask everything you want to know. If it doesn’t leave after you’re done asking, I’ll have to trouble you to pierce my throat with a coffin nail."

Zhang Qishan took one of the coffin nails and handed it to Lieutenant, who weighed it. Qi Tiezui was a little scared: "Fo Ye, your subordinates don't know how to control their strength. You can't ask them to pierce my throat."

"You don't have to pull it out." Zhang Qishan glanced at Lieutenant, who stepped forward, walked around the corpse, stretched out his fingers, and carefully grasped the end of one of the nails, pulling it out bit by bit without any tools. As soon as the nail was pulled from the wound, a gust of air came out that sounded like a fart.

There was a strange stench in the air and the body got paler and paler, making Zhang Qishan think that there really was a weasel spirit sealed in the corpse. After all the nails were pulled out, the body looked completely withered. Lieutenant looked back at Zhang Qishan and then at the pale Qi Tiezui, who was covering his mouth and looking around very nervously.

The room was silent for a long time, but there was no movement from Qi Tiezui. Blue veins jumped out on Zhang Qishan's forehead as he looked down at the corpse’s eyes. They didn’t move.

"Where’s the weasel spirit?" Lieutenant asked as he jumped down. "Ba Ye, were you rejected? It didn’t want to go to your body at all, so I guess your feelings are unrequited."

Qi Tiezui blushed and looked around, not knowing what to say. Suddenly, a corpse three beds over gave a jerk and Qi Tiezui immediately jumped up and shouted: "Over there!"

Zhang Qishan leaped up, stepped on two corpses, and then jumped to the edge of the moving corpse’s bed. When he pulled the cloth from the corpse, he saw that the eyes were muddy and lifeless, but the mouth was open.

Zhang Qishan went up and grabbed its chin, squeezing it until something hidden under its tongue was revealed. He took it out and found that it was a rotten piece of oracle bone.

As the corpse’s mouth quickly collapsed, Zhang Qishan coldly looked at the oracle bone in his hand. He remembered the other fragment he had found in the coffin before and suddenly understood something.

He grabbed Qi Tiezui—who kept bowing all around and thanking the weasel spirit for leaving a message— by the back of the neck and shouted to Lieutenant Zhang, "Pull up all the maps of the whole province and all the townships. Especially those marked with geological and mineral resources. Don’t miss a single one."

Lieutenant immediately got to work and started barking out orders. It was almost midnight by this point, yet everyone at headquarters was called up.

Not long after, Er Yuehong was passing by outside the defense headquarters when he saw the bright lights inside and became thoughtful.

He continued walking all the way through the old part of the city until he was back at his old mansion. The manager had prepared some tofu and mung bean noodles, so he hurriedly took a few mouthfuls before heading to his training room. When he got there, he stepped on a few boxes, quickly jumped up to the beams overhead, and pushed up one of the tiles above the beams.

It wasn't a roof above the tiles, but a hidden room. Even though it was only as tall as a person, it was filled with various boxes and ancient books that were buried in dust. Since he stopped going underground, he hadn’t come up here for a long time. He took out the thimble that Zhang Qishan had given him, went up to a three-meter-long box, and opened it. There were hundreds of identical thimbles inside, which had all been neatly placed in the dusty insert. The insert had several grids, many of which were empty.

Er Yuehong blew off the dust and saw that the bottom of each grid had been painted with a flower pattern. He compared the flower pattern on the thimble to the patterns on the bottom of the grids and found a blank space that had the same pattern.

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My A1C was 7.0 so here's a chapter in celebration o(^▽^)o