Chapter 3

As the last echo of that voice faded, the cold, grim white bones slid from Sun Wukong’s back and hit the ground with a thud.

Sun Wukong lowered his eyes to the scattered joints. The corner of his mouth lifted, and a contemptuous scoff forced its way through his teeth.

That yokai’s last sentence had been a provocation.

“So the young master really was a yokai!” Sha Wujing exclaimed in disbelief. He set down the carrying pole, strode over to Sun Wukong, and crouched to examine the bones. “These look like human bones. Could the yokai have been possessing someone?”

“What yokai! If it was a yokai, why didn’t it grab Master just now?” Zhu Bajie flung his sleeve in anger, refusing to agree.

The pig was clearly arguing for the sake of it. He was upset, and so he vented. Perhaps he was angry that such a good-looking youth had really been a yokai; perhaps he was angry that the youth had simply left without a word.

Sha Wujing frowned. A rare look of reproach appeared on the honest monk’s face. “Second Senior Brother, what kind of nonsense is that?”

They had all seen it with their own eyes. That beautiful young master had turned into these cold white bones. If he had been a living person, how could he have changed like that?

“What did I say?” Zhu Bajie retorted. “Even if the young master was a yokai, he didn’t grab Master, did he? If you really count it up—you’re a demon, I’m a demon, Eldest Senior Brother is a demon. What’s the difference between any of us?”

After all, he had once been the renowned Marshal Tianpeng. Beneath his greedy, lazy nature lay a clumsy-seeming but profound wisdom. His glib rebuttal, spoken like a fit of temper, unexpectedly illuminated everything.

Sha Wujing had always been diligent, steady, quiet, and poor with words. How could he out-argue the slick-tongued Zhu Bajie?

In the end, Tang Sanzang spoke, his tone calm. “Enough. Let’s continue on.”

As the White Dragon Horse passed the pile of bones, Tang Sanzang lowered his eyes for a glance. A trace of thought surfaced in his quiet, peaceful gaze.

Let the mind arise without dwelling anywhere. To Tang Sanzang, whether the youth was human or yokai, it came down to four words: know the illusion, and leave it.

The four of them traveled another half hour before reaching the inn Sun Wukong had mentioned.

The inn stood right at the border of White Tiger Village.

The innkeeper was an honest man in his fifties. After Tang Sanzang explained their purpose, he brought them water and vegetarian food, then told a waiter to prepare a room.

The four sat on stools eating their vegetarian meal. At the table beside them were three constables in official uniforms.

The thinnest one drained a large bowl of wine and complained, “Wang San’er’s eldest son went to White Tiger Ridge and vanished. Anyone with eyes knows it’s yokai mischief. And now the county magistrate sends us to investigate? Isn’t that just deliberately making trouble for us?”

“Just go through the motions. If we actually went up White Tiger Ridge, we’d likely never come back.” The fat constable on the right shook his head.

“If you ask me, it all comes down to lust,” said the constable on the left. He clinked bowls with the tall, thin one, gulped down several mouthfuls, wiped his lips with his sleeve, and continued teasing. “Don’t you think those people are ridiculous? They don’t realize that the yokai may be beautiful, but she’s no immortal. They don’t become romantic scholars—they become dead souls!”

The three constables were not speaking quietly. The four travelers, sitting barely a meter away, heard every word clearly.

When they heard the word “beautiful,” all four of them thought of the pretty young master they had met before reaching the inn.

The young master was beautiful—lotus face, peach-blossom eyes, delicate and pitiful. But unfortunately, he was a yokai.

Was this the yokai the constables were talking about?

But though the young master was beautiful, surely he wasn’t so beautiful that a single smile could steal a person’s soul?

Before long, the three constables finished their wine and left the inn. The four travelers finished their meal and returned to their room to sleep.

…

In the middle of the night, a fine wind rustled the dense camphor trees, producing wave after wave of whispering leaves.

“Fire! There’s a fire!”

“Come help put out the fire!”

“Have you seen my son? Has anyone seen him?”

“Innkeeper! Right now the important thing is putting out the fire! Your son is a grown man—do you really think he’d get lost?”

Amid the clamor, the four woke from sleep.

Tang Sanzang rose and looked out the window. Faint firelight flickered.

“Wukong, go take a look.”

While the three disciples helped fight the fire, the innkeeper caught Tang Sanzang. The big man in his fifties pleaded anxiously for help finding his son, who had suddenly gone missing.

Before they had retired to their room, the four had met the innkeeper’s son—a young man in his twenties, tall and strongly built.

According to the innkeeper, a quarter-hour earlier his son Zhang Sheng had come to his room and said a pile of inexplicable things.

At the time, he had only thought it strange. After Zhang Sheng left, the more he thought about it, the more wrong it felt. When he went to find Zhang Sheng and ask what was going on, his son was no longer in his room. Before he could react, the inn had suddenly caught fire.

By the timing, Zhang Sheng had only just disappeared. Whether the sudden fire was connected to him was still unknown. Others were already fighting the flames; the priority now was to find Zhang Sheng.

So Tang Sanzang and the innkeeper split up to search both sides of the inn.

It was deep night. The inexplicable fire filled the inn with children’s crying and the sounds of adults running with water. All of it tangled together into a noisy chaos.

Outside the inn, the moonlight had at some point vanished into black clouds. Only a faint sliver remained. The wind stirred the mottled leaves, and their swaying cast black silhouettes on the ground, adding an eerie mystery.

Tang Sanzang walked along the too-quiet road and found Zhang Sheng beneath a locust tree.

He approached, about to call out, but Zhang Sheng acted as if he could not see him at all. Face blank, he walked swiftly up the mountain.

Tang Sanzang glanced back at the inn spitting sparks, then at Zhang Sheng, who was almost out of sight. After a few seconds of thought, he followed.

Zhang Sheng walked fast. Tang Sanzang had to quicken his pace to keep up.

As they went farther, the tall locust trees blocked the last trace of light. The cicadas fell silent. In their place came the hoarse cries and whimpers of hungry hawks and mournful birds. The branches stretched like bared claws, filling the darkness with a creeping, desolate chill.

Fortunately, Zhang Sheng carried a torch, allowing Tang Sanzang to follow him accurately.

The uneven mountain path slowed them. Tang Sanzang stepped on something hard—white bones, though whether beast or human, he could not tell.

He thought of the legends about White Tiger Ridge, and of the youth in white.

He followed Zhang Sheng’s blurry dark figure to a hidden cave. He saw Zhang Sheng walk inside. Reason told him he should not follow further, that he should stop here. But in truth, from the moment he had seen Zhang Sheng heading toward White Tiger Ridge and chosen to follow, he had already missed the best time to turn back.

Suppressing every thought, Tang Sanzang softened his breathing and stepped inside.

His footsteps were light. He followed Zhang Sheng through a long corridor flickering with candlelight, all the way to the deepest part.

He hid behind a rock. In the brightest pool of candlelight, he raised his eyes and saw the youth in red on the soft couch—and in that instant, he froze.

The youth lay on his side on the soft couch, his wrist, white and translucent as lotus root, propping up his head. Black hair spilled carelessly around him. His posture was leisurely, languid. His features were astonishingly beautiful—skin like congealed snow, brows like black ink, a bewitching charm and otherworldly allure at the corners of his eyes and brows. Every part exquisite. Every part perfect. A fraction more would be vulgar; a fraction less would lose all charm.

Tang Sanzang thought of the villagers’ hushed, wary descriptions of this youth.

The yokai on White Tiger Ridge only needed to look at a person once to steal their soul.

He had assumed those were exaggerations—that the yokai used magic to cloud the minds of those greedy for beauty.

He had not expected such devastating beauty to truly exist in this world—beauty that made the heart panic at a single glance.

As Tang Sanzang was thinking this, the youth slowly raised his eyes. Tang Sanzang saw those dark pupils, cold and deep as a frozen pool. Only then did he realize that, compared with that seductive, bewitching face, the youth’s eyes were like a boundless sea beneath starlight—amid the bright moon, they carried an unexpected, solitary sharpness and coldness.

A bewitching, alluring face, and eyes utterly unapproachable and cold.

The contradiction fused in the youth.

It made one lose one’s soul to the former, then fall to the dust because of the latter.

“Who are you?”

Tang Sanzang heard the youth’s voice—languid and lingering, careless, with a trace of alluring magnetism.

Right after the voice came the youth’s gaze, fixed straight on him.

The youth had discovered him.

In that instant, Tang Sanzang’s heart clenched.

Truly, as the Buddhist teachings said: all things in this world arise from cause and affinity.