Daomu Biji: A Thousand Faces

The subsequent story shouldn’t be recounted in detail.

At this point, Ah Tou could probably already guess what would happen next.

Pan Boda’s operation was successful and the process was recorded in detail on the next tape. Pan Boda wanted this upright and honest man to become the next long immortal so that he could be treated.

Within a month, the man began to grow taller, and within a year, he had already grown to a height of two meters. It was about four months after the surgery when he started to acquire the ability to heal people.

This man, however, turned out to be a demon. The desire in his heart was extremely fierce and he was a completely different person compared to Long Immortal. Even though he was usually very taciturn, his heart was completely corrupted by the healing power.

To prevent Pan Boda from operating on anyone else, he encouraged the villagers to hang the doctor (this reminded Ah Tou of the other object that had been hanging from the beam in Xie Yuchen’s house). Then, he kept the rest of the stones for himself. He blackmailed the villagers again and again, raked in a bunch of money, and threatened his patients into having physical relationships with him. He had suddenly transformed from a seaside fisherman with nothing to an immortal who had everything at his fingertips. 

He asked the villagers to build a statue of himself and destroyed all traces of the previous Long Immortal. In the videotape, this man constantly stayed silent, but he always looked coldly right at the camera. Ah Tou felt like he was completely unpredictable, as if there was a ghost living inside of him. 

This new long immortal did everything he wanted without restraint until he turned twenty-nine. The villagers knew that he would turn into a real demon once he reached the age of thirty, so they killed him the night before he turned thirty. The tapes after this were all recorded by an unknown person, probably Pan Boda’s assistant in the village. Nevertheless, the recorded information was fairly comprehensive. 

After the new long immortal died, the assistant who filmed the tapes cut open his brain in the middle of the night and removed the stone. The assistant found that the stone had become larger than when it was first implanted and seemed to be growing.

This assistant never showed their face, but they remained extremely calm throughout the whole process.

They hid both Pan Boda’s and the new long immortal’s śarīras inside the old house that Long Immortal had bought before. To destroy the evidence, the old house was sold as a whole. It was dismantled into building materials, exported, and eventually rebuilt on Xie Yuchen’s property.

Ah Tou and Liang Yanyan looked at each other. "If the stone was hidden in the house, then it would’ve been mixed in with the building materials when the house was torn down," Ah Tou said.

"These stones were mixed in with other stones when they were brought to the new address. They were either used to pave the road or cushion the walls, so that means that the stones from Long Immortal’s brain should now be somewhere inside the walls or in the road at Xie Yuchen’s property,” Liang Yanyan said. “If these stones emit any energy, it’s possible that we were sensing what they went through a long time ago."

"So it wasn’t Long Immortal who attacked me, but the new long immortal. Long Immortal was a lot taller than the new one. He was almost six meters tall, whereas the bad one was only about two meters tall." After Ah Tou finished speaking, she felt like she was talking about sharks.

"I think that’s what it is."

"Then who was the long immortal we saw underground? Did he come back to life? Or—"

"I wanted to assume that it had already become another organism, but that’s not the case. He talked to me when he captured me."

"He can talk?”

Liang Yanyan nodded, "He wanted me to apologize to Black Glasses for him.”

“Why?”

"Because he can't cure his eyes," Liang Yanyan said. "When he touched Black Glasses, he sensed a lot of things. He wanted to heal Black Glasses’ eyes, but he couldn't. There are still people who need Black Glasses’ eyes, and Black Glasses knows it himself. In Black Glasses’ heart, there's someone who’s more important than his eyes. Moreover, that person needs him to stay in his current state.”

"Did Long Immortal say anything else?"

Liang Yanyan shook her head. Ah Tou could tell that the other woman was hiding something from her, but one thing good about Ah Tou was that she wasn’t curious enough to get to the root of the matter.

"So, he didn't die but regained his ability to heal people."

"The biggest crystal in his brain wasn’t taken out. Maybe after he turned forty, the cycle began again and he was protected by his own power. But he didn't want to be human anymore, so he had been living underground. Since we found him, he needed to leave his village and find another cave to hide in."

This is such a bad ending for an immortal. Is it really so terrible to be human?

"If that’s the case, then why did the bad long immortal want to kill me? Is he simply a demon?”

"I told you before, sometimes this strange force will give you a false impression that it has wisdom. Rather than attacking you, the force might just be acting according to some laws or patterns. We just don't know which laws you conform to," Liang Yanyan said. They had finally finished watching the rest of the tapes, so she stood up and stretched her joints. While doing that, she messaged Xie Yuchen using the new phone she had bought. 

Xie Yuchen quickly responded. Ah Tou didn’t know what he said to her, but it was obvious that a great weight had been lifted from Liang Yanyan’s shoulders.

It was at this time that Ah Tou finally remembered Black Glasses, “Ah! He’s still digging you up! Have you told him yet that you’ve already come back?"

"Let him dig a little longer. I’m almost done dealing with your problem and I don't want him to cause any trouble. Now that we know all of the causes and effects, what comes next is solving the problem.”

"What are you going to do? Should we go back first?"

Although a lot of things had happened in Guangdong, she at least didn’t have to deal with that long-shaped ghost here. She couldn't help thinking that maybe it was safer for her to stay in Guangdong since Long Immortal was here. 

"After you arrived in Guangzhou, you weren’t attacked again. This means that the previous attacks were due to the location,” Liang Yanyan said. "We need to go back and do some experiments. I just exchanged some information with Xie Yuchen and asked him to stand by. We’ll sort it out bit by bit and figure out why those stones attacked you."

"Is there anything I should know about?" Ah Tou asked. She felt that Liang Yanyan had an idea but was hiding it from her. Liang Yanyan glanced at the tapes and looked like she wanted to speak up, but then she hesitated.

****