Chapter Thirty-Nine: Borrowed Corpse, Returned Soul

I stood there in a daze for a long time, unmoving, until my grandfather finished his phone call and turned to gaze anxiously out the window.

Back then, I must have gone to the internet café, waiting for that woman to show up again the following evening. I wanted to ask her if she still needed those seven coffins, but she never gave me a clear answer, so I sought out Zuo Daoyin instead.

At the time, my grandfather told me he was away in the neighboring county, handling a funeral, and wouldn’t return for a couple of days. Looking back, he must have been worried about me and tried to come back to Bai Street earlier than planned. But why, in the end, did he fail to make it back? Why was it the bus driver, and not my grandfather, who appeared by my side?

What did the Daoist woman mean by “returning to life through borrowing a corpse”?

The bus had now reached halfway up the mountain. Everyone inside was either lost in thought or preoccupied with their phones, while my grandfather sat ramrod straight, his expression deeply troubled.

Just then, a sharp bend appeared ahead, and a blinding light suddenly shone from the opposite direction. Next, I heard an ear-piercing honk right beside my ear. What happened next left me utterly stunned.

A car with its high beams on sped past, skimming the side of the bus. Perhaps to avoid this car, the bus driver jerked the wheel sharply—too sharply. The bus crashed through the guardrail, and the double-decker coach, like a wild horse breaking free, barreled straight toward the cliff’s edge.

In that instant, everything inside the bus froze in time. I could see every passenger’s face clearly. Some hadn’t even realized what was happening, still dozing or fiddling with their phones. But within a second, terror flooded every face, followed by a chorus of screams—screams that were instantly drowned out by the deafening roar as the bus plunged over the cliff, tumbling down to a pile of jagged rocks at the mountain’s foot.

It was a catastrophic accident: a double-decker bus with over sixty passengers went over the precipice, completely destroyed, leaving no survivors except the driver. Everyone else—including my grandfather—died.

Looking at the mangled, bloody bodies—just a minute earlier, they were all living, breathing people. Now, they were torn and broken remnants.

I had no idea how the bus driver survived—perhaps just luck, or maybe simply because he was the only one wearing a seatbelt. He was grievously injured and lay barely alive in the twisted remains of the driver’s seat.

It was then I saw my grandfather appear before the driver—or rather, my grandfather’s soul, for his body still lay in the last row of the shattered bus.

He looked down at the dying driver, his brow furrowed deeply. Then, very solemnly, he bowed to the man and, with one swift motion, grasped him by the throat.

“I’m sorry. I have to get back to save my grandson. I have no choice but to sacrifice you.”

After saying this, I saw a black mist rise from my grandfather’s body. As it all seeped into him, dark veins began to surface beneath his skin.

I had seen this before—twenty years earlier, when he killed the Daoist woman, his body had taken on this same appearance. It was the forbidden art from the Book of the Underworld.

My grandfather, still gripping the driver’s throat, slowly lifted him out of the wreck. The black veins spread from my grandfather’s arm onto the driver’s body. In the blink of an eye, after uttering “return to life through borrowing a corpse,” my grandfather vanished.

The bus driver collapsed onto the ground. After about five minutes, he slowly climbed to his feet and shoved open the bus door.

He walked to the pile of rocks outside, where another double-decker bus—identical to the first—appeared before him. The bus uncle opened its door, then returned to the wrecked bus and began dragging out bodies.

But he wasn’t really dragging out corpses—he was pulling out their souls. I could see it clearly: each time he removed a body, the flesh remained in the bus, but their souls were taken to the second level of the other bus.

It took the bus uncle nearly an hour to move all sixty-odd souls onto the second bus. He took a deep breath and said, “Once I’ve saved my grandson, I’ll send you all on to your next life.”

With that, he locked the second level of the bus, and drove the double-decker swiftly to the other side of the mountain.

“Grandpa—that bus uncle is my grandfather!”

By the time I reached this point in the memory, tears were already streaming down my face. No wonder he knew everything that had happened before, no wonder he knew the toilet was in the yard, no wonder he knew my computer’s password. Of course he did—he was my grandfather.

All this time, the bus uncle had insisted he would never harm me, doing everything he could to help, yet in the end, I doubted him and told him to leave. Thinking of this, the pain in my heart was like needles piercing me.

Only now did I understand why those two underworld envoys kept coming to our coffin shop looking for my grandfather. They must have suspected that the bus uncle was, in fact, my grandfather, returned through the forbidden art of corpse borrowing.

I didn’t know what kind of punishment the Underworld would mete out for what Grandpa had done, but the fact that he never admitted his true identity made one thing clear: if the Underworld discovered he had used such a forbidden technique to return to life, he would face a terrible fate.

Suddenly, I remembered something he once said to me—that only I could uncover the truth behind everything. Even if he knew, he couldn’t tell me, for if he did, he would die.

At the time, I was puzzled and thought he was being mysterious, but now I understood. If Grandpa revealed too much, the Underworld would immediately figure out who he was and send many envoys to capture him. He wasn’t afraid of going to hell—he feared that if he was taken, no one would be left to help me.

Once again, darkness swept over me. When I opened my eyes, I found myself back on the dam by the Dongmen Reservoir.

My eyes were bloodshot as I shouted Grandpa’s name toward the center of the reservoir. I wanted to jump in and swim to save him, but Wang Feiyang and Lu Li held me back with all their strength.

“Wu Dao, run! Run, now!” Grandpa kept shouting, over and over. The Daoist woman smiled wickedly and turned to me. “Wu Dao, do you want to save your grandfather?”

“What the hell do you want?”

“It’s simple.” She pointed at the bubbling water below. “Jump in. Use your Nine Yin Meridian to open the mechanism and fetch the treasure inside for me!”

I agreed almost without thinking and was about to jump, when suddenly a shrill scream came from Grandpa. I saw black mist swirling around him, dark veins surfacing on his body at a visible rate.

Grandpa slowly rose from the ground. The broken sword embedded in his shoulder was forced out by some invisible power, and the heavy chain hooked to his collarbone was wrenched off by sheer strength.

Grandpa was covered in blood. He seized the Daoist woman by the throat and lifted her high into the air.

She showed no fear. Instead, the same eerie laughter echoed from the reservoir, sending chills down my spine. “Wu Zhenlong, twenty years ago you learned the forbidden art from the Book of the Underworld. I never guessed you too were born under the Nine Yin Fate. I fell for you then, and you killed me. But now, twenty years later, my cultivation has grown more than tenfold. Do you really think you can kill me again?”

“Don’t forget, I was the one who passed the Book of the Underworld to you! Now, let me show you what true forbidden magic really is.”