Heavenly Dao Formula - Chapter 40

Chapter 40: Void Spirit

“Little Daoist, this is the place.”

The old lady brought Xia Fan to her house.

Xia Fan took a look at Ru Qiu hiding behind Mrs. Tian by the light of the oil lamp inside the house and could indeed see a clear look of fear and weakness on her face.

“Do not enter the house until you’re informed.” He instructed, then walked into the house and inserted the latch.

The house was built in the most common style of housing in the county. The largest room was the hall with about ten square meters with a door on each side. It had a kitchen on one side and a bedroom on the other. There was also a narrow door in the kitchen that led to the latrine and the backyard.

Xia Fan spent a minute taking a cursory stroll around the house, confirming that there was no one else, and then opened the bedroom window.

Li, who had been in position long ago, silently entered the house.

At this time, she was like a martial artist. Despite wearing ordinary cloth, with the augmentation of the straw hat and raincoat, she looked very much like a swordsman. If she had a longsword at her waist, she would look like an authentic swordsman.

As for her fox demon characteristics, they were completely covered by her clothing. Judging from her demeanor alone, she was basically no different from a human.

“How is it, does it fit?”

“A little tight in the chest, but it doesn’t affect my mobility,” Li replied.

Clothes that could perfectly match her body shape… would indeed be harder to find. Xia Fan cleared his throat. “What should we do next?”

“Wait.” She walked to the bed and sat down. “Only by seeing the anomaly with our own eyes can we make an accurate judgment.”

“No need to blow out the lights?”

“No.” Li’s eyes looked like she was looking at a fool. “How else can you observe them when the lights are out?”

“I thought… ghosts would be afraid of light,” Xia Fan replied awkwardly. Habits were hard to kill…

“If they were afraid of light, then there would be no need for the mystics to deal with evil spirits.” The fox demon snorted. “Even succubi, who are most affected by light, are not so scared of light that they would flee the moment they see it, not to mention the others. Besides, I don’t think that old lady encountered a ghost.”

“Why?”

“Ghosts are the most difficult to deal with among evil spirits, and mostly appear in the form of corpses. Hiding their heads and showing their tails is not their style. And once they appear, they will most likely set off a bloody storm. It’s unlikely that they would let the two people in the house live until now.”

Xia Fan found himself vaguely understanding the fox demon’s temper. Although she would never miss an opportunity to laugh at humans, she would still seriously do what she promised. Even if she needed to explain, she would patiently start from the basics, rather than summarise.

“How exactly are these evil spirits classified?”

“According to my master, it should have been passed down by word of mouth for thousands of years. The Privy Council just made a further breakdown, adding the four categories of demon: monster, succubus, and fiend before demons and monsters — the two groups correspond to one another, but the former is used to refer to the weaker evil spirits. Of course, the people have many weird names for even spirits, and any name is normal.”

“That’s why you said that there’s no essential difference between the succubus and the fiend in the Night of Great Desolation…” Xia Fan suddenly understood.

“But this classification is not without loopholes.” Li humphed. “First of all, classifying demons as evil spirits is in no way justified and purely due to human selfishness. If we really categorized by type, you should also belong in it. Secondly, it’s not possible to include all the abnormal beings, such as some elves…”

Speaking to this point, she suddenly paused and looked up at the roof.

“What’s wrong?”

“Shh—” She made a gesture of silence. “Listen.”

Xia Fan couldn’t help but hold his breath and follow her gaze upward. Under the light of the oil lamp, only one side of the overhead beam emitted dim reflections. The rest were hidden in the darkness, and with the large shadows on the tiled roof, the details he could see were extremely limited.

In this silence, he heard a slight “da, da” sound.

At first, Xia Fan needed to concentrate on listening, but since he heard it, the sound gradually became distinct, as if it was far away for a while and then near, and sometimes it seemed to come from around him.

He realized that what Mrs. Tian said was true. It was neither psychological nor hallucinatory, there was indeed something in the room!

It sometimes paced along the roof beam, and sometimes swept over the closet, as evidenced by the soft and clear footsteps.

Even after the baptism of the Night of Great Desolation, Xia Fan still felt goosebumps rising on his back.

Because no matter how he looked, he couldn’t find the source of the sound.

No wonder Ru Qiu was so tormented that she couldn’t sleep all night long. If someone faced such a bizarre situation and was still able to sleep peacefully, their psychological quality would definitely be extraordinarily high.

But if it was only invisible, who was to say he couldn’t defeat it!

Xia Fan took off the wooden sword behind his back and held it firmly.

He was waiting for the moment the evil creature exposed itself.

15 minutes later, the oil lamp suddenly swayed, and a wooden cup on the low table above the bed was knocked over with a clang and fell straight to the ground.

Almost at the same time, Xia Fan made a move.

As he concentrated, his five senses reinforced by Qi clearly captured every detail of the cup tilting. It first tilted to the left, and then was toppled towards the outside. If there was something there, it must be behind the wooden cup and its route of travel was from right to left!

Xia Fan swung his sword towards the position he predicted the spirit would go and slashed it. According to the frequency of the “da-da-da” sound, there was no way it could have dodged the blow!

“Smack!”

The strong impact made him almost fail to hold the hilt, and the wooden sword landed almost unhindered on the table, its recoil shaking Xia Fan’s palm so much it went numb. Apart from leaving a dent in the low table, there was nothing more to be gained from this strike.

The “da, da, da” sounds continued as if mocking him.

“Hahahahaha…” This time someone was really laughing.

Li held her stomach and laughed for a while until it turned into pain before stopping. Apparently, the burst of laughter had affected her wound.

“Little Daoist, are you, are you okay?” A puzzled inquiry came from outside the house.

“I’m fine… I’m catching ghosts!” Xia Fan shook his tingling hand and glared at Li without good grace. “Is it so funny to miss once?”

Li nodded seriously. “It’s really funny to see you fully concentrate on chopping the air.”

“Air? It clearly knocked over the cup—” Halfway through his sentence, Xia Fan suddenly frowned. “Wait, you know exactly where that thing is?”

“Yes and no.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that as long as you don’t see it, you can never know its exact location.”

Not seeing… means not knowing. The problem was that if he didn’t even know its position, how could he even see it? Xia Fan was puzzled.

“The trick is in figuring out how to see it.” Li raised the corner of her mouth. “I already know what we’re looking for.”

“Well, what is it?”

“A monster, or… a spirit.” The fox demon replied, “This is also the category of evil spirits with the most branches. As the saying goes, there are a thousand strange things and monsters. If I’m correct, it should be a void spirit — a ‘Kan’, the same as me.”

Xia Fan immediately took note of this knowledge, even if he couldn’t understand its meaning for the time being. “Do you have to use a spell to see this… void spirit you’re talking about?”

“I don’t know. Some spells may enable you to see it, but my master did not teach me any.” Li paused. “But before there were mystics, people also figured out ways to see the void spirits.”

“What kind of ways?”

“You’ll find out soon. But until then, I need a big stack of window paper, the more the better.”

…

It wasn’t easy to gather a huge stack of window paper at 9-10 pm. It took a lot of effort for Xia Fan and Mrs. Tian to borrow or buy five or six rolls of oil paper from the neighbors.

Li quickly connected them end to end and glued them into three “paper strips”. These paper strips were taped horizontally to the ends of the wall, dividing the room into several areas. She then lit a dozen candles — Mrs. Tian’s entire stock — and placed them in various corners of the house.

“This… is enough.” After making these preparations, Li clapped her hands.

“Are you sure?” Xia Fan doubted. “It feels like the house just has a few more banners made of window paper hung up.”

“For anomalies, it’s not the more complicated the more effective.” The fox demon took off her straw hat and sat cross-legged in front of the paper. “The void spirit is a manifestation of Qi. The reason you can’t see it is because of too much focus on your eyes.”

“But didn’t you say earlier that it’s more detrimental to observation with the lights out?”

“Indeed. Because, instead of making you give up using your eyes, the darkness will increase the focus on vision, and the effect will naturally be worse.”

Xia Fan thought about it and found that the other party also had a point. “Then, what’s the purpose of these papers?”

“The things you see through the window paper will be blurred, which indirectly weakens the scene reflected in your eyes. This will force you to realize that the eyes are no longer reliable. Instead, you can perceive something that’s usually difficult to be directly observed. As they say, two negatives form a positive. This is how it works.”

The problem was that this deceives only one’s own brain… and couldn’t affect external objects, right? As he was in a state of both belief and doubt, a black shadow suddenly jumped on the paper.

Besides him and the fox demon, there should have been no one else in the room!

Through the oil paper, Xia Fan could see the shadow of the bed frame reflected in the hazy candlelight. Meanwhile, the walls, windows, and other things a little further away completely disappeared behind the paper, as if it was infinite space. At the top of the contour line of the bed frame, the black shadow twisted and moved slowly. Everything was like a rough shadow play, and the shadow was its stage.

“I see it,” Xia Fan whispered.

“You haven’t really seen it yet. Void spirits can appear in any possible location before they’re perceived, and even the world they’re in is different from ours. The moment it knocked over the cup, its body wasn’t necessarily near the cup. In my master’s words, we cannot understand the movement of the void spirits because we’re bound by the rules of heaven and earth.”

Bound by the rules? Xia Fan couldn’t help but silently recite in his mind, “A spirit can cross beyond the rules?”

“The closer you get to chaos, the harder it is to measure it with common sense. Isn’t that how the manifestation of an anomaly is?” Li spread her hands and said, “And as soon as this void spirit is perceived, it will be restrained by heaven and earth and become an entity that can be touched. It’s time to see what it really looks like.”

“How?”

“Just walk over.”

Xia Fan nodded and slowly walked around the oilpaper banner and looked toward Ru Qiu’s bed frame—

There was a cat on it. An extremely normal Dragon Li[1]. It seemed to have noticed something and turned its head towards Xia Fan, opening its mouth and meowing softly.

“Meow— Ooh.”

[1] a cat species.