荒墟牧神 - 第63章 三字合體之謎 - 錦書坊

A thin thread of radiance came flying through the air and hid itself among the village headman's hairs. Showing nothing on his face, he strode down out of the sky and returned to Yincan Village. A hundred li away downriver, the Yongjiang turned a bend, rounded a mountain and threaded through a gorge; there the ice flood met its obstruction, piled higher and higher, and at last choked the channel. "Sang'e, stop!" The hundred-legged white-boned centipede woman, bearing Shen Mu, was coursing through the air in sinuous, rearing leaps like a dragon winding forward, yet swift beyond telling; at the words she settled onto a peak on the gorge's left bank and said with a cold laugh, "Brat, why should I listen to you?" Shen Mu sprang from her back and said doubtfully, "I freed you from your bonds. To repay me, you will naturally help me break open the ice dam." Sang'e's body swayed, and she became Qixia'er once more, chains dragging from her wrists and ankles. She hopped and skipped around Shen Mu, circling him several times with her iron chains clanking, then thrust her head round from behind him to face him and giggled, "You help me, and I have to repay you? Have you forgotten? Last time you did me such harm — that old bald donkey nearly refined me to death! And you stole the treasures I had hidden away all these years. I ought to eat you first!" "Only you don't dare," Shen Mu said with a smile. Sang'e's neck suddenly shot out to a length of several zhang; she wound it around Shen Mu several turns until the two were almost face to face, and sneered, "I don't dare? The old bald donkey isn't here to help you now. Why wouldn't I dare?" "I live in Yincan Village. My family has nine grown-ups, and any one of them could snuff you out as easily as blinking." Shen Mu smiled. "No matter how you change your shape, no matter how far you flee, they will find you easily, kill you easily, and make you regret easily that you were ever born into this world." Sang'e shuddered several times, drew her neck back in, and became once more a cute girl of snow and ice, shaking the golden rings and chains on her hands as she hopped about. "I'm afraid of your family's grown-ups — but that doesn't mean I have to help you. The old bald donkey was right: you let me out, so I'll go do evil, go eat people, go bring calamity down on the living! Why should I help you save anyone? I'm off—" She turned to go, her chains clattering. Shen Mu said suddenly, "Sang'e, the Buddhists say that to lay down the butcher's knife is to become a Buddha on the spot. That saying is far too lax — it draws no line between good and evil, and is not worth believing. But if you help me level this barrier lake and save the countless living things downstream, that will be your merit — merit far greater than that bronze Buddha's." Sang'e halted, twisted her head round upon her back, and listened, curious. Shen Mu went on, "Save people with me, and your merit will stand higher than the bronze Buddha who suppressed you — a hundred times higher! Next time you meet that bronze Buddha, will he still have the face to suppress you?" Sang'e tilted her head, thought it over, then burst out laughing. "All right, you have a point. I'll help you. Heh — that old bald donkey, all false benevolence and sham righteousness, made my eating people his excuse and suppressed me in the name of justice, saying he would let these rolling waters wash away my sins. I told him: when I eat people I make no distinction between good and evil; I am simply hungry and need a meal, just as you humans eat rice, eat chicken, eat vegetables — when you're hungry, you eat." She glanced at the choked channel below and said, "I have no feelings for the people I eat, so I treat them as food; you have no feelings for vegetables and rice, so you eat vegetables and rice. The thieving bald one called it twisted heresy, and suppressed me. Well done him — so I ate people inside his own temple, and made sure he had no merit at all! But if m