Free Web NovelChapter 110: Chapter 28: The Mystery of Longshu Temple
They reached Wang Wenbo by phone. After escaping Jin Hai Mansion, he’d been sent to the hospital, patched up, and had some images taken. All the nearby hospitals were packed, and his injuries weren’t severe enough for them to keep him.
Jiang Yang called a ride for him directly. Half an hour later, a taxi pulled up at the alley entrance. With his head wrapped in gauze and a dazed expression, Wang Wenbo limped into the apartment building.
Even after seeing the Green Text Mission on the wall, Wang Wenbo showed little reaction. It was hard to tell if he was scared stiff or just completely numb.
There were still several hours until nightfall, so Gao Tian decided to go back to his room and sleep for two hours to recharge.
After all, he had been through several major battles that day, and he was reaching his mental and physical limits.
...
...
In the darkness, the phone alarm he had set earlier began to beep.
Gao Tian slowly opened his eyes from under the covers. He was in his room in the apartment, and the bedroom was pitch-black.
After a two-hour nap, his mental fatigue had eased considerably. It was time to start preparing for tonight’s trip to Longshu Temple.
The gray ticket stub had also appeared on his nightstand at some point.
As Gao Tian lay alone in the dark, quietly mulling over the literal clues of this Green Text Mission, he caught a glimpse of something in his peripheral vision. At the foot of his bed, a woman with disheveled hair was slowly rising.
?
’What the hell is going on?’
’That tall frame... it can’t be the Rainy Woman, can it?’
Just as every muscle in Gao Tian’s body tensed, the female ghost sitting up at the foot of the bed slowly began to speak.
"Gao Tian."
"I’m going on this Green Text Mission, too."
Gao Tian snatched his pillow and threw it right in the "female ghost’s" face.
It was Lan Chu’s voice.
’It’s that madwoman. I don’t know if I forgot to lock my door when I went to sleep, or if she used some special method to sneak in, but she’d been squatting at the foot of my bed this whole time, just waiting for me to wake up.’
Gao Tian’s heart was pounding. He couldn’t help but roar in anger.
"If you want to go, go talk to Jiang Yang downstairs! What are you doing in my room?"
"Are you nuts?!"
Lan Chu sounded aggrieved.
"I already talked to Jiang Yang. He said it was fine, as long as I don’t cause trouble on the way."
"He told me to come up and let you know. He also said you might be sleeping, and if you were, I should wait for you to wake up."
"So I was being very polite, waiting in this room for you to wake up. How is this my fault now?"
Gao Tian’s heavy panting and the cold sweat beading on his forehead slowly subsided.
’Forget it. Lan Chu has always been a little crazy. There’s no point in trying to reason with her.’
Forced to swallow his grievance, Gao Tian could only throw on some clothes and head straight downstairs.
...
The three people assigned to the mission—Jiang Yang, Wang Wenbo, and Gao Tian—were all there, along with the volunteer, Lan Chu. All four of them were present.
This trip to Longshu Temple was Yu Sheng’s seventh mission and Jiang Yang’s sixth. Something was definitely very wrong with it.
They had to be thoroughly prepared.
Jiang Yang was the first to speak. He had put on a pair of glasses. While Gao Tian was resting, he and Wang Wenbo had looked up a lot of information about Longshu Temple.
The real-world Longshu Temple, of course.
"The temple was founded about 1,400 years ago, during the early Tang Dynasty. Back then, it was just a small temple without much influence. Over generations, monks collected alms and made repairs, gradually expanding it to a medium-sized complex covering over a thousand square meters. At its peak, it was quite famous locally. It was said to be especially effective for those wishing for children, attracting pilgrims and newcomers from far and wide to come and worship."
"It was destroyed and rebuilt several times due to wars. During that time, three eminent monks appeared, and after their passing, they left behind Relics, which shocked the local county government. The data is too lengthy and I didn’t find any valuable information, so I’ll skip that for now."
"About a thousand years ago, during the Northern Song Dynasty, local folklore annals record that a crimson meteor streaked across the sky over Longshu Temple. Strangely, when pilgrims arrived the next day, they found the main gate locked tight. After forcing it open, they discovered that every monk and the abbot inside had vanished overnight."
"Over the next thousand years of ups and downs, Longshu Temple was demolished and rebuilt many times, with new groups of monks moving in. Today, the ’Longshu Temple’ building has no connection to the one from the early Tang Dynasty. It’s a contemporary structure with no particular fame and is now completely abandoned."
...
It didn’t sound like there was any useful information or clues for their escape.
Gao Tian pressed further.
"Is there anything else in the records about that crimson meteor from a thousand years ago?"
Jiang Yang shook his head.
"These local, unofficial histories are often missing a lot of details. I couldn’t find any corresponding records elsewhere."
"We can basically assume it’s just a folk rumor that got distorted over time. It was probably a tall tale spread to add a bit of legendary flair to Longshu Temple."
"The temple was repeatedly destroyed by war, and monks came and went. Even if all the monks ’disappeared,’ it’s most likely they were just robbed, killed, and buried by passing bandits."
Wang Wenbo, who had been focused on typing on his keyboard, looked up.
"I hacked into the official website of the relevant authorities and looked up the list of all registered monks at Longshu Temple for the last thirty years, right up until the temple was abandoned."
"I couldn’t find the name Yu Sheng anywhere."
"This Yu Sheng probably never was a monk at Longshu Temple. He’s a fake monk."
Wang Wenbo had only met Yu Sheng a few times and naturally had no trust in their administrator.
Jiang Yang:
"Not necessarily."
"Yu Sheng might just be his Dharma name, taken after he renounced the secular world. No one knows his real name."
Lan Chu let out a strange laugh.
"Does any of you know Yu Sheng’s real name?"
Her words left Jiang Yang speechless.
He didn’t know.
Xia Ta didn’t know.
No one in the entire apartment knew.
They had worked with Yu Sheng for so many years, but the man was like a black hole; any information near him would be completely devoured, leaving nothing for others to pry into.
The lead they had hoped to pursue—the connection between Yu Sheng and Longshu Temple—was temporarily a dead end.
Jiang Yang mused.
"The key to the mission probably lies in our three different objectives."
"Relatively speaking, Gao Tian’s task is the easiest: retrieve a Transparent Coffin."
"Gao Tian, what did Yu Sheng say to you before he left? Did he mention anything about a Transparent Coffin being at Longshu Temple?"
Gao Tian had a headache just thinking about it.
"Nothing at all."
"He gave me the gray card and told me I would face a fatal trial in the future."
"He also said that if he didn’t come back, everything in his room was mine."
"He didn’t say a single word about anything in Longshu Temple, or the Transparent Coffin."
’The "fatal trial" Yu Sheng mentioned, the one between the upstairs exploration and the four missions, must have been the Ghost Infant and the Ghost Cave coming for me at Jin Hai Mansion.’
’Based on my own strength, I should have been dead for sure. It was just my insane ghost luck that suppressed the star of death hanging over my head.’
Lan Chu toyed with the dog collar in her hand.
"How long has Yu Sheng been gone? Why don’t we open up his room?"
Gao Tian:
"True. He said we could open it if he wasn’t back in a week. He already told me the password."
"If you all want to, we can go open it right now."
Jiang Yang:
"Don’t be so hasty. The four of us will go up together in a bit and open Yu Sheng’s room."
"There’s one more strange thing about this Green Text Mission that I can’t wrap my head around."
"My mission is to ensure Yu Sheng’s survival and solve the mystery of Longshu Temple. That part is pretty standard, par for the course for a Green Text Mission."
"Wang Wenbo’s objective is the strangest: to relieve the suffering of the monks of Longshu Temple?"
"Is the Green Text Mission implying that there are other living people besides Yu Sheng at the haunted Longshu Temple?"
"Besides, among all of us, Wang Wenbo is probably the weakest, right? Why was he assigned what currently looks like the most difficult task?"
"Is Old Wang being targeted by the apartment, or does this mission require some kind of specialized knowledge, knowledge and skills that only Old Wang possesses?"
As soon as he said it, even Jiang Yang himself couldn’t quite take it seriously.
Wang Wenbo is a programmer from a major tech company. What he’s best at is... coding.
Surely the haunted Longshu Temple doesn’t need a programmer to help them rewrite some code.
That would be too absurd.
Gao Tian was the first to correct Jiang Yang on his first point.
"Not necessarily. The monks of Longshu Temple don’t have to be living people."
"Ghosts have feelings, too. They can even feel constant pain. For them, remaining in this world is like living in purgatory."
It was like in the Memory Ghost incident, when Gao Tian had successfully climbed down the balcony, leaving his "parents and sister" behind on the fourth floor.
Back then, his "sister" had said she would endure pain unimaginable to the living.
Ling Feifei had also said that, through her bone flute, she could personally experience the emotions radiating from ghosts: despair, pain, helplessness, emptiness...
"The monks of Longshu Temple may have been turned into ghosts against their will, forever trapped in the temple."
"They can’t be killed, and they can’t even commit suicide. Something Wang Wenbo has might really be the key to helping them find release."
The Green Text Mission probably wouldn’t set an unsolvable stage. Otherwise, making a newcomer like Wang Wenbo, who had only been on one or two missions, handle the most difficult part of Longshu Temple would be a death sentence.
Hearing his name mentioned, Wang Wenbo, who was still typing on his keyboard, looked up from behind his laptop at Gao Tian.
"Gao Tian, that forum post you had Xia Ta ask me to unlock? I’ve unlocked it."
"Should I tell you about it now, or after we get back from the mission?"
So much time had passed that, for a moment, Gao Tian couldn’t even remember what post he was talking about.
’Oh, right. It was the post Xu Yuan made online back when he was still alive and running missions in the apartment.’
The title of the post was "On the Essential Nature of Ghosts, Discovered During My Time in the Apartment."
The post itself was locked, and Gao Tian had been asking Xia Ta to find someone to unlock it. But then a series of other things happened, and it was never dealt with.
At the moment, this post had nothing to do with the Longshu Temple mission—
Gao Tian looked at Wang Wenbo.
"Thanks. But please, tell me now."
"Four of us are getting on the bus to Longshu Temple. I don’t know how many will be coming back."
"If you don’t say it now, I might never get the chance to hear it, and you might never get the chance to say it."
