In the darkness, a firelight suddenly flared. It was Lan Sizhui, who had lit an illumination talisman.
The flames of the illumination talisman could not be extinguished by the sinister wind that carried evil, and he used this talisman to relight the candles anew while the rest of the youths went around to console the others. Under the light, Wei Wuxian took a nonchalant glance at his wrists. Another cut had healed.
It was then that he suddenly realized the number of cuts were wrong.
There had been two cuts on his left wrist and two on his right. One cut healed after Mo Ziyuan’s death, another cut healed after the death of Mo Ziyuan’s father, and then a third after the death of the servant A-Tong. Tallying that up, there should have been three healed cuts, leaving only the cut with the deepest wound and the deepest hatred.
But now there was nothing on his wrists. Not a single cut was left.
Wei Wuxian trusted that Madam Mo was most definitely among those whom Mo Xuanyu wished to seek revenge upon. The longest and the deepest gash was likely for her, yet it had surprisingly vanished.
Was it Mo Xuanyu who had suddenly let it go and abandoned his hatred? That was impossible. His soul had been sacrificed as the price for summoning Wei Wuxian. In order for the cut to heal, Madam Mo had to die. Unless…
He slowly moved his gaze from his wrist to Madam Mo, who had recently roused and was surrounded by the crowd. Her face was white as a sheet.
…Unless she was already dead.
Wei Wuxian was sure something had already possessed Madam Mo. If that thing was not a spirit, then what could it be?
Suddenly, A-Ding cried, “Hand…hand, A-Tong’s left arm!”
Lan Sizhui moved the illumination talisman over A-Tong’s corpse. Sure enough, his left arm had also vanished.
The left arm!
In that flash of a second, everything was clear. The creature causing mischief and the vanishing left arms formed a connection that clicked in Wei Wuxian’s mind. He suddenly snorted and burst out laughing.
Lan Jingyi huffed. “That dummy, how can he laugh at a time like this?!” But then he realized that, given the man was a dummy, what was the point of bothering with him in the first place?
However, Wei Wuxian grabbed Lan Jingyi’s sleeve and shook his head. “No, no!”
Lan Jingyi irritably tried to pull his sleeve back. “No what? Not a dummy? Stop playing around! No one’s got time for you.”
Wei Wuxian pointed at Father Mo’s and A-Tong’s corpses on the ground. “That’s not them.”
Lan Sizhui stopped Lan Jingyi, who was about to blow up. He asked, “You said ‘that’s not them.’ What do you mean?”
Wei Wuxian replied solemnly, “This isn’t Mo Ziyuan’s dad, and that’s not A-Tong either.”
With his face smeared in makeup, the more solemn he was, the more it felt like he really was mentally ill. However, under the haunting candlelight, his words were surprisingly hair-raising. Lan Sizhui was stunned for a moment, then questioned him in spite of himself.
“Why is that?”
Wei Wuxian said smugly, “Because of the hand! They’re not left-handed, they always beat me with their right hands. I know that much at least.”
Lan Jingyi lost his patience and spat, “What are you so smug for? Look at that pleased face!”
Lan Sizhui, however, had broken out in a cold sweat from the shock. Thinking back, A-Tong had strangled himself using his left hand, and when Madam Mo’s husband pushed his wife down, he had also used his left hand.
But during the day, when Mo Xuanyu had been causing a ruckus in the east hall, those two had been busy trying to chase him out using their habitual right hands. Surely they couldn’t both have turned into left-handers all of a sudden right before their deaths.
Although the cause was presently unknown, in order to investigate what was causing mischief, they had to start with those “left arms.” Having come to this conclusion, Lan Sizhui sent a bewildered look at Wei Wuxian. Despite himself, he thought, For him to suddenly say something like that, really…doesn’t seem like a coincidence.
Wei Wuxian only continued to laugh cheekily, knowing that the hint had been too conspicuous, but there was no other way.
Thankfully, Lan Sizhui didn’t dig into it, thinking, Either way, since this Mo-gongzi was willing to call attention to it for me, it most likely wasn’t done out of ill intent. He moved his gaze from Wei Wuxian, swept it over A-Ding, who had fainted from weeping, and landed his eyes on Madam Mo.
His eyes traveled down from her face to her hands. Her arms were hanging by her sides, mostly hidden in the sleeves, revealing only the tips of her fingers. The fingers of her right hand were snow white and slim—truly the hand of a woman who lived in privilege, without the hardship of labor.
However, the fingers of her left hand were longer and thicker than those of the right. The knuckles were curled, filled with strength.
How was that the hand of a woman? It was clearly the hand of a man!
“Hold her down!!” Lan Sizhui shouted.
The youths had already twisted Madam Mo’s arm back in a hold. With a “Forgive me,” Lan Sizhui pulled out a talisman. He was ready to slap it down when Madam Mo’s left arm twisted at an impossible angle, aiming for his throat.
The only way for a living human to twist their arm that way would be if their bones were broken. The hand’s movement was fast, and it would have seized his neck had it not been for Lan Jingyi tackling Lan Sizhui with a loud “gah!” and blocking the attack for him.
There was a flash of firelight. That hand had only just grabbed Lan Jingyi’s shoulder when green flames flared to life at the same spot. It instantly loosened its grip. Having escaped death, Lan Sizhui was just about to thank Lan Jingyi for coming to his rescue when he saw that half of Lan Jingyi’s uniform had been burned to ashes, making him look incredibly unkempt.
Flustered and enraged, Lan Jingyi stripped off the unburnt half of his uniform as he looked back and yelled, “Why did you kick me?! Stupid lunatic, did you want me killed?!”
Wei Wuxian scurried away, hugging his head. “It wasn’t me!”
It was most certainly he who had kicked Lan Jingyi. The outer robe of the Lan family’s uniform was tightly embroidered with spells and incantations inside its lining to provide protection. However, the effect would have been nullified after one use when encountering a formidable creature such as this. Under these dire circumstances, Wei Wuxian could only give Lan Jingyi a kick to make him use his body to shield Lan Sizhui’s neck.
Lan Jingyi was going to yell some more, but Madam Mo collapsed to the ground. The flesh and blood of her face had been drained so utterly that only a layer of skin pressed against her skull remained. The man’s arm that did not belong to her fell off of her left shoulder, yet its fingers could still move as it willed. It was as if it were stretching, the pulsing of its veins clearly visible.
That thing was the evil that had been summoned by the spirit-attraction flag.
Dismemberment was a standard violent death. It was a little more dignified than the way Wei Wuxian had died, though not by much. Unlike being crushed to ashes, the limbs of a dismembered corpse retained a part of the grudges of the deceased. One would yearn to return to its body, yearn to die a complete corpse. Thus, it would also attempt to seek out the other parts of its body. Once found, the corpse would then perhaps rest in peace and satisfaction, or perhaps wreak greater havoc. If the rest of its original body wasn’t found, however, a limb could only go for the second-best option.
What was the second-best option? Seek out the bodies of living humans and make do, just as this left arm had demonstrated: devour the left arm of the living, take its place, and suck out the living human’s spirit, blood, and flesh. Then abandon the body to continue searching for the next host. This would continue until all parts of its original corpse were found.
Once this arm attached itself to a body, it was instant death for the host, though prior to their blood and flesh being completely eaten, the human could still move normally under the arm’s control, as if still alive. After the arm had been summoned, the first vessel it found was Mo Ziyuan. The second vessel was Mo Ziyuan’s father. When Madam Mo had told her husband to get lost, he’d acted out of character and pushed her. At first, Wei Wuxian had thought it was because the man was heartbroken because of his son’s death and that he had also had enough of his wife’s unreasonable behavior. In retrospect, that had not been the demeanor of a father who had just lost his son. That had not been the stupor of despair—it had been stillness. The stillness of the dead.
The third vessel was A-Tong, and the fourth was Madam Mo. The left arm took advantage of the chaos when the lights went out earlier to migrate to her body. And when Madam Mo was killed, the last cut on Wei Wuxian’s wrist had also vanished with her demise.