Chapter 169
The car followed the navigation system, left the provincial highway, and turned onto a county road soaked with fine, steady rain. At times, it even had to drive over dirt roads full of potholes and ruts.
The clouds hung low, pressing down over the layered mountain ridges in the distance. Along the dirt road, tree branches stretched out wildly, scraping against the car with a constant shashasha sound.
Mu Dai’s master lived at the foot of the Ailao Mountains, but the mountain range itself stretched for a very long distance—about 500 kilometers, according to legend.
Cao Yanhua asked Mu Dai what the place where the “Grandmaster” lived was like.
It was hard to describe. It was a quiet, peaceful little town. For years, waves of tourist development had swept across Yunnan. Any place that became even slightly famous got dug up and overdeveloped. Yet this town had been miraculously overlooked.
The town was called Youwu.
It was said that it didn’t use to have that name. Because the fog was so thick year-round, early in the morning, when the men of the household got up and the women were still lying in bed, they would ask, “Husband, is there fog today?”
Over time, the town simply came to be called Youwu Town—“Foggy Town.”
“Foggy? How foggy could it really be?” Cao Yanhua couldn’t imagine it.
Mu Dai explained: “Just… foggy. When you wake up early, the whole town is wrapped in mist. You can’t even see the person standing right next to you—like the town’s been wrapped into a dumpling with fog, and the houses and people are the filling inside.”
Only when the sun climbed high into the sky would the fog finally disperse.
As she was speaking, the car suddenly stopped.
Cao Yanhua, unprepared, slammed his head into the back of the front seat, clutching his head and grimacing in pain. Mu Dai, though wearing her seatbelt, still felt her chest ache from the sudden jolt.
Looking ahead, they saw a deserted concrete road—so empty it felt lonely. No pedestrians, no cars trying to cut in. Why had Luo Ren stopped so abruptly?
Mu Dai looked at Luo Ren in confusion. He was sitting in the driver’s seat, staring at something higher up in front of them.
Following his gaze, they saw a towering roadside billboard. The ad promoted tourism in Yunnan—a map of China, with Yunnan highlighted in a red square. Beside it was a slogan:
“A Fairyland on Earth—Colorful Yunnan.”
What was wrong with that?
Luo Ren’s knuckles turned white around the steering wheel. “I just thought of something.”
The county town was very small. Because of the rain, there were barely any people on the streets. Luo Ren drove in loops around the town before finally stopping in front of an Xinhua Bookstore.
He didn’t bother explaining anything and walked quickly into the store through the rain. After waiting a moment, Mu Dai couldn’t hold back her curiosity and motioned for Cao Yanhua to go in with her.
The bookstore was empty, with Luo Ren as the only customer. He bought a map of China and spread it out directly on the floor of the shop. Half-kneeling, he stared at it intently, one hand pointing at the paper, the other gripping a marker. Another marker of a different color lay beside him. The clerk seemed completely uninterested, calmly knitting at the counter.
Mu Dai and Cao Yanhua squatted down on either side of him.
Luo Ren pulled the cap off the marker. After a brief pause, he drew a heavy circle over a spot in Ningxia.
Mu Dai saw it and whispered, “Xiaoshang River.”
The second circle was drawn in Guangxi, near Beihai. Cao Yanhua recognized it immediately. “Isn’t that my brother San-san’s hometown? Wuzhu?”
Luo Ren didn’t respond, but his breathing grew faster. The third circle landed on the border of Guizhou, near Sizhai.
The tip of the pen kept moving upward. Another spot was marked near the border of Hunan, Guizhou, and Chongqing—Nantian. Then another circle at the border of Sichuan, Chongqing, and Shaanxi. This one was all too familiar: Cao Family Village.
Five heavy black circles now sat on the map, like five eyes staring straight ahead.
Luo Ren drew broken lines, connecting Wuzhu, Sizhai, Nantian, and Cao Family Village.
On the fresh map, a jagged line with four nodes appeared, plus the distant circle at Xiaoshang River.
He looked up at Mu Dai. “Do you see it yet?”
Not yet. Mu Dai shook her head hesitantly.
Luo Ren smiled faintly. Picking up the pen again, he started from Xiaoshang River, drew a horizontal fold toward Inner Mongolia, then a slanted line downward, bent sharply again near Sanmenxia, and connected it straight to Cao Family Village.
That shape…
A spark flashed through Mu Dai’s mind.
On the other side, Cao Yanhua tilted his head and muttered, “Looks like a ladle.”
Luo Ren said, “Exactly. The Big Dipper. We were fools, stuck in our own blind spots. We talked so many times about the Big Dipper and the Bagua Stargazing Platform, but we never realized that the places where we subdued the murderous slips match the positions of the Big Dipper stars almost perfectly.”
He had Cao Yanhua pull up a Big Dipper star map on his phone, then adjusted the angle and laid it over the paper map.
At first glance, the two Big Dipper shapes matched—the direction, the tilt, everything. Only the phone version was small, and the map version was huge, as if it carved up the heart of the mainland.
Each star had a name, and each corresponded to a location on the map:
- Wuzhu matched Yaoguang
- Sizhai matched Kaiyang
- Nantian matched Yuheng
- Cao Family Village matched Tianquan
- Xiaoshang River matched Tianshu
Tianxuan and Tianji had been added by Luo Ren, but Mu Dai felt the placements made sense. Tianji fell around the Sanmenxia area, and Sanmenxia was near Hangu Pass—an undisputedly crucial location in the legends of the murderous slips.
This was a gigantic Big Dipper, laid out across mountains, rivers, and land.
Luo Ren switched to a different colored marker and drew a five-pointed star in the Zhejiang region.
“On a bridge in an ancient town in Zhejiang, a pattern appeared that was identical to the huge underwater mural in Wuzhu Village. We can basically confirm that it belongs to the same murderous slip—the one whose inscription was ‘Water.’”
Cao Yanhua nodded. He remembered that Luo Ren had even speculated that slip might have traveled thousands of miles, migrating from Zhejiang to Wuzhu.
Luo Ren pointed at the sketched Big Dipper, lowering his voice. “What if this Big Dipper, using its center as the pivot, were rotated ninety degrees counterclockwise?”
After the counterclockwise rotation, the star position that had originally been Yaoguang at Wuzhu Village now landed squarely…
…inside Zhejiang Province.
Mu Dai’s heart started pounding.
At first, they had simply followed clues, rushing here and there in a haphazard way to hunt down the murderous slips, secretly complaining that the relics were too scattered, forcing them to travel endlessly with no chance to deal with everything in one sweep.
Later, the fortune-teller warned them that they couldn’t keep chasing blindly like that. They had to understand the cause-and-effect and the hidden patterns.
The Bagua Stargazing Platform observed the murderous slips. The Big Dipper that appeared on the surface of the water had actually been a secret pointer to the locations of the seven slips.
…
Cao Yanhua was already searching for information about the Big Dipper online.
“Brother Luo, it says here that the Big Dipper changes position with the seasons. There’s even a rhyme: when the handle points east, the world is spring; when it points south, the world is summer; when it points west, the world is autumn; when it points north, the world is winter.”
“Right now, the handle is pointing near Wuzhu Village. Isn’t that exactly ‘handle pointing south’? And when it pointed to that ancient town in Zhejiang, wasn’t it ‘pointing east’?”
“Brother Luo, Taoist texts say that a person’s fate is governed by seven star lords. Midnight corresponds to Tianshu, the late-night hours to Tianxuan, the tiger hour to Tianji, the rabbit hour to Tianquan… Everyone, based on their birth time, can find their ruling star…”
What did it mean? It was abstruse and confusing. Luo Ren felt his head throbbing, and Mu Dai barely listened to Cao Yanhua’s recitation at all. She stared at the map, focusing on the positions of Tianxuan and Tianji, and asked quietly:
“Luo Ren… the last two murderous slips should be here, shouldn’t they?”
Very likely. But a single circle on a map could mean an unimaginably vast area in real life.
They could only hope that the next clue from Phoenix Luan Buckle would arrive soon.
Sam Williams On TYMIMA Chapter 152