Empreinte de main en sang

Chapitre 60

Yang Zheng woke up, but did not open his eyes. He remained lying on his back, motionless.

He heard almost every word of the conversation between Ma Nan and Ba Qi. He didn't quite understand or care about the rights and wrongs of Ba Rong and the Ba people, but a sentence Ba Qi said later shocked him so much that he almost jumped up.

Ba Qi said, "His name is Yang Zheng. In a way, he's also your brother."

The man they mentioned at the beginning, Ba Rong, turned out to be his biological father. His mother told him that his father had died long ago. But he had known for a long time that his mother was lying to him; his father had simply abandoned them and never returned. Yang Zheng's memory of his father was very vague. Sometimes, he would vaguely sense a shadow surrounding him, but when he tried to touch it, it would immediately vanish without leaving a trace.

Yang Zheng never imagined that one day he would find him—the father who abandoned him and his mother.

Ba Qi and Ma Nan's conversation filled him with suspicion. He realized he had fallen into a conspiracy far more complex than a simple murder by a court official. The Ba tribe was a name he had never heard of. Now, he knew of Ba Rong—his father—who had betrayed his tribe, stolen treasures, and died on Peach Blossom Mountain. His dying wish was to return the stolen sacred artifacts to the Ba people. Therefore, Ba Rong must have mentioned the whereabouts of those artifacts in his suicide note.

But it is up to him to verify whether the whereabouts of the sacred object are true or not.

Could there really be some secret hidden within me?

Yang Zheng decided to keep his eyes closed and listen to what Ma Nan and Ba Qi would say next.

Perhaps because he had been unconscious for too long, he now felt weak all over, and those familiar images began to resurface in his mind—a warm ocean, deathly silence, and mysterious creatures lurking in the ocean, circling around it, ready to pounce.

Why were these images, which should only appear in dreams, appearing when he was awake? Yang Zheng vaguely felt that something was quietly happening—sweat was seeping from his forehead, and he could hear his heartbeat getting faster and faster.

He felt terrified; it was a fear he had never experienced before.

He wondered what terrible thing would happen next.

“I know you can’t think of using ancient punishments to kill people,” Ma Nan said, looking directly at Ba Qi. “You’re just protecting someone right now; he’s the real executioner.”

Bachi remained silent. His silence here was, in effect, tacit agreement.

Now, Ma Nan has finally determined who the judge is—Han Shan.

He found the Ba people, brought them to the city, and disguised himself as a executioner, using ancient tortures to kill them. This move had two purposes: firstly, it drew the police's attention to Zhang Shanren, who had brutally murdered the teenager; secondly, it allowed him to use the dead to help Ba Qi complete the ritual of summoning the soul.

Did he really do this to fulfill his adoptive father Ba Rong's wish?

"Alright, we haven't done the most important thing yet, but we've already said so much." Ba Qi's voice sounded slightly tired. "Let's verify now whether what Ba Rong said in his will is true or false."

Ma Nan suddenly tensed up. What Ba Qi wanted to verify was also what he was most interested in right now.

However, he still had some lingering worries, not about the authenticity of Ba Rong's will, but because he vaguely felt that something was amiss. He saw Ba Qi talking to the three Ba people standing around him. The three Ba people nodded respectfully, clearly indicating that they had reached some kind of understanding.

Ma Nan became even more nervous. The feeling was very strange, like walking on the edge of a cliff, but not knowing where the cliff was. He tried hard to think, his head ached, but he still had no clue.

At this moment, Baqi's wheelchair moved forward slightly. He said, "Now that you're awake, why don't you get up?"

Ma Nan was startled, only then noticing that Ba Qi's gaze was fixed on Yang Zheng, who was lying supine on the ground. His words were clearly directed at Yang Zheng. Yang Zheng, lying on the ground, was now genuinely angry.

"What you just said, is it all true?" Yang Zheng looked somewhat doubtful, and even a little fearful.

Baqi continued to stare at him without saying a word.

Just as Ma Nan was about to step forward and say something to Yang Zheng, suddenly, the three Ba people beside Ba Qi moved swiftly and surrounded Yang Zheng. As Yang Zheng looked around, somewhat bewildered, Ba Qi in his wheelchair quickly took something from his robes.

Strange sounds emanated from the mouths of three Ba people, like monks chanting in a temple. The sounds began deep and resonant, seemingly possessing some kind of rhythm, but soon the tones became uneven, sometimes high-pitched, sometimes low-pitched, sometimes sharp, sometimes melodious. They assaulted the eardrums of everyone present, making it seem as if the sounds were coming from the mouths of dozens of people.

Ma Nan instinctively covered his ears, while Zhang Shanren and the household registration police, who were tied up, also showed expressions of pain. Yang Zheng, surrounded by the Ba people, gradually calmed down, no longer tense or afraid, his eyes slowly becoming dull, as if the problems that had been troubling him had left him, or as if he had forgotten everything.

At this moment, Ba Qi, in his wheelchair, tightly clutched the object he had just taken from his bosom. Ma Nan looked closely and immediately recognized it by its shape as the legendary Fuxi Ram Horn Pillar.

Legend has it that Fuxi used it to measure shadows with a pole, but that's merely a conclusion drawn by archaeologists and scholars based on some archaeological discoveries. No one has actually seen the Fuxi Ram's Horn Pillar, and some even deny its existence. But now, it's actually in the hands of Ba Qi.

Baqi gently turned one of the "ram's horns" with one hand, and the ram's horn pillar began to rotate slowly, faster and faster, until finally the two "ram's horns" had merged into one, leaving only a ball of light and shadow.

It turns out that this Fuxi ram's horn pillar, like the prayer wheels in the hands of Tibetan monks, can rotate.

Yang Zheng's gaze was drawn to the spinning ram's horn pillar, and once he looked at it, he couldn't take his eyes off it.

The voices of the Ba people were like fluttering ribbons, tightly binding him. The ram's horn pillar that Ba Qi was spinning in his hand, however, was like a blinding light, piercing through his entire body in an instant.

Yang Zheng let out a groan, and then his whole body began to sway.

Ma Nan saw that Yang Zheng was covered in sweat and his face was flushed red. His cheek muscles were twitching incessantly, and his body was tense, as if he was struggling against something.

Ma Nan suddenly felt a surge of impulse; he wanted to rush forward and stop the Ba people from treating Yang Zheng this way.

However, this was something that Ba Rong had explained in his will. To find out the whereabouts of the Ba tribe's sacred object, the demon sleeping in Yang Zheng's heart must be awakened, because only that demon knows the whereabouts of the sacred object.

Ma Nan had also experienced a similar memory awakening. It happened in a remote border town, where a Ba ethnic shaman had gone into hiding, becoming the town's best winemaker. Ma Nan arrived just before his death, finally awakening his dormant memories. As for the method Long Yang used, Ma Nan guessed it was similar to what modern people call hypnosis.

But Ma Nan remembered that he only saw a beam of white light that time, and then he fainted. When he woke up, the channels of his memory had been fully opened, and he did not feel any pain.

The process by which Yang Zheng's memories were awakened was clearly different from his own. This might be because what Yang Zheng was to awaken was not his memories, but another self that was sleeping deep within his heart.

Suddenly, Ma Nan's heart skipped a beat; he had already figured out why something was wrong.

Ma Nan lives in a small border town with Chu Yan and the six children he has adopted, but he doesn't bring Yang Zheng—his only biological son—with him. This is obviously because he doesn't want the Ba people to find him, which shows that deep down, he still loves this child. Moreover, he had Long Yang suppress his evil self so that Yang Zheng could live like a normal person—because anyone with even a slight understanding of dual personality knows that its duality is often contradictory. Therefore, some people use terms like yin-yang personality, opposite personality, hidden personality, or manifest personality to describe dual personality. This kind of contradictory personality, to some extent, is similar to two different people residing in the same body. They are not connected to each other, but sometimes, one self must bear the consequences of certain actions of the other self.

This also reflects Barong's concern for the child.

Given this, how could he allow others to awaken the evil self within Yang Zheng? Moreover, he personally left a will, instructing the Ba people on the specific implementation method.

Did he not know that when his evil self awakens, Yang Zheng will be plunged into an abyss of suffering?

No father would push his beloved child into such a dangerous situation.

Unless there's some secret hidden here that no one else knows.

Instantly, Ma Nan's hands and feet turned ice-cold. He had already considered another possibility—six months ago, Batu fell into Ba Rong's trap because he witnessed the tragic deaths of Ba Rong's four adopted sons. Ma Nan obtained clues from them, following the trail step by step, and finally concluded that the Ba tribe's sacred object was inside the Peach Blossom Mountain maze. Batu could never have imagined that Ba Rong would sacrifice the children he had raised to lure him into a trap.