“The wood figures I gave you.” Jianmen pointed at the dust that spilled from Caroline and Jason’s hands onto the table: “Consider them your spare lives or emergency med packs just like those in video games. They activate once you are faced with fatal attacks. As long as the strengths of the attack do not exceed a certain limit, they will protect you from them.”
“Wait… did you know?” Caroline narrowed her eyes and pointed at her broken wooden card.
“I sort of knew.” Jianmen sighed: “Remember the divinations I did for you? The omens were alarming, that’s why I gave you these to help you protect yourselves. And of course, today’s the 99th day of your first trace of Xuanli.”
“Wait… what? What’s so special about the 99th day?” Jason asked.
“What happened to you today was another round of tribulations. ” Jianmen refilled Caroline and Jason’s tea: “Now, before you ask - yeah I know, you just had your first round of tribulations and in theory you shouldn’t have another round this soon. But here’s the catch - remember what I told you about your first round of tribulations, about them being gifts?”
“Yes. And you never explained that to us.” Caroline finished another cup of her tea.
“I literally couldn’t tell you anything in detail.” Jianmen said: “And I still can’t. Not that I don’t want to - it’s actually a passion of mine and something I am quite good at. But you should know, if I told you it will only hurt you.”
“What? Because we can’t handle the truth?” Jason rubbed his eyes in frustration: “But Boss, that might be the case one haunted hospital and a haunted hotel ago, now we are absolutely ready? We deserve to know what we signed up for! And I still have 4 friends in the haunted hospital that need your help!”
“Okay.” Jianmen: “Tell me your friends’ names. I’ll see if they need my help now.”
“Ricky - Richard Paulson. The others … I don’t know. ”
“Just write it here. Do you know his birthday?” Jianmen passed Jason a piece of paper and a pen.
“Yeah.” Jason wrote Ricky’s name and birthday on the paper.
Jianmen took the piece of paper, rolled it up and buried it in the incense burner below the ashes. The moment he did that, Jason sensed some kind of arcane connection was made between him and Ricky. And in a more mysterious way, something from this connection was projected onto the incense burner. After one or two seconds, he took the piece of paper out from under the ashes and opened the paper up, revealing the mildly burnt edges and tanned parts.
“Yeah, your friend will be fine. Looks like someone saved him.” Jianmen tossed the piece of paper back to Jason: “You can call them in a few minutes - shouldn’t be more than 20.”
“You gotta teach us that.” Caroline took the paper and looked at it, trying to find any hint of what Jianmen just said: “How’d you know all that from this piece of paper.”
“When you reach the fifth layer, I’ll teach you.” Jianmen refilled both his students’ tea again while looking at Jason: “This trick just taps into the flow of Karma on the most shallow layer, and its accuracy depends largely on how much you care about the answer. You’ll learn.”
“Okay. But I really want to make sure they’re safe...”
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“They ARE safe!” Jianmen stood up and gently patted on Jason’s shoulder: “So relax! Now, to the basement.”
“Are you gonna tell us what the tribulations and the ‘gift’ was?”
“I won’t just tell you. I’ll show you.”
Three of them went into the basement, Jianmen snapped his fingers when he closed the door. Scrolls that were hanging on the walls rolled open, revealing sets of new drawings Caroline and Jason never saw before.
And the drawings and symbols on the scrolls started shining in a gentle light. The light grew stronger by the second, but for some reason it was never to a blinding level, even when the entire basement was drowning in light.
When the light started fading away, Jason and Caroline noticed that they were no longer in the basement, instead they found themselves in the middle of plain with burning grass, bushes and trees around them, with red hot lava rivers and lava lakes scattered across the land, and with mountains and volcanoes covered by dark clouds afar. Winds were howling, ashes and hail was falling from the sky, and lightnings were striking the trees and mountain tops.
The air was hot, dry and was filled with the smell of the burning grass, trees and rotten eggs. Every breath Caroline and Jason took, they felt like their nostrils and lungs were burning.
Somewhere far away in front of them, with the occasional blue light coming from behind the clouds due to the lightning, they can see a giant shadow of some kind of winged animal creature, with horns on its head and huge spikes on the side of its body and a long centipede-shaped tail. The shadow seemed to be floating towards their location.
Seemingly aware of the gaze from Caroline and Jason, the creature let out a low roar. Even though the roar was not loud, upon hearing it, both Caroline and Jason felt like they were simultaneously struck by lightning, burned from fires of extreme temperature from the outside and frozen from extreme cold on the inside. And when they tried to get away from the huge shadow, they found that they were not able to move a muscle.
A strange warm and comforting feeling came from behind, easing the horrible pain they felt and breaking them off from their bind. They turned around, and saw around a dozen people advancing on their position, either in the air or on the ground.
The first one they noticed from the group was a woman in plain white traditional Chinese silk clothes with a string musical instrument in her hands, and with silk ribbons from her clothes gently floating behind her like some kind of aura.
Each of the individuals that this group consisted of was extremely distinct: there was one man with four hands sitting on a flying bamboo mat, a huge fluffy cat with three tails and two heads, and a knight in shiny silver armour wielding a huge battle axe.
Different as these people were, Caroline still sensed something similar from them - they could not tell why and what it was, but they were very certain it was not some kind of delusion.
This group of people raced past Caroline and Jason, leaving a trail of no longer burning grass and trees, and fresh air. And when Caroline and Jason paid attention to the group when observing from behind, they saw faint shadows of threads and chains of different color from the group that seemed to connect them to the sky.
The group rose to the air as they moved towards the direction of the shadow in the sky behind the clouds. And shortly after they clashed with the creature in the sky, another wave of bright light emerged from around Caroline and Jason.
“How are you feeling?” Jianmen gently asked Caroline and Jason as they recovered from the visions: “You felt anything special?”
“I… I don’t know what to make of it.” Jason coughed and asked: “Is it meant to tell me that we’re... we’re some sort of chosen ones?”