Chapter Seventy-Six: Past and Present Lives, The Floating Stone of Three Lifetimes

I waited in this lavishly absurd hospital room for about ten minutes before I heard the sound of machines being moved outside. When the door opened and the machines were wheeled in, I saw the director approaching me. He came to my side and said, “By the way, I haven’t asked your name yet. How should I address you?”

I wasn’t the kind of person to put on airs, especially since this wasn’t my home. They were only treating me so well because of Er Peng; if it weren’t for him, the director wouldn’t bother with me at all. So I replied amiably, “Just call me Xiaodong,” and then glanced at the crew moving the machines.

The director rubbed his hands over his chest, smiling as he spoke, “Take a look—these are the hospital’s top-of-the-line devices, and here is a team of ten medical doctors, each with over twenty years of experience, all graduates from Germany. You could call this an internationally elite team. We also have the most advanced diagnostic equipment from medical powerhouses like the United States. With this team and this technology, you can rest assured about your examination.”

Damn, I only coughed up a bit of blood—was it really necessary to mobilize such a force? In all my life, I had barely seen a doctor with a doctorate, and now ten of them—German-trained, no less—were standing before me, all to examine me.

I forced a bitter smile and said to the director, “Uncle, it’s really not a big deal. Why such a big fuss?”

The director was clearly taken aback by my question, no doubt thinking, “Is this kid crazy? To have such a professional team treating him, and he says something like that?”

But the director’s quick thinking was impressive. After all, to rise to his position, he had to be sharp-minded. He looked at me, still smiling, and said, “You’re the young master’s friend and a guest of the Ran family. Besides, the young master has always been generous and can’t bear to see his friends hurt. He arranged all this himself with a single phone call.” With that, he urged the doctors to speed up.

Doctors—real doctors! In any other hospital, these people would be star physicians, yet here they worked like ordinary university students and showed not a hint of complaint.

Once the equipment was installed, the director gestured for me to lie down for the examination. I didn’t know the names of these medical devices, but it was clear they were unlike anything I’d seen in the small clinics before. The faint blue scanning lights they emitted made me feel drowsy.

Sleep had been a stranger to me for a long time. Ever since becoming a demon corpse, I had never truly slept. But now, a powerful sleepiness washed over me, and my eyelids grew heavy and uncontrollable. It felt as though this blue light had a hypnotic effect. I couldn’t help but marvel at the progress of society and technology.

Finally, I couldn’t resist any longer. My eyelids fell, and I plunged into endless darkness. I knew I had fallen asleep, for as a demon corpse, I could control my thoughts in dreams. This darkness existed only within my mind.

At that moment, I was completely unaware of anything happening outside; I only knew I was surrounded by darkness—darkness even the eyes of a demon corpse could not penetrate.

As I wondered about my situation, a blood-red square appeared before me. From a distance, it looked like a door, reminiscent of the portals through time and space described in novels. In my dream, I found myself deeply drawn to that crimson door and walked toward it without thinking.

The darkness surrounding me remained unbroken, save for the dazzling blood-red glow emitted by the door ahead. The distance between me and the door was not far, and in no time I was standing before it. Staring at the door, which seemed to drip with fresh blood, I paused, a thought flashing through my mind: “Could this be the passage to some kind of hell? The door looks so strange—who knows what horrors lie within?”

But curiosity killed the cat. In the battle between curiosity and reason, curiosity won out. I stepped through the red door.

What followed was not the wailing of ghosts in hell, but a heavy sensation in my head. I was falling, and my surroundings twisted and warped like the tunnels of time and space, with images playing out like scenes in a film.

In the swirling time-sea of the tunnel, I watched myself grow younger—from twenty years old, to nineteen, to eleven, all the way down to one.

Until at last, I returned to my mother’s womb and disappeared from this world.

What was all this? Why did this place hold a record of my life from beginning to end? Gazing into this time-sea, I saw the hardships of my twenty years, saw my parents weep alone in my childhood because of my lack of effort, saw my father raise his whip and lash me through gritted teeth—I knew he did not want to do it.

I remembered it clearly: I was eight years old, lazy in my studies and always skipping class. We were a poor family to begin with; every parent hopes their child will not follow in their own footsteps as a farmer, will not inherit poverty as if it were a legacy. How heart-wrenching the love of parents is.

I shook my head forcefully, trying not to recall any more, as though those memories were knives stabbing at my heart.

Now I was about to graduate. In another year, I could give my parents a good life, spare them the toil and exhaustion they had endured for my education. Since I’d thought of it, I had to do it—I believed I would succeed.

At that moment, I still felt myself falling, but the scenes in the time-sea no longer belonged to this world. I understood: this was the underworld. Before the Stone of Three Lives, a small ghost with disheveled hair was approaching the stone, ready to be reincarnated.

Before dying, I seemed to hear him reciting a verse:

“The road of life and death stretches far and long,
A lone shadow lingers, soul fading strong,
Past lives drift before the Stone of Three Lives,
Today again I cross the Bridge of No Return.”

What a fine poem! Could it be that this ghost was my previous incarnation? I never imagined my former self was a poet. Though he seemed unknown, his ability to compose verse marked him as a man of letters.

The time-sea flowed on, replaying my past lives. I soon saw my previous existence in the mortal world. To my surprise, I had been murdered. His name was Gu Man, a fifth-rank official in the Qing dynasty. Because he overturned a wrongful death case for a common woman, he offended powerful men at court and was killed as a result. I never imagined I was once an incorruptible official, pure of heart.

Yet in the end, even he could not escape the schemes of treacherous ministers.

……