Daomu Biji: A Thousand Faces

There wasn’t much information about Long Immortal in the later part of the chronicle. It seemed that from the moment Long Immortal couldn’t save others, no one intended to write about him. Once a human’s attention had wandered, it was difficult to recover. 

Ah Tou closed the chronicle and sighed. Nothing was recorded in the later part of the chronicle, and they still didn’t know what the huge dark figure just now was. But they did learn that it had all started in this village, and it was related to this man called Long Immortal.

"Where do you think this is going?” Liang Yanyan asked her. 

Ah Tou was stunned for a while, "What?"

She wasn’t old enough to spontaneously talk about life with another person, so she was a little surprised by such a question.

"About Long Immortal."

Ah Tou thought for a while. Will he continue to be a good man? A majority of people will turn bad after experiencing such things, or at least become an adult. Isn’t cultivating into a Buddha a practice meant for you to see through the world while still maintaining a gentle attitude? 

To become a bad person or an adult was going against what fairy tales taught us. But fairy tales were written by adults, so did they contain some kind of conspiracy or way to escape from such an outcome?

"I hope he was able to find a way to make peace with himself. No matter what it was, as long as he could do it, I’d be happy for him.” 

"Why? He could’ve killed a lot of people from that moment on, even if it was unintentional. He might have even turned evil and become a demon."

But didn’t that black shadow just save a person? What happened? What danger was Black Glasses referring to? If the shadow just now was Long Immortal’s ghost, then how did he save someone after losing his healing ability? What’s going on here?

"So all the good things he did before don’t count?” Ah Tou asked. "Why don’t people look at the problem as a whole? If this is the case, then is it true that I can be a bad person all my life and do one good thing when I’m dying and be forgiven by everyone?"

Ah Tou was surprised that she was saying such things. She hadn’t really thought much about it but these words just came out of her mouth.

**

"And so, the butcher who lays down his knife becomes a Buddha. Three-dimensional creatures don’t pay attention to the past. They only value the future. The future benefits them more, and the past has just passed. Four-dimensional creatures don't do that, because they see the good and the bad. Just like looking at a piece of apple pie that has already started to rot, they can tell which part is edible and which part is rotten at a single glance,” Pan Boda said. He was eating an apple while Long Immortal was lying on his side in a hospital bed.

Xie Yuchen watched all of this while lying on Long Immortal’s other side. “Have you gotten any results? What’s wrong with me? Why am I able to do all of these things?” Long Immortal asked Pan Boda in his Chaoshan accent. 

"I’ve checked your blood and bone marrow. They’re no different from an ordinary person's. But your brain, on the other hand, is different from ordinary people," Pan Boda took out an X-ray film and handed it to Long Immortal. 

"There are four tumors in your brain’s prefrontal lobe. All four tumors have stopped growing, but they’re compressing your brain and pushing your midbrain too far inward. One of the tumors is so large—almost a quarter of the size of your brain, in fact—that you’d have been dead long ago if you were a normal person. But the rest of your brain is still working,” Pan Boda said. “There are only two recorded cases in Chinese history of people with this kind of brain. Both of them were very long lived but forgetful.”

****