Take one palm and send it to Jiangbei, to measure the width of the other’s waist for me.
___
“I feel that this face is a little familiar.” Gu Yun held a wooden stick and looked at the ‘woman’ on the ground for a while, then concluded.
The Wolf King’s tent of Jia Lai Ying Huo was turned upside down by the people of Black Iron Camp. They found that there were neither rare pearls nor corals in it. It looked magnificent but actually was deep in poverty. It could be seen that before he wiped clean the aristocrats’ property, he also did the same to himself. He was really a selfless lunatic.
To Gu Yun’s great disappointment, they couldn’t find the goddess’s witchcraft in legend.
Thinking about it, only Great Liang people liked to write everything on paper and assemble it into a book. There were many primitive customs in the Eighteen Tribes, things that need to be recorded were likely to be engraved on stone, tortoise shell and leather, or simply passed down by mouth. The witchcraft they were looking for might be hidden only in Jia Lai’s brain and was already burned to ashes.
Finally, only such a strange figure was brought back to the northern garrison under the insistence of Chen Qing Xu.
“What did Miss Chen say about this thing just now?” Gu Yun asked the soldier, “What kind of statue?”
“Soul statue,” the soldier replied, seeing Gu Yun poking it back and forth with a wooden stick without any taboo, he couldn’t help saying, “Marshal, I think this thing is very insidious. Perhaps there is something not clean about it. You should stay away from it.”
The ‘soul statue’ was life-sized, but it weighed only around ten to fifteen kilograms. After cleaning, the face and skin were no different from a real person at first sight, as if it could talk after opening its eyes.
It was said that this was not a complete piece of human skin. It was made from the best skin of many young boys and girls. After being treated with some kind of voodoo, it formed a whole piece and was wrapped around the wood that was carved into a complete human shape in advance. When the human skin and the wood were closely pasted together, it could create a lifelike dummy.
The Eighteen Tribes believed that this kind of soul statue could summon the souls of the children that had died in foreign countries.
At first, the soul statue was covered with dust. After being washed, it completely resembled a nude living person. Shen Yi thought it was too unorthodox and asked people to find clothes for it to ‘wear’.
Gu Yun stared at the closed eyes of the soul statue. He felt that it slightly resembled Chang Geng when he was a child. He reached out his fingers and stroked his chin, tried to search his memory and asked, “You say what it summoned was the soul of the Barbarian royal consort that year?”
The soldier believed in demons and did not dare to look much, he said in fright: “Marshal, we better move it away quickly, this thing is scarily demonic…”
“It’s alright,” Gu Yun said casually, glancing at the face of the soul statue. “I think that she still looks very pretty.”
Soldier: “…”
Recently, Marshal Gu had to take care of both battlefields north and south, perhaps he had lost his mind from exhaustion.
At this time, Chen Qing Xu, who was not feeling reassured and went to see Shen Yi, barged in suddenly: “I remember now!”
Gu Yun: “Huh?”
Chen Qing Xu drew out a knife and knelt on the ground. Under the eyes of Gu Yun and his superstitious soldier, she cut the soul statue open from the chest.
Gu Yun: “…”
His soldier trembled with fear, turned his back and recited ‘Amitabha’. Gu Yun looked at him, then at Miss Chen, who was like a butcher. He reached out and handed the stick to his silent soldier and said pitifully, “Take it to ward off evil spirits and defend yourself.”
Chen Qing Xu ignored the surroundings and concentrated on the point of the knife. The human skin looked flat and even very soft outside. There was no flesh and blood inside after cutting open. The two sides were separated cleanly. The texture was like tanned leather. Chen Qing Xu had a good grasp of her strength, only cutting the human skin and did not affect the wood below.
Gu Yun was sitting around doing nothing at first, then suddenly, he narrowed his eyes, pulled up his sleeve and squatted down to gently lift the skin up without any hesitation, touching the wood surface.
The soldier’s face was green, hurriedly confessed his sins, took the stick given by the Marshal and ran outside to watch the door.
Gu Yun felt around for a long time, wondering, “Why, there are still words on this wood?”
Chen Qing Xu had cut open the human skin from head to toe, like peeling an egg shell. Changing into a smaller knife, she carefully took the human skin off one by one until the whole section of the human shaped wood was exposed. She took time to respond to Gu Yun’s words: “Yes, but it’s carved small and shallow. Only people with extremely sharp sense of touch will be able to feel it. If ordinary people want to see, I’m afraid it is only with the help of tools, would Marshal help me read what was written on it?”
The Black Iron Camp and the Eighteen Tribes have been enemies of two generations. Many senior generals in the Black Iron Camp knew the common words of the Man language. Gu Yun fumbled for a moment on the neck of the humanoid wood and hesitated for a long time before responding: “It’s all very strange words, cooking what… I don’t know, there’s a number… Ah, it seems that there’s something else about sunlight… “
Gu Yun looked at Chen Qing Xu in confusion: “Why is there a mysterious cooking tutorial engraved on this soul statue? Eh… Miss Chen, what’s the matter?”
Gu Yun had never seen such an excited look on Chen Qing Xu’s face. Her cold eyes were almost full of tears.
As if never seeing wood before, she picked up the humanoid wood with her hands, took out a silk and carefully wiped off the dust on it, as if holding a rare treasure.
“For the soul statue to bring back the spirits of other countries, it needs to communicate life and death. The usual way is to hide a personal item of the person inside the wood. But if this method was used to call on the soul, the deceased are usually thousands of miles away, most of the burial place could not be found. So their personal item can’t be obtained every time. I just remembered, in this case, the caster will generally replace it by the last words left by the dead or the inscriptions that can represent the dead. “
“In those days, the Barbarian sisters fled from the deep palace. On the way, the elder sister died in a foreign country. The younger sister fled with her sister’s child to a bandit’s den. Before the death of the imperial concubine, she left one very important thing to Hu Ge Er. Later, it passed through Hu Ge Er’s hands and finally fell into the hands of Jia Lai the Wolf King…”
Gu Yun heard this, his heart started beating like mad.
“It is the secret art of the goddess.” Chen Qing Xu pointed out what he was thinking in his heart, “I… I only thought of this possibility, I did not expect for it to be true… “