Sun and Huang walked up the stone steps, passed through a torii gate, and entered the front yard of the Tenjoyama Shrine.
And just as they walked under the torii gate, the originally dark sky suddenly brightened up again due to the appearance of a bright moon.
This speed of "moving the clouds and seeing the moon" is as if someone has opened the curtains in a dark room. It is a bit weird no matter how you look at it...
Of course, the two people who knew this place was "unclean" from the beginning didn't say anything more about it. They just exchanged glances for a moment and continued walking inside.
At the same time, inside the shrine...
The three groups of people who came here before Shuang Xie were all resting quietly.
Let me mention here that shrines, like temples, can be large or small. The ones you often see in movies, TV and anime, which are about the same size as public toilets, are small. Small shrines usually only have one. The main shrine is only for worship, and usually no one is allowed in. There is a money box at the entrance of the hall, and a bell is hung on the box. This is enough; as for large shrines, there are various architectural styles and structures. , some are divided into inner and outer halls, and some are divided into main and side rooms, which can usually be occupied by people.
The current Tenjoyama Shrine is naturally a relatively large one. It adopts the "garden-style" style. The space inside the shrine is very large, and there are corridors on all sides of the shrine.
Such a place can accommodate not only five or six people, but even fifty or sixty people can squeeze in.
Therefore, at this moment, the three people in the palace are all on their own side, and they are all quite far away from each other. Although they are all wary of each other, for the time being, they still keep their distance.
However, the appearance of Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai broke this delicate balance...
"Hey! Isn't this 'harmful'?" Within two steps of entering the palace, Sun Yixie only glanced at Hayato Kamo in the corner to his right, and immediately exclaimed.
Normally, after traveling around the world for so long, Sun Yixie wouldn't be so surprised, but this time it was also a special situation.
After all, when Hayato was unable to protect himself, he still interceded for Sun Yixie under the knife of the pirates, and only then did he get a glimmer of hope for the latter.
Even if this does not mean that Hayato directly saved Sun Yixie, it was at least a 10% life-saving grace. Therefore, Sun Yixie was somewhat excited to see that his Japanese friend was still alive.
Hayato was also very surprised when he saw Sun Yixie being called out like this.
First, from Hayato's point of view, he felt that Sun Yixie had a narrow escape when he was thrown into the sea. He never thought that Sun Yixie could actually survive; secondly, what Hayato never expected was that the "Eastern" martial arts master from the Central Plains "Xiexi Poison" actually came to Japan, and happened to appear in front of him at this time and place...
"Brother Sun...you..." After a brief shock, Hayato said with a surprised look on his face, "You actually survived?" After saying that, he immediately looked at Huang Donglai next to Brother Sun, "And Huang Donglai Brother...why did you come to Japan?"
Everyone, please pay attention here. According to the principle of "defamation" that we explained earlier, because Sun Yixie knew that Hayato could speak Chinese, what he just said to Hayato fell into the hands of Hayato. There was a sentence in Chinese in his ears, so when he said "hurt people", the other party couldn't tell whether it was "damage" or "falcon".
But to the ears of other Japanese people besides Hayato, Brother Sun spoke in Japanese, and Hayato's name was translated into "hurt" in Japanese, which was very strange.
Then, because Hayato didn't know that Sun and Huang had their own translation skills at the moment, when he heard the other party speaking Chinese to him, he also responded in Chinese... and the Chinese he spoke fell on the ears of other Japanese. , of course it’s still Chinese.
In short, after the back-and-forth between the two parties, Ma Shanzhongzang, who came to investigate the details of the double harmony, immediately began to make wild guesses: "It seems that my guess is correct, these two people really came from The big guy came here, and the Japanese he just spoke was very good. Not only did he not have a Chinese accent, he even pretended to have a Kansai accent...
"He called the man who arrived first 'Huanren'. It didn't look like a name at all. Maybe it was a secret code during the meeting?
"And that 'harmful person', no matter how you look at it, is a real Japanese, but when the other person spoke Japanese to him, he responded in Chinese and revealed the Chinese surnames of the two people as soon as he opened his mouth. Why? ?
"Hiss - could it be that he deliberately used this method to convey the message that 'it has been revealed that you are from the Central Plains, and there are some people present who are targeting you'?"
"So he has already seen through me?
"Or... he is doubting..."
Thinking of this, Juzo instinctively glanced at the group of monks on the other side of the shrine.
It didn't matter if he didn't glance at him. A glance at him would startle him.
What's going on?
It turned out that at the moment when Juzo glanced at the monks, three of the four monks were also staring at him.
As soon as the two sides' eyes met, Zhongzang was so frightened that he quickly turned his head away the next second, pretending to look at the other person accidentally.
Here, it's not that Juzo is a coward, but that the monks are really weird.
Look at the four monk soldiers. One of them is sitting cross-legged in the middle, and the other three are sitting around him with their backs to him.
The one in the middle is wearing a white monk's robe, with a thick cape outside the monk's robe, and a string of huge Buddhist beads hanging around his neck; while the three people surrounding him are all wearing black monk's robes. , wearing a tattered cassock, no beads around his neck, but there is a knife in each hand.
You may have noticed when you see this. Judging from their clothes and the things they carry, we can only tell the identities of these four monk soldiers, but there is nothing "weird" about them, so their problems are obviously all It's on the "face".
Take the monk in white, for example. He looks to be in his sixties, neither fat nor thin, and his other facial features are quite normal, except for his closed eyes, which have a large area around them that are entangled with the eyelids. of scar tissue.
From a distance, it looked like he was wearing a large sleeping mask with flesh-colored patterns, which was quite disturbing to look at.
As for the three black-clothed monks in their prime, their faces were even more exaggerated... The ears of each of them seemed to have "collapsed" inward, curled up into misshapen balls of flesh and squeezed together. After entering the ear canal, only a small part is still exposed outside the head; and their eyes reflect the lyrics - "eyes are as wide as copper bells", they are so wide open, like It looked like it was about to fall out of the eye sockets at any time, and all the eyeballs were covered with bloodshot eyes.
When Juzo met the eyes of these three people, could he not feel numb?
Fortunately, after he averted his eyes, the monks did nothing else, so Juzo quickly calmed down, turned his attention back to Hayato and Shuanghe, and began to eavesdrop on their conversation.
On the other side, Hayato was telling about his experience of returning to Japan from the sea...
Let's talk about that day, Hayato and Sun Yixie, who had a gout attack, were captured by Japanese pirates on the ship. Everyone knew about Sun's situation: although his operation of pretending to be a Japanese fool was not completely out of control, the Japanese pirates did not further screen him. Because of his nationality and intellectual interests, he just wanted to kill him. After Hayato interceded for him, Brother Sun was able to escape into the sea.
As for Hayato... Because he looked fair and his conversation and temperament were quite elegant, the pirate leader guessed that this kid might be a member of a famous family in Japan, and it might be useful to keep him, so he took him as a prisoner.
Call him a "captive", but in fact Hayato was not tied up or imprisoned by the Japanese pirates; because he had nowhere to escape on the ship, and imprisoning him would be unnecessary. If you really imprisoned him and tied him up, someone would have to be there. How much trouble would it be to wait for him to eat, drink, and poop? What's more, Hayato didn't look like a martial arts practitioner. The Japanese pirates were all confident that he would dare to resist.
In this way, Hayato was forced to work as a hard worker on the pirate ship and drifted at sea for another month.
Until one day, the pirate ship he was on encountered another group of pirates disguised as a merchant ship "fishing" during the robbery...
After a fierce battle, there were not many survivors left; Hayato relied on his onmyoji magic and used a simple blindfold to hide his figure, and successfully survived.
At that time, the place where the two ships were fighting was not too far from the land. At least the outline of the land could be seen with the eyes. So when the battle was coming to an end, Hayato took advantage of the situation and got a small boat and rowed towards the land alone. go.
He originally thought that with this small distance and the calm sea at the time, he would be able to row to the shore with his physical strength as an adult. Unexpectedly... just this "small distance" almost killed him.
As the saying goes, "Looking up the mountain and running to death", even on land, sometimes there will be a big error between the visual distance and the actual distance, not to mention that a wave can push you out to the sea dozens of meters away?
Had Hayato not caught up with a "favorable tide" a few hours later, Hayato might have died of exhaustion at sea that day.
Fortunately, he finally returned to the shore by luck and returned to his hometown.
"What happened next? Where did you make your fortune after returning to China?" Sun Yixi asked after hearing what Hayato said.
"Harm! What's the point? It's better if you don't starve to death." Hayato replied with a helpless look, "In my current life... Today I tell fortunes in Dongcheng, tomorrow I catch a monster in Xixiang... I earn all my money The hard-earned money can only catch up with the needs of those wealthy families. If I can't catch up, then I will have to hunt, dig vegetables, and sleep in the open."
He was telling the truth. Looking at Hayato's simple clothes at the moment, he knew that his life now was not as good as when he was in the Central Plains.
Some people may find it strange when they see this. In many people's minds, isn't the profession of Onmyoji all supported by daimyo or even the royal family, with noble status and no worries about food and clothing?
Then all I can say is that Kamo Hayato...he has bad luck.
Although Hayato is from a famous family, he happened to be born in a special era, and he happened to be the last descendant of the most disadvantaged branch of the Kamo family. You should be able to guess from the fact that he went to the Central Plains to make a living in Japan. Life has never been easy.
"That's it..." Huang Donglai thought of something when he heard this, and continued, "Then why you are here today..."
"Alas..." Hayato sighed, "I was entrusted by a family named Tomita in Yae Township to the east to come here to find their young master."
"Ha!" Sun Yixie understood immediately after hearing this, "Let me guess, their young master came to this mountain and was disturbed by a monster?"
"Ha..." Hayato smiled bitterly, "Who knows..." He paused, "Maybe the young master did encounter a monster, or maybe... he just slipped and fell to death in the mountains, was eaten by wild beasts, or maybe... He was killed by a gangster... Anyway, the information I got is that someone saw him entering this mountain alone at dusk. After that, no one was seen alive or his body was found... Since there were rumors nearby that there was someone in this mountain who shouldn't The existence of the shrine', and finally this job came to me... The reward is generous, and I have no reason to refuse."
Because Hayato hadn't spoken in Central Plains dialect for so long, he was a little awkward at first, but as the conversation progressed, he got into the mood, his accent and accent became more and more correct, and his speaking speed became faster and faster.
Ma Shanjuzo's Chinese was only half a bucket full of water. Hayato's first sentence was relatively simple, and he understood it. Afterwards, he listened more and more to Yuehutu, and he couldn't understand what Hayato was talking about. Instead, the double-harmonic words were translated. He can understand Japanese.
But this only further deepened Juzo's suspicion.
Because what he could understand clearly and what Shuanghe said were short sentences, and they were either questions or content with elements of "youkai" that might be secret codes; and what he couldn't quite understand were what Hayato said. The Chinese he speaks is always long paragraphs that seem to have something to say.
Just when Juzo was thinking about taking the risk of contacting those three people to get more information...
"Damn it, when I first came in because I saw you, I was so excited that I didn't take a closer look. Now that I'm looking over..." Sun Yixie turned his attention to the monk soldiers in the dark corner in the distance and lowered his head. The voice said to Hayato, "I noticed that those monks over there look quite demonic..." As he said that, he threw another sentence at Huang Donglai, "Brother Huang, what are those 'deaf and blind monks' famous for? Can you tell?"
“?????—”
A second later, before Huang Donglai could answer, the monk in white clothes in the distance suddenly laughed strangely.
This old man's smile is so charming...
His laughter was like someone scratching the glass with his fingernails rhythmically, and there was a broken bellows blowing wind in the gaps.
In addition, the shrine's shrine is an open and closed environment, so the sound becomes even weirder after being reverberated.
"The three young people over there..." After laughing for more than ten seconds, the monk in white finally stopped making this weird noise, and then said in his slightly hoarse voice, "Have you ever heard of... deaf people? See well, will the blind hear this sentence well?”
His words were obviously aimed at what Brother Sun said about "deaf and blind monk" just now. On the one hand, it means that even if you say bad things about me in a low voice, I can still hear you. Frontal counter-arguments.
Anyone else would have been a little embarrassed when being retorted by these words, but Sun Yixie would not. He just smiled and replied without any shame: "I'm sorry, I'm illiterate. Are you here?" What to say?"
