Chapter 601 — Watching My Own Cremation

"I'm sorry. We did everything we could. You should start making the funeral arrangements."

The doctor's voice outside the ward was soft, yet Lin Yu, lying on the sickbed, heard every word with perfect clarity.

Perhaps a person's hearing sharpens to an extraordinary keenness just before death—especially where his mother's weeping was concerned, which cut through the air with piercing shrillness.

Lin Yu was not the first man to give his life for a stranger's sake, and he did not regret it. He only felt he had failed his mother.

His father had died young, and his mother had raised him single-handedly, enduring hardships beyond counting. Now, with his outstanding grades, he had been admitted to Qinghai City People's Hospital, and life with his mother was just about to brighten—who could have guessed such a calamity would strike?

"Damn this heaven."

So good men truly got no good reward. Lin Yu cursed under his breath, and his eyelids could hold out no longer; slowly, they closed.

"My son! My son!"

A shrill, anguished wail jolted Lin Yu awake. He opened his eyes and found himself standing at the foot of the bed, while his mother had flung herself across the mattress, sobbing wildly.

"Mom, what are you crying for? I'm right here, perfectly fine!"

Lin Yu was overjoyed, thinking he had miraculously recovered. He reached out to pat his mother—and found his hand passing straight through her body.

His mother showed no reaction whatsoever, still sprawled across the bed, weeping bitterly.

Lin Yu's expression changed. He looked up and saw that there was still another him lying on the bed, face sunken and livid, clearly already lifeless.

I'm dead?

Lin Yu looked down at himself standing at the foot of the bed and saw that his body was somewhat pale and faintly translucent.

Lin Yu was stunned—so souls really did exist after death!

No matter what he said or did, his mother could not perceive him.

With the nurse's help, his mother, choking back her grief, dressed Lin Yu in burial clothes. Then the orderlies carried his corpse onto the funeral vehicle.

His mother climbed in after him and sat beside his body, clutching his hand tightly. Tears streamed ceaselessly from her red, swollen eyes. "Yu'er, go in peace. Once I've finished settling things here, I'll come down to keep you company."

To her, her son was her everything. With her son dead, her life in this world had lost all meaning.

Hearing that his mother meant to take her own life, Lin Yu panicked. He tried lying down on the corpse the way they did in movies when a soul returned to its body, but it was no use—each time he sat up, it was only his soul that rose.

The vehicle soon arrived at the crematorium. After the fees were paid, a staff member gave Lin Yu a simple cosmetic touch-up and handed his mother a numbered tag. Then the cremation workers wheeled Lin Yu's body toward the incineration hall.

"No!"

The instant the workers pushed his body into the furnace, Lin Yu broke down completely.

As his flesh burned, Lin Yu felt his consciousness weakening. Countless faint motes of light drifted from his body and scattered in all directions, and his soul was slowly fading as well.

At the same time, another world began to flash before his eyes—everywhere he looked was endless darkness, shot through with blazing red flames and shrill, miserable screams.

Hell!

That was the first thought to flash through Lin Yu's mind, and a vast terror swallowed him in an instant.

His soul instinctively dashed about wildly in the air. The motes of light kept drifting out of his spirit body, faster and faster.

The hellish world before his eyes grew ever clearer, and he could hear a mysterious, hoarse voice below calling out to him.

By now Lin Yu's body in the furnace was nearly consumed. Amid the ashes, a jade-green pendant suddenly blazed with dazzling light in the flames.

It was what his maternal grandfather had left him when he passed away. He had worn it since childhood, and when his mother dressed him in the burial clothes, she had deliberately left it on.

The pendant's radiance grew ever brighter, then burst apart with a bang. A wisp of emerald-green light shot out from the pendant and attached itself to Lin Yu's soul.

Then an aged voice sounded in his mind: "I am the sage of your ancestors. From this day forth, you are my heir. Receive my arts of medicine and mystic arts; heal the world and save the people, deliver others and deliver yourself."

Then the voice faded, and a vast flood of information abruptly filled Lin Yu's mind—esoteric medical arts, cultivation formulas, and some of his ancestor's travel experiences all poured into his head at once.

Taking in the information in his mind, Lin Yu felt exhilarated, as though a door to a new world had opened.

But the excitement vanished in a flash. What use was an inherited secret art when he was already a dead man about to descend into hell?

As that thought crossed his mind, a memory concerning the art of soul-returning suddenly surfaced in Lin Yu's head.

The memory showed that through the soul-returning art, a person whose soul had not yet dispersed after death could possess another body and be reborn.

But Lin Yu's own flesh had already been reduced to ashes in the fire. Fortunately, there was also a record of a soul-returning method for a destroyed body: "When the flesh is annihilated, become a ghost, seek a living body, and then possess it."

Lin Yu drew a sharp breath. It meant that since his flesh was destroyed, the only way to revive was to use the soul-returning art to become a ghost and find someone else's body to possess.

Everyone knew that in human consciousness, ghosts were the very embodiment of evil. And besides, if he took over another's body, wouldn't that amount to depriving someone of their life in disguise?

As he hesitated, Lin Yu's soul had already grown fainter and fainter, until only a phantom remained, and the voice at his ear grew ever clearer.

Lin Yu gritted his teeth. Looking at the bodies being pushed into the incineration hall one after another, an idea suddenly struck him—the dead wouldn't do, but the living dead should, shouldn't they?

Several minutes later, Lin Yu arrived at Qinghai City's largest care center for vegetative patients.

Many people in a vegetative state have no consciousness at all and never wake up for the rest of their lives; only their bodies remain alive. Lin Yu reasoned that possession of such a person would not count as murder.

At first Lin Yu searched ward by ward, looking for a suitable body.

But he found his own consciousness growing fainter and fainter, soon to be extinguished altogether, while the call from hell grew more and more urgent.

With no time left to think, Lin Yu fixed his eyes on a male vegetative patient in his twenties, chanted the Soul-Returning Art, and in an instant transformed into a wisp of white smoke, hurling himself into the body without a second thought.

"You can't escape!"

At the same moment, the voice at his ear abruptly turned into a shrill, miserable scream, and then Lin Yu lost all consciousness.

When Lin Yu woke again, the first thing he felt was a blinding glare of light; it took him a moment to adjust, and when he looked down, he found himself lying in a hospital ward.

Success!

Lin Yu nearly cried out in excitement. He sat up with a jolt, glanced at his new body, tore the IV needle from his hand without a moment's hesitation, and sprang off the bed, only to stagger and crash to the floor the instant his feet touched the ground.

Perhaps because he had lain there so long, the young man's muscles had atrophied slightly.

Lin Yu clambered unsteadily to his feet, looked up at the calendar on the wall, and saw that it was already the next day. He touched the bed and the wall, feeling the cold, hard chill they passed to his hand, and it all seemed like a dream: he had died only yesterday, and now, beyond all expectation, he was alive again today.