1 Lord Seventh Written by priest Original Chinese work (c) 2010 Unofficial translation (c) 07/11/2020 - 12/09/2020 by Huang “Chichi” Zhifeng Both versions are protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Reposts are not permitted in any capacity. (No, not anywhere, no matter who you are, and no matter what you think you’re doing.) If you have found this translation anywhere except chichilations.home.blog, ko- fi.com/chichilations, or the huangzhifengtheosprey Google Drive, it has been stolen. There is absolutely no authorization for it to be posted anywhere else, especially not any site that charges money for access to those translations or has ads. I have never required payment to access any translations that I do, nor have I ever claimed ad revenue. Anyone else claiming my translation as theirs is fraudulent. Check the dates, eh? If you’re going to steal a translation, steal it from a machine. They don’t have feelings. Stealing from an anonymous bird on the internet is pretty… yeah. The original work was published on jjwxc. This translation was published originally on Wordpress. Translator Contact Information chichilations.home.blog ~ ko-fi.com/chichilations ~
[email protected] The blog is the source site, and the ko-fi has plans for further translations, though it’s a space solely for my original works, otherwise. Please send any inquiries, bug reports, typos, etc. regarding the translation to my email. Also let me know if anyone has reuploaded this translation elsewhere, especially if they’re redistributing it in epub/pdf format; I can and have dealt with them before, I’ll do it again. Ancient Chinese Units of Measurements, for your reading convenience shichen: one of the 12 two-hour time periods ancient Chinese folks used instead of hours cun: equivalent to 3⅓ cm li: equivalent to ½ a km chi: equivalent to ⅓ m zhang: equivalent to 3⅓ m catty: equivalent to 604.79g tael: equivalent to 37.8g Translator’s Foreword Welcome to the fanmade translation of Lord Seventh! This was originally an EPUB. I retired those originally, hoping that would prompt more official ebooks and translations. That didn’t quite go as planned, so now I made them hard to copy. Lessons learned, yadda yadda yadda. It’s not perfect, is less interactive than the blog (I like seeing comments :( ), but GDocs does prevent copying and downloading. It’s the most I can do. (Don’t request edit access. Those emails go straight to the trash.)
2 Here is a content warning for the whole book: body horror, gore, death, pedophilia mention, incest mention, one (1) whole kind-of sex scene that’s easily skipped over. Be sure to buy the work from JJWXC, or donate directly to the author. If you lack in money, you can still contribute to the author’s works by viewing all the chapters that you can, liking everything, giving high ratings, and commenting (in Chinese only, or it’ll be auto-deleted). This helps their algorithms on jjwxc. It’s free to do this, so please do. JJWXC Raws — In-Depth English JJWXC-buying Guide
3 Glorious Springtime Does Not For the Youth Remain 1: Seven Lifetimes of Ephemeral Lives The first lifetime, a stone appeared, turning into the burial mound of a hero, feelings unable to be broken. The second lifetime, a boulder split, ferrying a predestined love across the Bridge, a pair of mandarin ducks flying off together. The third lifetime, a jadeite burned, vowing to abide by an invaluable oath, eternally following each other in life and death. Flowers bloomed all across the opposite shore, blood-like. The River of Forgetfulness’s 1 waters trickled quietly, going three-thousand years to the East, three-thousand years to the West. Wandering souls came and went, treading on the endless Yellow Spring Road to come up the Bridge of Helplessness, pour a bowl of yellow soup down into their bellies, and thus have the entirety of their assorted previous lives go away. A crowd of beings passed the edge of the Three-Life Rock 2 to and fro, but none spared a glance towards the place. It was evident as to how reincarnation was little more than a trance. Beside the Rock sat a person. It was a man. Upon drawing closer, one could see he was wearing a wide-sleeved green robe with a crude bamboo flute stuck into its waistband, and also that he was between twenty to thirty years of age even though his head was full of silver hair, unbound and scattered about randomly. The man had his back turned to the souls on Yellow Spring Road, his front facing that smooth Three-Life Rock. All he did was sit there silently, eyes closed. It was unknown whether he was asleep or awake, and he was seemingly completely unaware that someone had been watching him for a very long time now. Hu Jia was a newly-appointed Ghost Messenger, and had traveled amidst the Yellow Springs for no more than forty years. From the very start of his memory, this white-haired man had always been sitting there, unmoving. Whenever Hu Jia came back and finished giving a report after handling an assignment at the human realm, he would regularly go and stand at that spot, staring at the man’s rearview figure for a time. The yin realm was a world of demons. The yang realm was inundated with light, yet did not have any fewer demons than the yin realm did. Hu Jia’s state of mind would sometimes get beyond gloomy; gazing at that back that was as motionless as a mountain would, for a moment, calm him down in a strange way. Suddenly, a deathly pale hand was placed upon Hu Jia’s shoulder. Despite being a Ghost Messenger, he inevitably felt a wave of coldness attack him from it, which caused his senses to viciously sharpen a tad. He swiveled his head around, only to have Bai Wuchang’s papier- 1 An extremely pared down version of the the cycle of reincarnation in Chinese mythology: dead souls travel to the Yellow Springs (the underworld), receive punishment in the Ten Courts, then cross the Bridge of Helplessness over the River of Forgetfulness afterwards, where they then drink Meng Po’s soup, forget their life, and move on to their next reincarnation. Related in-depth articles for reading: The Ten Courts of Hell (TW violence, torture, and gore, if cartoony), Diyu Wiki Article 2 The Three-Life Rock (三生石) — also referred to as the Fated Love Stone, at least for the IRL version at Lingyin Temple — is purportedly located near the Bridge of Forgetfulness in the underworld, and engraved upon it is fated relationships. It’s named after the concept of ‘three lives’ in Buddhism; the past life, the present life, and the next life. When one commits to hundred years of marriage in a relationship, and they die before their partner, they are to wait at the Three-Life Rock until their partner joins them in death. That way, they face oblivion together. Furthermore, despite the wiping of one’s memories, getting deja vu in one’s present life when falling in love with someone is said to be a sign of having been together in the last life, and when people fall in love, they hope that they will continue to be so in the next one, hence the connotations of the ‘three lives’ with marriage and fate.
4 mâché-like face come up before his eyes. Patting his own chest, Hu Jia turned and hurriedly bowed towards him. “Soulhook Envoy.” Bai Wuchang slightly nodded in an abstruse way. His lips didn’t visibly move, but his voice was distinctly audible. “Go call out to him, state that the time has come, and request that he get on the Road.” “Me?” Hu Jia felt a chill. He looked at the statuesque white-haired man, then looked at Bai Wuchang. “This… lowly one…” “Go do it,” Bai Wuchang said mildly. “I hooked a person’s soul by mistake once upon a time, harming him with separation in both life and death. He’s an infatuate who has sought yet not obtained for several lifetimes, and hasn’t had a peaceful life for several centuries. He presumably isn’t willing to talk to me.” “Got it.” Hu Jia didn’t dare disobey the Soulhook Envoy’s words. He hesitated a bit, then asked, “What… what should I call him by?” Bai Wuchang only replied in a quiet voice after he had apparently been momentarily stumped. “Call him Lord Seventh, everyone else does. He’ll answer.” Hu Jia hesitated no longer, walking over to the man. When he had still been in the human world as a child, he had listened as his private school teacher told a tale. Long ago, there was a person of extremely good technique in painting. One day, he was casually scribbling a long dragon on a wall, but he did not do the eyes. Passersby that spotted this were puzzled, and when they asked, he just said that he feared that if the dragon’s eyes were to be drawn, it would then turn into an actual dragon and leave. The onlookers simply didn’t believe him, so the helpless painter was obliged to draw the dragon’s eyes on, and it did indeed then come alive, letting out a long howl as it flew up into the sky like a cloud; that was precisely the legend within ‘painting a dragon and dotting its eyes‘. Hu Jia didn’t know why, but at this moment, he felt that… the quietly-sitting white-haired man was like a divine dragon whose eyes hadn’t yet been drawn, and it seemed like once he called out to and awakened him, that plot of land next to the Three-Life Rock would no longer be able to retain him. He approached. The man remained unaware, sitting with his face towards the stone surface and his eyes closed as usual. Hu Jia cleared his throat, taking great courage to reach out and lightly push on the white- haired man’s shoulder. “Lord Seventh, the Soulhook Envoy gave this lowly one something to come pass on; he stated that the time has come, and requests that you get on the Road.” The man didn’t move, as if he hadn’t heard. Hu Jia gulped, raised his volume somewhat, then got closer to the other’s ear. “Lord Seventh, the Soulhook—” “I heard. I’m not deaf.” Hu Jia stood there stupidly for a second, only reacting after half the day had passed. The man that was wholly unlike a living thing had actually opened his mouth and said words, as well as spoken them to him. This ‘Lord Seventh”s voice was quite quiet and gentle, like the wave of a soft breeze blowing against one’s heart when in their ears. Immediately following that, he shifted a bit, his form as sluggish as if he’d been sleeping for a long time, and he moved his shoulders about. He opened his eyes with extreme slowness, casting a glance at Hu Jia.
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