Only three people in the world knew what Xie Bai initially looked like, two of whom were Yin Wushu and Xie Bai himself.

According to the version heard by Lou Xianyue and the pawnbroker Luo Zhusheng, Yin Wushu, out for a stroll near Yunrao Lake, found an abandoned doll in the nearby Red Plum Forest. When he found it, it was half-frozen, with a bluish hue all over. Yin Wushu searched the vicinity but found no nearby residents, so he brought the doll back.

For Lou Xianyue and Luo Zhusheng, all they saw was Yin Wushu closing his doors for a year, not allowing anyone in.

After a year, the solitary Yin Wushu had a small child with him. The child looked thin and small, only three or four years old, extremely shy. Besides Yin Wushu, the child ignored everyone else. When pressed, he would hide behind Yin Wushu's clothes and refuse to come out. For Lou Xianyue and Luo Zhusheng, who were already of unknown age, raising a child was quite unusual, even though the child seemed to ignore them. They used all their patience and took two years to finally make Xie Bai familiar with them and stop treating them as if they were invisible.

In Lou Xianyue's understanding, that was how Xie Bai's background was, nothing more special than that.

However, the reality was different. Yin Wushu didn't go to Yunrao Lake just because he was idle. Instead, he felt that his time as Yin Guest was running out, so he went out to find his next successor. Since he took over the role of Yin Guest, each successor was found by him following specific clues at specific times and places. However, that was all there was to it. Apart from finding the successor, he had no further involvement with them. Sometimes they wouldn't even meet for a hundred years.

The days Yin Wushu went to Yunrao Lake happened to coincide with heavy snowfall, which continued incessantly for three days and three nights. Yunrao and its surroundings were already damp and cold, and with this weather, it became bone-chilling. Everywhere he looked was white, and the Red Plum Forest, being a mass grave in the past, had always been deserted. Now it was covered with a thick layer of snow, with only scattered red plum blossoms scattered by the wind and snow, appearing like blood on the ground.

Xie Bai at that time was curled up under the tree with the reddest plum blossoms, his body wrapped in snow, resembling a small bulge. Only one hand and jet-black hair protruded from the snow.

The hair was pitch black, contrasting sharply with the white snow all around, so Yin Wushu noticed him at a glance.

Contrary to rumors, when Yin Wushu approached the tree and brushed away the snow covering it, he found that the child underneath was already dead. He had assumed it was a child abandoned by someone who couldn't afford to raise him, unfortunate enough to encounter the cold snow and die in the mountains. However, as he was about to leave, thick black blood suddenly flowed from the child's mouth, nose, and exposed ears.

Yin Wushu frowned, stopped his steps to leave, squatted down again, and lifted the child's already frostbitten jacket, revealing the pale and stiff skin underneath. There were some areas that had been bruised, with even tiny, horrifying blood spots.

Strangely, he found three copper nails inserted into the child's heart. Each nail bore complex curses. After reading the curses inscribed on the three copper nails, Yin Wushu's face sank—

These three copper nails were not ordinary nails. They were engraved with the Eight Trigrams of countless nameless evil spirits and had been tempered in the heart's blood, rich in yang energy, for nearly a hundred days. They formed the Hundred Ghosts and Corpse-Nurturing Formation, which, as the name suggests, was used to gather souls and nurture corpses. However, this formation didn't gather any souls or nurture any corpses. It only gathered nascent souls and nurtured fetal corpses.

In other words, the child lying in the snow wasn't frozen to death by the snow, but had died shortly after birth, with its soul not completely leaving the body yet.

For some unknown reason, someone inserted these three copper nails into the heart of the stillborn and cast a curse, setting up this Hundred Ghosts and Corpse-Nurturing Formation. The stillborn would grow up with the passage of time, neither alive nor dead, nurtured for a full four years. At the end of the fifth year, in late winter and early spring, they would wake up, considered alive. However, the price was the four years prior, during which they would endure the pain of being sliced by knives and burned with boiling oil day and night, unable to escape for a moment.

The Six Copper Coins hanging from Yin Wushu's waist suddenly trembled, ringing out a buzzing sound without any wind. These six copper coins were almost only used once every hundred years to find the next Yin Guest. Only in front of the designated Yin Guest would these six copper coins make such a sound.

Yin Wushu had lived for so many years, but it was the first time he had encountered such a situation where the found Yin Guest was a stillborn. What was even more bizarre was that the already-formed stillborn Yin Guest had been set up with such a demonic and evil corpse-nurturing formation. It seemed that he would soon come back to life. Removing the copper nails would undoubtedly cause chaos by releasing the hundreds of evil spirits, but continuing to nurture this dead Yin Guest, who knew who would eventually come back to life?

Should it be destroyed instead?

Yin Wushu hardly hesitated at the time and decided to remove the copper nails. However, the three copper nails had to be removed simultaneously, not a moment too soon or too late. He brushed off the snow that had fallen on his clothes, stood up, and was about to lift his hand to suck out the three copper nails together when the already stiff stillborn suddenly moved his fingers and hooked onto the edge of Yin Wushu's robe.

The fingers were thin and small, with a pale and bluish complexion, gripping the edge of the robe tightly, trembling slightly, whether from the cold, fear, or pain, no one could tell.

Looking at the two streaks of black blood flowing from his tightly closed eyes, Yin Wushu suddenly changed his mind, squatting down to pick up the stillborn from the snow, wrapping him in several layers of robes, and taking him back to the courtyard of Tai Xuan Dao. Then he sealed the doors and didn't come out for a year.

Yin Wushu didn't know how old the stillborn was, because he looked too small and thin compared to a normal child. When he touched the delicate and fragile bones of the stillborn, he estimated that he was at most three years old.

It turned out that his estimate was spot on. The stillborn, neither dead nor alive, slept in his courtyard for another whole year until the end of the second year's late winter and early spring when it was still somewhat chilly. Overnight, the stillborn changed its appearance, its skin turning from a bluish-gray color to a frost-like white, and all the bruises and blood spots on its body disappeared.

On the day the child opened its eyes, the red plum tree in the courtyard had just withered, and the snow that fell the night before hadn't melted yet, covering the long-unvisited courtyard with a thin layer of white.

Yin Wushu casually gave him a name: Xie Bai.

(NT:  谢白 Xiè gratitude, Bái white, pure)

Translator : DarNan