Inner Demons

A four or five-year-old boy was playing under a weeping willow tree. He was pink and chubby, utterly adorable.

The sun was high in the sky, casting a cool shade under the tree. The boy, wearing only a red dudou and with his hair in two topknots, was whipping the ground with a tender willow branch, muttering to himself as he looked up into the tree.

A young woman sat on a blue stone under the tree doing needlework, occasionally looking at the child, her face radiating a happy and joyful smile. But gradually, she noticed the boy’s behavior was a bit strange, so she followed his gaze up into the tree—

But there was nothing there. Only the morning sun filtering down through the gaps in the leaves. She quickly turned her head away and asked the boy, “Tuantuan, what are you looking at?”

The boy ignored her, still just staring at the tree. After a moment, he giggled. After laughing for a bit, he pointed up at the tree and replied to his mother, “This big brother—”

The young woman looked up at the tree again, but still saw nothing.

A sudden chill ran through her heart, and she felt the cold under the tree intensify. She quickly got up, snatched the child into her arms, and walked away quickly, glancing back at the tree several times as she went.

—Of course, she couldn't see Li Yunxin, who was currently sitting on a horizontal branch of the weeping willow, basking in the sun and lazily flipping through the thin booklet in his hand.

This was the advantage of having a dharma body. The Spiritual Soul, condensed into a physical form, could touch and feel like a real person. But with a thought, he could also become invisible to the eyes of mortals like a ghost—unless that person, like this child, was born with yin-yang eyes.