Blood-Stained Love Chapter 143

After collapsing and feeling how the bats swarmed her, Sian Eng was attacked by a mix of fear and horror combined with pain throughout her body. The bites of the small creatures brought heat, itchiness, and stinging pain. She rolled back and forth, screaming like a madwoman, until, within that wave of horror and fear, an extraordinary desperation arose—a rage that strangely made her suddenly gain new strength. Sian Eng leaped up, both hands gripping the bats still clinging to her body, slamming them, stomping on them, and she even began biting the heads of the small creatures, crushing their skulls and sucking their blood. The intense pain made the girl seem oblivious to her surroundings; all that remained in her memory was retaliation, killing, and rampaging.

This terrifying struggle in the darkness, had it occurred in a bright place and been seen by others, would certainly have filled them with dread and horror. The girl's clothes were ruined, torn here and there, her hair disheveled and loose. Her behavior was also like that of a lunatic. She rolled around, sometimes leaping and jumping, sometimes laughing, then crying—all due to the suffering of intense pain combined with fear and dread. Yet, she ceaselessly killed the bats and even began eating their flesh and drinking their blood. Sian Eng struggled all night long. Piles of bat carcasses accumulated in the room, and who knows how much blood she had drunk, how much flesh she had swallowed. Finally, the night ended, giving way to morning, marked by a beam of light entering the room.

This light helped Sian Eng drive away the bats. However, Sian Eng was also exhausted, lying sprawled unconscious on top of the bat carcasses. Her clothes were torn, her skin covered in red spots from the blood oozing from her wounds. For a full day, Sian Eng lay sprawled on the bat carcasses in the underground room, half-unconscious, half-asleep, or as if she were dead. However, after the sun set and the room became dark, the small bats began to fly and then attacked her. Sian Eng seemed to be awakened, and like a female ghost or a *kuntilanak* who only "lives"

At night, she rose again, and just like the previous night, the battle resumed with the small bats that attacked and swarmed her fiercely.

Again, Sian Eng became a victim of bites, but strangely, her movements were more agile and fiercer than yesterday. Now, even more bats died, and more of their blood and flesh entered Sian Eng’s stomach. Again, a fierce, terrifying small war took place all night long in the dark room, but this time Sian Eng seemed to be getting stronger, so that toward morning, the creatures began to fear her, and only one or two dared to strike. Yet, with a single swipe, Sian Eng caught it, tore it in two, and sucked the blood that spurted out. Apparently, the taste of blood, the heartache, combined with hunger and thirst, transformed Sian Eng into something like a *kuntilanak*. Strangely, as soon as the sunlight illuminated the room,

Sian Eng only then felt weak and tired, then tumbled and lay sprawled half-naked on a "mattress"

Made of piled-up bat carcasses. Just like yesterday, Sian Eng slept half-unconscious for a full day. The small wounds on her fair, smooth skin, which yesterday looked dotted with red, now began to disappear, but her body felt intensely hot one moment, and then cold as snow the next. Indeed, something tremendous was happening to this girl. The bats turned out to be a species of poisonous bat, whose bite usually left enough venom to claim a person's life within two or three days. Meanwhile, Sian Eng had received repeated bites from these bats, fierce bites accompanied by rage, causing a great deal of wicked and dangerous poison to enter her body and contaminate her blood.

However, by sheer coincidence, that horrifying situation drove Sian Eng mad and savage, making her angry and causing her to eat bat flesh and drink their blood. This very act became the antidote, an unparalleled cure in this world. Unbeknownst to and unconsciously by herself, besides filling her stomach to stave off hunger and thirst, Sian Eng had cured herself. Not only did she cure herself and ward off the danger from the bat bites' venom, but far beyond that, she had introduced a source of tremendous power, because the bat venom contained hot *hawa* (energy), which usually would scorch the heart and dry up the blood; conversely, the neutralizing poison found in the bats' flesh and blood contained cold *hawa*.

Now, these two opposing poisons began to work, fighting desperately within Sian Eng’s body, causing the girl, while unconscious, to alternate between extreme heat and extreme cold. If the Almighty God wills a person to live, there will be no shortage of ways, no matter how strange and impossible those ways may seem in human eyes. This was the case with Sian Eng. Her life hung by a thread. Only God could save her, only God could decide her life or death. The two types of poison that entered her body—one through the bite wounds, the second through her mouth—were extremely dangerous and had entered her body in excessive amounts. Now, the two types of poison, possessing opposing forces, were competing, pushing against each other to dominate Sian Eng’s body, which would end in death if one of the poisons lost. Hot and cold *hawa* pushed and pulled, vying for control.

Even a slight difference in the strength of these two *hawa* would have ended the life story of Kam Sian Eng, this unfortunate girl. However, as mentioned earlier, God had not yet willed this girl's story to end; therefore, miraculously, the two types of poison HAPPENED to possess balanced strength. They mixed together, and their destructive power vanished; in fact, conversely, within Sian Eng’s body, the two poisons mixed and gave birth to a kind of miraculous energy that increased the *sin-kang* (internal power) in the girl's body several dozen times over. It was not surprising that when the girl stirred and woke up after the day turned dark again, on the third night, she felt her body light and comfortable, with no pain whatsoever, only a pleasant warmth.

Besides this, the feelings of fear and dread also vanished. She even laughed when she heard the swooping of the bats, which for the third consecutive night now began to try and swarm their tenacious enemy. Sian Eng felt how slow and weak the creatures' attacks were. She easily flicked them away with her fingernails. A single flick was enough to crush the head of a bat that swooped toward her. When many of the creatures began to swarm, Sian Eng was overwhelmed and was forced to let one or two bite her half-naked body. However, something strange happened. The girl felt no pain whatsoever when bitten; instead, the bat that bit her released its grip, fell, convulsed, and then died. Of course, Sian Eng did not notice this, but an hour later, not a single bat attacked her anymore.

The creatures merely flew around, chirping in fear, as if they now acknowledged that the human who had been swarmed for three consecutive nights was invincible and worthy of becoming their queen. Sian Eng was freed from the threat of death by those dangerous poisons. However, the influence of the poisons seemed to affect her brain as well. At the very least, it certainly altered her perfection, disturbing her and making Sian Eng strange. Sometimes she laughed to herself when catching a bat to eat, sometimes she cried because she remembered Suma Boan. That third night was filled with alternating laughter and tears. The next morning, Sian Eng could move swiftly, and her mind also became clear. She remembered that she was trapped there, buried alive. This thought spurred her spirit, and she approached the stone covering the hole.

She tried her strength to dismantle the stone, to push it back. She felt a powerful *hawa* surging within her body, feeling intensely hot. She exerted her energy, the hot *hawa* increased, the stone swayed, but suddenly the hot *hawa* changed into cold *hawa* and... Sian Eng collapsed unconscious, and the stone closed the hole again. After regaining consciousness, Sian Eng tried again, and she fainted repeatedly just because of the change in *hawa* within her body. Finally, she realized that there was a strange *hawa* inside her body, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, but so tremendous that she was unable to control it, and if she forced herself to keep exerting that strange energy, she would eventually die from self-inflicted injury. Because of this, Sian Eng then looked for another way.

She examined the entire wall, inch by inch, inspecting it very carefully. But the result was futile, and meanwhile, because she still could not control the two types of *hawa* in her body, Sian Eng collapsed unconscious repeatedly. But one day, about five days after she was trapped there, her efforts succeeded. She began examining the floor. She scrutinized the floor stones one by one, and finally, when she pried up a stone in the left corner, a hole about two square feet wide was uncovered. Suddenly, a snake with a white head shot out from inside the hole. Like a flash of lightning, the snake lunged upward, and without being able to avoid it, Sian Eng’s left arm was bitten. Sian Eng screamed and exerted her energy. Because she had not yet mastered the two types of energy in her body, she exerted it haphazardly, and coincidentally at that moment, the cold *hawa* in her body was stronger, so this exertion of energy instantly made her snake-bitten arm feel as if it had turned to ice.

And remarkably, the snake then released its bite, coiled and writhed, and then stopped moving, dead. Sian Eng became very interested. Was this the hiding place of the *Tok-siauw-kui* scriptures? Without hesitation, she entered the hole, and it turned out that after she jumped down, she was in another room, an upper room located directly beneath the room full of bat carcasses. And sunlight entered through the two-foot hole, making the room bright enough. In the corner of the room, there was a stone table, or more accurately, a stone bench whose surface was concave (hollow) and depicted the shape of a person's crossed legs and buttocks. Apparently, this spot was formerly used for sitting cross-legged by the person who meditated here. However, how a stone bench could become concave like that just from being sat upon was truly extraordinary.

Only that bench was found in the room, and nothing else. Due to the immense disappointment and regret, Sian Eng dropped to her knees in front of the bench and cried. She saw how small and delicate the imprint of the crossed legs was, depicting a woman's feet, making her certain that this bench must have been the place where *Tok-siauw-kui* Liu Lu Sian, the mother of Suling Emas, sat cross-legged and meditated in *samadhi*. She cried because she remembered her connection to *Tok-siauw-kui*. *Tok-siauw-kui* was formerly the wife of her father, Jenderal Kam Si Ek, who later left her husband, causing her father to remarry, with her mother. Apparently, *Tok-siauw-kui* hated her mother so much that even though she was deceased, *Tok-siauw-kui* was still venting her resentment and punishing the child of the woman who stole her husband.

"Aunt Liu Lu Sian... why are you so cruel? Why am I the one you torture, when I have committed no sin against you? Aunt... regardless, I am your stepdaughter... you once loved my biological father... for the sake of my late father... please show me the way out of this hell, Aunt..."

She cried and remained kneeling in front of the stone bench. Then she remembered her father and cried even more sadly.

"Father... Father, you must be reunited with Aunt Liu Lu Sian... please persuade her to show your daughter the way out of this hell."