WJ Chapter 113

Morning Wind (2)

The Fengchun Sheng poison that had tormented the Young Sect Leader Changliu for fifteen years had finally been cured.

In the blink of an eye, this news spread without restraint, sweeping through Xifeng City, then outward from Mount Shenlie to all thirteen branch halls, and within mere days it had traveled across more than half the jianghu.

Fengchun Sheng had at last been broken — this meant that the position of the next Zhuyin Sect Leader was now virtually beyond dispute. Given the degree of Yun Guyan’s favoritism toward his eldest son, it was as good as set in stone that Yun Changliu would inherit the mantle. Even the unfathomable Wuze Realm — so long as Yun Guyan truly had a mind to shelter him — need only assign one of his own shadow guards to the Young Sect Leader’s side, and passing through the Wuze Realm within a year would be no great matter.

For a time, people spoke endlessly about this future Zhuyin Sect Leader who so rarely showed his face in public. Most were not overly troubled — they reckoned that Yun Changliu succeeding as Sect Leader would not come for several decades at the earliest, and that they had a great deal of time yet to slowly study this Young Sect Leader’s temperament and manner.

Yet at the same time, another piece of news was being kept under strict lock and key within Xifeng City itself. Save for a small number of the headquarters’ senior leadership, very few people outside knew just how harrowing this cure had truly been.

On that day, under an enormous shock, the Fengchun Sheng poison within Yun Changliu’s body had suddenly erupted in full force, and in an instant his life hung by a thread. The freshly drawn heart’s blood had no time to be processed into medicine — it could only be poured down his throat in haste, all of it at once. The Young Sect Leader’s condition fluctuated repeatedly, and it was not until ten days later that he finally stabilized.

Mercifully, the efficacy of a medicine person’s heart’s blood proved extraordinary — the Fengchun Sheng poison within Yun Changliu’s body seemed to have vanished without a trace.

The one variable was that when the Young Sect Leader at last woke, his memory had suffered a loss.

He had forgotten someone. Everything that had ever happened concerning Ah Ku had been erased from Yun Changliu’s memory, becoming an empty void that could not be grasped.

Yun Changliu could not recall it. The rift in his memory seemed to have scarred over — any attempt to touch it brought a splitting headache and difficulty breathing.

The Hundred Medicines Elder therefore forbade the Young Sect Leader from trying to remember, saying that one false move and no one knew what danger might follow.

No one had foreseen that those two young men, who had spent seven years side by side, would come to such an end.

****

Another five days passed.

The Young Sect Leader Changliu, who had been confined to bed in the Medicine Gate for a total of fifteen days, was at last permitted to return to his Changsheng Pavilion.

Yun Changliu walked out of the Medicine Gate.

It was a bright spring day, with white clouds drifting lazily overhead. The Young Sect Leader still wore his customary snow-white robe with wide sleeves. As he made his way slowly out from the depths of the gate, the physicians of the Medicine Gate and the patrolling Zhuhuo Guards he passed along the way all bowed to him one after another, their expressions carrying a reverence that had not been there before.

There was neither sorrow nor joy on Yun Changliu’s handsome and refined face. He held his head slightly lowered, his long, cool eyes equally cast downward in indifference, looking at no one.

A person — no matter how resolute of will — who suddenly and inexplicably loses great swaths of memory one day, will never find that an easy thing to bear.

Most of all, when that person is told that this lost past may never be recovered, the sense of loss and anxiety becomes all the more profound.

A small commotion appeared ahead.

Yun Changliu raised his eyes. The disturbance was happening some ten-odd steps away.

He saw an unfamiliar young man dressed in the blue-grey garb of a medicine person — gaunt and haggard, his complexion as ashen as a dead man’s.

Everyone around was bowing or kneeling toward the Young Sect Leader. Yet this blue-clad youth, who looked as though a gust of wind could scatter him to pieces, stood with a perfectly straight spine and stared directly ahead with a pair of jet-black eyes.

Yun Changliu did not recognize him, only finding the young man somewhat strange.

It was not uncommon to see medicine people in the Medicine Gate who had been tormented into madness and derangement. But to allow such a lowly little madman to cause a scene before Young Sect Leader Changliu — that would be a grave offence on the Medicine Gate’s part.

Sure enough, in the next moment, the medicine person who had dared to show disrespect toward the Young Sect Leader was kicked to the ground by furious Medicine Gate physicians, while two other physicians stepped forward, sweating profusely as they apologized to the Young Sect Leader again and again.

Yun Changliu frowned, then waved his hand to signal it was no matter.

He continued walking forward, his stride not disrupted in the slightest by the commotion around him.

As he passed alongside that young man, the Young Sect Leader heard a faint cry of pain.

From the corner of his eye he saw the blue-clad medicine person, who was being “disciplined,” writhing in agony, curled into a trembling ball — one skeletal hand clutching desperately, desperately, at his own chest, shaking without cease.

Yet in the very instant that Yun Changliu drew level with him, that young man seemed to find strength from somewhere unknown. He suddenly lurched forward two crawling paces, shot out a hand, and five fingers clamped tight around the hem of the Young Sect Leader’s robe.

Yun Changliu’s feet came to a halt. He turned back, taken aback.

Looking down from above, he regarded this unfamiliar young medicine person with a calm gaze tinged with a thread of curiosity.

Ah Ku looked back at Yun Changliu.

…When Yun Guyan had told him in person, Ah Ku had not believed it.

He had endured the torment of a needle piercing his heart, and had dragged his barely-living body back from the gates of hell for the Young Sect Leader’s sake. In the moment he woke on the bed, feeling the weakness and searing pain in his heart meridian, he knew that this body was ruined for the rest of his life.

Yet he was not afraid, and he had no regrets. He was filled with joy — even a faint, quiet pride. He had believed he could survive, and he had truly survived. He thought that once he was through this ordeal, nothing but good days lay ahead. He thought of the Young Sect Leader’s promise, and of the Sect Leader’s word; he counted the days until the peach blossoms would bloom. In all his fifteen years of life, he had never been so happy.

And so when Yun Guyan had come to see him, Ah Ku had curled his lips at the Sect Leader in a smile. His eyes had been bright. Weak but pleased, he had laughed and asked: does the Sect Leader’s word still hold? In truth he had already been certain of the answer — it had never once crossed his mind that Yun Guyan might go back on it.

He had never imagined he would hear an answer that would overturn everything.

At first, Ah Ku refused to believe it. He refused to believe that fate could be so cruel, refused to believe that Yun Changliu could truly have forgotten him.

Not unless he saw it with his own eyes and heard it with his own ears.

Yun Changliu’s expression grew faintly grave. The hem of his robe had been seized and was now creased and dirtied. The Young Sect Leader said to that medicine person, “Let go.”

Ah Ku blinked. He still gazed at the Young Sect Leader without looking away.

The sound of whips cutting through the air rang out. The physicians, both alarmed and furious, drew disciplinary whips specially used for disciplining medicine people and lashed them across his back. They put their full strength into it — immediately, his flesh split open.

Ah Ku gritted his teeth and took several blows, his clothes slashed to ribbons. His mouth was filled with the coppery sweetness of blood, and his fingers tightened further still, as though he wished to tear the fabric he was clutching to shreds.

But this grip — fierce as a drowning man clinging to driftwood — lasted only an instant. Without even needing the Young Sect Leader to speak again, Ah Ku slowly, slowly, let go.

Yun Changliu gazed at this strange medicine person. Seeing the young man’s barely-there breath, he had no desire to add further punishment, and so merely turned away with cold indifference to leave.

Ah Ku made no sound. He raised his head and stared with eyes still as a dead pool at Yun Changliu’s retreating figure — brilliant as snow, untouched by dust.

Young Sect Leader…

You said you would protect me for the rest of my life. You said you liked me. Now I am being trampled into the dirt and humiliated before your eyes — and you do nothing?

You will not even look at me?

Even if you were furious that I deceived you — you could beat me, you could curse me, you could stop caring for me the way you once did. But how could you forget me? Do you truly have the heart to punish me in such a cruel way?

Ah Ku bit down hard. His consciousness was growing hazy, his breath weaker still.

He had only barely clung to life to begin with. The heart is the sovereign of the five organs and six viscera. The long needle that drew his blood had destroyed his heart meridian — even being moved now caused him pain so intense he wished he could simply lose consciousness. How could he endure such lashing on top of that…

Young Sect Leader, please turn back. Turn back and look at me once.

Young Sect Leader, do you truly no longer want me?

****

Suddenly, the disciplinary whips raining down on him stopped.

The physicians drew back. Ah Ku, collapsed in a wretched heap on the ground, stirred weakly. He forced his eyelids open, and through blurring vision he saw Yun Changliu standing before him once more.

He was covered in blood and filth, wretched and soiled; and his Young Sect Leader remained as he always had — cool and pristine, untouched by the dust of the world.

Yun Changliu crouched down to Ah Ku’s level. He hesitated, and with a furrowed brow asked:

“You… have I known you before?”

Ah Ku froze.

He looked up carefully and saw the pair of eyes before him — a pool of cold clarity within. It was the look Yun Changliu wore when facing a stranger: even when his gaze rested on a person, the depths of his pupils remained utterly indifferent.

This subtle difference in expression was something very few people could distinguish. Ah Ku had not paid it any mind before. He used to cling to Yun Changliu’s side every day making trouble, demanding with every other breath that the Young Sect Leader cherish only him — once even sulking because the Young Sect Leader had embraced Ye Ru.

Only when Yun Changliu had truly forgotten him did he suddenly and startlingly realize just how wholeheartedly and completely the Young Sect Leader had once loved him. And at the same time, he realized with equal shock that in the Young Sect Leader’s eyes, he was now no different from the ten thousand anonymous faces of strangers.

This was Yun Changliu. This was how Yun Changliu had always been.

In this moment, that swell of unwillingness within Ah Ku’s heart — that stubborn, relentless obsession — dissolved, inexplicably, all at once.

“Ugh—!” Suddenly, Yun Changliu’s frame swayed slightly. He pressed a hand tightly over his head with deeply creased brows, a flash of barely-suppressed pain crossing his face.

The rift in his memory was aching within him again. The Young Sect Leader struggled to breathe through it, but still persisted in asking Ah Ku. “Speak — speak. Who are you, exactly—”

In that instant, Ah Ku seemed to understand exactly how he ought to reply. They had gone through such tremendous hardship to cure the Fengchun Sheng poison — could he really bear to make Yun Changliu suffer again?

He opened his mouth, voice hoarse. “This slave…”

Ah Ku knelt upright and pressed his forehead deep against the ground. It was the posture of abasement that medicine people had long made habit — the very posture he had once so despised. He had thought it his lowest; he was using it now.

“This slave… offended the Young Sect Leader, and deserves ten thousand deaths…”

Ah Ku kowtowed earnestly, and spoke the words he had once found most contemptible — the kind of words he used to berate Ye Ru for saying:

“This slave begs the Young Sect Leader’s mercy, and asks that you spare this slave’s worthless life…”

The pain in his mind gradually receded.

Yun Changliu steadied his breathing, and understood.

This medicine person had offended him. By the rules, a few more blows from the physicians’ whips and the person would likely not survive. That desperate, grasping reach just now had been a plea for clemency — to beg for his life.

Young Sect Leader Changliu lowered his eyes and concealed the faint sense of loss that rose unbidden from the depths of his heart. He stood, and with a casual gesture toward the medicine person youth before him, said indifferently to the physicians: “Spare him.”

The physicians assented at once.

Yun Changliu did not look again. This time he truly turned and left.

Ah Ku was silent. He raised his head, his gaze still as stagnant water, watching as Yun Changliu’s luminous, snow-white silhouette gradually receded into the distance.

His little Young Sect Leader was still so sparing with words.

His little Young Sect Leader was still so indifferent.

His little Young Sect Leader was still so merciful.

A faint curve broke across Ah Ku’s lips. A wave of cold seeped through his entire body. He was still trying his hardest to keep his eyes open, to look — but that transcendent white silhouette had grown impossible to see clearly…

His little Young Sect Leader was so wonderful. So wonderful.

His little Young Sect Leader, from this day on, was no longer his.

****

Inside the Medicine Gate, the Young Sect Leader Changliu’s figure grew more and more distant, while Ah Ku remained kneeling exactly where he was, rigid as a figure carved from clay or wood. A physician gave him a contemptuous kick to the lower back and spat. “You truly swallowed the gall of a wolf and the heart of a leopard, you lowly wretch — you caused a scene before the Young Sect Leader just now, and now you dare stare at the Young Sect Leader’s back! You were spared by the Young Sect Leader’s own grace — consider yourself lucky, and get lost already!”

The blue-clad youth did not get lost. He pitched forward with the force of the kick, and toppled sideways to the ground.

The physicians all froze.

The one who had kicked him bent down, grabbed this audacious medicine person, and hauled him around to face upward.

The young man’s eyes were clenched tightly shut. Strands of black hair lay tangled across his deathly pale cheeks. His four limbs were limp and pliant, allowing himself to be moved however they pleased. His chest no longer rose and fell.

A physician reached out and tested beneath his nose, then immediately changed color:

“What — how? This child — he’s not breathing!”

The others around him were startled. Another person crouched down, patted Ah Ku’s cold face, and pressed fingers to his neck. The response came quickly, and loudly: “Can’t find a pulse either. He… he’s really dead?”

“We were just saying he was lucky to be alive, and now he’s gone — it seems he simply wasn’t fated to hold on to good fortune. What do we do?”

“What else? Wrap the body in a mat and throw it out.”

“…”

The chaotic voices from behind drifted faintly into Yun Changliu’s ears from a distance.

The Young Sect Leader had already reached the exit of the Medicine Gate. A gentle breeze brushed past him. He looked at the brilliant sunlight and dappled cloud shadows falling across the leaves and branches of the medicine fields — and his footsteps paused, just for an instant, with the faintest twinge of reluctance.

Death came far too often among the medicine people, who were treated no better than livestock.

A person still alive one moment, gone a few hours later — unable to endure and taking their last breath. Such tragedies were commonplace beyond all reckoning.

Yun Changliu felt the smallest thread of pity.

But it was no more than that.

He did not look back, and walked out of the Medicine Gate at his unhurried pace.

****

Without any warning, the sound of hurried footsteps broke through the whispered conversation of the physicians. They all turned to look — and hastily bowed in greeting: “We pay our respects to the Gate Master!”

The face of Guan Muyan, who came rushing over, had already gone a frightful shade. He said nothing, shoving the physicians carelessly aside and dropping beside Ah Ku, testing the child’s breath and heartbeat, then turning back his eyelids.

One of the physicians, sensing that something seemed amiss, tried helplessly to explain. “Gate Master, this medicine person—”

Guan Muyan paid no heed. He immediately propped Ah Ku into a sitting position, drew the needles he always carried on his person, and plunged them into several major acupoints across the young man’s body.

The divine physician’s hands moved with extraordinary speed. In a breath’s time, over a dozen silver needles had entered the body — and yet Ah Ku, who appeared to be already dead, showed not the slightest reaction.

Cold sweat began to bead on Guan Muyan’s brow. He sat cross-legged behind Ah Ku, brought his palms together, and channeled his internal energy to strike the acupoints through the air without contact. The silver needles vibrated with a fine, subtle tremor, reverberating through the meridians in rhythmic waves of resonance — now deep, now shallow — as though turned again and again by an unseen pair of deft hands.

After roughly a dozen or so breaths, the life-drained youth suddenly went rigid all over. An unnatural flush rose up his paper-white face.

He abruptly opened his eyes, and with a violent pfft, expelled a great mouthful of blackened, congealed blood. The ten-odd silver needles all shot outward from his body at once, scattering across the ground with a clattering rain of sound.

The physicians had long since been struck dumb. One of them murmured in disbelief. “Brought — brought back from the dead…?!”

Ah Ku swayed, then once again lost all strength. Eyes falling shut, he slumped backward softly into Guan Muyan’s arms, gasping and coughing without cease, barely clinging to a thread of breath.

Only then did Guan Muyan let out a long breath of relief. He wiped the large drops of sweat from his brow, reached out both hands, and held the child with great care as he lifted him.

Ah Ku’s neck hung slack, his head resting against the old man’s shoulder, half-lidded eyes trembling. He coughed and retched blood without stopping, his throat straining with the effort of each swallow, pale lips quivering with each frail breath as he lay against Guan Muyan…

Like a dying young creature, clinging to the last of its life.