Flower Stealing Master

Chapter 1116: The Celestial Music of Nature

Fine and long those brows, gently curved that mouth — had Di Yun been present, he surely would have marvelled at how his martial sister’s face had filled out from what it was a few years before, grown softer and lovelier, like a peach ripened to its fullest.

Wan Gui, however, had no such tender sentiments. At his wife’s words, his expression shifted and he shoved her aside as he rose abruptly to his feet. “What do you mean, ‘hurting people’? What does a woman know of men’s affairs!”

Qi Fang smiled a sorrowful smile. “I come from the countryside, and I haven’t much learning. But I know right from wrong. I know something of what you did today — even people of the wulin look down on striking an enemy from the shadows. Your grandfather is a Chief Minister of the court, yet he acts without scruple or method. And you — rather than counsel him otherwise, you act as his willing accomplice—”

Crack!

A sharp slap. A vivid red handprint bloomed across Qi Fang’s fair, smooth cheek.

“Shut your mouth!” Wan Gui shot a startled glance toward the window. Seeing no one nearby, he allowed himself to breathe again, then rounded on his wife with a fierce glare. “What do you understand? My father’s line is a concubine’s branch — we’ve been wandering the wulin all our lives. If we don’t find ways to please Grandfather, how will we ever establish ourselves within the family?”

“What does it matter if we can’t establish ourselves?” Despite her heartache, Qi Fang blinked back tears and reached for her husband’s arm, hoping that tenderness might soften the stone of him. “We could return to Jingzhou and live quietly. Couldn’t the family be happy together, just like that?”

“The thinking of a woman!” Wan Gui wrenched his arm free with a cold snort. “My grandfather is the Chief Minister — second only to the Emperor himself, above ten thousand others. What a position of honour that is. Doing a few things under his banner is worth more than ten years of a common man’s lamp-lit studying. Return to Jingzhou? So that a petty prefect like Ling Tuisi could look down on us? I have no intention of going back to that stifling kind of life.”

A look of deep disappointment passed through Qi Fang’s eyes. She understood at last that the gulf between them on this matter was simply too vast to be bridged. Though she had read little, she had been raised with a kind heart and had always known good from evil. When she first learned that her husband’s grandfather was Moqi , she had felt as though the sky itself had collapsed. Yet she had always kept to the old ways — a woman follows her husband, for better or worse — and so she had endured it all in silence. These past two years she had urged him many times to leave, but each attempt ended the same way, the two of them parting in mutual ill feeling.[G: Moqi refers to Wan Gui’s grandfather, the notorious Moqi, who was responsible for the death of the patriotic general Yue Fei — one of the most reviled villains in Chinese historical memory.]

“I’m going back to Lin’an first thing tomorrow morning,” Qi Fang said suddenly. “I miss Kongxincai.” Kongxincai was the daughter she had borne Wan Gui. Wan Gui did not know the origin of the name; had he known, he would never have allowed his daughter to carry another man’s nickname. [G: Kongxincai, meaning “hollow-stemmed vegetable” or water spinach, was the childhood nickname that Qi Fang and Di Yun had given to Di Yun.] 

“We still have unfinished business here — we can’t leave tomorrow!” With Song Qingshu still at large, Wan Gui felt a restless unease gnawing at him. But the sight of his wife’s mournful face softened him somewhat, and he knew that keeping her here was only causing her suffering. “Fine. I’ll have someone escort you back tomorrow.”

The reason he had brought her to Yangzhou in the first place was to pose as a family on an outing, a cover to deflect the attention of sharp eyes in Lin’an. Now that matters in Yangzhou were largely settled, and certain arrangements had been made with Han, there was no longer any need for the pretence. Sending her home was the sensible thing — better than having her linger here and grate on his nerves with her endless reproaches.

The plan had gone well today, and Wan Gui had been in high spirits, intending to use his recovery time to seek some warmth from his young wife. Instead she had served him the same tired sermon as always, killing his mood entirely. After agreeing to send her home the next day, he left with a face full of displeasure.

Left alone with the image of his sullen departure in her mind, Qi Fang grew more and more desolate. She fell across the bed and wept, soft and broken.

*****

Had Song Qingshu known that his chief tormentors were at such discord with each other, he would certainly have clapped his hands in satisfaction. But at that moment, he had no leisure for such thoughts.

He was, after all, gravely poisoned. The exertion of flight had stirred the Heavenly Devil Flower’s venom, which had grown deceptively quiet for a time, back into violent activity. Song Qingshu felt a creeping numbness spreading through his limbs. At moments there came a strange, vertiginous sensation — as though he were nothing but consciousness, stripped of his body entirely.

“Quickly — he’s over there!”

The pursuers were closing in. Song Qingshu had been through battles before; from the shouts and signals in the darkness, he quickly deduced that they had split into two forces — one driving from behind, the other circling ahead to cut him off.

Knowing further flight was futile, he stopped. Not far ahead he spotted a concealed cave entrance in the mountainside. He dragged himself toward it and stumbled inside.

He gathered a few branches to screen the opening, then collapsed completely. Things that on any ordinary day he could have managed with a flick of his sleeve had nearly cost him his life tonight.

He had thought it through clearly. Either the pursuers were blind and would miss the cave — in which case all would be well. That possibility, he knew, was vanishingly small. They had come to hunt him; they would leave no thicket unsearched, no hollow unexplored. This cave would not be overlooked.

But even if they found him, so be it. There was nowhere left to run. Better to use the narrow entrance of the cave as a chokepoint — one man holding a pass — than to be surrounded from all sides in the open. He knew he had little time left in this world, but a cave could be a fine place to take a few enemies along for the journey.

It’s time to leave some last words…

The thought surfaced suddenly, and Song Qingshu went quiet.

He had heard that phrase once, in his previous life, watching an old animated series. An alien stranded on Easter Island had waited a lifetime for a ship that never came to take him home. Knowing his end was near, he had murmured those words to himself.

At the time it had meant nothing to him. Now, recalling it, Song Qingshu felt a profound and unexpected kinship with that alien — he too was a stranger passing through a world not his own. And he too, at the end of it, was utterly alone.

Well then. If that alien left his testament carved into the Easter Island statues, I ought to leave something of my own — some proof that I existed in this world.

He reached into his robe and drew out a roll of white cloth, and then a stick of charcoal he had fashioned into a writing brush. But he hesitated before setting the first mark down.

Last words are for those closest to you. He had no children. He had no shortage of beloved women — but writing to each of them would take time he didn’t have, and cloth he didn’t possess.

Since leaving any one of them out would be an offence, he would leave none of them out — by leaving no names at all. Let them all resent me together.

But his arts — his hard-won, extraordinary martial arts — those he could not bear to let rot with his bones into the earth.

He finally understood why, in all those novels, protagonists tumbling down cliffs or stumbling into caves so reliably discovered the secret manuals of great masters. Because he was now a dying master, and he had no desire to let his life’s work perish alongside him.

The white cloth was limited in space. After much deliberation, he decided to set down the key passages of the Joyful Meditation Method. He had barely written a few verses when a commotion broke out not far from the cave entrance — the pursuers had arrived.

“There’s no time left.” Song Qingshu felt the Heavenly Devil Flower’s poison seeping into every corner of his body, flooding his four limbs and a hundred bones. Even the charcoal stick had slipped from his fingers. He let himself accept it, and closed his eyes.

Then — just at that moment — a clear, cool voice drifted to his ears:

“Oh? Is this the martial technique that caused me such… embarrassment last time?”

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