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Chapter Text

‘Fate leads the willing.’ 
The Immortal fell quiet and met the beggar’s eyes. 
‘I need not tell you,’ he reminded, ‘what befalls those who are not.’

- From the folk tales of Shan Yin, Immortal Warden of Huang Zun.  

For the fisherman who dwells by the southern shore of Huang Zun, a few bits of driftwood could mean a pot of hot porridge. If the winds blow favorably, the sea’s spittle can even gift him enough to trade for a turnip or two. And so by dawn, he wanders out to greet the salt-laden winds and feel the white sands close around his bare ankles. His nets are often empty now; the sea has been uncharitable in the past years, and what little he catches is as sleek and thin as he. But the winds had blustered and billowed in the night, and the pale shore lies dappled with dark seaweed and chipped shells and the odd, bleached branch of wood, so Xu the fisherman takes his woven basket and hobbles westwards.  

The salt water burns the boils and sores on his feet. What ailment his feet suffer from, he does not know. His soles are thick and calloused; coarse as cured leather, and still they bear him. Not fast, and not well, but he thinks his feet should endure a few more winters yet. By then, his eyes will be too poor, and his hands too weak, and he can remain in his bed, and close his eyes, and think no more of fish and turnips, and let the sea sing him to sleep. 

But while his feet still hold him, his hunger is a steadfast wolf, and his thoughts wander to stewed fish and millet and the warmth of a hot bowl between his hands. What his eyes cannot see in the white sands, his feet and hands find for him; little pieces of wood, clusters of clams, the shell of a crab.

His hands find the dead one too, there on the shore of the crescent cove, amidst knots of rotted seaweed and driftwood. 

Driftwood, he names him; the man with the bloodied mouth and the threadbare whispers of a heart still awake. 

Old Xu knows how to trade. The sea’s spittle for two turnips. A gentler, warmer death for the robes on the drowned man’s back. A fair bargain, the old fisherman tells himself as he hobbles to fetch his nets. His arms have no strength in them to carry such a burden. Let the sands ease his toil; let the gray skies mourn the sea’s whims. Let the winds steal the last shudders of the dying man’s breath. With these unspoken words in his heart does the fisherman haul his catch back to the hut by the bank. 

The sea bears witness to his labor, hears his quiet grunts as he heaves the dead upon his back to climb the last steps to his door. Old Xu knows the sea’s wrath too. His small abode he built above the reach of her capricious hands. 

He throws the dead one onto his own bed; takes his satchel, takes his robes. Torn as they are, the fabric is soft. He thinks the seamstress might want it. If he sells the satchel at the market, it will keep him fed for many a long, wintry day. The embroidered, empty pouch he finds within the robes, he will keep for the bitter days to come, and warm himself on the knowledge that he has a prize to trade for fire and hot congee. 

More than this, he does not find. If the dead one had ever worn a hair ornament or bracelet, the sea has taken them for herself. Old Xu still thanks the winds and spares a dried branch for his stove, so he may stir some warmth under his roof. He tucks his own tatters around narrow shoulders; hides a hollowed stomach and pallid skin drawn taut over sharp ribs, nests a folded rag under a dark head. Then he cooks his own millet and broth and sits down to mend an old pail.  

‘Be quiet,’ he says now and then, when the man’s wet breaths shudder through him like a drenched sailcloth in the winds, ‘be quiet and do not fight. Ease into it, and the path will be gentler on you.’

‘Better sleep here,’ he murmurs as he hobbles to the bed to catch the blood running from the corners of the man’s mouth. ‘Better here than at sea. You can stay if you want. Whisper in the wood, wander on my roof, sleep here in the shadows. You have the face of a quiet man. You won’t put out my fires or clatter with the pots, I think. So better sleep here than at sea. She would have you. Many a man has she taken before you. Fishermen, generals, sons and fathers, lords and royal brides. Covetous is she, and jealous, dressed in the moon’s silver at night and the sun’s praise. But below her handsome gown, Fú Mù, she is black and cold as the winds below Naihe bridge. I have known her. Oh, long have I known her. She would have you, and you would wander in her realm, where no light ever reaches, a lonely spirit bound to her dark, salt heart.’

‘So die here,’ sighs the old fisherman as he pours water to wash the salt from the torn robe he has taken, ‘if you can not die in your own bed. And die gently. I will bury you in the sands and give you a name to wear on your grave.’

By dawn, it will be over, he tells himself as the wet gasps weaken, and the mouth of the man turns as gray as the clouds above the sea. The breaths still left in him are but whispers; small embers caught in a candle’s wick. They will not kindle that wick; will not burn.

At nightfall, the first cough shakes the old bed; strains the brittle woodwork. By then, old Xu has eaten the last millet and broth and sits on the lid of an old chest. His qi, as wooden as his bones, is slow to flow now. He knows no techniques to bend it to his whims, and never had a need for them. His is the easy way; let the qi do what it wills. In his youth; he knew how to rap a staff over a pickpocket’s wrist. In the fall of his last years, with eyes weak and hands ridden with tremors, he keeps no treasures to guard. So he listens to the sea’s murmur and the wind’s low song, breathes the scent of raw seaweed and the smoke of burnt wood, feels the wood bite into his back. 

The second cough cuts through the quiet like a knife cuts through paper. Old Xu opens his eyes. He finds the man’s chin stained red. 

The figure on his bed has no strength left to writhe under the anguish of his convulsions. Red froth gathers between pallid lips; runs down the man’s neck, soaks the brown tatters. Xu the fisherman eyes his door and wonders if his old feet will agree to wander until quiet is restored to his hut, and his driftwood will never draw breath again.

‘The sea spat you out, and still you drown,’ he laments at the gray face. He hobbles closer. And with some efforts from hands stiff and feeble does he turn the man to lie on his side. Blood runs from his mouth, pours onto wooden planks and straw, and the overwrought chest dares a shaken and stolen inhale of breath.

Xu shakes his head at this.

‘A quiet man and a stubborn man, I think,’ says he. ‘With roots like a mountain. And what use, I ask, what use is all this to you now? You torment yourself, and you keep me from my sleep. Unmoor yourself and let us both have peace.’

As he speaks, old Xu drifts back to his stove. The prized satchel he found upon the dying man, he hung up to dry. Now he takes it down to feel the innards with his withered hand. 

‘But I promised you a gentler death, and I won’t have you clatter my pots and breathe the cold of the grave on my bed here,’ he grouses. ‘And Tao Ming takes no less than three silver taels for an exorcism these days.’

‘Shush,’ he croaks at another faint cough from the bed. ‘What is it you ask of me? I am no physician, like you seem to have been. See here, what’s these for?’

No consolation is there to find in the physician’s satchel; no bottled, potent remedies, no silver needles, no silken handkerchief of a loved one to fold in the dying man’s hand. Molded, soaked bread he finds. A flask made of a hollowed gourd too. Later he will trade it for a pair of straw sandals. Of the herbs in the medicinal pouches, he is none the wiser. A few dried leaves, a bottle of pungent, dried fungus, a few smaller sachets. One holds the remains of a brown powder; another a red one. All have been stained by saltwater. Only a ragged pouch in pale blue hides bit of oiled cloth, in which the old fisherman finds more dried herbs.

Petals, white and pale red, a nail’s length of some dried root, a few seeds and a confection wrapped in brown paper.

‘What good will all this do now?’ asks the fisherman. ‘No good for you. Perhaps a quiet night for me. I’ll boil this up.’

He puts the pot on his stove. Of water is he rich, for he lives near a creek bound to the sea, and the water there is sweet. And while he suffers to burn more of his wood that day, he still feeds the stove’s black mouth, lights fire and allows the water to simmer. 

‘Word by mouth, ear to ear, I have heard that when one good remedy blends with another, it will become poison. So it is with a man and his wife. Well, what will be, will be.’ As he speaks, he adds the leaves and fungus, the petals, the grains of powder; all that he found, he stirs into the water. The sweet he takes for himself and sucks on it, but when he tries a taste of the bitter brew, he spits out the confection and stirs until it melts.

Then, he takes a stool to sit near his bed, heaves the dying one onto his back, raises his head and brings the first spoonful of his poison to a red-stained mouth. 

The hooks are thin and sharp as needles. The first one tears through him; burrows into him, hooks the tatters of him to the last, feeble dribble of qi caught in ravaged pathways. 

On the bank of the black river, the wanderer halts. A lone spirit is this; gray and vaporous as the mists around his bare feet. 

He has no name he knows of, and no path to follow. As far as he knows, he has always wandered by the shores of the endless river. 

Now and then will he see other wanderers ahead of him; some bent and hooded, others straight and youthful, some with no faces, smooth like river pebbles, others like carved stone. All are pale gray. They come as a stream unending. Many had come before him. Many more will come to wander that way, long, long after the last of him has faded with the mists.

A few, he sees, walk hand in hand, bound and braided into each other, part of a whole on a journey to a land of no return. 

They follow a path unseen and do not answer him. He thinks he might have reached for them once; but his hand was of mist and the breath of a moth’s wings, and the cold of them burned him if he came too near. 

So he wanders by himself; falters around each bend, treads the smooth stones, and the dead waters lick at the bone-bleached shore before him. Now and then, they reveal to him the faint reflections of a man. A faceless beggar in rags; a royal in an Emperor’s gown. A swordsman in white, a cripple. A boy. He does not know them; has never known them. Neither of them wear tatters of severed threads on their left wrist. 

The poison’s hooks, when they catch him, tear an end into the eternal. 

Thousand upon thousands, they burn like molten iron. The fire eats at his innards, drains the black river, burns away the bleached shore on which he stands, carries to him the echo of blood on his tongue. With no voice for his anguish, he writhes, claws, wounds himself, tears himself apart to flee that unseen, torturous entrapment. He strives for the dead river, but the waters will not have him. He falls to his knees, claws and claws, but there is no purchase to find on that smooth, cold stone.

Please, he pleads. 

No one answers him. No deities are there in the Netherworld with ears for the untethered voices of the nameless.

The first wet breath he comes to know stutters through him with the tremors of qi in raw and tender pathways. He knows the timid flow, the one balm in a sea of an agony beyond endurance. He is the flow. 

A poison. The vessel to which the hooks fettered him is steeped in poison; it hollows him, sears through worm-eaten meridians, scrapes out remains of an old ailment black and fetid, knits back parts of him long since withered and crippled. It tears him open to a timid flow which whispers of a name he no longer knows.

A strange qi is this; the moon’s sharp and vivacious silver, braided into currents that are not his own. A gale; a storm. The sun’s mirthful warmth.

The pain ought end him; no heart could bear such anguish. His own had long since surrendered. But the new venom enslaves it; wrings one more quiver from it. And another. And another.

This is penance, he knows, with the wordless, fevered knowledge beyond all thought and reason. He had wronged and been wronged, had asked and received, had wanted but not wanted, had feared and taken but refused and forked his own path, then cast himself by the wayside.

He had — 

The whispers are not his, but speak in his borrowed voice. And what they tell him, he can not say. He does not even know his own name. Later, much later, words will entwine the anguish of that night and teach him. 

But the man who was brought to die in old Xu’s hut does not come to know words for a long, long while. 

For what it is worth, he lives through the night, and rouses chagrin in the old man who has sought to ease his death with such diligence. By the first break of gray over the quiet sea, his wet, bloodied coughs and shudders have turned into raw and strained breaths that cut up his throat. The cold pallor of his skin is mottled by the fire of fever, his fists clenched against the cramps that would have cost him his tongue if the old one had not owned enough sense to set a wooden spoon between his teeth. 

Blind, mute and lame, trapped in the hollowed remains of his earthen self, he comes to know day and night as spoonfuls of millet and fish broth. Now and again is there a yellow light in the dark fog; a scent of stale fat and woodsmoke. Now and again does he hear the prattle of a voice like a rusted lock; long litanies that blend with the rhythmic murmurs of the sea. 

‘… So there, no need to weep. What do you have to weep for? You lived. Had I known you kept such wonders in your satchel, I should have sold those powders and leaves to Blind Shi. She has a son, Blind Shi, a boy eight years old, who is all bones and clouded eyes who can neither run nor work. I’d have sold those fine powders to her; I’d give them away for half a sack of grain. What good did they do to you where you lie there?’

He does not know. 

Now and again is there a stench of rotted seaweed and unwashed rags, of black teeth and old age. A stern hand on his chin, the touch like coarse leather. He shudders away from it; begs reprieve from the coarse sack against his cheek. 

‘Be still, you,’ gnarls the voice. ‘Fú Mù, I named you, but you brought no warmth to my stove. All rotten and brittle. What use is there for you? Be still, or I’ll throw you to the sea.’

Fú Mù. Driftwood. 

Throw me to the sea, he begs.

The leathered hands do not. 

Now and again, the moon’s silver quavers and runs dry in his raw and sore meridians; there is not enough left to tether the spirit to the crippled vessel, and the one named Driftwood can once more see the pale shores of a river darker than any night. But when he falters, the storms and sun’s warmth still enfold him; breathe his breaths, coax his heart to beat.

They are not mine, he comes to understand, one moon’s turn past the day the fisherman had brought him to his hut to die.

With that knowledge comes a word. Yangzhouman.

But the storms and the sun’s warmth are not Yangzhouman, and yet they are part of his currents; his qi to have, to own, to be.

He does not remember who they had been, the two who had given so generously of themselves. 

‘A liar, I think,’ croaks the old one in his corner, as he is wont to do when the nights fall and the sea is in turmoil. ‘You have the face of a liar, do you know? Oh, I shall wager the women had a good eye to you. Well, you are not much to look at now. My eyes are poor enough, and that is a mercy. Look at yourself; hollow cheeks and bitten mouth. What did you bite yourself for, I ask you? You got a liar’s mouth.’

The silence which follows the judgment of his character is thick and laden. Steps hobble back and forth over creaking wood. Uneven, a clear, cold part of his mind supplies him, old. 

Then, 

‘I will cut your hair, I think.’

Driftwood folds in on himself. A short moment after, a leathered hand finds his shoulder and a fist winds into sweat-stiffened tresses. 

The first word he comes to breathe is water.

The hut stands empty at high noon; Xu the fisherman has wandered out to trade his fish and dried seaweed.

No one gives him water. 

The first sight he comes to know is the blurred, salt-stained scraps of old sailcloth hung from the rafters. They billow like quiet ghosts and take him for one of their own.

As winter comes, the days bring more, but not with a generous hand. By and by, he learns to sit, to hold a spoon, to wash his own face with a wet cloth. 

‘Lotus root,’ says the old man as he tucks a bowl of paste between his hands. ‘Eat while you still have teeth. It’s yours. I sold your hair.’

He eats. The warm paste quells the cold within his hollow stomach for as long as he can raise the spoon to his mouth. 

‘What is your name?’ asks the fisherman one eve. That and much more does he ask, for he came from town with a pot of rice wine in him, and his tongue is oiled and loose. From where does he hail? What sect had lost him? Had he been a seafarer, a physician on a ship? Had he left behind a wife, a son? Would his near and dear seek far and wide, would they pay in tears and riches to see his face once more?

Driftwood scratches his nose. 

‘I do not know,’ he says. 

The first time he sees his own reflection, he carries water to old Xu’s hut. The path to the creek is not long, but demands of him a climb to reach the green bank above the sands. The skies are dark that day, stern and grim. A cold breeze blows from the sea; crowns her peaks with ivory, combs the grass where the sands meet the curbs of dry earth. He sets down the pail and bends down to rest, a hand on his knee, the other closed around his stick, and sees in the water a thin, wan face. He sees chalked skin drawn taut over his bones; foul against uneven hair that falls short of his shoulders.

Driftwood, he thinks. Burned and carved and hollowed out; bound to the brittle prison by an inner force that is not his own.

He does not stall for long. Xu the fisherman has patience for boiling sinewy seaweed until he can chew it, and for guttering candles and the whims of the winds and the sea. But he has no patience for driftwood which will not burn, and the blows he meted out with his staff bruised skin and left an ache to last. 

Driftwood no longer knows how to soothe such aches; his qi is a faint current that flows as it wills. His hands still think they know a physician’s touches, but those do not avail him; his pale skin does not mend; the cuts he earns himself when he cuts turnips with his feeble hands bleed and bleed. Only at night, on the threshold to sleep, does he feel the remains of storms and sun’s warmth lick at his wounds.

He dreams of two dogs. A small, cheerful one with a pale coat. A dark, scarred pit fighter. They lick at his wrists, hide their snouts against his neck, follow at his heels, become his shadows. 

‘Huli Jing.’

The name leaves his mouth with the first break of dawn. Xu the fisherman stirs in his chair.

‘Is that what you think you are?’ he croaks. ‘Huli Jing? I think not.’ He picks up his sandal and throws it across the hut.

‘Come light the stove for an old man.’

Chapter Text

When the winds blow their first breaths of spring over the eastern coasts, Driftwood begins haunting the streets of Huang Zun.

The weather is raw and the cold eats through his rags, stiffens his hands, blanches his cheeks. Xu the fisherman gives him a hemp cloak to wear over his back, but refuses to part with his warmer furs. 

Trapped on a patch of land between stone and sea, the town kneels to the shadows of barren crags and has little farmland to speak of. Forgotten by the wider world, it sees little trade and pilgrimage, and the townsfolk are wary of travelers. He thinks they will drive him out of town with sticks and stones, the half-blind, starved man from the sea, but the winter wears on, and he becomes known as Xu’s property and is tolerated as such. 

And as old Xu collects driftwood after each storm, so is he a man to collect his debts. The sea brought him no treasure, no wealthy lord who can send for his sect and his wealth and gild his savior with riches. The sea has not thrown at him a swordsman who can toil day as night to set rice wine and steamed chicken on his savior’s table. A bit of driftwood did he find on her shore; a man whose hands shake when he holds out his beggar’s bowl, whose voice is soft and hushed. And old Xu uses him as such.

‘Beg your own bread,’ he tells him one cold morn when he deems Driftwood strong enough to walk as far as to the pig-herder’s fence. ‘I’ve kept you dry all winter, and if you couldn’t be warm, that’s on you. You’re a paper lantern with no wick to light, you are. The winds will tear you apart,’ he strikes his chest with a flat hand, ‘and there’s no embers to feed in you. What fire will warm you, I ask, when you cannot keep any warmth at all?’

‘Would you rather I had eaten sand?’ asks Driftwood of the old man, his eyes cast down upon his folded hands. ‘I will boil myself a pot of sand and seawater, and garnish it with shells and feathers. It shall fatten me better than your stew of kelp and clams, and be gentler on the tongue.’

‘Would that yours had been cut out of your mouth,’ the old one barks at him, ‘ungrateful cadger. Spittle of the sea. Begone, and don’t show your face here unless you come back with half a loaf for me.’

So Driftwood does as he is told, and with a coarse bowl in one hand, and a wooden stick in the other, he finds his slow way back to his roots. It ends as it began, he tells himself as he offers the bowl to a laundress who shies away from him. The beggar boy, now a thin and feeble man, with salt-caked hair and dry, brittle hands, who had for a while worn borrowed names and lived borrowed lives.

No loaf is there for him that day. No one speaks to him. He steals a lotus root from a merchant’s basket and brings it back to boil on the fisherman’s stove. 

‘You’re that drifter,’ says a squint-eyed woman to him the next afternoon. ‘The one old Xu fished out of the sea last year.’ Her voice carries teeth and vinegar, but she tosses him a bit of mantou. ‘Fú Mù,’ she scoffs. ‘Hah. See that he won’t burn you in his stove.’

He smiles at her hands. ‘He won’t burn me,’ he answers. ‘I can’t burn.’

‘Then what’s the use of you?’ she asks of him as she walks on.

Within the first three days, he learns the streets of Huang Zun; the market, the weaver’s red door, the long, narrow alleys between humble homes. The town has no sect to precede over it, no funeral hall, no temple. Rites are performed under the roof of a lone monk who dwells near the outskirts. By hearsay, Driftwood learns that when this man was a child, his parents sent him to be the disciple of some faraway temple. But once the young man learned his rites, he came back to his town of birth, and since then was he content with his lot and his services and sought no more of the wider realm. 

A lord is there too; some son of some forgotten courtier who once fell out of favor with the Emperor and was sent to officiate over this castaway town. Now old and infirm, the son has kept to himself for many a long year. He does not keep banquets, does not invite wealth from afar, and does not see to the needs of the locals. 

‘Don’t come to his door,’ says a sweeper who finds the day dull enough to speak to the quiet beggar from the sea. ‘He doesn’t like the poor. There won’t be any alms to get but hard words and blows for you there.’

‘Who else here does not like the poor?’ asks Driftwood. His stiff hands ache; he does not wish more hard words and blows upon his back before he has tasted his first bread that day.

‘The poor do not like the poor,’ says the sweeper. ‘So don’t you nose at them either. This is their town, you know. You’re one more mouth to feed.’

As it is, there stand at the southwestern edge the ruins of a burnt tavern. A fire once razed that part of the town, and the townsfolk never rebuilt the houses of that quarter. For years have they shunned that charred, barren square, and as the tavern stood abandoned, it became the nest for those who could not work, knew no trade, or had no will to be of use. 

Many of them are children; some unwanted, others orphaned. He sees them at the corners, sees their eyes follow him. They keep away and do him little harm to speak of. If he earns some coppers, which is not often, they fly past him and knock the bowl from his hands. They are faster than him, and he lets them take his coppers as a toll to be paid and does not hide his pittance.

Once, when the boy who tries to rob him falls over his own feet and paws at the dust for coppers he cannot see, Driftwood eases them under the child’s hand. The boy is stunted; perhaps eight or ten years of age, but appears six or seven to the eye. The skin under his eyes is swollen and red with some ailment that leaves his eyes wet and mucous, and he spits and sneezes dust until his mouth is black. 

‘Here,’ says Driftwood while they sit in the dust. The boy kicks away from him; hits the flask he offers and sees it skitter down the road. They both turn after it. Neither of them rise. 

The boy offers him a mute stare. 

‘Fish soup,’ lies Driftwood. ‘You flew so fast. I wanted to offer you food, and here you ran into me.’

‘Are you dumb?’ asks the child with his blackened mouth. He sets his hand on the stolen coin; tucks it into his sleeve.

‘Some have to be, so others can be clever.’ Driftwood shakes dust from his tunic. ‘Fetch the flask. I don’t want it.’

The boy’s infected eyes widen, then narrow. ‘You are dumb.’ 

‘My stupidity is a favor to you,’ sighs the older man. ‘Fetch the flask. There is tofu in the soup.’

He does not bother to stand while the child hobbles after the flask, nor does he care to speak as the boy drinks the salt broth boiled on seaweed and white clams much more mucous than tofu. He does not reach for his flask when the boy has quaffed it all and stands there, uncertain if he dares to filch the flask and run.

‘Don’t like tofu,’ the child decides at last.

‘Mm,’ says Driftwood.

The boy tucks his feet inwards. ‘There is no more soup,’ he dares. 

‘I don’t want it. Fetch me water. Clean water, from the well.’

The child scratches at his scalp. He shakes his hand and peels away more dust from underneath his broken nails. ‘Don’t you want to eat?’ he asks.

‘Such a clever sleuth,’ offers Driftwood. ‘No, I do not want to eat.’

A flare of ire. ‘Then do you want to die?’ 

The child does not stay to hear his answer. He leaves a cloud of dust in his wake and takes with him the coppers, the flask, the broth in his belly. And Driftwood closes his hand around his stick and finds his slow way up on his own feet, and meanders a short while until he finds a sun-baked wall to lean upon. There he sits down, the pale light just warm enough to rouse shivers in him.

‘Do you want to die, Fú Mù?’ he asks the washed-out skies. Raises a hand to shelter his weak eyes. Terns drift upon the winds above; their cries thin over the town’s dry roads and decrepit rooftops. 

In his mind, he asks himself again, and by another name; the one he never shared with old Xu. 

Li Lianhua had answered this question when he kept the white and pale red petals; a thumb’s length of the stalk, three precious seeds, and a sweet confection wrapped in brown paper. Li Lianhua could not live, but had feared death all the same; had stood upon the precipice and faltered and turned his eye to his bed of scallops and his kettle of cheap tea.

Li Xiangyi had not feared death, but demanded to choose death by his own hand. And so had these two men, the old quack and the sect leader, brokered a pact; the quack borrowed of the Wangchuan flower and told himself that when the day was upon him, when the poison would tear from him his last bloodied breaths, the sect leader would keep the cure within his reach and still turn his back upon it. 

These two had not wanted to die and had not wanted to live, and Driftwood has no wants at all. Burned and hollowed out by the cure forced upon him, he is empty and parched; neither ill nor hale. The cough comes and passes, not wet, but dry. His eyes will not mend. He will never again hold a sword. Yet fevers no longer haunt him; his chest rises and falls with even breaths. He has not tasted blood in three moons. 

He draws the hemp cloak tighter around his shoulders and feels the light warm his eyelids, and listens to the echo of storms and sunlit motes of mirth in the shallows of his qi. 

In his mind’s eye, their faces are faded. A boy — no, a young man, who wears his heart on his smile and the light of summer skies in his eyes. A grim, chiseled face. A swordsman in dark garbs, his left face scarred — no, hidden behind ornate iron. A rival, a peer, a red thread woven into his path since the days of his youth.

He left them, he knows. 

Li Xiangyi left them because he could not give them what they wanted. A confidant had been wanted; a fellow investigator, always at the heels of a new mystery, swept up in yet another of mankind’s tragedies. Same old stories, same old mummer’s acts. A worthy opponent had been wanted, a prize to hunt, never to conquer; the silvered weight to balance his old rival’s scales.

Li Lianhua left them because that which he had wanted, they would not give to him.

Driftwood left no one and nowhere. Hollow and salt-bleached is he, and light, light as the shade under an osmanthus tree. The wind can steal him away, the sea can whisk him to faraway shores. He is empty, and he is free.

Di Feisheng finds the boy where he expects to find him; at the cliff where Xiao Zijin last saw the one true leader of the Sigu Sect. A broad-shouldered man he finds there, his posture firm, his hand easy on the hilt of his blade, but to him, the young lord of Tianji Manor remains titled boy.

Boy is a courtesy to him. Fang Duobing reminds him of a small dog; the kind of obscure breed that runs fast, barks louder and reaches a man just above his ankles.

Li Xiangyi had favored dogs.

‘Three moons,’ he says by way of greeting. At every turn of the moon, you come here, he does not say.

‘‘They have given up,’ answers the boy. ‘Sect leader Shi ordered the search to end three weeks ago. My mother requests my return to the manor.’

Di Feisheng keeps his silence. The boy’s shoulders tighten, await the inevitable; await a crumb of hope. When he receives neither, his hands fall. At his feet, the yellow-coated mutt lifts her snout from the grass. 

Thirty-six towns in nine provinces, sixteen rivers, more than twenty crags and mountains. The satchel on his back weighs heavier than iron. Di Feisheng has never balked at pain; has long since conquered fear. But this day is a soft one, the river coated in the youthful, verdant shades of the renewed woods, the winds dry above the riverbank mists. They tease the young man’s hair, pick at his embroidered sleeves, make grass dance around his boots.

‘Three moons,’ Di Feisheng reminds him. The boy turns to him, head cocked. Does he know he sets his head askance like Li Xiangyi’s yellow-coated mongrel?

‘I am not deaf, you know,’ comes the answer. ‘Why do you come here, Di-mengzhu?’

As if they do not meet here at every turn of the moon. As if they do not come with hope, then read the disappointment in each other’s backs and faces. 

The boy looks wan today. The furrows at the corner of his eyes, the heavy brows, the hunch in his back hides a man’s careworn grief in a face still youthful. A child abandoned in the armor of a fierce swordsman, a dutiful son, a man of age with a man’s concerns and duties upon his shoulders.

‘No word from the province of Jiangbei,’ Di Feisheng tells him, which is what he believes the boy’s ears strain for. There is no need to speak these empty news; investigator Fang can read his steps, can understand his silence. Di Feisheng loathes wasted words. But still do the boy’s eyes ask. And when he hears the news, the faded light in them dies down. 

A wry smile steals upon Fang Duobing’s mouth. Di Feisheng knows that smile; has seen it in the corners of an old fox’s soft face. The boy still strives to own it, as he strives to own the Xiangyi Swordplay, as he still cultivates the Yangzhouman. 

‘Di-mengzhu, ah Di-mengzhu,’ begins Fang Duobing, with levity as shallow as the river’s false gold. ‘What is it with you and the Nayin royals? One wanted to burn the realm for you. Another resolved to put the entire realm between you.’

‘Draw your sword,’ commands Di Feisheng.

Li Lianhua would weave away; wave his hand, cast down his gaze. Fang Duobing’s blade sings as it leaves the sheath and shields his nose from a blow that would have severed it from the boy’s face.

Di Feisheng charges.

They dance on the edge, trade blow for blow. There is no little dog in the young man who fights him now; Fang Duobing’s sword howls with grief-laden wrath; a beast unleashed, each thrust sharper than the last. His footfalls are light, fast; a feather’s touches on the arid earth. In the quivers of qi between them, Di Feisheng feels the very air thrum with rage.

The Xiangyi legacy. The young man is formidable; a swordsman unrivaled. He could have been a worthy contender; a gateway to the highest rank, the prize his predecessor bereaved him of. Di Feisheng has not challenged him. Rank no longer tempts him. These days, little does.

His is ever the narrow way. One purpose. One dedication. The hunt to become the first martial artist of the Jianghu left a taste of ashes on his tongue; another quest owns him now. And today has he reached that road’s end. 

He tames his blows; favors defense, parries the boy’s rage with indomitable strength, allows his own thrusts a wider berth. Fang Duobing’s breaths fall faster, sweat beading on his brow. 

And in the heat of their wild spar, the boy sees through him. Curse his eyes; Li Xiangyi’s disciple has a mind as sharp as his shifu’s blade. 

Di Feisheng slows his blows, lowers his blade, takes his distance. 

‘If you wag your tongue, I will cut it out,’ he tells him. 

Fang Duobing dries his brow with his sleeve; appraises him, draws his boot over the arid earth. He does not wind himself up and does not bluster. 

‘You have a hard hand,’ he says with a bitten-off smile. Tastes a new honorific between his teeth first, speaks it with a mellow hesitance. ‘Di da-ge?’

Who is your da-ge, Li Lianhua would scoff. He can hear the fox’s voice; the quiet lilt, the amusement hidden under dry dismissal. 

Di Feisheng keeps his silence. 

The boy draws closer, sheathes his sword. For a while, he too stands quiet. Ever do his eyes seek the river below. 

Di da-ge, thinks Di Feisheng as he watches the broad back of this young man. With such ease; Di da-ge. And all the duties sewn into those two words, the boy now delivers into his calloused hands. 

‘See here,’ he says with no further ceremony. He unfastens the satchel upon his back. Meets the hopeful, stolen look with stone-cold composure. Draws forth an oilcloth, and from within, a sodden, salt-crusted boot. They have seen that boot before, seen it kept by the plain, hard bed within the  wagon-house. Soft and well-worn were that boot and his twin. Both had been taken by their owner on the day he left them.

Fang Duobing’s face grays where he stands. His riverstone eyes cloud over, his hand numbs. Di Feisheng sees how his strength bleeds from his fingers. In the grass, a stone’s throw away, Huli Jing perks up her head and whines. 

He throws the boot to the dog and sees her run to snuff it. He knows that the boy’s chest does not rise as they watch, that he stands with bated breath. He hears the mournful whine before the dog raises her snout to the skies.

Fang Duobing’s breath leaves him in shudders. He stands rooted, lost. The breeze blows his hair into his face, hides his dry eyes. An old man’s weariness steals over him. 

Di Feisheng does not rest his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Di da-ge would know when his touch is not wanted; would know the mercy of bedrock calm.

‘We need to end this,’ he says. The boy will not speak - can not speak - so he shall speak for him.

‘Where did you —?’ the boy falters. There is no breath left in him, but he vies for those small, shallow gasps; tamps down the tremors, cuts up his throat on that croaked question. ‘Where did you find it?’

Di-mengzhu might have told him, might have sent him upon yet another chase. Di da-ge cannot. 

‘I will not repeat myself,’ he warns. ‘We need to end this.’ The silvered hilt of cloud iron lies heavy against his breast; colder and heavier than any tombstone. He feels it through the cotton of his inner robe and closes his eyes; allows himself that one brief respite, hides from the hated river below. 

‘Yes,’ comes the breath, the quiet concession. The boy does not raise his eyes. He stands like a scarecrow of straw and wood, and the yellow-coated dog comes to rest her loyal head on his foot.

Di Feisheng takes him in; this gifted youth, born to wealth and love; the path ahead of him broad and gilded with a courtier’s pleasures, a clan to inherit, a vast realm to wander, swordsmanship to master, disciples to raise in the Xiangyi arts and philosophies. Later, a handsome, devoted wife. A man’s duties. Sons to share his blood. 

He sees it all in the boy’s path, and watches him want not one of Fate’s offered riches.

This is how they part ways. He has no words for the young man, no consolations. Such lies could only be weaved by the light of the sly moon and born upon a glib tongue.

Chapter Text

It becomes a habit. He walks the streets with his bowl, begs at the market, takes the odds and ends the townsfolk have no use for, and returns to the sunlit corner where the wood will warm his back. The spring’s warmth is mellow. Often, the sun hides her face behind her thin veils and leaves her timid light to fall between spurs of rain carried from the eastern sea. At the outskirts of the town, the first apricot blossoms still sleep in their buds.

He walks with muddied feet and a threadbare robe. His cough worsens for a while, but while it tires and weakens him, it brings no bone-deep pain. It does not spear his chest as it once did. His is a mellow world now; faded through eyes old and weathered by the poison he carried in him for a decade. But still does he learn to walk the narrow roads of Huang Zun; learns to not lean on treacherous stones of the old well, learns which porch will allow him to hide from the rain. The townsfolk he learns to know by their voices and footfalls; the clatter of their cheap talismans, the sweep of their garbs, the murmurs of their concerns.

Those are the worries of villagers; Shu the weaver frets about her dowry. Farmer He has a brother who came down with some malady. They wish for a better harvest; wish for less rain, wish the summer drought away. Wish for a child, wish for fewer mouths to feed. Behind every want is a need unmet, a quandary unsolved. 

To live is to want, echoes the voice of Qi Mushan. But Driftwood has no wants. Day after day, he drifts where the currents bring him, does what old Xu asks of him, lets the worn beats of Huang Zun’s heart do what they will with him.

Liar, says Li Xiangyi to Li Lianhua. You still want to eat. Your feet hurt. You hate to be wet. You hate Xu’s kelp and clam broth. When did you last taste clean rice, a bit of pork; a sweet, candied peach? You come here to be warm, to see the faded blue of the skies and hear the cries of terns. You want and want.

I want, frowns Li Lianhua, to be spared such natter from you, and be left in peace, and sit here with no thoughts at all in my head, and let the day do with me as it wills. 

He throws his thoughts to the winds, lets them fly, invites the quiet he needs to feel the slow and thin flow of his qi. Most of it is borrowed, a vibrant spatter in his washed-out and wilted meridians. 

He does not often touch them; these old, banked embers which kept him alive where there was not enough left of him to endure the cure forced upon him. As old Xu would ask; what good does it do him to toy with the ends of those severed threads?

A flask lands at his feet. He opens his eyes and finds the boy with the mucous eyes before him; the orphan who once stole his copper coins and made judgment of his wit. Li Lianhua finds the same hollowed gourd as he gave the young beggar the day they sat in a cloud of gray dust. 

The boy stares him down, just out of reach of his stick. 

‘Water,’ demurs the child, his eyes like needles, ‘but you can’t have the gourd. It’s mine now.’ Angry, thinks Li Lianhua. What for? What fault has he in the boy’s ill-fated birth? 

He holds up a hand to shield his eyes; peeps through his fingers. His other hand he keeps still. Leaves the stolen flask abandoned in the dust. 

‘You are late,’ his mouth answers. Words have always come upon his tongue like dew gathers on grass; round and smooth like pebbles, soft like cotton, sharp as teeth. They come to him with the same ease as the swordplay written into his hand; beyond exertions, beyond thought. They are a part of him as much the qi that had once flowed through him like silver. 

He does not mean to speak to the boy; has no wish be goaded or played for a fool. His mouth runs on.

‘Late,’ he repeats. ‘How can I drink now, when I am all parched and dried out?’

He thinks the urchin will scoff and walk away, too hungry and too irked for Li Lianhua’s drivel. The boy reaches for the flask with his foot, paws at the dust with his heel. He scrapes it closer.

‘I can pour the water on you,’ he bites back, his cracked mouth tight, ‘if you like.’

Li Lianhua lowers his hand. Follows the reddened, sore eyes that will not fasten on him. Remembers how, a decade ago, starved and lost in a town he knew not the name of, he found a gray-haired laundress with hideous warts on her hands. No work was to be had for her; the peddlers would not have her near their grains and chickens. To cure her had been no remarkable feat; he stole the needed herbs from an apothecary’s basket, kneaded them into a paste of tallow, let her have the balm. She took him to be a miracle worker and found for him his trade. 

Li Lianhua was a quack who had coaxed and hoaxed and used what he knew of herbal lore and acupuncture to earn himself his millet. Li Lianhua died at sea as the sect leader before him.

Driftwood cured no one; warmed no one, did not burn.

You said, he tells himself, you would let the day do as it wills with you. Here is the day, and here is the boy. And you need no more than salt and boiled water and a root of the common gentian to treat him. 

‘I can cure your eyes,’ his mouth says. 

The boy leers at him with the belligerence of a wary cow. 

‘Why would you?’ he asks at last. Which, Li Lianhua owns, is a fair question to raise to the beggar the boy once robbed. Why would he? Why has the child come back here, weeks later, to throw at him the well-water he had asked for? 

‘Would you rather have your eyes cured, or play Why Would You?’ he returns. ‘We can play it until nightfall; until next New Year’s Eve. I’m a physician. Ask old Xu.’ 

‘Old Xu says you’re a cadger,’ answers the child. 

Li Lianhua unbends himself, sits up straighter, feels the bones of his back ache against the wall. His hands shake as they hold his weight. 

‘What does that word mean?’

The boy scratches his neck. Hunches his shoulders. ‘A kind of yellow rat, I think.’

‘Mm,’ says Li Lianhua. He holds out his stick. The boy stares at it, tarries, takes at last a hold of the end and deigns to draw the beggar to his feet.

He trades the flask for a pinch of dried gentian root. The apothecary is not pleased to bargain with him; at first, he seeks to drive him off his porch. But Li Lianhua has augured his reticence, and shakes before him a pouch of broken clam shells to tease with a promise of coppers. The rest of his inauguration falls to his tongue. A man shall ever be starved for discourse with a fellow craftsman, provided he will, in the end, prove himself the better one. 

Li Lianhua is neither wiser nor better schooled in medicinal lore, but he is soft-spoken, humble and knowledgeable in a few curious practices from faraway corners of the jianghu. He knows his place. In the end, the apothecary sees no need to take the beggar’s hard-earned pittance; the hollowed gourd suffices.

For three days on end, he comes to wash the boy’s eyes. He bids him sleep with a cloth on his face, suffused with the same solution as he uses on him when they meet. The boy, whose name he comes to know as Fen, pays him in hard buns made of dried-out millet porridge on which he almost breaks his teeth.

Fen also brings to him his younger sister; a wretch of skin and bone with a lame foot. Then comes Three-Finger Wen with a wound on his back that will not mend. Mute Lin, with a broken wrist. Qiao, with fresh burns on her cheek, as if some cruel hand shoved her face into a firepit. 

At the outskirts of the town, near the ruins of the square where no one but the beggars come, the physician in tarnished gray treats them all. Quiet of manner and soft with his hands, he asks no fees of them, no favors. Some come with burnt millet, and some with rotten bamboo shoots and last year’s calabash, and some just stare at him as if he was a hanged ghost and shy away from his touch. Candle-ends and spools of thread he earns; small, ragged sachets, sweet seeds and smooth stones from the sea. Then come the coppers; the first bronze coin. 

At the market, he trades these for a loaf of mantou, a handful of wheat. Once, a sweet cake. What he cannot trade that day, he brings back to Xu and lets the old one keep them as his share. 

His work is paltry. He buys small pinches of such herbs as will clean wounds or mellow a fever, but most of his cures come with clean water and salt, linen for sprains and broken bones, leaves to hide cuts and scrapes so they will not fester, pastes made of ashes. 

In the end, it is a fair bargain; another unspoken pact brokered between two ghosts, the righteous sect leader and the sly quack. Both of them leave him be, leave him to drift.

He no longer comes to warm himself in the square where he met Fen. Now and again, he allows himself hear the whispers of storms and sunlit motes in his qi, but not often. He does not want to.

‘To live is to want,’ he says to himself one eve as he meanders towards the shore and the pot of kelp broth which awaits him there. ‘Why do you fear to want?’

A shudder shakes him. In hollowed, dead wood, the ghosts of the men he had been now fester. 

He wishes the sea had kept them both. 

They find each other at the edge of a bamboo thicket, a stone’s throw from the bleak coasts of the Eastern Sea. Underneath the murmurs of young leaves, the sea whispers her own old hymn. 

The boy looks like a thief caught red-handed, mouth open and eyes wide, foot caught mid-stride, right hand frozen on the path to his blade hilt.

Di Feisheng halts at the sight of him; sees his own misdemeanor reflected in the younger face. The fire which burns in him, which fans the storms that drove him here, peters out. His own fist loosens, falls dead at his side.

‘Di da-ge, —’ breathes the boy, hand raised in a weak effort at courtesy. The smile writhes like a worm on his mouth. 

How long has it been? Two weeks, three weeks. A moon’s turn. 

He should have known when he left the boot behind. Should have known that the boy would peruse it, find the yellowed salt-stains to come from seawater, follow the river’s currents to the inlet where the river meets the sea. He might have paddled here on a raft and haunted the long coasts for days. 

‘I told you,’ sneers Di Feisheng, ‘that we should end this.’

The boy smothers his castaway smile; meanders closer, quells the unsaid retort; yet you are here.

‘Don’t rebuke me, Di da-ge,’ he pleads as he ambles after the sea’s whispers, where the reeds thin enough to show the green and silver of water. ‘I just thought —’

Di Feisheng follows him in silence, a shadow at his heels. Di da-ge. With such ease, with such lack of thought; Di da-ge. Dimwitted, callow youth; to throw such words around himself like he scatters his riches. Worthless disciple. His shifu knew the value of words; weighted and appraised them like a jeweler, used them with the same mercurial ease as he danced with his sword. 

What did the boy think? That he would find a hermit’s hidden cottage on this coast, built of leaves and bamboo sticks? An abandoned raft at the shore, a tattered robe hung to dry in the breeze, the scent of a burnt, ill-cooked supper? Rage rises hot and bilious in his throat, a steadfast accomplice to black shame that burns worse than any poison. Hand in hand they wake in him, shame and wrath, inseparable since his early youth. He grits his teeth.

The boy skids down to the sands, raises a hand to shield his eyes. In the coastal winds, his hair billows, whips at his shoulders. He sinks down to sit on a rock and rest his elbows on his knees. The yellow-coated dog comes to sit with him, awaits his hand on her head, leans into his touch. 

‘I thought there were no ghosts,’ he says when Di Feisheng has begun to hope the boy will be content to hold his tongue. ‘I used to believe in them, you know? When I was a boy, I was terrified of sleeping at night. The maids kept a candle for me, and three wards around my bed, and still I sat awake and thought how dark it could be under my bed. Old Luo once told another maid there had been a black eye under the bed on the day I was born, and since then, I stayed awake and thought about the black eye, and wondered if it stared at me from below.’

Di Feisheng stares at the youth’s back. If there are words cheap enough to pair with this drivel, he does not know them. 

The boy gives a shallow chuckle. ‘But then, in all the mysteries we unveiled, there was a sham behind every ghost, a tragedy of flesh and blood behind every demon. And I —’

‘Is that why you came here? To hunt a ghost?’ 

The boy peers over his shoulder, a wan quirk at the corner of his mouth. He lifts a hand to brush away errant strands of hair from his face.

‘I think we have become ghosts, Di da-ge,’ he smiles. ‘Is that not what they do? Wander and haunt.’ He takes a handful of sand and lets it run between his knuckles. ‘I do not want to return to Tianji Manor.’

To court, to wealth, to a man’s duties. A wife, thinks Di Feisheng. The blessed path of the fortunate; the riches men would murder for. 

‘Haunt,’ he echoes. Has he returned to claim his seat as the head of the Jinyuan Alliance? The jianghu is vast; has he ridden out to seek new peerless martial masters to defeat?

Has he even once thought to bury the silver hilt he bears underneath his coat to this very day?

Shadows are they, rootless shadows. He chooses to stand by the boy’s left shoulder. Folds his arms across his chest. The sea is mellow, dormant. She licks at sand and stone; dyes smooth pebbles darker, steals seaweed and empty shells and casts them back. 

Fang Duobing turns away from him, sets his chin between his hands, watches the horizon. 

‘I just — I wish’, he says, with the hitch of a pained breath, with a reticence shackled to shame, ‘I wish I could have seen him, just once more.’

 Once more, thinks Di Feisheng. Just once more. Just once more. One more plea, one more lie. He yearns to leave, to close his ears to the boy who is not his rival, to cut his bonds to this callow youth who in his boyhood slept on soft silks and knew no other fears than the whims of his child’s mind.

Di da-ge. Is this what the fleabitten old fox left him? A pride in tatters, a face lost before the finest swordsmen of the jianghu, the silver hilt of a broken sword. A youth who takes him for his da-ge. 

He does not stir.

‘Just once more,’ pleads the boy with the sea. ‘Just for one sichen. Just to beg him to —’ He hides his face in his hands. ‘I had such fancies then,’ he elaborates, ‘drunk on triumph, freed from my court obligations, let loose to do as I willed; I burned to unravel more mysteries, set wrongs to right, fight and drink rare wines and taste culinary wonders from faraway corners of the realm. And I wanted him there with me — no, I told him my path awaited us. I painted it for him with a child’s ardor while he wore his faded parchment-smile for me.’

The yellow dog whines, rests her head on his knee. He does not touch her. ‘I thought his illness had blunted him, had soured his vigor, I thought —’

He falls quiet.

‘I did not think at all.’

Fang Duobing lifts his head, mouth as bleak as his chalked cheeks, a tremor at his chin. 

‘Not once, Di-mengzhu, did I think to ask him what he wanted.’

The words are a thin knife, sharp and sleek. They cut between his ribs as softly as a cutthroat’s blade leaves the sheath. Fang Duobing’s face is wracked with remorse. Di Feisheng does not acknowledge remorse. He never questions his right to demand that which he believes himself to be owed; never doubts. To doubt is to hesitate, to hesitate is to die. This iron law has been branded into his bones long before this boy before him was born.

So Di Feisheng of the Jinyuan Alliance had no qualms about his assertions and did not waver. He turned a deaf ear to quiet refusals. He forced his will upon the worn and threadbare shadow of Li Xiangyi. Li Xiangyi, who had watched him deliver the Wangchuan flower with inscrutable eyes.

And here, on the shores of the Eastern Sea, half a day’s ride from where he found the waterlogged boot, the boy who takes him for his da-ge now teaches him. 
 
Di Feisheng’s wrath is abrupt and hot; arid like the desert gales. It thrums in the veins of his throat, bursts through the flow of his qi. He pays it no heed. Let the winds howl. He is no longer young; has long since lost such indulgences of youth as stubborn irascibility. 

Di Feisheng had reveled in his pride. Di da-ge, he comes to learn as he meets the boy’s wet, pained eyes, can ill afford it.

He bends his head.

Fang Duobing needs no spoken acquiescence from him, no words. His breath shudders out of him, laden with unshed tears. 

They sit in silence, two wraiths bound to the sea. Long enough for the skies to yellow with the tints of a faded day. Long enough for Di Feisheng to quiet his winds, to taste the softer edges of wonder. What would it have been like, he asks himself, if he had asked, and given? Would the face of his rival have softened, would the weary eyes have warmed to him as he had seen them warm towards his disciple? 

Would he then, at long last, have deserved the earnest smile bestowed on him in Jiao Liqiao’s wedding chamber? 

In the face of his old rival and equal, he saw the fearsome Li Xiangyi; unquenchable, indomitable. To consider that he could have mellowed the strain upon that careworn face, brought relief to narrow shoulders, lightened the quiet pain in lost eyes — these are novel thoughts. 

He does not shudder and does not weep. The ache is ravenous, a grisly wound in his chest. He has grieved the loss of a peer; a swordsman unrivaled, a wit hitherto unmatched. He has never grieved this. 

The boy’s breaths still hitch, dry and uneven. He sees him clench his hands until his nails draw blood from his skin. Di Feisheng averts his face from him. 

The ache leaves him old, withered, hollow. Ghosts, he thinks. Bound to that which cannot be, unfit to dwell in the world which is. 

He draws a slow, measured breath; feels the strength of his qi, wills it to center around his heart meridian. 

He cannot allow this. The boy will drown.

With the grace of wood, he raises a hand and rests it upon the young man’s shoulder. Fang Duobing tenses, bites his cheek, shivers under his touch.

‘We have to end this,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ breathes Li Xiangyi’s disciple.

Chapter Text

The first time Li Lianhua knows a cold breath of dread, it stirs from a rumor. He sits in the ruins of a charred kitchen, the fallen rafters caked with black soot, the wood under him strewn with straw. Seated on their bare knees, the beggar children flock around him. They bow their heads, endure his ointments, breathe the medicinal steam from his pots, allow his soft touches.

‘Mender Mù,’ they call him. Mender Mù with the soft hands and the fox-like smile. Mender Mù, born of the sea, who knows stories from faraway lands, who knows the names of all herbs and all stars on the skies.

Their trust is tenuous and hard-won. At first, Fen alone came to him. Then a few more. The little sister. Three-Finger Wen. A one-eyed boy no older than three. Then widow Meng, who was too poor to afford herbs and salts. She had a tumor in her stomach, did widow Meng. At the northern edges of Huang Zun, Li Lianhua picked poppies for her. 

The first time he was allowed to see the beggars’ haunts, a boy had come down with a fever. Fen and Three-Finger Wen and two younger thieves took Li Lianhua by his hands, bound his eyes, led him blind into the ruins. 

‘You have storms in you,’ said the strange boy with the dim, fevered eyes to him. The child was no older than eight or ten, but his teeth were rotten as those of an old man. Li Lianhua gave him herbs to chew, fumes to dull the pain, a sliver of his own qi to quiet his fever. 

The surrender of his qi left him shaken and faint for the remainder of the day, and the children begged and cajoled their chief to let him stay the night.

Their chief, a man of some and twenty winters, threw him out. Li Lianhua slept under butcher Shu’s eaves that night, then meandered back to the fisherman’s hut at the first light of dawn. There were no storms in him at all; only whispers of the dead.

Three days later, he learned that the boy with the rotten teeth had lived. Three-Finger Wen asked him back to the ruins, hauled him there by his wrist. A week later, they no longer bound his eyes. 

The chief of these thieves and beggars is named Hu. The man is oldest of them; the son of some itinerant peddler who once abandoned his boy on the road. Hu knows how to cripple a knee, how to stun with a solid blow. Before Li Lianhua, he wheels a bamboo stick and breaks a chipped crock pot as a show of martial arts and an unspoken threat. His face is coarse and tanned, his beard unkempt. His eyes look decades older than his years, bitter and weathered. 

Li Lianhua eyes the crock pot and wonders how long it will take him to mend if the young man breaks his ribs.

But by and by, need conquers mistrust, and Mender Mù is allowed to come as he wants. On some nights, if the weather is wet and bitter, he sleeps there. The children bring him fresh straw to keep him warm. He still freezes with such ease. Warmth will not stay with him. 

‘Tell us a story,’ begs Qiao one night when his head aches and his hands feel stiff with cold, and no straw can ease the tremors in his shoulders. ‘Tell us a sea-story, Mender Mù.’

He lies with his cheek on sooted wood, his elbows drawn to his chest. ‘There once was a sea, who could not see, she sold kelp as tea, now leave me be.’

Qiao furrows her nose, purses her mouth. Behind her, the now toothless Ling tilts onto his back under the strain of his nasal cackles.

‘Not that story, Mender Mù,’ she scolds.

‘Mender Mù, Mender Mù,’ rises the chorus around the firepit. 

‘Tell us about King Tian’s sermon,’ begs one. 

‘That one too short,’ another boy cuts in. ‘Tell us about the Emperor who lost his own shadow.’

‘Tell us,’ whispers Qiao, a shy hand on her scarred cheek, ‘of the old fox and the little dog.’

Li Lianhua coughs into his wrist, eases himself up on his elbow, brushes stray hairs from his eyes. The tresses are gray, coated in dust. He shakes his sleeve a little. A dozen expectant eyes are upon him. 

‘Pick a straw’, he says and offers his closed hand to the scarred child. 'Long for the fox, bent for the Emperor, short for King Tian.’

Qiao bites her lip, mulls over each straw, picks at them, changes her mind twice and thrice, and does not know that all his three straws are the same length. At last, she draws a straw, raises it for the others to see, peers at the mender. 

‘That is a short one,’ Li Lianhua tells her and throws away the other straws before she can ask him to see them. ‘Have you heard this tale before?’

‘Yes,’ chorus the children with delight. 

Li Lianhua lies down, draws his cloak up to his chin, throws his elbow over his eyes. To stunned silence, he says, ‘then I don’t care to tell it again.’

The children cry out, shove at each other, shout their rebuttals. ‘No, I mean no,’ caws Three-Finger Wen. ‘No!’ agree the rest. ‘Tell it, tell it. We haven’t heard it, Mender Mù!’

‘Then,’ answers Li Lianhua, ‘what’s the use to tell it? What you don’t know you don’t have, you don’t know you want.’

A foot shoves at his ribs. The children drone like a shaken beehive. ‘I know the tale,’ tries Fen. ‘And so does Qiao. You know that, Mender Mù. Don’t be dumb.’

‘Good,’ smiles Li Lianhua under his sleeve. ‘Then you two can tell it to those who don’t.’

Laughter curbs indignant whines, softens the crackle of burnt wood. Small, unwashed hands draw and shove at him, tear at his sleeves, shake his shoulders. There is no tact and no courtesy to be found here, no respect for elders. These castaways know but to fear the strong and prey on the weak. But under the stars seen through the broken roof, they laugh and tumble like pups, and Li Lianhua feels light and empty. 

Hu’s footfalls upon old planks smother the titters. The children part way for him, let him come nearer the firepit, follow him with expectant eyes. The young man throws down a sack of tubers. Li Lianhua sits up to see them spill out of the sack. 

‘If Mender Mù won’t,’ dares Three-Finger Wen, ‘Master Hu might. Tell us about the man who can’t die, Master Hu. Tell it to Mender Mù.’

‘How about I flay the hide off your back,’ offers Master Hu in return, ‘if you don’t fetch a knife and peel these? You,’ he thrusts a crooked finger at Qiao, ‘fetch more water.’

The scarred child hides her eyes in her hands. ‘I don’t dare,’ she says, but even then does she rise to her feet. 

‘You’ll dare even less to stay,’ warns her chief. He does not smile as he speaks, and while he stays his hand, the one named Qiao quavers all the same. Li Lianhua stays where he sits and keeps quiet. Hu sneers at him, shows him yellow teeth. It’s a young man’s bluster, an unspoken assertion. The beggar children like the physician from the sea; bear with his treatments, drink his bitter tinctures, laugh when he speaks, ask him to stay. They do not smile at Hu’s coarse face. They do not share stolen treats of their own free will either. 

Li Lianhua folds like a rag.

He draws his knees closer to his chin and bends his head. His hands seem wooden where he hides them against his chest, but wood will not shelter him from the worms in other men’s hearts. Still, Chief Hu takes his bent head for deference; his silence for fear. He thaws, straightens his back, lets the quiet physician be. After all, he too suffers rashes. It would not do to lose the cure-all’s favor.

Hu’s presence imposes order; the children are less rambunctious, their tongues harsher. They throw barbs and shove at each other for the warmth of their shared firepit; speak like old drunkards and brawlers, mutter like old men. Three-Finger Wen shows the day’s alms and reports of news from the streets. The potter’s wife gave birth to a son whose father is farmer Po. She might be pleased to have this secret kept for a fee.

‘And then,’ caws Three-Fingers with his hoarse voice, ‘farmer Po would be pleased to have this secret kept for — for ten coppers!’

‘And then,’ boasts Fen, ‘Potter Ji Qing would be pleased to have this secret told for another ten coppers.’

And then, thinks Li Lianhua, there will be more fingers lost, teeth knocked out, faces scarred. He does not speak. The quack and the sect leader would have. What use is there for driftwood to speak?

Qiao comes to sit with him when she has brought back the water. He hears her teeth chatter, hears the small shudders in her breath. The night is not cold, he knows, but the forsaken ruins are dark as pitch. When he does not raise his head at her touch, she dares to rest her cheek on his shoulder. 

‘I can tell you about the man who can’t die,’ she whispers to him. ‘It’s just Hu’s old story. There is a man who can’t die, who lives in the mountains above town. Hu says his name is Immortal. He watches over Huang Zun, so the wives leave food at his shrine.’

The chill of dread in his chest is faint, a mere stir of cold that makes him wonder, at first, whether the remains of the Wangchuan flower did cure him after all. He does not know why. 

Qiao whispers on, her voice like cotton, but not quiet enough to pass unheard in the low murmurs around the fire. ‘I’ve never seen him,' she admits. ‘I don’t much care to. Your stories are better, Mender Mù.’

Chief Hu eyes him where he sits, his gaze thin and bilious. 

Li Lianhua feels the fine hairs on his neck rise. 

For a while, Di Feisheng and the boy wander their separate paths. Bound by their agreement, they drift across the realm, pass through villages, traverse mountainous paths, cross rivers wide and narrow. Di Feisheng returns to the seat of his lands, dresses himself in the mantle of Di-mengzu of the Jinyuan Alliance. He still finds loyalty there; men who will follow him, men who obey. Even after his long absence, they receive him with respect and honor; flock to his strength like moths to a flame. For a while, he cultivates his responsibilities to them, rebuilds what has been lost, strengthens his ranks. 

Then he wearies of it. He crowns the highest peak of the mountain now, only empty skies above him. At long last, he believes himself to rank first. After years of relentless strife, he stands alone.

‘Li Xiangyi,’ he says to the hilt of the broken sword. Clenches it in his fist until the cloud iron threatens to yield to his ferocious qi. ‘What did you do when you stood here?’

Seated on the cold throne of his hall, he runs his thumb over the sword hilt and thinks of the youth that was Li Xiangyi. Arrogant, fierce, quick of tongue as he was of wit. Radiant as the light reflected in his blade, fleeting like vapor. He had the whole of the martial arts world at his feet; rivals and admirers, loyal followers and serpents in the grass, and yet, at the crest of the peak, Li Xiangyi stood ever alone. 

A decade ago, Di Feisheng did not know this. Now, seated alone on his throne, with a pitcher of fine wine and culinary treats laid out for his solitary pleasure, with the echo of his own voice behind the draperies of the cavernous hall, he knows.

The hilt he holds does not fit his hand; the hand to whom this hilt belonged was smaller, softer. 

‘Li Lianhua,’ he says. Tastes the quack’s name, tastes the velvet lilt of it. What did Li Xiangyi know but his own strength and the joys of his own quick wit? Li Lianhua knew. Battered by the years and the ill use of those who claimed to revere him, eaten from within, the weary-eyed man had known all too well what it had cost him to crest the peak and touch the stars while the jealous sands on which he stood crumbled under his feet.

And for longer than a decade, his one rival wished no more than to best him and take his seat upon that peak.

Di Feisheng runs a hand over his eyes. Throws the pitcher of wine at the opposite chair. Rises from his seat.

He leaves the Jinyuan Alliance that day; leaves his loyal man in charge and rides out with no more than a few spare garments, a pouch of money to keep him fed for a week, and his blade.

The mantle of Di-mengzu roused in him an ill temper and callous unconcern, he muses as he roves across the countryside. From a distance, he watches the farmers toil on their rice fields, sees herons nest on dry tufts. 

Di-mengzu knows not the joys of wine, does not desire women, knows not the pleasures of sweet-scented winds from apricot orchards. All he knows is the ache of overwrought muscles, the weight of a blade in his hand, the ferocious torrents of qi honed and bound to impeccable technique. 

Scarecrow, the pup had named him on that day he came to deliver the Wangchuan flower to Li Lianhua’s wagon-cottage. 

Di Feisheng breathes through his wrath, closes his eyes to feel the rhythm of his mare’s trot. He wants to close his hand around Li Lianhua’s slender neck and bellow into his face. He wants to batter his fists against stone until his knuckles break and bleed. He wants to look him in those sly, weary eyes and ask him why.

He shudders. The ache in his chest is unlike the sharp agony of a blade’s deep thrust, unlike the blunt pain of broken bones. It festers in the depths of him, cold and torturous, hot and unbearable. His palms are damp against the mare’s reins.

The storms howl, strain against his restraints, tear through his meridians. Di-mengzhu wants to draw his blade and ride to ruin. 

Di da-ge can ill afford it. 

Hearsay on the road leads him to the boy, and Di Feisheng takes to follow him from afar. 

Clad in a wayfarer’s garbs and fitted for humble travel, a sword in his hand and the winds of youth and courage under his wings, Fang Duobing looks like any young man who has left his roots behind to seek fame and fortune. He is reckless in his ways; throws himself into disputes, noses where curiosity is not wanted, shies from no one’s blade. A decade ago, Di Feisheng would have deemed this a show of a man’s strength. Now he deems it folly. 

 He watches the boy meddle with village feuds, find stolen heirlooms, recover lost children, unravel murders with the same wild abandon as a drunkard quaffs his drinks. There is no thrill in it, no joy. Di Feisheng does not know much of joy, but he has seen the whelp’s face in those days when the old fox was around.

This, he knows, is anger. This is how Fang Duobing dares Fate.

So he follows him from afar, keeps an eye on his back. He sleeps under open skies and under trees, suffers to wake wet and cold after a night of rain, eats damp bread and drinks river water, endures a stiff neck and a tense back, and still finds more worth in his days on the road than he found on his throne as Di-mengzhu.

Di da-ge, indeed.

The boy excels with his blade. He weaves the Xiangyi Swordplay into his own martial arts and soars on the currents of his skill. Di Feisheng leaves him the brigands and highwaymen and watches him dispatch them with some uncharitable pride.

‘Look at him,’ he says one day, when he knows he will be heard by no one but the trees around him. ‘There is our disciple, you old fox.’

Heat floods his neck, warms his ears, roots him where he stands with the deep shame of humiliation. Enraged, he mutters his defiance under his breath. ‘He names me his da-ge, so I stake my claim to him.’

The threats on the road are few to a capable swordsman, but the boy travels alone. He cannot keep vigil all night; falls asleep with his back against old trees, allows his fire to burn out. Di Feisheng keeps watch for him; sets traps for beasts. Once, he takes down some cutthroat. The wretch followed the boy from a decrepit village; stole between trees and past tall shrubs, awaited the night to fall. Di Feisheng does not ask why the man carries a blunted, rusted knife; he silences him with a blow to his throat and breaks his wrists. 

When day dawns, the boy wakes from undisturbed rest, his fire burnt out and his cloak laden with dew. Di Feisheng watches him from the shadows, sees him wash in what water he took from the nearest brook, hears him whistle as he lights his fire and boils his tea and porridge. He is alone. The dog no longer follows him; Di Feisheng has not seen it since they last parted ways.

He wonders if the mutt now lies dead on the wayside. 

Fang Duobing has no eyes and no thought for shadows in the woodlands. He eats, he packs up his cloak and his tools. He feeds his mare what hay and seeds he keeps and takes to wander back to the trodden path he follows. 

The day passes.

And another. 

In he end, Di Feisheng is forced to reveal himself. The boy is on the road that day; he speaks to a man seated near a broken, pillaged cart. The thin, wizened man is wounded, dressed in bloodied rags, his one foot hobbled. He waves at a narrow path that branches from the broader road and climbs up the mountain.

Fang Duobing rests his hands on his knees to not tower over him, offers him a hand, his open face soft with pity and vivid with righteous indignation. Di Feisheng can not hear them, but knows the boy has promised to take this poor peddler to his village just around the bend. And true to his prediction, Fang Duobing bends down and hoists the wounded man to his feet, draws his arm across his back. He does not see how this man coats the hilt of his savior’s sword in some oil, nor does he know that around the bend of the narrow path await ten brigands with their swords drawn.

Di Feisheng believes it would serve the boy a lesson, but the oiled hilt concerns him. ‘Have it your way,’ he sneers under his breath as he strides forwards.

‘Don’t touch your blade,’ he demands. Fang Duobing whips around, hand on the way to his sword. Di Feisheng shoots a pebble at his elbow, sees him flinch and shake his hand as if burned. 

‘What—,’ he begins, as the decoy’s elbow rams into his chest. 

The fight is paltry. He throws the boy a thick branch and bears down on the brigands; keeps half an eye on the boy’s back as he dispatches man after man. The decoy does not join the fray; miraculously cured, the bloodied bandit shoots down the road, and Di Feisheng is too occupied with three old swords against his own to give pursuit. Fang Duobing dances and weaves, knocks an old scythe from a bandit’s hands and arms himself with it.

They leave those who will live alive and crippled; leave the dry earth to drink the blood of their fallen ilk.

In the wake of the fray, Fang Duobing catches his breath and dries his brow with the back of his hand. His smile is shaken, earnest, threaded with embarrassment.

‘Oh,’ he says. 

Their eyes meet and Di Feisheng sees them brighten. No one has ever brightened at the sight of him before.

No, he tells himself. That is a lie.

‘Get your horse,’ he commands. ‘The decoy fled for the hills. There are lairs in these mountains. There will be more.’

The boy’s mare is worn and starved, so they lead their horses by the reins and keep a brisk stride. At the nearest shallow brook, the boy rinses the hilt of his sword and powders it with chalk. 

‘Necrotic Flame Poison,’ the boy says, appalled. ‘It would have burned my hand to the bones.’

‘Fool,’ Di Feisheng declares him, because the thought knots threads of unease in his stomach. Because the boy’s face is too gaunt, his voice too faint. 

‘Thank you,’ says Fang Duobing, with the soft manner of the old fox and the sincerity of his own bared heart.

Di Feisheng brushes his gratitude away with stoic silence. He awaits the boy to clean the road dust from his face, wash his sword and rinse his hands, then takes the lead as they return to the road.

Where the road leads, he knows not. He doubts it is of consequence. Fang Duobing soon joins him in his stride, the reins of his pinto mare wound around his one hand. He leans forwards and cants his head to peer at his face, asks a few shallow questions that Di Feisheng leaves unanswered, takes to speak of his days spent on the road.

Di Feisheng hears of some peasant woman abducted, of a well poisoned, of a drought in the southern parts of Jingbei and coastal storms on the east, and bandit raids on the countryside of Zunfeng Water-Town. He allows the boy’s voice to blend with the breeze, the raw scents of stagnant water in dried-out pits by the road, the thin chirps of hidden birds in the shrubs. 

They fall into a slow rhythm, unconcerned with brigands now that the boy can draw his sword. Dust rises around Di Feisheng’s boots, dyes the dark hem of his coat a pale brown. He shades his eyes with his hand, scouts ahead. Before them, the road lies empty as far as his eye can see.

‘ — so that’s why I thought to myself, A-Fei, ah, A-Fei, you might as well breed seagulls. I thought about hawks, you know? Miss Su told me you have a hawk’s face yourself, but no, I say, no bird has quite the same ornery, yellow leer as a seagull —’ 

‘What?’ Di Feisheng cuts through. The boy smiles at him, a paper-thin smile that never reaches his eyes.

 ‘What, Di da-ge?’ he echoes. ‘You never listen either way.’

Di Feisheng bores his gaze into him. 

‘There it is,’ exclaims the little wretch with the enthusiasm of a snake oil salesman. ‘A gull-breeder, Di da-ge. Wouldn’t it suit you? You could build yourself a roost on some cold peak above the sea, and then —’

‘Be silent,’ commands Di Feisheng. 

‘But you like it when I talk,’ natters the boy. ‘What matters it what I talk about?’

Di Feisheng does not grace this claim with an answer. His silences speak for him, as they have since his charred boyhood.

‘Your shoulders ease, your jaw softens. You walk with that pensive faraway gaze,’ dares Li Xiangyi’s disciple in his placid way. The smile that teases the corner of his mouth might be the first sincere smile Di Feisheng has seen since the cursed letter arrived in his hands.

‘Where is your dog?’ demands Di Feisheng. 

‘I let her stay with Miss Su,’ the boy tells him. ‘Huli Jing injured her hind paw on the road; I’ll fetch her again after midsummer, I think.’

‘So be it,’ answers Di Feisheng. He never saw the charm in the yellow-coated mutt. But the boy roves and roves, and the roads and woods are treacherous. Had he kept the dog, the beast might have warned him about the murderer in the woods, the ambush around the bend of the hillside path. 

The boy is quiet now, his chin lowered in thought. Di Feisheng leers at him; does not welcome the musings his silence breeds, does not ask if this is what the old fox would have wanted of him.

‘Fine, I will be quiet. You talk then. Tell me about him,’ says the boy when he has caught his breath. He hides his thumb into his sash, the other hand rested on the hilt of his sword. 

‘Li Xiangyi,’ he says when Di Feisheng raises his head with what must be the yellow, ornery leer this brat ascribes to seagulls.

‘You want to hear about Li Xiangyi?’ Di Feisheng barks a laugh. ‘Go ask the Sigu Sect, Baichuan, the beggars of Tao Jun, the monks of Fourth Pass, the whole martial arts world.’

‘I’ve heard them,’ answers the boy, bitter bile hidden under the affected ease of his manner. ‘But I haven’t seen him through your eyes.’

Di Feisheng scoffs, slows his steps to allow the mare graze from the wilted shrubs near the road. 

‘You have seen him through the eyes of his sect, his rivals.’

‘But it was you he trusted,’ says the brat with his old ease. ‘Do you know, even when he saw you at Shan Gudao’s side, he said you must have had your reasons.’

Di Feisheng does not know what to do with this knowledge. The heavy responsibilities of Di da-ge weight on his chest, burn against iron shields of shame-laden pride. Once, when he was younger, he had sworn to the earth and the skies that he should never again bend his head to another man of his own free will. To bend was to bare flaw. To bare flaw was to die. 

Such folly from an ignorant boor, no better than the boy of twenty summers who thought himself the brightest crown of the world. 

Di da-ge, more than a decade older, cannot afford this pride, he reminds himself. To teach pride is to teach cowardice. He hastens his steps, turns his back to the boy. 

‘I did not see him at all,’ he confesses. 

Wonders what could have been if he had. 

Chapter Text

After that night, Li Lianhua no longer returns to the beggars’ lair.

Fen tries to tempt him there, tells him Three-Finger Wen broke his legs, lies about fevers, lies about a pouch of sweet nuts, tugs at his sleeves. Scarred Qiao comes too, offers him half of her prized seed cake. He tries a bite and sees her eyes smile at him and still refuses her pleas. 

Rather, he sits with them at the edges of the market square. The townsfolk come there for water from the old well, and soon do they come to seek humble remedies made or counseled by the cure-all from the sea. 

Huang Zun has another physician; a dour man wed to a midwife, but he takes his fees in copper and silver, and Mender Mù takes millet porridge and bread and fresh greens, or old rags no longer of use. He is cheaper, gentler. He has no rare herbs or potent concoctions to cure many of their worse ailments, but still they come to nose at him like curious dogs at a bone. 

The warmth of spring brings an ease to his bones, quiets his old aches, soothes the dry cough that still tears up his throat. He no longer starves; the townsfolk seek his counsel often enough to feed him thrice a day, if he does not allow himself to feast. Old Xu he still pays with what pittance he can earn, or with driftwood picked on the white shores. 

He takes to wash often. The river water is no longer cold enough to numb his hands and leave him faint and pallid. He combs his hair with a wooden comb gifted him by widow Meng, ties it back with a twine of hemp. His hair has grown past his shoulders; he asks Fen to cut the ends for him to even out the reminders of old Xu’s butchery.

When the apricot trees stand white with flowers, he scrubs the worst soot and yellowed fat from old Xu’s rafters; throws out old fish bones and dried kelp, washes the stench of age and winter from threadbare hemp and cotton. The old fisherman curses him when he opens the blinds to air out smoke and the odors of the chamber pot each morning, asks him if he wants an old man to catch his death.

Driftwood tells him he needs not fret about catching his death; sooner rather than later, death will catch him.

The old man throws a stone at him. Half-blind, and he still hits Li Lianhua above his left brow and leaves him a bloodied cut to treat with his own remedies. Dead is unbeatable Li Xiangyi; dead is quick-witted Li Lianhua. Driftwood is too blind and slow to dodge an old man’s ire.

On sunlit afternoons, when the white sands are warm and the sea calm, he comes to sit by the shore and watch the waters that would not have him. The sun warms his shoulders and eases the pains in his back as he listens to the sea’s song. There is a quiet in her murmurs, as there once was a quiet in the sprouts he grew, in the leaves above his roof, the embers of his stove, the cotton of his bed. They are a poor man’s riches; the sun at his back, the sweet taste of a seed cake, the pleasure of a deep breath unmarred by pain or the itch of dry coughs. 

But there are no herbs for him to sow in the sands here, no young leaves to run between his fingers. Here, at the end of his road, he comes to sit among broken shells and dried kelp and bones of birds and stare at the horizon. Some nights, when the sun has sunk into the sea and mist creeps over the grasses behind him, and the waters become one with the black skies, he thinks of a dead river and bone-bleached shores. 

Thus does he weave the patterns of his days. He cleans for the old fisherman, mends and counsels the poorer townsfolk, eats what they will feed him, sits by the sea. He does not visit the beggars’ haunts, and he does not grow herbs. He knows he will never again hold a sword.

Then scarred Qiao dies.

Fen barrels into him that day, bereft of breath. His words scatter out of him like beads from a pouch. Qiao is dead. The boy clenches the mender’s tattered sleeve between his hands.

‘I am no miracle-worker,’ Li Lianhua tells him. ‘I cannot cure the dead.’

The boy seizes his wrist, wrenches him to his feet. 

Qiao, he learns, lies in narrow alley at the southern end of the town. Li Lianhua follows him there, keeps a hand on his shoulder as the boy leads him through the dim roads. They find Three-Fingered Wen and mute Lin there, two bone-thin shadows on bare feet. Neither of them weep. Their eyes are dry and hard as stone. ‘Run and tell Hu,’ demands Fen of the maimed boy. 

Li Lianhua kneels down as the boy skits away and touches the child’s cold wrist. He sees no blood on her, no cuts and wounds, no blunt injury. Her neck is unbroken, her bones set right. He runs his thumb over her mouth, pries open her teeth and sees no sign of poison on her tongue. He can not find rashes or puncture wounds of teeth or needles. No one has undressed her, no skin and blood under her nails, no terror to find in the furrows of her face. 

But still is she cold and dead. Li Lianhua saw her a few days ago. She was never hale and well; left as starved and stunted as the rest of these unwanted children. But she had been quick on her feet, and he heard no cough and felt no fever in her when she put her hand into his and peered at him with her mischievous eyes.

Fen ambles around him, kicks at pebbles, shoves his hands into his filthied sash. There is a faint hope in his eyes as he steals a gaze at the mender from the sea, but it fades fast.  

‘She’s dead,’ he says, as if he dared Mender Mù to correct him.

Mute Lin does not stir at all. She stands with her head bent, as still as a statue, deader than driftwood. As far as Li Lianhua knows, she has a tongue, and she has a voice. She cries in her sleep. No one knows why she does not speak.

‘She is,’ Li Lianhua admits. He closes the dead child’s eyes, brushes her hair away from her face. Beggars die. Children die. What’s there to grieve for, under these dark skies? He never knew her. Just one more face in the sea of many who fawned on him, asked for his favor, smiled at him and hoped some part of him could belong to them. He does not grieve; can not grieve.

If he still had grief left in him, he would yearn for beds of scallops and the delicate leaves of fragrant herbs under his hands, for the raw scents of wet earth and rain, and the simmer of a pot on his small stove. For the coarse fur of a yellow coat and a soft ear to scratch, for a warm snout on his knee. 

He would have yearned for the light weight of a blade in his hand, for leaves in the wind and the silver of the moon, for the flow of a dance that came to him as water runs to earth. 

Might be that it would even be in him to grieve for the boisterous laughter he will never again hear, the outraged cries about his awful suppers. A broader, darker hand on his shoulder, the clink of wine thimbles. 

He kneels by the dead child, so lost in thought about that which he does not and cannot grieve, that he does not hear Hu’s quick footfalls behind him. A hand seizes his shoulder and wrenches him backwards, and he lands on his back. Breathes a mouthful of dust, coughs into his sleeve. 

‘ — Hold your tongue,’ he hears the chief of the beggars demand. Three-Finger Wen answers him, earns himself a blow across his face. He takes the rebuke with well-worn indifference. 

Hu squats down, turns the body over, finds no cause of death. He picks off Qiao’s pouches, peels away her sash, throws the yellowed, unclean dress at the mute child. 

‘Yours now,’ he says. 

Mute Lin clutches the rags to her chest.

Li Lianhua endeavors to sit up. Fen scuttles closer and offers him a hand, and he leans on the boy until he can sit on his own. He stays to watch the weather-worn man with the quick temper paw through the pouches. Qiao has not even been robbed; her three coppers, a glass bead and half a rice cake remain with her. 

He wonders if she had carried other, worthier treasures that might have been carried away. Her death unnerves him; it tastes of rotten water and silt. He see no cause for it at all. It is as if the child had fainted on the street, and her soft heart, starved through the winter and scarred with ill use, had no strength left to keep her alive.

When he coughs to clear more dust from his throat, Chief Hu sends him a barbed look. ‘So much for your herbs and tinctures,’ he says.

Li Lianhua smiles at him. In his past lives, he has made it no habit of his to listen. He had not listened to his shifu, to his shixiong, his followers. Above all, he had never listened to himself. 

He tells himself now to hold his tongue and bare his neck; to meet the barbs with downcast eyes. Be quiet, he tells himself. Be quiet and look. Driftwood is unarmed; his qi a shallow, dried-out brook, his sight weakened and his reflexes dulled, his heart as brittle as his bones. 

And yet, yet he smiles and holds the younger man’s resentful gaze. In the silence between them, Chief Hu’s nostrils widen. His hand clenches. 

‘So she’s dead,’ says Hu. ‘So what? Who won’t die, in the end?’

‘Shall you not bury her?’ asks Li Lianhua with a placid lilt. He cants his head, allows his short hair to pool over his left shoulder. ‘If you don’t, she will return, you know. Walk on your rafters, cry in the chimney, breathe death in your ear. Just like the others.’

The other children peer at their chief, their eyes saucer-wide. 

So even these beggars bury their dead, Li Lianhua learns from their faces. 

‘Rats may bury her,’ bites Hu. His anger is cold and dead, encased in wooden indifference. He turns on his heel, beckons his ilk to follow him. Li Lianhua had hoped for heated words, for insults spat at him, the short breaths of restrained fire. The cold and dead promise a harm far worse.

Seated in the dust with the dead child, he is left alone under the darkened skies. No one enters the narrow alley. No lanterns light his path out of there. 

The thought of chief Hu sickens him, eats at his innards, leaves him as weakened as he felt on those last days of winter.

He tries to stand and hunches down over his knees, a hand on his mouth. Bile burns his throat. 

‘What ails you, Fú Mù?’ he whispers under his own wet breath. ‘This Hu has not touched you.’

He could have answered that, if he allowed himself this grace. But Li Lianhua’s echoed lies are softer, sweeter. Li Lianhua’s lies are the crutch he needs to stand straight and hobble back to old Xu’s hut. Li Xiangyi’s old wounds will not. So he listens to the old quack and tells himself he must have eaten some bad food; that the porridge he had earlier was sour and the yams rotten. 

He sinks down to his knees again, braces himself on his hands, breathes slow and shaken breaths.

Fen returns to him before the night has painted the skies black as pitch. They bury scarred Qiao at the northern outskirts of town, kowtow to the mound of earth. No one will question her death. No one will miss her. The streets will be emptier, until another unwanted child is born and cast away. 

Li Lianhua returns to the shores before the break of dawn; wakes the old man as he steals into their shared abode. The old man greets him with an order to brew them both some tea, so Li Lianhua tells him how he spent the night. 

‘What, couldn’t work your cure-all?’ sneers the old man at him. His temper is that of an irate wasp this day; his lower back aches, the sores and boils on his feet pain him.

Li Lianhua peers at his kindred spirit, sees there his own withered reflection, breathes in the steam of wild mint he has foraged on his way back. 

This is a tomb, he thinks, a wooden tomb for the dead, for fish bones and dried kelp and sand. For this old, salt-cured wretch with one foot in the grave, and for driftwood taken from the sea.

‘Three ailments I can’t cure,’ he answers. ‘The curse of poverty, the decay of age, and the worms in a callous man’s heart.’

‘Hrmh,’ answers old Xu and quaffs his tea.

‘Oh,’ appends Li Lianhua. ‘There is a fourth.’

‘Which is?’ demands the old man, his patience as frayed as the sleeves of his shirt.

‘The dimwitted,’ Li Lianhua tells him with a smile at the corner of his eye, ‘whose worms have crawled from their hearts to their skull.’

The old man sits silent for a moment. Then he throws his stick after Li Lianhua; drives him out of the door, tells him to sleep in the sea if he deems it worth his while to be crass with his old savior. 

Li Lianhua finds relief in this exile. He sits on the shore until the break of dawn, allows the waves to run over his bare feet, then wanders to nest in the grasses above the fisherman’s hut.

The days drift on like the white veils over spring skies. The farmers till and plow what few patches of land they own at the edges of Huang Zun. The breezes swell with the fragrance of apricot flowers and jujube. Mender Mù still comes to sit by the well; tells his tales, cures small ailments, counsels those who ask for his advice. 

At first, those who came to him were older women. The men shunned him, eyed him with mistrust. The maidens found him too sore on the eyes. But those poor widows and gray-haired wives with empty pouches came for rashes and aches and bad teeth, and some sought his wisdom on such ailments as they would be too embarrassed to admit to the town’s physician. Now some of those who seek him are younger; they ask his advice on ailments of the heart, share with him their doubts and pains, ask him how to best please a father that will not be pleased, a mother who refuses them to wed the man they love. Some ask him to augur their future.

Li Lianhua would have asked for three silver taels for such augury, curse his rotten tongue. Mender Mù shakes his head; tells them to not hasten their future, tells them tales of caution.

‘I knew a beggar boy once,’ he tells them, ‘who would have thrown himself into a well and starved himself to death if he had known his own future.’ 

The maidens look at him with horror and he smiles at them, light and empty. ‘But he did not know,’ he confesses. ‘So he did what he could to live. And in the end —  well, word has it he came in the way of a tyrant and quelled some war or other.’ He shakes his head. ‘But what do I know?’

Mender Mù does not know much at all. When the market square is quiet and the weather allows the farmers to toil on the fields, he wanders out to watch them at a distance, meanders between tufts and weeds, wonders what it would have been to feel the dark earth under his hands, to see young roots feed on the water he pours. But each night, he returns to the old fisherman’s bleak shore and seeds those unspoken wonders in dead sand. 

Then Fen dies.

What his rivals and followers never learned is that Di Feisheng always had a painter’s eye. When he closes his eyes, when he follows the flow of his qi through his meridians, he can paint before his inner eye the most vivid sights. Where his mind wanders, scents and sights unfold like a dancer’s elaborate skirts. Were a wayfarer to describe to him the way to a faraway village, he can see the sun-dried grasses at the edges of the crooked road, catch the scents of straw and dust, see the light dapple bamboo leaves in the forest, taste the river’s froth. 

Night terrors from his past are few and far between. But when they come, he still wakes with the taste of blood on his tongue, the burn of a whip across his back, the claws of terror burrowed into his ribs. He still knows the scents of his master’s leather cuirass, the oil in his hair, the black of his irises.

For as long as Di Feisheng can remember, he has had a painter’s eye. He finds a certain reason in it; he is, as they say, a man of few words. Words are hollow, often cheap. Words are for merchants and wives, for children. He has never been a child. 

But what he withholds from the realm, he must keep to himself. Little wonder then that his silences paint for him the vivid imagery of his inner eye. Little wonder then that he knows the lilt of Li Lianhua’s voice, the dry hums, the elegance of his footwork, way he flowed on the winds with a sword in his hand. 

They lodge in a tavern by the road, he and the boy; a cheap and quiet abode that does not see many travelers. The garret is old and dry. A paper lamp sways in the draft under the rafters here, left behind from last year’s Lantern Festival.

‘I’ve slept in worse,’ says the little lord of Tianji Hall with some lighthearted pride. He enters with bowls of rice and steamed greens; sets them both down. ‘In Baishan, there were cockroaches the size of my thumb!’

Di Feisheng pries an eye open to stare at him. Wonders what he is meant to do with this knowledge.

But the boy is like the winds, he blows and blows, plays with words, scatters them like dry leaves.

So Di Feisheng tastes the rice. It’s good. Clean. The steamed greens are salted with soy and garnished with garlic. Fang Duobing comes to sit with him, shakes his head to an unspoken question. The boy spent a sichen or so downstairs; listened to hearsay. He did not listen for rumors, because they do not search and do not travel with a purpose. They have no purpose. They are on the road because they still draw breath, and as long as they still draw breath, they must fill some part of the jianghu.

‘Be quiet,’ says Di Feisheng before the boy can open his mouth. 

Then, ‘I saw him as an exquisite swordsman, a clever sect leader, a worthy rival.’

A prize to chase, conquer and take, he does not say, because those words sit too ill in his mouth; paint him like some unwashed, uncouth brigand. Though not an educated man, Di Feisheng tells himself he cultivated dignity. He did not harm women lest to defend himself. He liked to dress in dark, elaborate garbs and to keep his hair clean. And what he liked, he took. This is how he treated himself and the world he was born to. 

‘You and the rest of the jianghu,’ answers the boy, and his voice is worn. He turns to stare at the yellow flame of their oil lamp. 

‘Yes,’ concedes Di Feisheng. The words to come clog his throat. They embarrass, humiliate, smother his breaths but refuse to escape him. Humiliation is worse than death.

But, he reasons with himself, is it worse than this?

It is a curse, he comes to see, to learn to understand a man long since dead. The path before him is paved with barbs of regret. If he willed it so; he could tread back and forth on those barbs and bleed until the end of his days. In truth, he has no choice. Regret comes to him like a tide; a heated and bitter anger. And like water on stone, it batters him and carries away small grains of him with every wave. But Di da-ge does not wish to lead the young man on that path.

‘Worthy,’ he echoes. ‘He was worthy.’

Water, he thinks. Graceful like the flow of water, strong like the sea in turmoil, mischievous like a fast and shallow brook, secretive like the depths of a still pond. Water and vapor, mist between his hands. These are words he cannot say; a painter’s words, unfit for the ears of this young whelp.

‘The rest of them were not,’ he chips, like a knife chips at a bamboo stick. ‘They were not worthy of him.’

The shixiong comes to mind with a swell of black hatred. Who was this shixiong, this worm of the gutters, to think his blood was owed the obedience of the realm? Di Feisheng has seen many a master on his throne, gilded in wealth and crowned with titles. Weak-boned, feeble, avaricious men, unable to defend their riches with their own sword. He bares his teeth, sees his own knuckles whiten under the strain of his clenched fist. Unworthy men, unfit to even lie at the heels of a true swordsman’s boots. 

‘What earned you the right, Di da-ge?’ harps the young man with Li Lianhua’s stolen aridity, ‘to judge men’s worth like that?’

Di Feisheng leers at him. Is this not the world of martial arts? Is might not right? In the old Book of Thousands, before the battle at the Eastern Sea, he came to rank second. Is it not for him to know true worth; to see the sharpest edge amidst blunt and crude blades, the moon’s silver amidst rusted iron?

He allows his words to falter. Before his inner eye, he sees himself beneath the man who ranked first; remembers how he reached for him, hungered to tear him down and take his place. A decade has passed since the night at the Eastern Sea, since the death of Li Xiangyi. And ten years later, Di Feisheng emerged, weakened but triumphant. Not one of his followers would have dared to deny him if he had claimed himself the first martial artist of their era. He could have asserted that title, could have pursued the three first warriors in the Book of Thousands and taken that coveted seat on the lonely peak. But deep in his bones, in those windswept roots of him, he knows he would still have ranked second.

Even after he emerged from seclusion, even as he quested for a cure to his rival’s deathly ailment, he thought the remedy to his own inadequacy would be found in the one true, fair victory over his old rival. And so he chased fool’s gold and vapor, ran after shadows of the past, fed on his own hunger like a serpent feeds on its own tail. 

What would it have been, he asks himself now, if he had laid down his sword, and cast down his gaze, and bent knee instead? 

He would still have ranked second. Untamed and indomitable, beneath no one but one. And when the sands and silt fell away under his feet, Li Xiangyi — later Li Lianhua — would still find foothold on one strong shoulder. 

He blinks. The steamed greens are cold; the bowl no longer warms his hand.

Fang Duobing is silent, his eyes fastened on him, his brow furrowed. Di Feisheng believes he sees pity in those furrows. He hates treachery above all, but pity is a worthy contender. What is there to pity?

He could have struck the boy’s dumb, open face, if he had deigned to stoop to such indignity. No longer young, he reminds himself. No longer commander of the Jinyuan Alliance. 

‘Ah,’ says the boy at last. Di Feisheng does not care for his tone, for the unspoken insinuation in that low exhale. And worse yet, Fang xiâozi does not elaborate.

Draw your sword, thinks Di Feisheng. I’ll have it out with you right now.

What he rather says is, ‘did you find them worthy?’

The boy raises his gaze, abandons his own ruminations. He looks uncertain, then hesitant. 

‘Who of us were worthy?’ He touches his own chest. ‘Was I? Were they?’ He shakes his head. ‘I don’t think the old fox cared.’ His chest heaves. ‘That’s not — that’s not how he thought. The only one of no worth to him was Li Xiangyi.’

Di Feisheng leans back and takes in the sight of him. Young, he thinks. Too young to bear such guilt. Too young to haunt the empty roads; wander from town to town, live from hand to mouth. Di Feisheng would have bound him and towed him back to the Emperor’s court by his own hand, but he has become wiser. 

‘You’re a pup,’ he says, with a bite to his words. ‘It wasn’t for you to teach him his worth.’

They tread the path of regret again. Di Feisheng feels the black and bitter tar under his feet and does not know where else to turn.

‘Ah but I did,’ the boy murmurs to his bowl of untouched rice. 

He falls silent. Draws a deep breath, then tears words from his throat like a man tears his skin on brambles. 

‘In the end, even I taught him that his worth lay in giving me what I wanted from him.’

Di Feisheng narrows his eyes at him. There is no inherent fault in a man’s wants. Even now, he does not regret his desire and request to spar with his rival; want is not one of his many regrets. 

‘Fang xiâozi,' he scolds, 'you did not know what you wanted.'

He finds that you is easier said than we. 

Chapter Text

Li Lianhua stands at the corner of Hafei’s tea shop. Before him lies Fen, as cold and empty as the scarred child Qiao had been. There are no wounds upon him; no signs of illness. But he is dead all the same. 

The other beggars crowd the dead boy and mill about the dirtied street. A woman cries out and hides her mouth behind her handkerchief. A tiller arrives with a hoe upon his shoulder, makes wide eyes. Curious and ill at ease, the townsfolk of Huang Zun flock to the corner. Another man Li Lianhua takes for the taverner across the street carries a lantern, raises it above his head to brave the shadows of an old day, sticks out his nose.

‘Dead?’ quavers Three-Fingered Wen. Mute Lin sits against a barrel, picks at pebbles in the dust, balances them on her raised knee.

Li Lianhua kneels down, runs two fingers over the boy’s wrist. Empty, he thinks, as the dead are wont to be. He cannot feel the child’s meridians; there are no pathways there in which he can breathe the remnants of his own strange qi.

Three-Finger Wen ambles closer, seats himself in the dust with a sigh, bends to unfasten Fen’s pouches.

Li Lianhua feels Mute Lin’s eyes on him. Of all stares in the crowd, hers are the heaviest.

‘What?’ says the boy. ‘What? Chief Hu will want them. Fen ate jujube. There might be some left.’

Li Lianhua draws back, rests his thumb upon his forefinger, holds his breath. Three-Finger Wen’s one word is like the wrong key in a rusted lock; it resists. It will not fit. What jujube? The red jujube is yet unripe, yet hard and sour. Might be that the lord of Huang Zun keeps jujube preserve, but Li Lianhua has never seen any servant of his feed the poor with the remains from his kitchen. In truth, he has never seen the lord at all. 

He reaches out to touch the boy’s mouth.

The corner of the dead child’s mouth is bloodied. Li Lianhua runs his thumb over the crusts. This is what his weakened eyes could not see. This is what the sly quack would have seen in the past when he was not yet half-blind. He wonders if scarred Qiao — 

Hu’s shout cuts through the murmurs of the crowd. 

‘It’s him! That foreigner!’

He needs not turn to know he has a finger thrusted towards his back. The thin crowd’s murmurs swell. Three curious spectators become six, then nine. 

They part way for the ragged man, flock closer to each other, whisper from ear to ear. None of them care for a beggar’s life, for the loss of an unwanted child. But now is there a commotion roused, and the word foreigner seeps through the crowd like black ink bleeds through silken paper. 

Li Lianhua rises on weakened knees; draws a slow breath. 

‘Don’t,’ he begs. Dead is Li Xiangyi, who would never stoop to such indignity. Driftwood is brittle and threadbare and not too proud to beg. He softens his demeanor, weaves silk into his voice, stands bare and meek before the crowd. Chief Hu is a stray dog, ill-bred and vulgar, his words coarse and his eyes hard. The townsfolk know him for a thief and a drunkard and shun him on the streets.

‘Don’t do this,’ Li Lianhua beseeches, soft as milk tea. ‘I have not harmed your children, chief. You know it as well as I.’

It is his only chance.

Hu the chief turns his back on him. He is not here for Mender Mù’s reason. He does not sate himself on deference. 

‘It’s his cures! First Qiao, then Fen,’ shouts chief Hu to the townsfolk who shun and revile him. ‘You turn your backs upon these orphans now, but before you know it, your own will die in their beds if you feed them his cures!’ 

Doubt blossoms through the crowd like ripples on a lake. Mute Lin stands up and makes herself scarce. Three-Finger Wen clutches at Mender Mù’s threadbare robe; sees the black ire in chief Hu’s sneer and draws away his maimed hands.

‘You can see my herbs,’ offers Li Lianhua to the crowd. ‘Thyme, milkvetch, a bit of dried costus root.’ 

Even as the words leave his tongue, he knows he has erred and stepped into the pit this vagrant has laid for him. He has parried the first blow of many, but the younger man has the benefit of his own aggression. Chief Hu is blunt and vile and unfavored. His accusations are bereft of tact. But he is also a known face, born in this town, raised to strife and deceit, spurred on by an empty stomach. All he knows is to fight.

And Driftwood the mender is weak and wearied, a ghost in the realm of men. He should have been buried to the left of his shifu. He should be asleep at the bottom of the sea.

‘Come, chief,’ he pleads, because he wants to die, but not like this. Chief Hu’s hatred eats at him as fire eats of paper. 

His words drown in the murmurs and the vagrant’s raised voice. 

‘He came from the sea, didn’t he?’ the young man accuses. ‘What for? Where from? There was no shipwreck and no other drowned men. And look at Fen here!’ he directs a crooked finger at the boy’s face. ‘Mouth all blue. Drowned!’

An ember of anger flares in Li Lianhua’s chest. The boy’s body is dry; his face not bloated, his rags not stiff with salt. Even a half-witted peasant can tell this child has not drowned. But that anger, hot and brief, drowns in a cold wave of dread. The townsfolk are fearful, gullible. They believe in mogwai and the undead and hanged ghosts with long red tongues. They will believe in a jiangshi from the sea.

In the end, it takes but one word by mouth.

‘A murder,’ gasps one woman to the first and best inquisitive face behind her, her voice hushed to a whisper. 

And murder becomes murderer and unwanted castaway becomes poor child and the curse foreigner threads the ebbs and swells of confused murmurs and indignant shouts.

They drive him out of the alley, follow him as he edges back from them, crowd him against the old well, pelt him with questions. From where does he hail? What keeps him in their town? What does he keep in his medicinal pouches? What had the poor child done to him, to die at his hand?

And at the forefront of this crowd, Hu the vagrant encroaches upon him. 

‘You,’ he says, a stone in his hand. 

‘What did you come here for?’ shouts a man Li Lianhua takes for the town’s butcher. ‘We have a physician here, we do! What did you do to the boy?’

Hu’s stone grazes his elbow; ricochets against the edge of the well. Li Lianhua winces, falters, catches himself against the cold bricks. 

He needs to speak. The weapon he carries is lighter than any sword, but no less sharp. And Hu is a yokel, garbed in the anger and mistrust that breeds and festers in forlorn, impoverished towns like Huang Zun. A few well-oiled words would steer this crowd around and turn their sticks and stones back upon him. 

But he cannot. The faces before him blur before his eyes. His sight is not sharp enough to tell a stone apart from a closed fist; he does not hear well enough to step away from a rotten gourd thrown his way. His qi is an uneven sputter in his meridians; just enough to keep his heart awake from one day to the other. 

Dread smothers his breath, numbs his tongue, weakens his knees. Sweat beads at the nape of his neck.

Some distant voice in him, ever astute and never at rest, tells him his dread is not for this vagrant before him or his overwrought crowd. He has never feared Hu the yokel. But the shadows of the man who hated him, the man he mourned for a decade, now fold over the young vagrant’s wrathful face, and there is no strength left in him to rise against Shan Gudao’s wraith. 

The battle he fought that day could only be fought and won by Li Xiangyi. And on that day, it shattered him; scarred the sly Li Lianhua until he was unrecognizable, left behind some debris that his Xiaobao and Lao Di mistook for a man who still breathed.

For one brief heartbeat, before fear yields to cold reason, he dares a look over his shoulder and throws a silent and pained plea at the skies. 

But no one catches his shoulder. No blade falls between him and the crowd, held aloft by a young, strong hand. At the end of the day, there will never will be such a hand for him. Driftwood the feeble mender stands as Li Xiangyi the paragon stood —  alone. 

‘Wait,’ he tries, as a fist seizes his hair. ‘Wait,’ he gasps as they tear at his sleeve and shove him against the well. A stick cracks across his ribs and he folds like a sodden rag.

‘What,’ thunders a voice, ‘is this?’ ‘Then, ‘away with you. Disperse! Away!’

Footfalls echo in the night, haste towards the well. The crowd’s murmurs ebb, then swell to shouts, each accusation stitched to another.

But the voice cuts through them all. A blade is drawn.   

The hands on him fall away and Li Lianhua can breathe again. He sinks down, draws his knees to his chest, shudders through the smears of voices that swell and dim around him. The voice which broke apart the crowd belongs to some town official in the lord’s service. He has only ever seen him from afar; a cold-faced man with broad shoulders. He wears his hair oiled and drawn tight over his scalp. 

The crowd swarms and swarms. Li Lianhua hears this baritone voice lash at Hu the vagrant as a man lashes a disobedient hound; threaten him with a taste of the whip if he does not take himself away. The official shouts that he will not stand to see the town’s well befouled, that his lord will not endure this unrest in Huang Zun. 

‘Beggars die,’ he barks. ‘What’s so strange about that?’ He waves his sheathed blade, brushes off the crowd around him, thunders his demands. 
 
When he at last scatters the crowd and paves his way to the well, the accused mender is nowhere in sight.

‘I took him for my zhiji,’ says the boy, as if he speaks of the weather. 

They are on the road. Their mares keep a steadfast trot, their hooves heavy with mud and red clay. Morning brought rain over these southern plains, but the skies cleared as the day aged, and a mild wind now whispers old secrets in the grasses. 

Di Feisheng thinks the grasses remind of the ocean’s waves; a sea of green as far as the eye can see. The winds comb the straws, murmur to the skies; an unbroken susurration. He knows that song; feels the echo of the winds in the currents of his own qi, feasts on their strength. No one can capture winds; no one can enslave them. The winds have no master.

And as they whip his hair across his cheeks and swell in his chest, he revels. The meadows are a vivid jade, the grasses silvered under the empty skies. In the far horizon, he sees a crane take flight.

Is this what the old fox meant when he asked him to look around in the wilds near Pudu Temple? Can the blue of the skies, the dappled light upon old roots and dead leaves, the scent of wild grass ever be enough?

I am lost, he thinks. Lost, as they are now lost on these plains. He has been lost since that day on the beach.

The day he became free of his old tormentor’s shackles, the roads had forked and branched before him; myriads of roads and paths. He had not seen them then, had turned back upon old and well-known roads and walked in circles. Back to endless practice of martial arts, back to old rivalries, to the cold and ornate throne crafted for the master of the Jinyuan Alliance. 

And yet, here he now wanders, with a boy in tow as lost as he is. 

This will pass, he tells himself. The boy will not stay a ghost until the end of his days. He will return to his prospects; to court, to his riches. He will remember his roots and return to his kin, older and wearier and wiser. Might be that he establishes his own sect to pass on the Xiangyi legacy. Six months have passed, and his smiles, still few and far between, are less wooden. His tongue is looser too, much to Di Feisheng’s chagrin.

Like the winds, the boy natters and natters, and asks no more than silence or the rare grunt Di Feisheng deigns to bestow him. 

It is not, he finds, unendurable.

On most days, it is not too unpleasant. The past is not often brought up between them. What is there to speak of? Di Feisheng does not share his regrets; does not invite the younger one into the thickets of barbs and brambles. Nor do they ask around, or strain their ears for a voice well-known amidst crowds, or hope. That, at least, they have forsaken. And if they turn when they see pale robes or an herbalist’s satchel over a lithe shoulder, they do not speak of it or fault each other. Mere old habits.

Rather they traverse the land, meddle in village disputes, lend a hand where their hand is wanted, punish those who prey on the weak. And they speak of the towns they have passed, of the weather, of festivals to come and threats on the road. That is, Fang Duobing speaks and Di Feisheng endures it. 

But then the accursed boy says, I took him for my zhiji and Di Feisheng near falls off his saddle.

Rage is ever a hot and arid wind in him. He clenches the reins of his mare and stares straight ahead, tastes the sheer gall of the boy’s airy revelation. Zhiji. This snot-nosed child, almost a decade younger than the man he used to call his master, dares to claim the first martial artist of the world as his confidant. His equal. His closest.

A dry and toothed part of him wants to ask what Li Xiangyi thought of this, and where the boy’s zhiji is now.

He can’t. 

The young lord of Tianji manor has elevated him to oldest brother; to a pillar of authority. 

Guardian, Di Feisheng muses. He teases, he is insolent, he treads in the old fox’ paw-prints, but in the thick of his grief, the boy turned to him. So Di Feisheng keeps his silence, feels the skin draw taut over his knuckles. He can hurt him, but must not.  

Confidant indeed. And was the boy not his confidant, whisper the serpentine winds in the grass. Who if not this boy did the old fox keep closest to his heart? Who if not this boy was allowed to peek behind the impenetrable armor of Li Xiangyi, the intricate lies of Li Lianhua? For whom, if not Xiaobao, would Li Lianhua forfeit his own life? 

The thought tastes of ashes and bitter bile, hits him like a sledgehammer below the ribs, and Di Feisheng wonders at himself.

In their small and secluded circle of three, under the dilapidated roof of that cartable nest, he still ranked second. Di Feisheng had known Li Xiangyi, had crossed blades and signed treatises with him while the boy was still a wheelchair-bound cripple, but Fang Duobing had Li Lianhua in ways unreachable to him. Di Feisheng came and went like the storms in his name and his qi. In those days, he did not care to stay.

And so, in his absence, this little worm with his soft eyes and his honest face dared to claim Li Lianhua as his zhiji.

‘You stare at that thicket ahead as if you’d want to torch it,’ Fang Duobing remarks. ‘What offense have those trees caused you, Di-mengzhu?’

Di Feisheng considers him from the corner of his eyes. The boy tries him, he thinks. Bites at his ankles, seeks to wind him up. It is an old and well-known dance between them, introduced in those early days when the old fox had sealed his qi with asura grass and this little pup puffed his chest up for no discernible reason. He considers to indulge him; to see if he can coax a weak, true smile from his mouth.

It is a novel thought for him; a strange aspiration around which the very realm pivots.

To Li Lianhua, Di Feisheng ranked second. Before him is Li Xiangyi’s treasure; Li Lianhua’s young and brazen confidant.

And as the second to Li Lianhua’s first, is it not his duty to protect the boy, hone him, herd him? Di Feisheng will never tell him so; this insight is for him alone. A reminder. A lodestar. 

‘Want a spar?’ he asks and leaves it at that. He is not all too blind himself; he knows that the assured calm with which he speaks will take the boy aback.

Then Fang Duobing rides up to him and paces his mare to the other horse. And Di Feisheng swallows the dry sand in his throat and asks, ‘Confidant. Why confidant, when he saw you as a boy and a disciple? He raised you to what you are now.’

Fang Duobing scratches the nape of his neck, stretches in his saddle, earns that self-conscious smile he has not yet shed. 

‘Yes,’ he admits. ‘But I —’ He falters, muses over his own thoughts, considers his words. So he think can if he wants to, Di Feisheng thinks, though he has long since known that Li Xiangyi’s disciple is a hidden sword at the bottom of a well.

‘But he didn’t need a disciple,’ concludes the boy. ‘Li Lianhua, I mean. He needed a confidant. So I took him for one.’

His eyes smile when he peers at Di Feisheng, though there is pain in them, and a faint appeal for approval that the older man knows from faded, bygone days. 

He draws a deep breath to expel the enervation rooted in the marrow of his bones; rouses his internal strength to bear the brunt of fresh remorse. 

Zhiji, he acknowledges, because you were the first one to think of his needs.

‘And did he know?’ he challenges. ‘Did the old fox know what he needed?’

Before they parted ways, Li Lianhua had spoken about his turnips and herbs, his recipes, his dog. Each day the same; far away from strife, from aspirations, from the cultivation of strength and might. A hermit’s life had he wanted. What had he needed? 

Fang Duobing’s eyes cloud; his shoulders fall. He averts his gaze, pretends to scout the edges of the thicket ahead. 

What had he needed? Not me, says the bend of the boy’s back, the resignation in his strong chin. Not enough to eat the cure, not enough to stay. Not enough to accept the boy who forgave all his lies, endured his deceit, took him for his zhiji. And so he wanders, this young revenant. Not a lost disciple who mourns the master who will never return; not a lord on the run from his duties as a man and heir to his sect, but a man who has lost a part of himself.

So be it, thinks Di Feisheng. A man can learn to live with just one eye, with just one arm. He might never perform the old and favored swordplay of his discipline; only learn to compensate.

With the passage of time, with decades, he might become a master in his own right, like the smothered weed will learn to grow around a boulder.

But where he rides now, he is a lone cloud beneath the unmarred skies, and to look upon him wearies Di Feisheng. He draws at his reins, halts his mare, unsheathes his blade.

‘Draw your sword,’ he warns, and the ferocity of his qi, woven into the arc of his blade, throws the boy off his saddle.

Chapter Text

‘Go where you will for all I care. The cows will spit on your road.’ 

Xu the fisherman never liked him. He does not like his fellow townsfolk, and unless there is a drop of rice wine to be had for him, he shall not like any man in the jianghu.  

For Li Lianhua, this indifference used to be a balm on old wounds. The fisherman had cared for his bread and his coppers, for debts repaid. He had not cared when Li Lianhua came and went; whether his alcove stood empty all night, whether he came back with his cloak heavy with rainwater, cold or starved or hurt. The man is as dry as the sands in which he hobbles, and if he has any love or hate left in him, Li Lianhua thinks it would be for the sea alone. 

Now, as he stands at old Xu’s door, his hands drawn to his chest to soothe the aches of bruised ribs, the old man’s words lash his face like a horseman’s crop. 

He trembles, he knows. He must be cold then, but he cannot feel it; cannot sense his hands and feet.

‘Give me the blue pouch then,’ he demands. ‘And my share of the porridge, and the spare sandals.’

For a brief moment, old Xu’s gaze flits to his mattress, but Li Lianhua does not care for what the fisherman thinks he keeps hidden there. 

Their eyes meet. 

‘Rob an old man, will you,’ answers Xu. ‘Take them if you will, you thief. What can I do if you take them from me?’ He shakes his head. 

When Li Lianhua had first barged through his door, he had told the old man of the dead child. He had told him how the townsfolk had crowded him with hatred and mistrust. 

Still does the old man peer at him with placid unconcern. 

It is what he had asked for; what he had wanted. No expectations, no wishes and wants to cater to. Xu the fisherman took him to his hut to die; paid his old man’s respects to the gates of death through which he too soon expects to walk. Xu the fisherman does not care for Driftwood’s fate, is unconcerned with his plight. 

Li Lianhua walks into the warmth of the hut, hunches under the low rafters, knocks over the old man’s staff and earns a curse at his back. The pouch he takes. The porridge is dry; he scrapes three spoonfuls from the bottom of the cast iron pot and eats them where he stands. In the dim, yellow light, his weakened eyes can not find the spare sandals. Old Xu smiles his yellow-toothed smile.

When he walks out, Li Lianhua has no farewells to part with. He receives no farewells in return. 

The road awaits him. He hastes across the wet sands, leans on the stick he took with him, raises a hand against the winds. At his back, the sea froths; threatens the white shores with her resentment, roars into his ears.

He climbs the bank, walks between yellow reeds and over tufts of dry grass, cowers before the winds that gallop over the farmers’ acreage. In the distance, the lights of Huang Zun shine like yellow eyes in the night. 

And the road before him lies dark; the wayfarer’s lanterns unlit. They shiver under their wooden posts, each of them gray in the dusk. 

He slows, halts, straightens and strains his wearied eyes; sees but shades of gray against the black of the forest ahead. The winds rip at the cloak he wears, bite at the tatters around his ankles and sleeves. He takes another step, lands his foot in a hidden burrow and falls to one knee.

‘Where shall you run?’ he asks himself. He has no bread, no water for the road, no oil, no warmer garbs to keep him. Above all, he is slow, weakened, almost blind. Wild dogs may chase him, and he has no strength to fend them off and no blade for his hand. Rain and wind will batter him, and though he owns no valuables of worth to any thief, there are more than enough wild men who will sate other needs if they see a wanderer they might take for prey. He is no longer young, no longer handsome, but he knows, from his earliest days, that men’s cruelty is wanton. 

Fear is a wet and deadened hand upon his skin, a claw under his ribs, a frigid breath at the nape of his neck. The winds steal his thoughts, numb his hands. The night blinds him, creeps towards him on unseen fingers, draws nearer and nearer. He straightens and heaves a breath, shuts his eyes, closes himself to the night and follows the uneven flow of his strange qi. 

‘Shifu,’ he breathes into the dark, because the old man’s name is water on dry and cracked lips. 

And with that, he turns back to Huang Zun. Strength and youth he can not steal. But a warmer cloak, a solid knife, a sack of millet and a bottle for water, that he shall have. The night promises rain. The sea is wrathful this night; he shall sleep dry, hidden under old eaves, sheltered in the narrow alleys of the forsaken town.

The town has no palisade and no keeper at the town’s gates. He finds his way through the northern road, walks past the weaver’s porch, the cabinetmaker’s door. The streets lie empty, the doors shut. No one wanders in such weather. He crosses the empty market square, watches the light shine behind shuttered blinds. 

And from the corner of his eye, he sees a gray figure unfold by the old well. 

‘Mender Mù,’ whispers a voice to him, and then three bone-thin fingers close around his wrist. 

Three-Finger Wen leads him from the square, takes him into an alley where the winds are not so terse; where there is quiet and Li Lianhua can smell the scent of pork soup cooked on some nearby stove.

‘Mender Mù,’ laments the boy as he clings to the folds of Li Lianhua’s threadbare robe. ‘I thought you drowned! Didn’t chief Hu throw you into the well?’

‘Water cannot drown in water,’ answers Li Lianhua. 

The boy peers at him, his mouth open. Li Lianhua can see his chipped teeth and mourns the hollow cheeks, the tanned, leathered skin over fine, delicate features. Three-Finger Wen, he suspects, is the illegitimate son of the reclusive lord of Huang Zun and the town’s most handsome maiden. 

‘Little brat,’ he says, ‘it is late, and my stomach is empty. Is this how you treat your town’s cheapest cure-all? I cannot eat your words.’

He arches a brow at the boy and watches him step on his own bare feet to warm his toes. After some thought, Three-Finger Wen nods, takes him by sleeve and leads him deeper into the alley. He puts a damp rice cake in his hand, and Li Lianhua peels away the dust and pebbles stuck to it and bites into the soft dough. Sweet bean paste melts on his tongue. Wakes tears in his eyes. He shudders through a breath, tames himself, returns half of the cake to the boy and keeps the sweet taste in his mouth for as long as he can.

They settle under the broad eaves of the butcher’s roof. The man is still awake; a small light shines through his old shutters. But on his porch is there a wooden pillar to lean upon and a thin patch of straw to sit on. Li Lianhua eases himself down, closes his eyes, draws his cloak tighter around himself. He came for millet, a cloak and a knife. He happens to know that the apothecary  locks his door with a rusted clasp, and the deep furrows in old wood will allow a thin hook to draw it back. But as he sits with his head bent and his arms folded to his chest to warm himself where no warmth is to be had, he finds he can not keep his eyes open. Each heave of his chest makes his qi sputter and wane in his meridians. He rests a thumb on his own wrist, feels the weak, weary beats of his heart there. 

Three-Finger Wen crouches by him, cants his head, peers at his face. Then he puts three radishes in his hand.

Li Lianhua tastes one and finds it sweet and tinged with the bite of pepper. He does not share them with the boy.

‘Tell me,’ he begins, when there are no more radishes in his hand, ‘about the man who cannot die.’

Three-Finger Wen widens his eyes, peers over his shoulder. For what it is worth, Li Lianhua follows his gaze. The black alley gapes back at them both. 

‘What for?’ frets the boy. ‘I don’t care to.’ He sits like a bird perched on a narrow branch; afraid to draw back, afraid to lean closer. 

‘Mm,’ agrees Li Lianhua, and raises his arm to coax the boy underneath his cloak. He does not care for this rumored deity of Heishan Crags either. 

He has no patience and little mercy to spare for men who dwell in hidden caverns and forgotten tombs above a forlorn town, and live well past their years on the stolen inner force of castaways.

He believes he knows how the two beggar children died. Fen’s bloodied mouth spoke of qi disruption, of shattered meridians. Scarred Qiao’s mouth had not been stained red; he saw no blood on her teeth or tongue, and that he finds conspicuous. The child’s teeth, mouth and nose had been clean. But her cheeks and hair had been gray with dust.

How easy it is, he finds, to ease into Li Lianhua’s old cloak. His eyes are poor, his hands weak, his reflexes dulled, but the unseen patterns unfold before him as ever before. Thread after thread he still sees and holds between his fingers; he needs but weave them into a whole. 

The boy under his arm shivers, chews at the nail of his thumb. ‘Wouldn’t it be neat?’ he asks, when he finds Mender Mù too quiet, and the night too dark. ‘If we couldn’t die?’

Li Lianhua eyes him. The nights awaken many a horror in the town of Huang Zun, he thinks. The winds howl over the roofs, breathe cold gusts into the alleys, threaten with rain. A qi-eater wanders the streets of the town. He does not need the boy to speak of such terrors as immortality.

‘It is not so bad to die,’ he answers; silks his words over his own tongue as he muses upon them. A black river, and a bone-bleached shore. But he could never find the unseen path into the Netherworld. ‘Quieter, and not so cold.’

‘Qiao used to say there is an old hag named Meng Po who forces you to drink a soup in a skull, so you forget. I don’t want to forget,’ the boy tells him.

And Li Lianhua rubs his thumb against his forefinger, and considers the boy’s fine features, and asks, ‘what is it you do not want to forget?’

The boy squirms under his arm. ‘Seed cakes,’ he says. ‘And rice porridge with chicken, which the butcher’s wife let us have when it was the last day of Harvest Festival. And the paper lantern Qiao got for me, which Hu cut up for his fire. And Fen, and A-Jian.’

He looks up.

‘What is it you don’t want to forget, Mender Mù?’

Li Lianhua does not expect the question to be returned to him. The stars, he thinks. The leaves in the wind. The fragrance of thyme. The taste of rice wine, the weathered face of his shifu, the quiet patter of rain on his roof.

The weight of a blade in his hand. The free, endless flow of Yangzhouman. Light footfalls over water.

He thinks of old Meng Po and her soup which would forever wash away from him the stains of Li Xiangyi, the remnants of Li Lianhua. What would be left of him, what would pass the bridge, if he cleaned himself of those two ghosts? 

The remnants of storms and sunlit warmth sing in his meridians. 

He coughs into his sleeve, winces from the strain. Three-Finger Wen elbows his chest, watches him with his dark, worried eyes.

‘Mender Mù?’ he hears, and he is about to assure the boy that he is as well as ever when Three-Finger Wen clutches at his wrist.

They are not alone. Footfalls echo in the darkened alley, soft and slow. Not a hobble of a lame man. Not the amble of a drunkard. 

Li Lianhua untethers himself from the boy, braces himself to stand. His hand closes around the stick he brought with him. He draws the boy behind his back, stares into the maw of the alley, waits. 

A man emerges from the shadows. He is not a local; Li Lianhua has never seen him before. His hood is raised, his garbs one with the night. If he carries a blade, it is hidden. The stranger walks with a purpose; there is no chance he means to pass them.  

Three-Fingered Wen peers past the mender’s elbow. His maimed hands claw into Li Lianhua’s cloak. 

‘Mender Mù,’ echoes the stranger, and Li Lianhua wonders how long he has listened to their quiet murmurs from the roof above them. ‘Wood?’ asks the man. ‘Why wood?’

‘Would you rather it be jade?’ Li Lianhua hears himself answer. ‘I am not that valuable.’

The man draws nearer, a quiet and sleek shadow. He has a cutthroat’s soft steps. 

Li Lianhua considers his circumstances; the dark of the night, the empty streets, the small and nervous presence at his back. Three-Finger Wen is quick on his feet; knows the crooks and crannies of town. He can escape, but needs a clear path.

‘What brings you to Huang Zun, immortal?’ he breezes, and feels the boy tense behind him. ‘It is a bitter night, and the coastal winds are rough. Even the moon hides behind her veils. Have you come to counsel the townsfolk? They all keep warm in their beds or sit by their stoves.’

‘Except you,’ remarks the immortal. 

‘Mm,’ allows Li Lianhua. ‘Those who have no roof over their heads must find it where they can.’

This, he tells himself, is an old and well-known dance. He has been injured and cornered before; has been caught on the brink of death, shackled and starved, tormented by thirst. But the hidden weapon they could not draw from his sleeves was still his tongue.

But Driftwood is bare; empty, a husk beneath sly Li Lianhua’s borrowed cloak. There is no zeal left in the thin, dry trickle of his Yangzhouman; he is adrift with no true cause to suffer for, no purpose. The child he now hides will still be caught and murdered. If not this night, then later. To where shall the boy run? Who will believe his wild tales?

He draws his left hand behind his back and shoves the pale blue pouch into the hollow of the boy’s closed fist. 

‘Beggars?’ says the hooded stranger. ‘You must be hungry then.’

Li Lianhua steps forwards; feels the pull from small hands fisted in his robe. He reaches out with his stick and knocks the hood back from the stranger’s brow. 

From what the shreds of light from the shutters allow him to see, the man wears a swordsman’s mien. His face is smooth; neither graced with youth nor burdened with age, unremarkable to the mind. There is no gray in his sleek hair. He reminds Li Lianhua of a smooth pebble.

‘Less hungry, I think,’ Li Lianhua holds his gaze, ‘than you.’

Three-Finger Wen is a clever boy. He cannot read, does not know long words, but vibrates to the undercurrents of tension like the strings of a guqin. He does not understand what has been said but hears the twine draw taut and turns heel. And Li Lianhua throws his fistful of dust into the qi-eater’s face and falls forwards to hinder his path.

The qi-eater shoulders into him, throws him off his feet, shatters the stick he holds before his chest. Li Lianhua braces himself, clenches his teeth.  

A cold hand captures his wrist and halts his fall. He is hauled to his feet like a puppet by a puppeteer’s hand. 

‘Fú Mù,’ muses the qi-eater. ‘The cure-all from the sea. There was word of you on the winds, so I heard your voice and came to see you. The beggars and thieves here flock to you, but I do not think you were born on the streets.’

Li Lianhua seeks to draw back his hand, tries the man’s strength. He can no more break the hold than he can bend iron.

‘The townsfolk here tell tales of you,’ he answers as he peers at the skies, sighs to catch his breath, weaves silk into his voice, ‘but I do not think you have ascended to immortality.’

The qi-eater caresses the tendons of his wrist. Li Lianhua notes the scent of a woman’s perfume on his garments.  

‘See here,’ muses the man. ‘Clever and sleek-tongued. Too clever to shout and rouse a spectacle. Were you a scholar once? Or is that some swordsman’s courage left in you?’ 

‘There is not much left in me at all,’ Li Lianhua tells him.

The qi-eater runs his thumb over his wrist as a man might appraise the meat of his dinner. 

‘So you say,’ he sighs. ‘But here are some words of wisdom from the immortal of Heishan Crags. Fate leads the willing. Have you heard this before, or must I tell you, cure-all from the sea, what befalls those who are not?’

He bats the broken end of the staff from Li Lianhua’s other hand. ‘The scarred girl told me of you.’ His thin smile curdles with disdain. ‘She prattled about your tales and herbs and how you cured some mongrel’s paw.’

No, thinks Li Lianhua. She did not. 

He is not allowed a closer examination of his own surety. The qi-eater burrows the nail of his thumb into his wrist, closes a clawed hand around his neck, and he learns, with a swell of frigid clarity, that even Driftwood the hollow mender still has some valuables of worth to left to lose.

The qi-eater’s technique is a cold breath from the grave, a ravenous inhale. He worms into Li Lianhua’s meridians, bleeds him of warmth, chars his defiance, drinks of him as a man drinks from a well. He feeds on echoes of fierce winds, steals the sun’s warmth —

And the threat of losing those last echoes, those hidden treasures within him, rouse a wild dread. He strains against the hand on him, shouts into the night, thrusts his hand into his assailant’s chest. The qi-eater claps his other hand over his wrist and forces him down on one knee.

Then a rock flies from the rooftop. The qi-eater hears it; betrays his keen reflexes, but his hands are occupied. And though he leans away to shield his eyes, the rock clouts him across the mouth and loosens his hold. And Li Lianhua wrenches back his hands and tears down the narrow alley with the qi-eater’s footfalls at his heels. 
 
He does not know how he can still run; what strength there is left in him to keep him on his feet. Pain eats at his wilted meridians, bleaches his thoughts, weakens his knees. He falters, spits, heaves for breath, feels the bitter blood run from the corners of his mouth. The qi-eater is far lighter on his feet than he is. 

So Li Lianhua picks up the first and best stone his hands can find and throws it through the weaver’s shutters. The stone breaks brittle wood, tears paper, rouses a woman’s terrified shriek and a man’s bewildered holler. Footsteps mill about within, approach the door of the abode. Li Lianhua runs towards the porch, feels a hand graze the ends of his hair. When the weaver throws open the door to catch the vandal red-handed, a stoker raised above his head, he rams into the craftsman’s broad chest, veers aside and falls in a heap on his doorstep. 

Behind him, the nearby dwellers peer out to witness the commotion. 

‘Thief!’ shouts one. ‘A robber, a robber!’

‘It’s that vagrant Hu and his ilk,’ hollers a young woman. ‘Fetch officer Zhao!’ 

Li Lianhua sobs through dry stutters of breaths. Draws his knees to his chest. Coughs into his sleeves. Dark blots swim before his eyes, blur his sight. The shouts and murmurs around him swell and fade in his ears. With the last of his strength, he raises his head and looks over his shoulder. Those men who live across the street flock to catch the robber, while bolder women step out to watch. 

Of the qi-eater is there no sight. 

Li Lianhua allows his forehead to fall onto his wrist. When a fist takes hold of his collar, he dares to close his eyes.

‘You were what he needed.’

The boy looks up from the fish he gutted and skewered for their fire. Di Feisheng allows him to soak in his own bewilderment, because he has never been a softhearted man and there is a reputation to uphold here. 

Then, before the boy can decide that his ears have fooled him to think Di da-ge has invited conversation about the past, he repeats himself.

‘You were what he needed, I said. Now cook.’

The boy’s stunned silence stretches over the river. A toad croaks near the bank.

 It will not end with that, Di Feisheng knows. He threw out the bait and this young fish swallowed the hook, which is a novel and not all too unpleasant way to spar. He learned, all too late in life, that not all battles need to be fought by sword. 

The boy is curious, he knows, but also wary. They do not often touch upon the past or dwell on their reminiscences. When their thoughts wander to those lost days, they keep them to themselves.

Di Feisheng studies his own reflection in the river. The waters are dark and still. He sees the skies in them, the youth of the river willows, the distant peaks of Heishan. He sees his own face as well, hard and unreadable, a sealed coffer. He does not remember how old he had been when he saw his own face for the first time. Older than he needed be. Older than most children are when they come to learn that fate has carved for them a mask to wear in which their ancestry is written for the realm to see. This is all he has from the mother who birthed him, the father who sired him. A strong, coarse face, a warrior’s chin, a chief’s jaw, a murderer’s dark eyes. 

Once, he thought he embodied a man’s strength and brawn; that he had been born to conquests, to ride with followers at his heels, to climb insurmountable peaks. Age had tempered him, let him taste the hollow triumphs that would not sate him, the false humility of serpentine tongues, the covetous gazes of those who bent knee to his face but watched his back with hungry eyes. And in tasteless wine and tawdry ornaments, in easy victories over unworthy swordsmen and loyalty as shallow as the silver coat of a cheap bangle, Di Feisheng had been ever shackled. Stagnant and bound to the stains of his past, he had still been owned by the man who once enslaved him. 

The winds in him had blustered and howled, and warrior after warrior had fallen to his blade, but still could he not shatter his prison and soar to the skies. 

Then he met Li Xiangyi. 

And Li Xiangyi, if he allows himself the indulgence of such private reflections, became the light to his shadows. Delicate strength and grace braided into his Yangzhouman; unmatched and indomitable. And Di Feisheng, who had been used to take what he set his eye on and claim that which he desired most, saw in this young man his key to freedom. 

So he had thrown out his hand to take, all for naught. His rival, then young and ostentatious, had danced around him and matched him blow for blow, word for word, and could no more be captured than mist and vapor. 

In spite of himself, Di Feisheng smiles. In his youth was there not much to remember and even less to cherish. But this one foolish frivolity he had.

He finds, to his own astonishment, that he does not regret the blunders of his younger self. Less that a moon ago, such reminiscences would come to him with bitter regret.

Not so now.

Let that which belonged to their youth be spared that taint; be held apart from the remorse and the thorned self-reproach of an older, wiser man. In the end, Li Lianhua was never Li Xiangyi.

That too he came to see too late. 

He looks over his shoulder. The boy peers back at him. He has kept his eyes peeled on his back since Di Feisheng first spoke. Perhaps is there some worth in the fallibilities of youth after all.

‘Huli Jing, catch,’ says the boy, and the yellow-coated dog stirs and opens her maw to swallow some fish innards. Then she rises, shakes twigs and dust from her fur and ambles over to sit with Di Feisheng. The boy fetched her from that woman Su’s care and now she tails after them, another ghost for the road. 

She comes to him now and again, though he does not feed her or speak to her. If she bothers his mare, he shoos her away. But still she comes to sit with him, perks her ears at the sight of him, snuffs at his hand.

What, he wants to bark. What do you want of me? I never caught him. He is not here. 

Instead, he reaches out and scratches a soft ear as he once saw her old owner do; as the boy does when she comes to beg treats of him these days.

It is strange, he finds, to see his own hand learn a tender touch. The dog shoves her head underneath his hand, rests her muzzle on his wrist. Her snout is wet, her breath foul. Disgust wells in him and sours in his mouth, but still he strokes her ears, allows himself to listen to the hum of dragonflies, the trills of river birds.

Behind him, Fang Duobing’s silence is heavier than a boulder. 

‘Di da-ge?’ he asks, when he can endure no more silence. And Di Feisheng shoves the mutt away, washes his hands in the river and comes to sit by their fire. The boy offers him a roasted fish with crisp skin and tender meat, salted and flavored with wild herbs. 

When he sees him like this, kneeling on the earth, hair in his face, his arms bared, his hands darkened with soot and grime, Di Feisheng thinks the road suits the boy. Might be that he is not meant for court intrigue and wealth and marriage after all.

And might be that the boy knows this and has known it longer than him; longer than even his stubborn zhiji. 

Li Xiangyi gifted the boy his Xiangyi swordplay. Di da-ge now wishes to bestow him a gift of his own.

So he bites into the fish, watches the boy flounder in the quiet between them for a little while longer, then says,

‘I remember when they celebrated the recovery of the Shaoshi blade and Li Lianhua took the chance to wield that sword right out of your hands.’

Fang Duobing’s face softens. He casts down his gaze, scrapes the sharpened stick over charred wood, stirs the cinders within. 

‘I remember that,’ he says, a tint of accusation in his voice. He looks up, eyes slitted. ‘In those days, I didn’t know him well enough to know he wouldn’t leap for that honor on his own, Di-mengzhu.’

Laughter wells in Di Feisheng’s throat, escapes him as a bark, strains the corners of his mouth. He does not intend to laugh; scolds the unpredictable winds in him. But his smile stays.

‘I remember what you said to him that day,’ he says. ‘While he stood there like some fox in a trap, you patted his back and told him he was a good mongrel.’

‘These are your words,’ counters the boy, his voice brittle beneath the shallow irritation. ‘I told him he was a lucky dog.’

‘You smiled,’ Di Feisheng reminds. ‘While the rest of the congregation murmured and stared at him with jealous eyes, you smiled for him.’

‘So?’ blurts the boy, because while he is no longer the dimwitted child he was in those early days, his mouth is still faster than his thoughts.

‘So,’ drawls Di Feisheng. Then he rises, throws his charred stick onto the embers and leaves the boy to chew on that conclusion where he sits. Fang Duobing blinks, opens his mouth, swallows his protests. 

Di Feisheng wanders into the woods. Raises his hand to see the light fall between the gold-edged leaves and branches above him. 

To his chagrin, the yellow-coated dog follows at his heels.

Chapter Text

The prison is cold and damp, a rat’s nest underneath the town official’s office. Li Lianhua wakes to the scent of mold, to stiff joints and cold feet. Tresses of his hair cling to his dry mouth, hide his eyes, needle his skin.

He sits in a corner, his knees drawn to his chest, his hands numb. Dust motes swim before his eyes; the rest of the chamber a dim blur. He cannot see the door. When he tries to lift his arms, he finds that his wrists are shackled. 

His head is too heavy for his neck, so he leans against the damp bricks and breathes slow and shallow breaths. His ribs ache. His teeth taste of dried blood. 

But the uncounted pains of his battered self are of no concern to him while he rests his fingers on his skin just above the left manacle and feels the weak, irregular flow of his qi there. The echoes are still with him; the whispers of northern storms, the bright warmth of the sun. These remnants of his past, which he so seldom permits himself to acknowledge, have not been stolen from him.

He knows he would have died if they had been torn from him. There is so little left of his Yangzhouman, and the man who could have cultivated that inner force is dead. But the qi that kept him alive as the poison of Wangchuan burned the Bicha out of him is with him still, and he draws his hands to his breast as if to tether that flow to his heart.

To live is to want. He would laugh, if he had breath left in him for laughter.

Now, want must pave way for need, and he needs to think. A qi-eater preys on the town of Huang Zun; eats of those who are unneeded and unwanted, those who have no roof over their heads and no name. Beggars die, as fleas die. Who asks why they die? And the townsfolk believe  the crags which shadow the town are the sanctuary of an immortal hermit, and weave him into their their rumors and tales. 

The prison shelters him; here, he may dare to sleep, may nurse his pains and aches. He may even be fed twice a day. Three-Finger Wen and the other children are not so fortunate. When he can stand again, he may weasel his way out of his prison, feed on scraps and haunt the streets until he can set a trap for the qi-eater. And then, he may borrow from Li Xiangyi’s old chivalry, braid it into Li Lianhua’s dishonesty and kill the leech in some backhanded way. 

But it is not so straightforward, whispers a voice at the back of his mind. There are edges of this chart that are unclear, threads yet hidden in the tapestry, but when he turns his thoughts to them, they fade and elude him. 

He cannot think. The roof his his mouth is dry. Bile rises in his throat, bitter and sour. It is all that remains in his empty stomach. So he drifts on the ebb and flow of sleep, allows his thoughts to fray and scatter. Now and again he wakes, his face hidden in the crook of his elbow, and listens to the shallow flow of his qi, to the echoes of those presences he keeps within him.

He wonders what the boy does now, the disciple of Li Xiangyi, the investigator of Baichuan Court, the young man who called him friend.

And do not lie, he tells himself, with a thought so reminiscent of his old shifu’s voice. You lie with the same ease as you draw breath, Li Xiangyi, Lianhua, Fú Mù. 

Lies have always loved his tongue as much as the blade loved his hand. Smooth and silken are they, sculpted to any ear as might suit his needs. They have threaded his life since he was a child; a beggar of royal blood, a sect leader who thought himself infallible, a miracle-worker who raised the dead. How late did he learn that as he spun wool over the eyes of others, so did he also blind himself.

There is peace in lies. He wants to believe that the boy who took him for his shifu now travels the jianghu as he dreamed to do, wants to believe he unravels falsehoods and deceit, upholds justice, practices the Xiangyi swordplay and weaves it into his own martial arts. He wants to believe the young man has found other, worthier confidants to drink and spar with; friends in the prime of their youth, whose aspirations are as boisterous as their laughter. Fang Duobing was never meant for solitude. And when he has wearied of travels, of perils and gallantry, there will still be a society to welcome him back to their fold; to esteem, to honor, to the devotion of a young wife.

The other one; his rival, adversary, his one true equal, he sees on the throne of the Jinyuan Alliance. There is a man, at long last unbound, who has to learn to soar. Of his fate, Li Lianhua is less certain. He doubts Di Feisheng will pursue conquests through war; doubts he shall become the scourge of the realm. The shadows which hide in him are not the shadows of barbarism and greed, but the dusk of night and northern skies. He is vicious, like a feral hound is vicious, but the feral hound does not revel in the anguish of vulnerable prey.

Eat, sleep, herd his pack, assert his rule and authority, beat down lesser rivals who vie for his throne; that is the path he sees for Di-mengzhu of the Jinyuan Alliance. If he knows him well, and Li Lianhua dares to assume so, the old swordsman will keep half an eye on the disciple of Li Xiangyi. 

And to both disciple and the rival, Li Xiangyi will remain a legacy; a sweet and bitter remembrance, a tablet in a shrine, a whisper on the winds.

He can, if he wills it, believe these lies. He cannot will himself to believe he has spared them from grief.

Grief fades, he lies. Raw wounds become sore scabs, then bleak scars. He had not meant to live when he had severed his tethers to them; only to choose his death. He had brought the remnants of the Wangchuan flower with him not to be cured, but to die with the assured faith that he had accepted his end.

And the slow and torturous end which he knew awaited him, he would not allow them to witness. 

The bonds have been cut, he tells himself as he touches the shackles on his left wrist. Yet here you are, unable to take your hand and your mind away from the remnants of your qi. 

He did not expect to survive the qi-eater’s touch, but what his life is worth, he knows not. Now the town of Huang Zun needs not deadwood, but a savior, a capable swordsman. He thinks of the pale blue pouch he shoved at the boy; the one last inheritance Mender Mù could give a boy who had offered him a kind hand, and laments that he never had the chance to leave some token of distress within.

Three-Finger Wen will not keep that pouch, he knows. Hu the vagrant will take it from him and sell it for millet or rice wine. He has seen the vagrant try to peddle his stolen goods at the western crossroads beyond the the rice fields. In such ways could the pouch have reached the wider world; could have unwound in the hands of Fate and lured a capable swordsman to town. 

But as he shivers in the cold corner and thinks of the young beggars who yet remain with the old vagrant, he knows that if he waits for Fate, there will be no children left. Few saviors turn their eye to the coastal town hidden in the shade of Heishan Crags. And try as he might, he can no more rid himself of his own heart than the dead can return from their shadowed realm. 

So he buries his face in the bend of his elbow, hides his bare feet under the threadbare folds of his robe, and calms his own breaths until sleep soothes his shivers.

And it is there, at the precipice of fevered sleep, that he turns the qi-eater’s words over. The scarred girl prattled about you, your herbs and your tales.

No, he asserts. Qiao did not. The beggars are wary of strangers; two turns of the moon did it take them to take him into their fold.

Then who did prattle, he asks, as sleep fogs his mind and steals his thoughts away.

The road does not care whether the traveler is lost, reflects the young lord of Tianji Hall, and so why should he?

He is not lost. To be lost, there must be a will to find or be found. He has neither. But the weather is fair and so he ambles in the shade of the leaves around him, Huli Jing at his heels. To the east, the Heishan Crags sleep under their coats of green, their peaks crowned white. Below them, the mild breeze breathes warmth between bamboo leaves, spreads the fragrance of the white blossoms of mulberry trees. 

In the end, Di Feisheng and he parted ways. Three days ago, the man ate of his porridge, saddled his own mare, bid him some curt farewell and rode off into the wilds. If there is any wonder to seek there, it is that he stayed as long as he did.

Fang Duobing finds that he does not mourn his departure. The man is not as quiet as he thinks he is. He speaks little and thinks louder than the winds howl in the mountain passes. And, as is his wont, he will return.

The old tempest threaded in and out of Li Xiangyi’s life for longer than a decade. Now he threads in and out of his. 

Da-ge, thinks Fang Duobing with a warmth in his chest. He wonders if the old fox had foreseen this; if he meant to leave his disciple more than just the Xiangyi primer and good wishes for his luminous future. 

The thought stabs under his ribs, cuts through shallow scars, blossoms red. He slows, heaves a breath, runs a hand over his collar. Then nearby voices and the crackle of burnt wood catch his ear. 

Around the bend, he sees peasants honor three graves. Two men lean upon their shovels. A woman burns joss paper over a small fire. Qingming Festival, he comes to remember. Even here, in this forlorn corner of the realm, the locals honor their dead.

Has it been so long? 

Remembrance floods him. The dry rebukes, the hidden encouragements, the wrapped sweet laid on his palm to honor the memory of the man who loved to eat them.

Tears well in his eyes, hot and vicious. They clog his throat, sap him of strength, root his feet. He has not wept on the day Di Feisheng read the letter on the shore. He did not weep then, and has not wept since. Now the tears well within his chest, smother his breath, run down his cheeks. And he knows, he knows, deep in the marrow of his bones, that he has at last come to the end of his road.

‘Li Lianhua,’ he hears himself say, a child’s defiance against the inevitable. ‘Where are you?’

And he is glad, so glad, that Di Feisheng is not here to leer at him now. He is scraped too empty to endure another day of pretense. 

‘You must be alive,’ he tells the skies, because there will never be a future where he, Fang Duobing, will accept that Li Lianhua has faded into the night, alone and in agony, while he and that old tempest still wander under the blue skies of the mortal realm. 

He can pretend, if it pleases Di Feisheng, as he knows the other pretends for him. He cannot live it.

‘Go away,’ caws a voice to his right, and it occurs to him that Huli Jing barks for his notice. 

‘Huli Jing,’ he tries. ‘Come back.’

The dog does not heed him; she barks and whines, beats her tail back and forth with a joy he has not seen in many a moon. And before her, seated under a tree, hunches a beggar, a disheveled man with grime-caked trousers and seeds in his hair. In his hand hides a pale blue pouch.

Fang Duobing’s feet are faster than his thoughts. Before he knows it, he has torn the pouch from the man’s blackened hand, and a pair of drunken, irate eyes find his own.

‘Where,’ breathes Fang Duobing, ‘did you get these sweets?’

The beggar stares at him, offended. He reaches to take back his pouch, hesitates, lowers his hand. 

‘I found it on the dead,’ he spits, wounded. His other hand tightens around his staff. 

Fang Duobing shakes. Hoarfrost spreads in his stomach, hollows his bones, empties his mind. Some faint and muted voice tells him he will shatter the vagrant’s wrist if he clenches harder yet. 

‘Where,’ he musters to stutter, ‘are the dead?’

‘I was drunk,’ confesses Mender Mù to the officer. The bowl of porridge thaws his hands where they clutch it to his chest.

The officer’s servant leers at him, raises his wooden club, peers at his master for permission. But the town official raises his hand. And Li Lianhua, small and pitiful, grateful for the warmth of hot porridge, looks up between his matted tresses and pleads with his eyes.

The officer is a man in his prime, clean-shaven and with fine, sharp features. A soldier’s face, thinks Li Lianhua, unmarred but for the scar that runs from beneath his left ear to his neck. Under the ruse of pitiful appeal, he appraises this man with the quick, precise strokes of a painter; takes in the set of his mouth, the way he carries his hands, the rise of his shoulders, the voice of his dark gaze.

In the count of three slow breaths, he concludes this officer bears him no ill will. He will not be branded a murderer and hanged in woods at the northern end of the rice fields, nor deemed an undead from the sea and burned alive. The breath which escapes his chapped mouth shudders in rhythm with the erratic beats of his worn heart, and he sets the bowl of porridge on his knee and holds his cloak tighter to his shoulders. 

The chance is, however, that he shall be kept locked up for longer than he desires. From the frown on the officer’s brow, he doubts this enforcer suspects he speaks untruth, and this too soothes him, but all the same has he committed a misdemeanor and must pay some penance. 

The officer does not know of the shadow that looms over his small town then. For now, his ignorance brings relief; a man who would know of the qi-eater and call himself the law enforcer in town is a man who who would desire to keep this secret of the Heishan immortal in the shadows. 

But officer Zhao Shan, as the servant addresses him, professes ignorance with his very demeanor.

‘Drunk,’ Li Lianhua repeats, with that faint smile he knows provokes as often as it charms. 

‘Drunk?’ barks the officer. Disbelief blackens his brow. ‘That night of all nights! Mender Mù, you had just ran away from a crowd that accused you of murder and sorcery, ready to beat you to death, and yet you come back to town the very same night, drink yourself out of your senses, and break into the weaver’s abode?’

‘But that’s just why,’ answers Li Lianhua. He winds a loose thread around his finger, lowers his gaze as if shamed. ‘That is just why, officer. I was terrified. I ran to old Xu, who had kept me under his roof all winter, and you may ask him how he found me that night. But the old man wanted little to do with me once he learned that I had fallen out of favor; he drove me from his porch. I thought to flee the town, but where would I run?’

 He coughs and needs not force the dry itch in his throat as he gasps for breath. ‘You see what I am; not hale, not strong, not dressed for rough weather,’ he resumes, ‘I turned back to town to find shelter, but I knew no one would let me in, so I drank my rice wine to keep warm.’ The wan smile surfaces, remorseful. ‘And in my despair, I lost my temper. The stone was a moment’s drunken folly. I never meant to rob or steal; had I come to town with such intent, I should not have roused such a racket.’

The officer narrows his eyes at him, mulls over his words. ‘You’ve been seen around Hu’s beggars,’ he reminds. 

‘They call me a cure-all,’ Li Lianhua tells him. The cold eats at him, but still he bids himself unfold, ease down his shoulders, assume some grace as he speaks of his past trade. ‘Once, I was a physician of the Shun Xi sect. They were seafarers, and dabbled in trade. But their ship was beset by deserters from the Jinyuan Alliance, and in the fray, I was cast overboard. Fate bore me to old Xu’s beach. This is how I came to Huang Zun.’

The officer’s silence invites elaboration. Li Lianhua silks his voice, weaves in pain and remorse, speaks with the forbearance of a taoist wanderer who came to suffer the cruelties of his fate and bore them with gentle humility; acceptant but not unscarred. 

‘I never recovered from the days at sea, from the tortures of thirst and frigid waters. My eyes are poor, my hands are weak, my back pains me even now. When winter waned and the new year came to pass, I was too ill and lost to seek work or make use of myself, and the old man had me beg on the streets. The townsfolk shut the doors on me. I tried the apothecary,’ he lies, ‘and I even thought to work for the undertaker here, but no one would have me. Some of Hu’s children took me in, and once I saw how they suffer, I could not forsake them.’

Officer Zhao Shan runs a thumb over the hilt of his blade. Li Lianhua sees him weigh this tale and pit it against his past knowledge of Mender Mù’s reputation in town. Then, at last, he nods once.

‘I would beg the weaver’s pardon,’ Li Lianhua laments, ‘and work for him until the damages I have done are mended and repaid and his wife and children find it in their hearts to forgive the scare I gave them.’

‘You are still a jiangshi from the sea to them,’ counters the officer, pensive. ‘And after what you did, the townsfolk will be warier of you than ever before. If you show yourself to them, they may hurt you. You are safer here.’

‘Mm,’ agrees Li Lianhua, and does not lie. He wonders who the qi-eater is, what face he wears in the day. A woman’s fragrant perfume, he reminds himself. It would be too easy if the honored immortal of Heishan Crags was revealed as the reclusive lord of this shadowed town.

‘I am also colder here,’ he admits. ‘And I hurt when I sit shackled like this. Make me work to amend my foolish drunken fit, officer, or else drive me out of town, but I ask you to not keep me here much longer.’

Once more, the law enforcer considers. And then, as Li Lianhua had augured, his honorable character prevails, and he beckons the servant he keeps to step forth with the key. The bald man scowls and looks to his master with doubt, but unshackles Li Lianhua’s wrists. Then the hand on his shoulder hauls him too his feet, and he does not feign his need to latch onto the officer’s arm to find the strength to stand.

‘Come with me then,’ orders this dour-faced man and tows him for the door. ‘We shall see what is to be done with you.’

Chapter Text

Contrasted to the expectations set for his position, officer Zhao Shan’s abode is sparse and humble. He lives, Li Lianhua learns, within the gates of the lord’s manor; owns there a lesser residence in which he can fit a maidservant and the brute who carries out his menial labor. The officer is unwed and has no children, and his ways are ascetic. Li Lianhua also learns that while he enforces the law, he also serves the lord as his secretary and scribe, and his loyalty to the reclusive master is sincere and rigid.

But in the midst of this asceticism and brevity, Li Lianhua finds himself treated to a hot bath, to rice water for his hair and a worn but clean robe to wear. The maidservant brings him a small bowl of steamed rice and sautéed duck, and Li Lianhua is grateful for the foresight of this small share, lest he’d throw up his dinner as soon as he had scarfed down the last grain of rice.

The officer leaves him in the hands of his maidservant and the man who looks like he desires to break his neck, and does not return to see him that day. From the maid, Li Lianhua learns as much of the lord of Huang Zun as he has learned in his days on the streets; the man must have seen some forty or fifty autumns, has never married, and cares little for the plights of his town. He does not open his coffers for festivities and he does not invite any faraway relations to his manor. He keeps a few servants; all of them locals, and he has fathered no children.

Li Lianhua smiles to that.

As he lies in the cleanest bed he has touched since the late summer of the past year, he thinks he should like to see that lord. He has inquiries to pose. But he doubts a lord so incurious shall want any driftwood from the sea. 

Strange, he reflects, how these old patterns shield him from the tides of desolation he otherwise suffers. There are secrets buried in this mellow town, innocents threatened, predators on the loose, and the ghost of Li Xiangyi rears his head. So many years have passed since this savior was buried, so many rites have been spoken to lay him to rest. But still does this deadened wood, adrift in this world, enshrine the sect leader’s heart.

In the end, he clawed his way out of the town’s prison on his own. And by his own hand, he will find this qi-eater and his accomplices, skirt around his own frailty and kill the man who preys on the beggars here. 

This is what he must do. But it is not what he wants.

Ah, he tells himself, defeated, so you still want.

This, he finds, should not astonish him again and again. He still carries Li Xiangyi’s heart, and Li Xiangyi wanted and wanted. Accomplishment, honor, respect and admiration he wanted. A woman to love. Even a decade later, even as he severed the last threads to Qiao Wanmian, he had still wanted; had still yearned and shed his tears as he closed that door to his past. But want, he has come to learn, must bend knee to reason, then as now. 

Now that which he wants is as unattainable as the love of youth was to old Li Lianhua, as rain is to the desert. He yearns for his earthen beds of scallions and leeks, for the smoke of his stove, the cheerful barks of his yellow-coated friend. He yearns to mend his old and worn robes, fish with his bare hands, walk the woodlands until the skies turn bronze and come back to eat from his hotpot in the light of a lone lamp.

Above all, he wants to hear laughter under his roof. He yearns to feel the fine hairs on his arms rise as the winds hail the unseen torrent of northern storms, while an old friend sits on his bench in meditative silence. He wants to share his dinners as dusk falls over the woodlands, drink tea over quiet chatter, watch a fire burn under starlit skies. 

He can no more have that than he can touch the stars. Even here, bereft of his name, untethered from his past, adrift in some forlorn town, strife and hardships found him. And Li Xiangyi’s heart stirs in him.

‘Death,’ he tells the rafters above, ‘offers you that peace. Why do you not take it?’

But he knows why.

With a sigh, he knocks his knuckles against his own brow, closes his eyes and hides them under his sleeve. He thinks himself in circles; treads paths old and worn over and over, finds no end to the road and no way forwards.

At least he is warm. He does not know when he last rested in a soft bed, when he last had meat for supper, when he last drank tea that did not leave a sour taste at the back of his mouth. He can savor that. If sleep refuses to visit him, then let his thoughts wander to more worthwhile considerations.

The qi-eater told him that scarred Qiao had spoken of him, and the motive behind this blatant lie scratches at the back of his mind. Why would the qi-eater lie about the manner in which he came to learn some rumors of the town’s cheapest cure-all?

Because, he reasons, scarred Qiao did not prattle to him at all. She prattled to ears she trusted. And the rumored immortal of Heishan does not want to expose those ears.

An accomplice then. There were no signs of struggle, no blood or skin under the children’s nails. No one had heard cries from those narrow alleys. And both children had been in trusted company. 

Li Lianhua considers his suspects. Hu the vagrant he rules out almost at once; he does not invite ease around his small beggars and has no patience for idle conversation. But beyond that vagrant, Li Lianhua finds himself at a loss. 

To whom would scarred Qiao impart her admiration and fanciful tales of the cure-all from the sea? The beggar children keep to themselves; they would not strain the patience of those who feed them, nor would they speak with ease to those who beat them. 

To his horror, old Xu surfaces in his mind. The fisherman trades with the beggars. When no better company wants him, he drinks with Hu the vagrant. A cantankerous, withered heart is he, who cares as little for the plight of his townsfolk as he cares for the dead flies in his bed. 

But that is a lie, Li Lianhua rebukes himself. You would want to stamp his heart black because he cast you out that night when you needed shelter, a gentle hand, a kind word, but it was he who took you to die in his bed and who brewed you a concoction he thought would ease the anguish of your slow death. 

‘No,’ he mouths to the light of his oil lamp. Xu the fisherman did not lead the beggar children into those alleys to die at the hands of a qi-eater. He believes he knows who did, but the cold stab in his chest is reminiscent of Xiaobao’s hesitance to unravel the truth in Yu Louchun’s manor. 

Some truths are better left buried. Who, if not he, would know this? Who, if not he, wished he had died at sea that night, in the faith that his shixiong loved him, that his sect would rise to honor his legacy, that his old shifu would pass with peace in his heart?

And yet. 

He hears his own shaken breath above the shivers of the candle flame, feels the cold gusts from the gauze-covered lattices run over his cheeks, and turns his back to the door to seek the embrace of sleep.

By the timbre in the boy’s voice to judge, Di Feisheng suspects that the end is nigh. The karmic fire has been set loose upon the jianghu, the skies will fold in upon themselves, the earth will swallow forests and mountains, the dead will walk under the skies; Yin and Yang torn asunder. 

He sits upon a shelf of bedrock, the sun hidden behind the crags of Heishan. Within him, the torrents of his qi flow at his command, burst through his meridians, knit strength into his bones, varnish his mind in the eternal quiet below root and stone, below day and night, below breath.

‘Di da-ge!’

Fang Duobing’s cry shatters that quiet, casts his mind back to the rhythm of his chest, the beats of his heart, the flow of his blood. He knows at once that the sun burns his eyes, that his collar chafes, that some insect climbs his ankle inside his left boot.

How the boy found him, he does not bother to unravel. He made no effort to conceal himself; did not hide the remains of his fires, did not stray from the road, did not expect the boy to follow him.

The accord between them runs beyond words, and the mutual regard for each other’s needs has hitherto been honored with no need for barter. Di Feisheng left because he wished to be alone. And because he knew his wish would be honored, he did not bother to hide the mare he left to graze at the foot of the cliff. 

So when he hears the boy’s shouts, he knows, beyond doubt, that the shouts must likewise be heeded.

He straightens to stand. Rests a hand on his blade. Faces eastwards as the winds catch the ends of his hair.

The boy lands before his feet. So does a pale blue pouch.

‘Di da-ge,’ croaks the youth. He gasps for breath, leans on his knee, raises his reddened face. Sweat beads on his brow; he must have flown quite some distance.

Di Feisheng throws the pouch up with the end of his boot and catches it in his hand. The fabric is soft under his thumb, faded and worn. It is empty.

‘This,’ breathes Li Xiangyi’s disciple, ‘is his.’

Di Feisheng clenches the pouch in his hand, hears the seams strain under his wrath. He skewers the boy with his gaze, holds his eyes. This, he thinks, is a breach of their pact. This is a trespass on forbidden paths. 

Many a man has taken his silence and his devotion to his own narrow pursuits for the folly of a dimwit. Di Feisheng is not a dimwit. He knows that the coasts of the Eastern Sea are near. He knows the sea will spit out her stolen treasures as her whims demand. Now the boy stares back at him with frantic hope in his eyes, beyond reason, ears deaf to all counsel and rebuke.

Cold silver runs in his veins, smothers tenuous whispers of hope. 

‘Where,’ he demands, ‘did you find this?’

‘On a beggar,’ babbles the boy. ‘Qingming festival; they were honoring their dead. Not the beggar though, he was drunk as a bottle. Huli Jing found him! Beggar Hu, he said his name was! This beggar told me he found the pouch on a dead man.’

Di Feisheng’s hand falls. Sapped of strength, his fingers loosen around the blue pouch, but even as his mind burns bridges with what anguish is wrecked on his lower chakras, he arches his brows with intrigue. This he did not expect. 

The hope roused in him is bitter, like the milk of the poppy is bitter. A hope for closure, for a way to seal the wounds they both bear with the fire of certainty.

‘Where,’ he hears himself ask, in the same way as he might have asked directions for the road to the Diyu, ‘did they bury him?’

‘No, but here is the matter of it,’ caws Fang Duobing, the very words stolen from Li Lianhua’s mouth, and Di Feisheng must avert his gaze.

‘There’s a town to the south of the crossroads below. Huang Zun, they named it. It is quite hidden, because the sea encroaches upon it from the east, and the crags shadow it from the north, and it has no sects and no tradition for martial arts, and the Emperor seems to have forgotten it, so it does not see many wayfarers — ’

‘Yes,’ answers Di Feisheng. ‘My men have searched this town before.’

‘ — and I went there and asked around,’ the boy runs on, deaf to all else but his own voice. ‘At the market, and then the manor. The lord would not see me; he is ill, they say, but the townsfolk could tell me that a drifter was washed ashore some six moons ago, and when spring came, he went about town as a cure-all. And then the potter’s wife told me there is now an immortal who dwells in the crags above town.’

Di Feisheng swallows. His heart bats against his ribs with a ferocity that threatens injury. He locks his hands behind his back, steps past the boy, gazes at the horizon ahead. Beyond the green canopies below, the sheen of the sea hides in the mists of distance.

He never believed in ghouls and immortal deities and spooks; never met a foe impervious to the bite of his blade. But if there ever was any man under these skies who could, by virtue of his excellence, cheat death and escape the vicious claws of the Bicha poison, it would be Li Xiangyi.

And if there was ever a charlatan who had the gall to take the guise of an immortal hermit, it would be Li Lianhua.

The smile which breaches his face is abrupt and beyond even his iron restraint, and Fang Duobing mirrors him with the sun’s own radiance on his face. 

But even as he kindles hope, he feels the bedrock beneath his feet give way, feels the realm as he knows it fall apart, and the clench in his stomach is the dread of a man in free fall.

He has come to accept that Li Xiangyi is dead, and that acceptance has unlocked the door to soft ruminations and regrets, recognitions he could sculpt and reflect upon and bear as his hidden burden. As a past beyond repair, as bridges burned. What shall he do if the tomb he thought to be sealed may yet be unsealed? 

What shall he do with the knowledge that while his rival and equal is dead, Li Lianhua might yet live?

It could end there, he comes to see, with the clarity of the bright skies above them. It could end with mere knowledge. To his utmost wonder, he finds that his pursuit could end with one last closure, with one last indisputable testament to the truth. His elation is not born from the prospect of a hunt, but for Li Lianhua alone. 

If they never meet and never speak again, he finds he would still be at peace, at last be at peace, as long as he knows that his old equal has cheated death and risen above pain, as long as he — 

‘As long as he lives well,’ says Fang Duobing, in his mild, pensive manner, and Di Feisheng does not know what the boy has seen on his face to sculpt words for that which stirs in his chest.

Might be that he did not see at all. Fang Duobing stares into the horizon, shades his eyes, his earlier unbridled exuberance tamed. No longer a boy; now a young man, with a man’s restraint and judgment and sorrows.

And Di Feisheng finds himself drawn back to his mantle of Di da-ge with an ease that astonishes him.

‘Fang Duobing,’ he warns. Do you not see, he does not ask, what his silence and his seclusion means? But those words are too many, and the breath for his voice is scarce now. It burns in his throat. 

He darkens his voice. ‘He shall not want to be found.’

Fang Duobing does not look up. He sits back on his haunches, folds his hands between his knees. A small smile draws at the corner of his mouth.

‘I just want to beg his forgiveness,’ the boy admits. ‘Just that. If he lives; if the hermit truly is him, I just want to say these words. I do not even need him to forgive me, I just need to ask. Then I will ride away and never turn back. I will never seek him again.’ 

‘What of his wants?’ 

The boy looks up then. His eyes are lost, forlorn. He tries to speak, thinks better of it, closes his mouth.

Then, ‘To think that it is your turn to remind me,’ says he, a dry and chalked edge to his words. But not jealous, decides Di Feisheng. Even now, there is no jealousy to varnish the boy’s self-reproach.

Di Feisheng chooses to kneel beside him. The hand he claps on the boy’s shoulder is heavy.

‘Who else but me?’ he asks. Who else but me, he demands of the skies and the woods below, of the bedrock, the cliffs and the distant sea. No one, he answers the silence. I alone am his equal. And the boy looks at him then, and acquiescences, and bows his head in deference.

‘I shall allow us to seek the truth in the Heishan Crags,’ declares Di Feisheng. ‘To learn whether he lives or not. All else I forbid. If he shall hear you, he must will it so. If he passes us as strangers, then to him, we shall be strangers.’ He tightens his hold on the boy’s shoulder, warns him of retribution if his decree is unheeded.

You took me for your da-ge, says his hand. You owe me that obedience. 

The boy shudders through his breath, swallows a sob. Then he nods. 

And Di Feisheng rises, the winds at his back. Mist fogs the horizon, hides truth, veils the sea.

In the end, no one can capture mist and vapor. 

‘Let us find this immortal,’ he says. 

Zhao Shan’s curt civility endures. Unlike Xu the fisherman, the officer does not remind Li Lianhua of his debt every other sichen, nor does he demand humility and debasement of him. He seems to take Li Lianhua for a kind of daozhang, an ascetic wanderer who lives from hand to mouth and devotes himself to the welfare of the destitute. 

‘Fú Mù,’ he tells him at their first shared supper, ‘Driftwood. You wear that name well.’

Li Lianhua finds that this treatment suits him. 

He is not spoiled with lavish feasts and comforts, but is treated to clean, hot water, to oils that soften his skin and clean, soft robes. He does not starve; knows no scarcity here, and sleeps in a warm bed. Hidden behind the gates of the officer’s residence, he needs not fear the ill will of the townsfolk of Huang Zun. As the days pass, some strength returns to him. He knows he will need it.

When the man can spare the time, Zhao Shan comes to dine with him. Li Lianhua learns that his education has been decent and deems that the man has been born with a good head, but that he has few equals in town. His duties do not often allow him to travel, and he is curious of the wider realm. The officer veils his curiosity in polite discourse, hides ignorance behind stoicism. Li Lianhua allows him this dignity; trades old news from the wider realm for knowledge of the town’s habits and affairs.

Of the reclusive lord he learns little at all. When that subject is touched upon, officer Zhao Shan becomes a closed book, and Li Lianhua knows he must be cautious. 

‘If your lord suffers from a feeble constitution or is plagued with illness, I would, to repay your benevolence, offer to see him and judge his condition,’ he tells the officer over a pot of fragrant jasmine tea.

‘I have told him of you,’ answers the officer with his curt tact, ‘and made him the offer. But he declined.’

 From this, Li Lianhua learns more of the lord of Huang Zun than he thus has learned from hearsay and rumors. 

‘His reputation paints him as a recluse,’ he says as he breathes the scents of his tea. Before him, officer Zhao Shan beholds him with guarded eyes still. ‘And unconcerned with the plight of the poor in his town.’

He raises his hand to soften what offense his words might cause as he speaks them. The officer’s face is unreadable; even he can not discern whether the man harbors hidden enmity towards his master. 

‘Do pardon me, officer Zhao, I but repeat the hearsay on the streets. It is not for me to judge a sufferer or presume to understand the lord’s burdens.’

Officer Zhao Shan offers him courteous silence in return. A dangerous man, decides Li Lianhua. Had he been younger, he would have been tempted to furnish that silence with his own words and reveal his own thoughts. 

And a familiar man, Li Lianhua decides as he beholds the shadows tease the officer’s face in their shared candlelight. This is a face he has seen before, but he knows not where. Was it here, in this remote town, or in a past life? He can not say. As it once frightened him to learn that his eyes were poor and his hands ridden with tremors, it now frightens him to learn that his recollection might be as blurred as his sight.

He quells that stab of cold dread. 

Rather he savors the warmth of tea and considers the dead end in which he stands. His words are of silk and cotton, weaved with tact and embroidered with insinuations. Perhaps they will not serve him here. Once, in a past life, he taught an old friend to lie.

Might be that it is now his turn to practice that friend’s particular arts.

‘I ask,’ he says, as he sets his hand down by the pot, straightens his back and meets the officer’s gaze. His voice is still cotton, but the sharp man discerns the sharp edge within, and Li Lianhua sees him awaken. 

‘I ask because within half a month, two of the beggar children in town have died from qi-depletion,’ he tells him, ‘The boy named Fen bore crusted blood at the corner of his mouth.’

Officer Zhao Shan raises his brows at him. ‘Qi-depletion? He might have bitten his tongue,’ reasons the man, cautious to question the judgment of a man who claims himself a physician. ‘Or suffered from a disease.’

‘He did not bite his tongue,’ assures Li Lianhua and pays heed to the officer’s reserve. ‘Those children had befriended me. After their deaths, I examined them both. Sores and cuts they suffered, but no signs of such diseases as might have taken them to an early grave.’

The officer bestows him a look of courteous forbearance. ‘And you know all illnesses that might haunt the poor in this corner of the realm, Mender Mù?’ he asks.

‘I know,' answers Li Lianhua, ‘that these children seldom wash, and wear the dust and filth of the town on their faces.’ He chooses a brief silence, throws the hook to his listener. ‘And it therefore bewilders me that someone took pains to wash their mouths, teeth and necks.’

The officer sets his tea away. His silence is laden now, his gaze a hawk’s. 

‘Are you certain?’ he asks.

Li Lianhua leans back in his chair and eases some of his stray tresses behind his ear.

‘Officer Zhao Shan,’ he answers to that, ‘Who is the Immortal of Heishan Crags?’

To his bewilderment, the town official scoffs at the teapot, and the grave concern fades from his face.

 ‘That is a mere tale,’ he says, but Li Lianhua hears the edge of relief in his voice, and wonders.

Chapter Text

What follows is this; Li Lianhua stays in the town officer’s residence, learns the rhythm of his duties and days, wanders in the enclosed garden west of the lord’s manor, charms the maidservant with his humble quietude. 

When he can, he pays heed to the timbre and pitch of the officer’s voice, learns his rural accent, practices his mannerisms. He repays the officer’s benevolence with such small chores as the maidservant will allow him to do, cooks when he can, lights the lamps, waters the garden, repairs an old screen. When bid to rest, he secludes himself in the officer’s sparse library; peruses the older records he can find there. Wonders at the elegant calligraphy and the unknown hand that wrote it. 

And when one day officer Zhao Shan must see to an affair in town, the young maidservant does not hesitate to allow him to fetch the clean laundry.

As the low sun torches the skies with fires of red and auburn, Li Lianhua fetches the laundry. Then he retires to his chamber, dresses himself in the town official’s dark garbs, raises his hood, and steals away to the lord’s own manor.

The entrance to the manor is unwatched, and little wonder, for the few thieves in town are locals and would never dare to rob the town’s only lord. Nor has the town suffered the scars of wars or brigand raids for many a year. Thus when Li Lianhua enters, he finds a dim, deserted hallway ahead of him. Faded draperies adorn the pillars; the lamps are few and far between. In the distance, he can hear the clatter of tools from the servants’ quarters. 

Cloaked and quiet, he follows the hallway; holds his hand out where his eyes will not serve him, allows his fingers to read his path for him, strains his ears for footfalls. 

A forlorn, dead manor is this, fit for a forlorn and stagnant town. The draperies smell of moths and old cotton. A scent of dust pervades the halls. Once, he passes a young maidservant who by ears and nose must be a sister or cousin to officer Zhao Shan’s own servant. He strides past her as he believes the officer would, and she does not raise her eyes when she bows to him. 

The manor was not built for a lone recluse, he thinks as he tries yet another locked door. Once, a wife governed the household. Before the lord’s decline, there might have been relatives who inhabited these unused chambers; unwed aunts, younger brothers and sisters. Strange, he reasons, that there are no such relations to care for an invalid now.

Past a banquet hall, at the far end of another undisturbed corridor, he comes to another narrow door. This one yields to his hand; admits him into a dimly lit chamber. Odors of medicinal herbs and incense suffuse the air, and he knows these scents. These are the aromas used to relieve the nerves, soothe the mind, dull heartache, soften caprices. 

Hidden behind a curtain of thin gauze stands a lone bed. Li Lianhua keeps his distance, salutes as appropriate. 

‘Zhao?’ demands a rusted voice. Then anew, ‘Zhao? Do not skulk in the shadows like that. Zhao, you wear on my nerves.’

A few immediate observations become apparent; there is indeed a man here who is acknowledged as the lord of Huang Zun. By voice to judge, he is past his prime. By tone, he affects a capricious temperament accurate to his reputation in town. Whether the man is in truth the current lord of Huang Zun, whether the public would recognize him as the son and heir of their late lord, and whether he is at all infirm, Li Lianhua cannot decide.

‘My pardon for the disruption of your rest, Lord Fang,’ he apologizes. ‘I came to deliver a letter and did not expect to find you awake.’ 

Li Lianhua has never mastered the technique to change his own voice, but if the invalid’s ears are as blunted as his own eyes are dulled, his own judgment tells him his rural accent and the curt tone will serve.

A short silence follows. 

‘Letter? What letter?’ 

‘The letter from the physician from the sea,’ Li Lianhua tells him, and says no more. 

The lord strikes the frame of his bed. Through that, Li Lianhua learns that Mender Mù has indeed been discussed in this chamber before.

‘The cure-all! What does he want? I said I would not see him. What use is there to see him? Does he work miracles? Raises the dead? Unwinds the past, changes the threads of Fate? Why is it, Zhao, that you keep him in town? Drive him out. The ailments I have are not for him to cure.’

‘He did not confide in me the contents of his letter,’ answers Li Lianhua, ‘but he insisted you would wish to hear it. I deemed it of little enough importance, so I chose not to deliver it until the end of the day. Shall I burn it?’

‘Read it,’ screeches the lord. ‘Do not burden my desk and my morrow with this daozhang’s pleas for pittance. Read it now, then burn it.’

Ah, thinks Li Lianhua, so your reproach to spite, you dare not turn the deaf ear. And why is that? Why is there an undercurrent of trepidation beneath your ill temper?

He has prepared no letter, so he draws a handkerchief from his sleeve, unfolds it and pretends to read,

‘Honored Lord Fang Yìchén of Huang Zun. It is with lament that I raise this concern. A predator preys on the poor of your town; on the destitute children in a flock of beggars which now have taken refuge in the ruins of the town’s old inn. Might be that in this corner of the realm, such a fiend will be titled immortal and venerated as an enlightened hermit. But where I hail from, we call men who have lived past their years and who fend off death with the stolen inner force of others for qi-eaters.’

He chooses to halt there. The man in the bed, hidden behind his gauze, gives a hitched breath. His hand falls away from the wooden frame. 

For a while, all he can hear are the stuttered wheezes of the old man’s throat. Li Lianhua bestows him his patience, accommodates the lord’s infirmities. He stands hooded and still, a shadow in the dark.

And at last, the lord finds enough breath to spit an oath. 

‘Zhao,’ he stutters. ‘You lie. You have never lied before. You two conspire against me. Who is that quack from the sea? What does he want? Zhao, you are a principled man; that is your curse. But remember, you are indebted to me.’

Officer Zhao Shan wields silence as a tool, and Li Lianhua allows this silence to meet the invalid’s tantrum.

‘What am I to do?’ laments the old man then. ‘”Qi-eater” writes this quack to me. What worth do those rats have? They steal and beg. They do not work. They are ill and spread their diseases in my town. What use have they for their inner force? It is wasted on them.’

‘Lord Fang,’ asks Li Lianhua, soft as the silken garrote, ‘how long will it be until this qi-eater empties the town of beggars and takes to feed on the butcher, the weaver, the potter’s children?’

‘He will not,’ waves a decrepit hand. ‘We have a bargain. He keeps to beggars. No one will want them; honest workers he won’t take. He does not take more than he needs. Zhao, enough of this. My chest aches, my heart stutters. Remember, you are indebted to me, so I ask — nay — I order you to run the cure-all out of town. Burn his letter, tell him he has fallen out of favor for such unfounded rumors. We do not need him here.’

The old man’s voice tapers away, breaks on a dry cough. Li Lianhua must swallow his own. He finds his hands cold, and himself so weary that his feet will not keep him. 

‘And the maimed boy?’ he tries, and hears his own voice seep through the imitation of officer Zhao Shan. 

‘What maimed boy?’ spits the lord. 

‘And what,’ demands the true voice of the town official, ‘is this?’

The invalid bolts upright in his bed. Li Lianhua wonders whether he has been too deaf to hear the officer knock, or the decrepit lord summoned him through some hidden devices. When he turns to look over his shoulder, the hilt of a sword throws his hood back from his face, and just then, Lord Fang bats away the thin curtain before his bed. His eyes threaten to burst from his skull.

Before he can be restrained, Li Lianhua draws closer to the bed and steals one brief look at the wizened face. The man is old; far older than his years, his skin sallow and withered. Deep furrows tarnish his mouth. His eyes are narrow and wet beneath heavy lids, but even then does Li Lianhua see the resemblance to Three-Finger Wen upon his face.

‘Mm,’ he says. 

But the withered skin and gray hair tell of other grievances than mere shared blood with an unwanted son. He too has been eaten; drained of the inner strength that preserves youth and vigor. 

Li Lianhua tells him so. 

Then officer Zhao Shan bears down on him, throws him off his feet, wrests his wrists behind his back, rams his forehead against old planks. Li Lianhua’s conclusions shatter like glass. 

‘Some tale,’ Li Lianhua musters to say when his dry tongue loosens from the roof of his mouth. He wakes in the same damp corner of the prison, his wrists shackled and his feet bare. Officer Zhao Shan’s shadow falls on his knees. 

His head aches so much that his stomach heaves with each wave of pain. The agony thrums behind his eyes, needles his temples, tenses his neck. 

‘I’d hold my tongue if I were you,’ answers his captor, cold as the bricks at his back. ‘I took you under my roof; bestowed my trust, respected you as a mender. You betrayed me.’

Li Lianhua dries his eyes with his sleeve, endures the burn of bile in his throat. The lantern-light in the officer’s hand sears his eyes, so he does not raise his head. 

‘Less so,’ he says gently, ‘than your lord has betrayed Huang Zun.’ 

His thoughts fray and unwind, burn down to loose ends and tatters. He runs his thumb over his forefinger, endeavors to salvage what he can and tie words to reason, but his head throbs with pain and even his own name blurs in his mind. Xiangyi, Lianhua.

Driftwood, dead and dry.

Speak, he beckons himself; claws at the dry well of his internal force. He must speak, must be heard. What he has to say is unbelievable enough, and yet he knows he depends on his tongue and wits alone.

‘Officer Zhao,’ he pleads, but his words are too slow and as feeble as his qi. ‘The qi-eater,’ he tries, before the pain wilts his tongue and leaves him with a salt and bitter taste.

And officer Zhao Shan’s cold silence speaks sharper than any words. The man turns his back to his captive and Li Lianhua hears his steps fade, hears the bolts scrape the door.

‘Bestowed your trust,’ echoes Li Lianhua into the cloth of his sleeve. ‘Who asked you for your trust?’

You are far from the first, he thinks, to offer trust in this court and find yourself betrayed.

Betrayal is his red thread of Fate; it weaves and winds through all his years. Each breath he yet draws is a betrayal when he left behind all he had to die as he willed; alone, destitute, under a clear sky. He was never the one he claimed to be; ever a mirage behind a paper mask, one coat shed after another, Li Xiangyi’s heart unfit for them all. Not a beggar of common blood; not an irreplaceable sect leader, not invincible, not a miracle-worker. Not shidi, not shifu, not a friend, no one’s zhiji. 

Such a contradiction was Li Xiangyi, masterful in near all he touched, yet never enough. 

He has betrayed and been betrayed, known the desolation of the realm’s highest peaks, known the steep fall from grace. Eaten from within, burned away by poison and withered by remorse, he lost more and more of himself until little but deadwood remained.

And above all, he has betrayed himself. Sated one need with one hand and forfeited another with the other. He has wept with agony and wrath; wept for the betrayal of his shifu, with the anguish of disbelief and anger, but in the end, he has never wept with grief. 

He weeps now; trembles with the restraint of vehement anguish, with the pain behind his eyes. He bites the fabric of his sleeve and howls through clenched teeth, hides his head under his own arms and weeps for the brother he had loved and respected, for the kinship he had believed in, for the ease he once wore around the man who told him that he would ever place his shidi above himself. He weeps until he throws up in his own mouth, until he must stutter through hiccups or else drown.

And even then, some whisper at the back of his head tells him that as the jiangshi may claw their way out of their own grave, so will he find a way to escape his confinement with what is still left of him. He will leave this prison, and he will seek answers from that three-fingered boy, and in the end, he will trap the qi-eater and end him. With the invalid of Huang Zun is there less to be done; karma has bestowed him his punishment; will punish him to the end of his days. 

Might be that some of these beggars will then live a few more years. Might be that he will die in his pursuit of the qi-eater.

He will still act. He needs no one. From the day a blade found his hand, he has never needed anyone.

But Li Xiangyi’s heart wants and wants. 

Officer Zhao Shan no longer comes to see him. 

Three days later, Li Lianhua coaxes the manservant to borrow him a few needles so he may treat his headache. What harm can a physician’s needles do? The man refuses at first; draw’s a brute’s pleasure from the prisoner’s misery, enjoys to loom over him as Li Lianhua hunches in his corner. He steals his food and threatens to pee in his water. Li Lianhua throws up his millet and waits until the brute is forced to clean it up, then asks for the needles again.

The next day, the man returns with three acupuncture needles. He stays to watch the physican’s treatment of his own ailments, narrow-eyed and irate.

‘Half a kè,’ he warns. ‘Then I will take them from you.’

‘You must let them work,’ silks Li Lianhua, ‘I will be ill if you draw them out. One kè, one kè is all I ask.’

The brute bares his teeth at him. Li Lianhua sees him drawn taut between cruelty and indolence, and hears in his scoff how indolence wins. He is allowed one kè, though with no clock present, his turnkey is left to decide how long that shall be. Li Lianhua picks the locks of his manacles while he treats his acupuncture points, pretends to faint, pilfers the warden’s keys when the man leans over him to draw out the needles.

In the last shades of twilight, Li Lianhua wanders out of the prison’s postern and steals down to the lower streets of Huang Zun. Near the deserted market square, he bathes himself in cold water from the well, drinks until he is short of breath. Of food is there little to be had; he has no tools to unbolt a door or unseal a lock, and is too weak and battered to wander far. 

He tries to find a kitchen hatch to steal from and meets no fortune there. Then he returns to the market square; picks a few seeds between the shuttered stalls, kneels in the light of the moon and allows his hands to find what his eyes cannot. Sleep finds him in a corner of the weaver’s porch, where he is almost certain Officer Zhao will not consider to hunt for him.

At the first light of dawn, he rises. Mist creeps in the narrow alleys where no light yet falls, and he hides with the mist and vapor of the near kitchens and awaits the skies to brighten and the rest of the town to wake. The beggars sleep late and rise late, or do not sleep at all.

Li Xiangy knew to fly, Li Lianhua knew to make himself unseen. Driftwood is neither graceful nor nimble, so he must be shy. He hides where he can; in shadows, in the nooks and crannies of the poorer quarters. A warm, quiet day slumbers over the roofs of Huang Zun. The town is small; many know the face of Mender Mù. His escape stirs no clamor amidst the locals; he does not expect any. Not yet. Officer Zhao’s man will not soon confess to his negligence, will not reveal an empty prison hold. Li Lianhua might have days, if the brute does not flee the town first. 

In the late afternoon, he hear’s Three-Finger Wen’s voice around the corner. The boy is blithe; cheerful with the false levity of an old haggler. 

And to his horror, when Li Lianhua draws nearer yet, he hears another voice answer the beggar boy; a voice known and dear to him as the first tender leaves of the mulberry tree, dear as breath itself. 

He halts. For the longest while, he stands petrified; vanquished, entrapped between waves he can not crest, and for which he has no name. He hears his heart in his own throat, feels not his hands or his feet, soars on the sheer delight of that timbre clear and youthful and plummets with the chains of his own past decisions.

He does not reveal himself. 

And when he knows he shall not be seen, he draws around the corner to steal a look.

The young man he sees has left boyhood behind. Fang Duobing, attired in a wayfarer’s garbs, knees coated in dust and sleeves blackened with dirt, sits on his haunches before Three-Finger Wen. The boy has a stick of fried lotus root in his claw-like hand and smiles from ear to ear.

And leaned against the western wall, head bent and arms folded across his chest, stands his old rival in his embroidered old coat. 

‘ — and,’ chirps Three-Finger Wen, ‘he is so, so old! He was born before the Emperor, and the Emperor, you know, has lived for so many years. Hundreds of them, I think. But so there, if we leave food for him, he watches over our town. He likes stewed duck. And rice wine. And some seeds which I don’t know what are, maybe lotus.’

‘What fortune for Huang Zun, to be protected by an immortal,’ smiles Fang Duobing. ‘And here we come, two pilgrims, to seek his wisdom and enlightenment. But I expect he does not see pilgrims?’

Li Lianhua draws back, rests his head against the wall, runs his hand over his eyes. A few breaths; he needs a few breaths to understand. Another few to settle. 

A last one, to remind the conceited, narrow-minded wraith of Li Xiangyi that even as Fate brought the boy and the old rival to Huang Zun, even as only ten steps part them, the two are not here for him. 

‘Oh no,’ boasts Three-Finger Wen. ‘He won’t show himself even a bit, unless there is a blue moon on the sky; then he comes to stand on the cliffs to watch over the town, and there will be white light behind him.’

‘Ridiculous,’ scoffs the older man and leers into the alley to his left. 

It thaws the cold fog around Li Lianhua’s heart, anchors him, allows him to strain his ears after the conversation.

He wonders what he would have done if they had come to seek him there; whether he would have had the strength of restraint, or whether those brittle and rusted shackles would at last have broken and allowed him to draw around the corner and let their eyes find him. 

That is beyond him now. 

And so he laughs, silent, eyes drawn to the skies above. ‘Li Lianhua, ah, Li Lianhua,’ he breathes to himself; shakes with a mirth as bitter and sweet as the scent of nightshade. And once more, he is that boy who returned to his sect, wounded and defeated, to stand hidden at the entry of his courtyard and hear his sect be torn asunder.

‘Let be,’ he tells himself. 

And he does. The surrender is a balm on burnt skin, sweet rain on parched earth. Water, he tells himself, will not drown, will not bleed; it flows and bends with the patterns of its path. All he once had loved, he has learned to let be so that he could die as he had meant to die; alone, destitute, and under a clear, bright sky.

Let be, whispers his vaporous heart.

He does. 

But curiosity stirs in him still, and he steals closer to the very bend of the corner to better hear their words and see what he can of their faces.

Fang Duobing is no longer a boy. Li Lianhua sees it in his shoulders, the tempered manner of his speech, the shadow of his smile. Once a sword fresh from the forge, light and sharp, he has since been battered by strife and skirmish, borne the force of cruel blows. Now he wears his hidden dints and furrows, honed and unbroken.

He has bound his hair with a tie of brown cotton, crowned with an ornament of wood. His face looks washed at least, and that is the best Li Lianhua can say for him.

The old wolf at his back is no better. They have been on the road for a while, Li Lianhua learns from their well-worn boots and dusted coats. His eyes narrow with mirth as he studies the head of the Jinyuan Alliance; the stiff stance, the grim avidity. Who would have thought that the road would have tempted him in the end?

But his Huli Jing he cannot see. The stab of a warm ache in his chest, the sudden, painful need to touch that furred head just once more, drowns in a cold gust of sudden prudence. Lest the boy has left her behind in Tianji Manor — and he knows his disciple well enough to doubt it —  she must roam the streets of this town. 

Li Lianhua bites his cheek, raises his gaze to the roof’s edge above his head; knows, even as he considers to reach up, that he does not have the strength to climb. Defeated, he lowers his chin, swallows a sigh. Prudence warns him to retreat. 

Li Lianhua stays and listens. 

Fang Duobing leaves handful of coppers into Wen’s left hand. The boy draws closer than needed, bows his head, is so quick with his other hand that his benefactor shall not mourn the loss of his coin pouch until it is much too late to hunt down the thief. Li Lianhua sees it because he awaits it. But the young traveler’s mind is with his captivated ears, and the boy still braids and knits his lies about the immortal in the crags of Heishan. 

‘ — No, no one can find his cave,’ says the boy. ‘It can only be seen during Qingming Festival, and it has to rain that day, but the skies must also be clear, and the sun must shine too. If there is even one cloud, the cave won’t appear. And also pilgrims who have tried to find it have been eaten by,’ the boy hesitates, ‘ — wild dogs.’

‘Aha,’ agrees Fang Duobing. 

Three-Finger Wen nods like a wise old sage, then peers up at Di Feisheng, hunches his shoulders and roots his eyes to his own feet. He wears straw sandals this day, but his feet are still black.

‘One of the dogs has two heads,’ he adds, once he has weighed his wild dogs against Di Feisheng. 

They are here for the qi-eater. Li Lianhua finds that this bewilders him. He doubted that word of this immortal had left the town, and any rumors the itinerant peddlers might take with them would be but tales. Less astonished is he by Di Feisheng’s presence around the young man he once took, if only in his heart, for his disciple. 

Fang Duobing laughs, soft as the heart he wears unearthed and unlocked for all of jianghu to see. ‘We’d rather not wake the immortal’s anger,’ he says, ‘so we shall leave him offerings of the finest stewed duck and rice wine to show we come humble and with honest intent. Where is his shrine?’

‘Oh,’ says the boy, ‘there is no shrine. But there’s a little stone path at the foot of the hill, past the goatherd’s pens. It’s hard to find, but you can look for broken stones.’

‘Good,’ answers Fang Duobing, with an echo of his old vivacity and some thin thread of wild hope, ‘and where in Huang Zun might one buy the best braised duck and rice wine?’

‘Ma Xiang,’ chirps the boy at once. ‘Don’t go to master Jing Lei’s tavern, don’t. Jing Lei does not like travelers, and Ma Xiang’s duck is much better. As for wine, old master Hu says — ’

He prattles their ears full, draws the path to the market square for them in the dust, sends them away.

Left to himself, he sits back to drink the sun’s warmth and eat of his fried lotus stick, and Li Lianhua allows him a short respite. 

Then, he approaches. 

Chapter Text

Three-Finger Wen’s ear twitches. 

He flinches and straightens, drops his lotus root stick in the dust, picks up the first and best stone he can find. When he sees Li Lianhua, his hand falls.

‘Mender Mù!’ comes the brittle caw, ‘āiyā, Mender Mù, you scared me!’

He brightens, smiles wide, hides the shadows of fear in his eyes. ‘I thought officer Zhao locked you up! It’s not bad to be locked up. He feeds you cabbage and millet, and you don’t need to work for it! And it’s warm there. Some winters, if it is very cold and Hu is in a temper, he locks us up and lets us sleep on dry furs.’

‘It was not bad,’ agrees Li Lianhua. He feels his way forwards; draws his fingers across the wall until he can sit down by the boy. Three-Finger Wen peers at his face, finds there silence and shadows and the darker blemishes where Li Lianhua’s forehead hit the wood in Lord Fang’s chamber. His smile fades.

They sit in silence for a while, breathe the dust. The boy rubs his roasted lotus root against his sleeve and bites into it. Li Lianhua listens to the shouts from the distant market rows, the clatter of cartwheels, the chime of a bell. 

Almost, almost can he see how the puzzle pieces fit the whole. There is no intricate mystery here; in the past, he has solved conundrums far more convoluted. But the threads are yet untied; where the maimed boy is concerned, the suspicion he has now forks into two conceivable truths. Wen will answer him. 

Mournful, he looks at the boy, and Wen offers him unspoken questions in return. Then Li Lianhua throws the pebble into the still pond.

‘Why did you do it?’

The boy’s face shutters, wilts. He keeps the lotus root in his mouth unchewed. When he swallows, it seems to pain him.

‘Did what?’ he tries, like every culprit has tried before him. His heart is not in it. ‘Threw the rock? I didn’t want you to be eaten.’

Li Lianhua keeps his silence, coats the boy in the heavy quiet between them. Wen clenches his fist, holds his breath, braces himself to run. Then, wearied, he turns away.

‘He deserved it,’ he says. 

Ah, thinks Li Lianhua. There is another piece. The puzzle unravels, confirms one suspicion, forfeits another, paints more of the whole. 

‘Because he killed Qiao?’ he gentles, and Wen draws his knees to his chest, his eyes narrow and dark. An old man’s eyes, thinks Li Lianhua. He has seen those eyes before. 

‘And A-Jian. And stunted Wan-Wan,’ answers the boy.

Li Lianhua must draw on conjunctures, follow the threads with his hand, bridge what he knows with what might have been. He hums, then takes the boy’s voice in his mouth.

‘So you told the qi-eater that Fen had betrayed his deeds to me; the daozhang who had come to cure and protect the destitute of Huang Zun.’

Three-Finger Wen turns to him with astonishment, mouth parted. But even his awe is a candle’s flame in the wind, and he soon peers at his dirtied nails and scrapes at the filth there. 

‘It was what I could think of.’ The boy’s voice is flat. He makes no effort to defend himself. In the end, he throws away his half-eaten lotus root. ‘I knew the qi-eater would be angry, and that he’d eat Fen for it. And he did. Serves Fen right.’

He raises his gaze and catches Li Lianhua’s eyes with brazen defiance. His voice quivers. ‘And I knew he’d come to eat you too, when Fen was dead! So I ran and told old Hu. I knew Hu hates you. I knew he’d run you out of town. I wish he had.’

The child puffs up his chest. ‘You can kill me if you like. I don’t care.’

Li Lianhua folds his arm around the boy’s shoulders.

‘Tell me first about the qi-eater and your father,’ he says. 

Three-Finger Wen elbows him in the ribs, leers between his knees, leans into the embrace. He reminds of an old rival Li Xiangyi had, thinks Li Lianhua. The boy is a sly fox where Di Feisheng is a brute wolf, but he has the same fierce eyes, the same indomitable will. 

‘My father,’ mocks the boy, sharp and brittle as broken glass. ‘So you know about that too.’ He stretches, scrapes his heel over the dust, wears down his straw sandal as if he means to break it.

Then, ‘They are brothers. The qi-eater and the old lord, you know. My father was the oldest, so he would be the new lord when the old one died. But his younger brother liked my mother a lot, and then –’ He hesitates.

‘I don’t know,’ he says at last. ‘Old Xu says the younger brother made his older brother very sick. And my mother was so sad that she died. I remember her, a bit. She had a jade bracelet. It was white. And her hair smelled good. She washed it often, I think. I remember the lanterns too.’

‘How long,’ asks Li Lianhua, ‘have you been on the streets?’

The boy raises his shoulders. ‘Many winters. Maybe six? I don’t know. Why should I know?’

‘You know a lot, Wen,’ Li Lianhua tells him, like a master who praises a disciple, like a swordsman who rests the sharp edge of a blade against his captive’s throat. ‘What else do you know?’

‘It’s just what old Xu told me,’ answers the boy. ‘All that about the two brothers and my mother. Fen and I used to be brothers too. Fen heard old Xu talk to me, and then he went to the qi-eater and told him that he was his son.’

Li Lianhua furrows his brows. The fragments in the child’s tale do not fit the painted picture, and yet does the boy speak with the sincerity of a defeated man. Then he takes Three-Finger Wen as the son of the invalid, turns him over between his hands, and fits him as the son of the qi-eater.

‘The current lord of Huang Zun is your uncle,’ he decides. 

And the boy looks his way with brows furrowed in pained awe. He folds his three fingers on Li Lianhua’s wrist, clenches it as if he had hoped to keep him for himself. 
‘You’re clever, Mender Mù’ he says, in a weak, beaten manner no child should ever speak. ‘I wish I was like y –’ 

He sees Li Lianhua’s eyes and catches his wish between his teeth. His fingers clench with an unspoken question, but he does not ask. In the few years the boy has lived, he has been taught to hold his tongue and read his answers from silence. 

‘I like that you’re clever,’ he promises rather, ‘and so did Qiao. You had clever stories and clever eyes and soft hands, even if your cures were all bitter and the balms stung. You shouldn’t be on the streets, Mender Mù.’ The boy smiles, wistful. ‘Old master Hu thought the same. That’s why he did not like you a bit.’

‘That,’ sighs Li Lianhua, ‘is an old and wearisome tale too.’ 

Three-Finger Wen falls quiet and chews on the nail of his thumb. Li Lianhua touches his shoulder in turn.

‘You and Fen,’ he reminds, and the boy’s eyes darken again, a black, still pond in which Li Lianhua can see his own reflection.

‘Not brothers by blood,’ says the boy. ‘But we looked a bit the same, so we pretended. But then Fen heard what old Xu told me. He went to the eater and said he was me. I think my father believed him, because he could talk about mother and the jade bracelet and some of what uncle had said in the past. I didn’t like it one bit, so I told him. But he said it would be for the best, because the eater had promised him to not eat him or his street-brother. And that one day we would both live in the manor.’

The child sighs. ‘I thought to tell my father that I was the real Wen, but I was afraid he’d hurt Fen then. I didn’t know he was a qi-eater then. Or what Fen did for him.’

Piece after piece, the puzzle unravels, thinks Li Lianhua. By now, he has but a few more threads to tie.

‘Officer Zhao has been good to you,’ he says. ‘Why did you not tell him about the qi-eater?’

‘Oh,’ answers the boy. ‘Because if I did, my uncle would think it was old Xu’s fault that Zhao found out, and then he’d kill him. Zhao is – ’ 

‘The fisherman’s son,’ Li Lianhua agrees. He draws on conjunctures anew. ‘He lives by the sea because the lord has banished him from Huang Zun. But he did not always fish; years ago, he was a servant in the lord's manor, and it was he who, as you say, “made the older brother sick” – or rather poisoned him, as I think he might have.’’

‘He did not tell me that!’ shouts the boy. Bewilderment clouds his face. 

‘How could he?’ soothes Li Lianhua. ‘The townsfolk would have demanded his death.’

‘But then,’ tries Three-Finger Wen, ‘why did the lord not keep him in the manor and make him rich? Why was he banished? And why did he stay here?’

These are the last threads, thinks Li Lianhua, and wonders if they will be tied with the death of the boy’s mother. Grief, he knows, will hollow the heart, clot meridian pathways, wilt the inner force, and yet he breathes still. He carries with him the grief of a decade, of a fall from the greatest heights, but still does his heart beat and his blood run in his pale hands.

Might be that the boy’s mother was frailer than him, and the love she bore for her son was not enough to shield her heart from the knife of grief. Might be that there are true jianghu in the black depths of the sea, and immortal hermits secluded in hidden caves at the edges of the very realm. But he sees in his mind a seedier truth.

To prove this truth, he must live. And he finds himself too cold, too ill, too feeble to bear another day on an empty stomach. He cannot sleep another night on the streets and hide in the nooks and crannies of this town, afraid to be seen in the crowds lest he is found by the officer’s men or his own past. 

‘Wen,’ he says, ‘we can learn those answers, but the truth you told me, you must tell officer Zhao.’

‘He’ll hang me!’ protests the boy. 

‘For what, Wen?’ soothes Li Lianhua. ‘You sold out Fen, but his death was not by your hands. And I will come with you. Zhao trusts me.’

The boy thins his mouth, shudders through a slow breath. Li Lianhua brushes a thumb over his wrist and finds the qi there flutter like a trapped flame. 

‘Master Hu will beat me if he sees us,’ sighs Wen. ‘Maybe pull a nail. I told him you had run out of town.’

‘Then he must not see us.’ Li Lianhua leans into this unforeseen benefit. The boy serves him a good a reason to remain hidden. ‘Fetch him here for me, Wen. I am cold and hungry. I think I will sleep here a while.’

Three-Finger Wen unwinds himself from the arm on his shoulders and rises, doubt etched on his brow. He beats dust off his knees, shakes his straw sandals after turn, tarries where he stands.

‘Officer Zhao does not like it when we disturb or bother him," he says at last. ‘He might not come.’

‘Fetch him,’ smiles Li Lianhua. ‘If you tell him you know where I am, he will come.’

At first, he thinks he dreams of a dog. She barks at him in the mist, joyous and wild, and as white and pale yellow as he remembers her. The sun warms the wood at his back, bathes his face in light, soothes the aches in his shoulders. He drifts, allows sleep to soften his thoughts, to draw cotton over his pains and blunt the sharp teeth of hunger. 

Paws bound over the dusted street; draw nearer and nearer. The first lick against his wrist wakes him, casts him back to aches old and fresh, to the burn of a light too bright for his eyes, to his hollow stomach. Then a wet snout finds his neck, pants in his ear and barks so he flinches. Teeth fetch the collar of his robe, strain the thin fabric, tug until he hears the threads tear.

And before him, with her clear, dark eyes bright with laughter and gentle with devotion, stands Huli Jing.

Li Lianhua lands a hand on her nose and shoves her back from his face. 

‘So,’ he wavers past the brittle shiver in his voice, ‘you are here too.’

Huli Jing bats his hand away and licks his cheeks. 

Li Lianhua hides his eyes in the crook of his elbow; strains his ears for nearby footsteps. 

‘Quiet, you,’ he begs. ‘Quiet, or you’ll draw them here. Here, here are my hands, here is my face. Do what you want with me, but be quiet.’

He leans away from the wall and offers her his hands to lick, watches her leap and dance in the dust. He had left her, as he had left them all, and yet is there no reproach in her bright eyes and no disappointment in her perked ears. He silks them between his thumb and forefinger and she laughs at him as she did when she was but a young pup, her tongue warm and red. 

She asks no more of him than his touch, his voice. She has not come here for dead men’s ghosts, does not hunt for a lost past, does not mourn that which is dead. She licks his wrists, snuffs into his sleeves for treats, beats his face with her tail as she bounds around in a circle, lands her paws on his shoulders.

‘Huli Jing,’ he murmurs; runs the dear name through his heart as he runs his fingers through her short and unkempt fur. It speaks to him of green grass and dew and sunlit woodlands, of tea brewed on dried leaves of the red gum tree, of the patter of rain upon his wooden roof.

‘Huli Jing,’ he scolds when she at last deigns to sit down before him. He taps her nose. ‘Did I not forbid you to play with the clutter you find on the streets? Why are you so stubborn? You were a good dog when we parted ways. Who taught you to be so wild?’

She pants at him, shakes her coat where she sits, leaps up to catch her own tail. When he catches her tail and feeds it to her, she nips at his sleeve.

‘Mm,’ says Li Lianhua. ‘Look at you. Unmannered and unwashed. A brigand, Huli Jing, is what you have become. Well, how do you find your small pack of highwaymen?’

Huli Jing eases her head underneath his hand and rests her wet nose on his wrist, and Li Lianhua’s voice falters. He allows his breath to ebb and flow with the wan currents of his qi, breathes through the ache in his chest until it mellows, until joy and grief become braided into one. 

Fate has offered him one treat, one handful of sweet water for his deadwood heart. She has allowed him to see his disciple’s face, hale and well. She has shown him his old rival and friend guard the boy’s back with his hawk’s eyes. And she has given him this afternoon under these clear skies, sweet as the confections he ate in his youth, alone and at peace with the dog he cried for in those wintry nights under old Xu’s roof. 

The first salt tears burn the abraded skin on his cheeks. Huli Jing leans into his knees, and he folds his arms around her neck and buries his face in her fur. The first wet gasp past his teeth she answers with a quiet whine against his bare throat. The rest he smothers in her coat, and she sits with him, as quiet and patient as his old shifu used to be. The light dapples the narrow street, paints the dust motes golden, whitens her soft ears. Li Lianhua soaks in the warmth at his back, feels the pebbles bruise his knees where he kneels, steals time he does not have.

Only when sleep blurs the edges of his mind, when light and warmth and the scent of unwashed fur blend to a gentle fog, does he allow his embrace to falter. The light has faded, the skies bear tints of gold. One afternoon spent in the beat of a heart.

‘Thank you,’ he whispers as he pets the yellow head. The wall catches him as he stands up, as he picks himself up and brushes stiff hairs from his nose and cheeks. Huli Jing draws closer to smell his robes, and he bends down and taps her nose.

‘Run,’ he tells her. ‘Run off and stay away, Huli Jing. Do not lead them back here. I will not be found. Ghosts wander at night; fade in the light of day.’

Footfalls at the mouth of the alley reach his ears. They are not the quick patter of his disciple, nor the heavier stride of his old rival, and his breath leaves his throat with relief.

‘Run,’ he admonishes and bends down to shove his friend away. But Huli Jing smiles at him, catches his sleeve, tears it with her teeth, and before his crippled eyes can find the tatter and rip it from her maw, she bounds down the alley with pride in her skips.

Li Lianhua straightens, soothes his eyes with his hand, begs his knees to hold him. He feels light and hollow, a leaf at the mercy of the lightest breeze. But to faint here and be left at the town’s mercy, unable to see or speak or steer with sculpted words, is rather a fate he should want to escape. 

So he steadies himself and leans upon the nearest wall, and sighs his relief anew when he hears officer Zhao’s blade leave his sheath.

‘You,’ shouts the man. 

‘Officer, officer,’ hollers the boy behind him. ‘Don’t cut him down, that’s just Mender Mù!’

Three-Finger Wen runs behind the town official, both straw sandals in hand. ‘That’s just Mender Mù,’ he repeats. ‘He wanted to talk to you!’

‘I am certain he did,’ barks the officer. He approaches in stride, weapon in hand, prepared to chase if he must, and Li Lianhua knows he must act fast. He needs to disappear from the streets. Above all, he needs to change his robes and conceal his scent.

He raises his hands before his chest, softens his face, makes himself meek and docile. Once more, he must gamble on inferences to save himself; must draw on knowledge he does not have, but suspects. A vague assertion might not stall the enraged officer; a precise revelation might. 

‘Your father poisoned Lord Fang’s wife,’ he greets officer Zhao, and watches the man’s eyes widen and his stride falter. He braces himself for the hand after his neck; is prepared for the blow to his back when officer Zhao throws him against the wall. 

A principled man, he reminds himself. Officer Zhao Shan was judged a principled man by the best of judges of this one virtue – a man who lacks principle himself. 

‘I told you,’ he says when he can spare the breath, ‘that I came to find the truth. Did you think I came to rob your old lord? Now whether you like it or not, the truth found me first.’

Officer Zhao rests the edge of his blade against his neck. His other hand does not relent, but he permits his captive to draw breath; allows his words to flow.
And then, the rage upon his face mellows under the yellow smoke of shame. His cheeks redden, his brows furrow, his gaze falters. He draws back his sword.

‘Who told you this?’ he beseeches, his shoulders raised. The man stands like a bent tree in a storm, his head lowered and his back stiff. Behind him, Three-Finger Wen stands still and silent, eyes riveted on the hilt of the officer’s blade while he awaits his chance to act. 

Li Lianhua coughs into his sleeve, soothes his sore neck with his other hand. 

‘You shall know,’ he offers, as much as his battered throat allows, ‘but take me from the streets first. I have not eaten in days. I think I have a fever.’

The younger man does not answer. His eyes are hollow now, worn with remorse. Li Lianhua rubs his own neck, closes an eye against the ache in the back of his skull. The torn sleeve of his left hand is a stark reminder of his need for haste.

‘Brother,’ he coaxes. ‘Be reasonable. It would inconvenience you if I fainted here.’

Officer Zhao sheathes his sword.

Chapter Text

They sit under the officer’s roof; the beggar boy, the law enforcer, the mender from the sea. The moon’s light sifts through the latticed window, blends pale silver into plum shades and bronze firelight. 

Three-Finger Wen speaks first; retells what he heard from old Xu, describes the qi-eater, admits to his part in Fen’s death. 

Li Lianhua follows the silver to the black skies and judges it to be near midnight.

Before him, officer Zhao pours him a sweet, green tea. Li Lianhua closes his hands around the cheap bone bowl and soothes his shivers with the gentle steam. 
In the end, he did not lie about the fever. And of the bowl of steamed rice and cabbage served to him, he could eat no more than half before the officer had to lead him to a bed. Li Lianhua woke to a hand on his brow and a bitter draught at his mouth. 

‘Water under the bridge,’ smiled the maidservant at him. Li Lianhua wondered what water she might mean, but she raised his head with a gentle hand and coaxed the bitter brew down his throat, and then he knew neither touch nor speech until Three-Finger Wen shook him awake.

Now dressed in the officer’s borrowed furs, he leans back in the chair he was allowed, soothes his sore throat with warm tea, and speaks. 

‘The man who titles himself the lord of Huang Zun is in truth the true lord’s younger brother. And the older brother, thought to be long since dead, is the man this town calls the Immortal of Heishan Crags; the qi-eater who steals life from the destitute to prolong his own.’

Officer Zhao does not dispute his foreword. His sword stands by the door, beyond the reach of his hand, and Li Lianhua accepts the invitation of his silence.

‘The older brother was to inherit his father’s title, his office, his duties here. Later, he took a young woman for his wife; a woman I believe to have been a lesser noblewoman from the Emperor’s own court; a fresh breeze in a stagnant town. What followed was of little mystery and rather paltry intrigue. As so often is between rivals, one brother coveted the other’s birthright. Shackled by filial obligations and hidden underneath the facade of friendship, this jealousy lay dormant until a young and beautiful bride arrived at their manor.'

Li Lianhua halts to reflect. The burn of fever heats his blood, fogs his head. He closes his eyes and breathes the mild fragrance of his tea, shivers in his furs.

‘The younger brother had a servant loyal to him. A scribe, I infer, with a penchant for poetry. To not stain his own hands, he had this servant poison his older brother. What he promised as his reward, you had best ask old Xu.’

He opens his eyes. Officer Zhao bears the tale with obdurate silence, with a face of stone. 

‘So you do not know this,’ derives Li Lianhua. ‘That is credible enough; you were a child then, officer. This intrigue took place near three decades ago.’

From the corner of his eye, he spares the beggar boy a look. Three-Finger Wen stares at him with an owl’s wide eyes. He’s clever; he sees at once that his own birth does not fit the tale. His mouth thins with distress. 

Li Lianhua resumes; ‘To weave the threads into a whole, I must ask you, officer Zhao, were you told that your own mother had died in childbirth?’

The officer gives him a shadow of a nod.

‘Of course you were told this. But first we must ask who this woman was when she bore you. Was she the scribe’s wife, as you have been told, or was she in truth the older brother’s young widow, and your father’s mistress?’

Officer Zhao Shan clenches his hand into a fist. His breaths are slow, deliberate, his patience strained to the last. Only the shame towards his father, cultivated through many years, restrains his wrath.

‘You think it slander,’ soothes Li Lianhua. ‘That is a reasonable accusation towards me, officer, a cure-all favored by thieves and beggars. But ask yourself what kind of man your father is. Did he ever care for wealth? If he did, he might have left the town and sought his fortune in the wider realm. But I have dwelt under his roof and heard him speak of the sea and her cold, dark heart. Words and poetry he cared for. I also know, his deadwood temper and ill manners to spite, that there are still softer edges to his hard heart. Now join the two truths and consider what might have bought your father to stain his hands with murder, and you will find that it is love.’

Officer Zhao eyes his tea with distaste. Li Lianhua wonders if he will ever stomach this fragrance again.

‘What more,’ he demands.

‘You are an adept man,’ silks Li Lianhua. ‘What do you think?’

The officer waves a hand at him. ‘I want to hear it from your mouth, cure-all.’

So Li Lianhua bows his head in acquiescence. A tenuous trust has been offered to him here, reminiscent of the trust he once bestowed to his old rival with no better cause than nebulous faith in the northern wind’s enshrined heart. And Li Xiangyi, Lianhua, Fú Mù has lived long enough to know the value of that faith.

‘From my own mouth then,’ he promises. ‘The scribe never had a lawful wife. The young mistress and widow bore the scribe a son, but a noblewoman cannot wed a servant. She might have been offered a choice; return to court and her family, or wed the younger brother of her late husband. If you look up the matrimonial registries from thirty years ago, you may learn whether such a marriage came to be.’

‘But,’ he says, ‘they say that in the ways of karma, what you sowed shall you reap. The widow, mistress to your father, wife to the younger brother, learned that her first husband had been murdered. If I am not mistaken, her second husband might have revealed to her that this was done by the hands of her lover. What does a woman do? She confronts the man she loves. Earlier, I told you that your father had poisoned Lord Fang’s wife. Might be that he did. But I doubt your father, the poet, had the heart to harm that woman. Nor would the younger lord of Huang Zun forfeit the prize who had belonged to his older brother. So I believe she took her own life.’ 

Li Lianhua taps his knuckle against his own nose. ‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘Have you, as a child, been told that your father had been exiled from this town for murder?’

Zhao Shan returns him a slow, shamed nod.

‘Then,’ he resumes, ‘it might be that she used the same poison to end her life as old Xu had used on the elder Lord Fang. This paved way for the younger brother to paint a murder and shift the blame for her death onto her lover. And the scribe could not defend himself. For the sake of old loyalties, the younger lord may have spared your father’s life, though I rather suspect he spared him for more practical purposes. And his son, I expect, was then raised in the manor, and was often reminded of his debt to his master and benefactor.’

‘How do you know all this?’ asks the officer. His voice is ashen, gray with years of guilt.

‘I read it in your palm,’ lies Li Lianhua. 

I augur the truth from your face, he does not say. He augurs from the officer’s shoulders, from his clenched hands. Each frown, each twitch of unease, each defeated, silent sigh he thinks he hides unspools the truth as they speak. He derives from old Xu’s character too; wonders what kind of man, when faced with a dying stranger, would brew a poison to hasten his death rather than run to the town’s physician or monk.

The law enforcer throws him a hard, dry look, and Li Lianhua allows him his morose spirits and picks up the threads of his tale.

‘You knew yourself to be the son of a murderer, so you became a principled, shamed man. I’ve seen how you feared the truth when we first spoke of the qi-eater, and it was not, as I then thought, to cover the guilt of your father whom you suspected. You knew of his temper. You feared he had killed again and were prepared to do your duty, the heinous truth to spite. A principled man.’

Officer Zhao Shan stares into the shadows. 

‘And here ends your part in this. But then,’ Li Lianhua speaks into the silence, ‘we have not yet spoken of the true murderer of these beggars - the elder lord of Huang Zun. What is a qi-eater? It is a man who can no longer cultivate his own inner force to live. He is a sieve. His meridians are rotten. If he does not feed on others, he will wilt away and die a slow and miserable death. There are qi-eaters who, in their old age, fend off death in this way. I believe the elder lord was poisoned with the Nightmother poison, which will wither a man’s meridians and bleed him of his inner force until he dies. Though the lord lived, he was not unscathed, and the injuries he took would leave him with months, perhaps a few years left to live. I suspect he fled town to seek a cure for himself, but later returned to Huang Zun with another technique to prolong his life.’

Li Lianhua rests a knuckle on his mouth. Frowns as he speaks. ‘Why did he not avenge himself on his brother? I think he tried. I have seen the invalid, aged beyond his years. But the qi-eater spared him in the end, perhaps from filial pity, perhaps because he was led to believe that it was his unfaithful wife who had poisoned him before she died. Now he too was dead in the eyes of the townsfolk and cursed with the affliction the poison left upon him. So he took residence in the crags and became the Immortal of Heishan.’

‘I don’t understand,’ stutters Three-Fingered Wen. ‘The qi-eater can’t be my father then. They’re both old men. And the real son of the pretty wife is officer Zhao.’

‘Old Xu did not lie to you,’ Li Lianhua answers with a mild smile. ‘A man is not above the need for food or drink or companionship even if he titles himself an immortal and dwells as a hermit in some forlorn cave. When I met him that night, he carried the scent of a woman’s perfume. I do not know who your mother was, but you bear your father’s face. And your mother must have known the truth, or some part of it, because when you were born, she took you to the manor, where you lived your first years. As long as she lived, your infirm uncle was obliged to hide you.’

Three-Finger Wen sets his chin in his own hands, his face dull and hard to read. 

And so I was correct in the end, thinks Li Lianhua as he ties up this last thread. You were the illegitimate son of the Lord of Huang Zun and what must have been the town’s fairest maiden.

‘Then she died,’ he sighs, ‘and you were turned out onto the streets, too young to know and understand your heritage. Old Xu is not long for this world; he must have seen the truth in your face and told you to wash the worst guilt from his hands. Perhaps he did not want you to die at your father’s.’

‘Oh,’ wilts the maimed boy, and Li Lianhua watches him with soft and tender eyes.

‘It’s all the same’ he admits once the silence of the night has eaten his past words. ‘In this wide realm, it’s all the same. Jealousy and rivalry and buried secrets, and the suffering of those caught in the fray.’

‘Ran away,’ corrects Three-Finger Wen. ‘He didn’t turn me out; I ran away. There was a servant who beat me, so I ran away to find my mother. Old Hu found me. I think he took me to sleep in the ruins.’

‘That might have been to your fortune,’ reflects Li Lianhua. ‘I do not know what the invalid would have done to the illegitimate son of his older brother.’

‘It fits,’ concedes the officer. ‘For as long as I remember, the lord of Huang Zun has spoken ill of my blood and reminded me of my debt to him. And ever since I was a young man, I judged him to be afraid of his own shadow. I thought, I confess, it was due to his illness. I thought he was ill-tempered and unconcerned with anyone else’s plight but his own, but I never thought that his hands would be as stained as my father’s.’

He quiets himself and considers. ‘But this boy –’ he looks at Three-Finger Wen, ‘must be some ten or twelve winters. And twelve years ago, I was a disciple of the Dēngtǎ academy.’

‘How convenient for the invalid,’ remarks Li Lianhua, and officer Zhao hides his face in his hands. 

‘Much of this is still unproven, Mender Mù,’ he warns, ‘but I have heard enough to ask my benefactor some questions.’

‘You may ask your father,’ offers Li Lianhua, ‘of the pearl necklace sewn into his mattress. And you may ask your lord and benefactor if the Nightmother will bloom early this year, and whether the winds bring her fragrance from the crags of Heishan.’

‘Just some advice,’ he smiles when he sees the officer’s haunted eyes. ‘I owe you, officer Zhao. Ask these two questions; the rest will be told you by the faces of the men you speak to.’

Three-Finger Wen writhes in his chair. ‘Word has spread to the road either way,’ he blurts. ‘Two men with swords have asked about the immortal all about town for two days. They said they were pilgrims.’

‘You gave them a few leads,’ Li Lianhua reveals and needs not his sight to know how the boy reddens in the dark. 

‘They had swords,’ the boy murmurs, ‘I thought – I hoped they might kill the qi-eater.’

‘With no thought to what this qi-eater might do to them, should he catch them unaware,’ smooths Li Lianhua, because he has some faith that the callous stones in the child’s heart might yet be pried loose. 

Officer Zhao rises from his chair. ‘We must warn them,’ he demands. Sends the boy a dark look that warns of hard words to come. 

Li Lianhua allows himself a brief moment of thought. He doubts this secluded qi-eater, who has hid in caverns for decades, will pose a threat to such an adept swordsman as his disciple. And Di Feisheng will burn through such a charlatan as fire eats of paper. 

No, he tells himself, he does not fear for them. If they came here to find this hermit under the pretense of a pilgrimage, they came prepared. They came to look for a murderer.

But if the boy or the officer speaks with them again, a word of Mender Mù may be let loose and reach their ears. 

That he cannot afford.

‘I, ah, have heard of them,’ he begins. ‘A young wayfarer and an older, morose man, is that not so? They are renowned martial artists. If they went to the crags of Heishan, it was not to seek the wisdom of an immortal, but to catch a murderer. Might be that a rumor has wandered from this town and found their ears.’

‘I shall not have the qi-eater dead on my hands before all has been made clear,’ decides officer Zhao. ‘Sit,’ he commands when the boy tries to leave his chair. ‘Neither of you shall leave before I return.’

Three-Finger Wen lowers himself down and watches the officer dress in his cloak and fasten the sheath of his sword.

‘The two travelers have left,’ he tells Li Lianhua as the door closes behind the officer. ‘I saw two lanterns on the road up to the crags. 

He climbs out of the chair and steals his hand behind his back. Li Lianhua sees a shade of threadbare blue in his closed fist. 

‘Is that my pouch?’ he asks, voice mild.

He does know if it is the same pouch he left the boy when the qi-eater found them in the night. As so often is, the facts he professes to know with the conviction of a prophet are in truths often nebulous surmises; he touches and sifts here and there, asks in the dark, follows the thin threads of light until truth answers back.

‘This?’ The boy holds up the old pouch. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Old Hu took it from me and sold it on the road, but I took it back. I thought —‘ he hesitates, then sets the pouch between them. ‘The fop, you know, who came to town with the older man who looks like a bandit, he kept it close to his heart. I saw it when he bent down and thought there might be coin in it.’

Li Lianhua leans back in his chair. Stares at the latticed window. 

Might be that his young disciple bought the threadbare pouch as an act of charity and thought no more of it.

But this, he knows, is a lie. 

The night deepens, the lamps burn out, the boy falls asleep in his chair.

Li Lianhua keeps quiet; speaks no more lies. 

Dawnbreak brings bleak tatters of mist over the narrow path to the crags of Heishan. 

The boy climbs ahead of him, his steps light and fast. Hopeful, sees Di Feisheng, as only children can hope. He must have passed his twentieth year, this boy who calls him da-ge; must have had his hope beaten out of him, torn from his hands, broken under the heel of Fate. And yet, after some while of defeat and surrender, he still returns to it. 

Di Feisheng is no longer hopeful. As they climb the winding path, brave the steep stairs where such have been carved into the mountain, he knows they will not find what they came for. 

The winds whistle in dry thistles, bend stunted weeds, claw at crooked trees in dry earth that lies shallow over unmerciful rock. He cannot say how he knows this. Might be that the winds tell him so.

For two days have they stayed in the secluded town at the foot of the crags and suffered the treatment Di Feisheng has come to expect from peasants who do not favor travelers. But every loose rumor, every scattered tale and lie and hearsay they were fed, Fang Duobing collected with the same hopeful vivacity, the same bright eyes, the same foolish smile. 

The immortal is a white-haired sage, a youthful man in his prime, a renowned martial artist, a royal of an ancient bloodline. He has dwelt in the crags since days immemorial, he was a seafarer from distant lands who founded the town of Huang Zun. He has ascended to immortality; he speaks with celestials, he has no shadow, he appears when the moon is full, he appears at dawnbreak on the fifth day after the Winter Solstice Festival. He takes his oblations in jars of rice wine and cured meat and grains, and he is partial to stewed chicken.

Rot and drivel, all of it. If Di Feisheng looks no deeper than the skin of this beast, these are all absurdities fit for Lianhua’s silver tongue; nebulous rumors to veil and bewilder and contradict each other until they meet in dead ends.

And yet.

Fang Duobing does not share his doubts; cannot and will not hesitate. Di Feisheng does not share his own reservations, cannot speak that which he has no words for. And so they climb with the pale light of dawn in their eyes and arid winds in their hair. 

Their lanterns have almost burnt out. 

How, he wonders, would Li Lianhua, who could barely walk the uphill road to Pudu Temple, climb this steep and narrow path?

He throws this question at the boy’s back. Fang Duobing looks over his shoulder, shades his eyes with his hand. His tunic flutters in the winds. 

‘I have thought about it,’ he says with the same undaunted smile. ‘‘There must be some secret cave, some hidden crevice or door at the foot of these crags. He wouldn’t scale the stone path. I’ve left Huli Jing to snuff for it in the northeastern thickets while she keeps watch over the horses. She might pick up the scent.’

‘And then?’ demands Di Feisheng. Who lights the lanterns in the crags of Heishan if this immortal lives in some hidden cave down below? And if the boy is proved right, against all rhyme and reason, what shall the dog’s master do if he sees his old mutt down there?

His temper flares; a lick of fire in his sternum, molten iron in his meridians. Even the winds shudder in his hair. He shackles it, leers at the foolish youth who dares to meet his eyes, wills the cold balm of obligation soothe the charred nails in him. 

Then he thinks of yellow-eyed seagulls and wonders how it is that he has not broken the boy’s neck many moons ago. 

‘You’re querulous,’ says the boy, as if he saw a flask of oil and deemed it wise to throw the whole of it into the fire. ‘It’s the liver, Di da-ge, the liver. Let’s sit down to eat and rest. We flew and climbed all night.’

‘Hold your tongue,’ warns Di Feisheng, and the pup looks at him with warmth in his eyes. 

They seat themselves on a broader ledge, rest their backs on shadowed stone. Di Feisheng ties back his hair to keep it from the winds’ fickle hands. Fang Duobing unwraps seed cakes and three white buns. He parts with two of them and Di Feisheng does not know whether to read it as a token of respect or a young man’s favor to an elder. He judges it better not to ask. 

Wasted words and wasted breath. 

‘Pickled bamboo shoots,’ says the boy, mouth full. 

The seed cakes taste of ashes. Di Feisheng eats them as he has been taught to eat; with no heed for their taste or his own pleasure. A stale loaf of mantou from a cheap street hawker or the eight treasures of a banquet; he cares not. So it bewilders him that the cursed seed cakes taste of ashes when they ought have no taste at all. 

He cleans his mouth with water from his flask. Rests his hands on his knees. Relishes the ebb and flow of his inner force, the echoes of ancient winds in him. He listens to the whistles of the winds above, hears them chant in their old tongue. Here under the empty skies, far above the dormant earth, they are untamed and free. They do not shiver before the crags; do not dread celestials and false deities and undeath. They know no fear at all. 

‘You are not a fool,’ he hears himself say at last, from a height far above the wrath which earlier ate at him. ‘Why do you act like one?’

Fang Duobing is not a fool. When he answers, it is with mellow resignation. 

‘What am I to do if he sees Huli Jing and flees, Di da-ge? If he leaves, then he leaves. You said this yourself. I do not own him.’

He reaches into his sleeve and unties a yellowed tatter of cloth from his wrist, turns the torn fabric over in his hands. 

‘What is that?’ demands Di Feisheng, and the boy shakes his head at him.

‘A toy for Huli Jing. Now and then will she bring back clutter from the streets. Li Lianhua used to scold her for this; told me he was afraid she’d eat it and be sick. But she likes this old rag so well that I kept it for her.’

Di Feisheng has no care for the dog’s quirks. 

‘But you still climb,’ he bites. You know this is a fool’s errand, you know we will not find him here, and still you climb, he accuses with a stare, and wonders how it is that he, who has succeeded in near all he set his mind to, could fail so with Xiangyi’s own disciple.

‘A fire must burn,’ answers the boy with ease. ‘An eagle must soar.’ He stands up, pats his tunic. ‘When I find him, I will return him his – eh?’

He pats himself anew, frowns, shakes the folds of his tunic, peers into his sleeves and clenches his fist at the skies.

‘He stole it. That maimed boy,’ he shouts. ‘He took it. He took the blue pouch. Of course.’ Fang Duobing tears at his hair. ‘I had bought some sweets to keep in it. He must have seen me at the market. Oh, fool! What a fool I am!’ 

Di Feisheng keeps his silence. The pouch is unworthy of his concern. Waterlogged boots and sachets and empty tombs, decade-old tales, moth-eaten praises of Li Xiangyi, reminiscences soaked in bittersweet wine; none of this is worth as much as a thought.  

He wants none of it; not Xiangyi, not Lianhua, no one but the silver of the brightest moon, untethered from every chain of the past. Let him bear what name he will; dress as he pleases, dwell in a straw hut or a palace; Di Feisheng wants him all the same. 

To his left, Fang Duobing now sits on his haunches, his head in his hands. Di Feisheng reaches within his coat, draws the silvered hilt of Shaoshi.

‘Fang Duobing,’ he says.

When the boy looks up, wide-eyed, Di Feisheng shows him the relic. The light catches in the silver, a bright, fallen star in his hand.

Then he throws the hilt over the edge.

‘Stand up,’ he says. ‘We climb.’

Chapter Text

Li Lianhua wanders along the shore, treads between kelp and sand and deadwood. 

Ghosts haunt their graves, and so does he. 

His own is a wet tomb, vast as the empty skies, deep as the river under the Naihe bridge. Cold as the secrets buried beneath the sands of time. 

He wanders where Xiangyi died, where Lianhua lies buried, where driftwood washes ashore. 

His feet are no longer bare. Officer Zhao Shan allowed him to keep the robes on his back; spared him the fur cloak, lent him his bath. His skin is clean. The oil he bought at the market veils his scent from a dog’s sharp nose. He burned those rags he wore when she found him in the narrow alley. 

The officer’s gratitude earned him a few silver taels as well. These he traded for a wayfarer’s staff, a sack, a spare robe for the road. Handfuls of millet and last year’s dried apricots. They wait for him at the northwestern road; he hid them behind a mulberry tree.

The road awaits him too. It is where he ought to be. 

Yet he wanders, empty-handed, on the eastern shores of the cold and quiet sea.

Nested at the edge of the bank sleeps old Xu’s dilapidated hut. Smoke rises from the chimney, from the small, black stove where broth is boiled on a fire fed on straw and feathers and deadwood. He does not disturb. That door is closed to him.

Wearied, he eases himself down on a rock in the sands and sits down to rest. The sea licks at his boots, washes away his footsteps. Above the waters, the gulls cry in the winds. 

He bends down to touch the water; sees his own rippled reflection in each shallow wave. Xiangyi, Lianhua, Fú Mù. 

They are one, he thinks. The two ghosts and the driftwood to which they are tethered. And the winds and the sun’s warmth within him bind them into a whole. 

The realm is full of strife, of old stories retold, old roads retreaded. The human heart is an old and well-worn book; he knows those tales like he knows the back of his own hand. So it is with the Emperor’s court, with the sects scattered far and wide, with noble halls and beggars’ dens. So it is with the town of Huang Zun. Brother betrays brother, servant betrays master, husband betrays wife. The weak suffer, and Xiangyi’s heart can no more harden to their plight than Lianhua can close his eyes to the truth when it lies scattered and spread at his feet.

One day he will die, and the ghosts will die with him. 

Until then, he must wander. A road lies ahead of him, shaded by green canopies and fragrant with mulberry flowers. The day will be a warm one, will be gentle on his old bones. He will not need to bend before cold winds, will not need to stray into the woods to seek shelter from skies heavy with unshed rain. The road near the town is not often traveled; he will not yet need to fear highwaymen or hide from foul-faced swordsmen. 

Huang Zun no longer needs him; has enough driftwood to burn. He can shed his names; the dusted path will never ask for them. The trees will not care if he is slow, the birds will not laugh if the half-blind wanderer stumbles over root and stone. 

The road awaits, and Driftwood sits by the cold sea. 

‘And do not lie to yourself,’ he says. He thinks of the blue pouch in Three-Finger Wen’s maimed hand, of the lies in his eyes. 

The boy was born clever. When Li Lianhua saw him steal towards the foot of the crags, he understood.

And so, though the road asks for him, he still sits by the white shores and watches the sea shimmer under the skies. 

And waits. 

They climb until high noon; fly over the most brittle steps and narrow passes. The boy still hopes; such is his lot in life, so was his heart made from birth. Di Feisheng still listens; resonates with the winds, endures the burn on his skin, relishes their ire. 

Neither of them are prepared for the scent of cooked rice and cured meat.

Fang Duobing halts, turns too fast, loses his foothold. Di Feisheng accosts him by the nape of his neck and flies up to the mouth of a cave.

It is well hidden; a crevice reminiscent of a rift in the stone, and so uneven that light will not soon escape it; the fires lit here will not be seen in the town below. Before the entrance, the path widens to a terrace of barren stone. 

They keep quiet as they enter, their footfalls soft and slow. At the back of the cave, a firelight paints the stone a rich auburn and plum; banishes shadows into nooks and furrows. They see a few mason’s tools, sacks of grain or rice, robes hung on nails chiseled from stone, lanterns and furs, traps for birds. A thick odor of some herb or incense hides in the smoke, enfolds the scents from the pot on the brazier they see, blends with the sour stench of hermitage. 

And by that fire sits a man cloaked and hooded, asleep with his head nested in the crook of his arm.

‘Eh,’ stutters the boy. Di Feisheng hears the anguish in that breath, hears the last shred of hope wilt in him. Yet he draws nearer, as if cursed, as if he has no more free will in him than the wooden devices crafted in Tianji Hall.

‘Li Lian – ?’ says the boy to the sleeper.

He kneels by him, reaches for a cloaked shoulder, cants his head to see under the cowl. 

As the firelight flickers, Di Feisheng sees the hollow sleeve, the odd bend of the cowled man’s elbow. He opens his mouth –

And ropes fly at him. Ashes burst in his face, swell in his mouth and nose when he gasps. Coils lock around his wrists, his shoulders, his chest. A blow to his ankles almost tears his feet from underneath him; forces him down to one knee. 

He draws his sleeve over his eyes, pries one open to see a shadowed form bear down on the boy from behind, while the cloaked puppet of straw and wood still sits by the fire. And Fang Duobing is fast; he turns and raises his arm to deflect, draws the sword from his sheath.

But the first touch on his bare skin stuns him, buckles his knees. The sword falls from his hand and his skin blanches to the shade of snow. Di Feisheng sees his eyes widen in a silent cry. 

He coughs, strains against the haze of poisonous fumes, wills his qi to burn through the fog that threatens to engulf his mind. The shadowed form bends over the boy and holds him down, keeps him stunned with a mere hand around his neck. In the dark, Di Feisheng reaches for his sheathed blade.

His sword has not drunk blood in moons. Ever since he took to wander the same road as Xiangyi’s disciple, he spared the worthless lives of what drunkards and highwaymen they met; left them with broken bones and loose teeth and cast them by the wayside. 

Now the winds in him howl; sear through the clouds of grief as his inner force eats through the poison in the yellow fumes, and his smile is a wolf’s bared teeth.

He hears the coiled rope tear around his wrists. 

Draws his sword. 

‘He expected us.’

They sit at the mouth of the cave, the golden light of the afternoon warm on their skin.

Fang Duobing is short of breath, fog-eyed and faint. His skin is as pallid as the ashes in Di Feisheng’s hair, but his head still serves him. 

‘The beggar boy,’ he heaves. ‘They must have colluded.’

Di Feisheng does not waste his breath. He cleans the blade of his sword, soaks up the blood of the qi-eater from the smooth metal. 

His way is silence. Xiangyi’s disciple rebels against it.  

‘I wonder,’ stutters the boy, as if he is cursed to share his every thought with the winds and the skies, ‘who he was.’

‘You don’t,’ Di Feisheng tells him.

They know who the hermit was not, and that eclipses all else. The qi-eater does not matter; never did. Some old ghoul who preyed on the townsfolk of Huang Zun, some layabout wretch, one of thousands strewn across the jianghu. Now he lies dead in the cave where he ate and slept. Di Feisheng shall not even grant him the last rites of a burial. Let him wander in the crags and howl with the winds. 

Let him rot.

Next to him, Fang Duobing is a boneless puppet. The boy stares towards the sea, his mouth bleak under the flecks of rust, his eyes empty. His hands quiver. He raises his one knee to his chest, embraces his ankle, swallows around words still captured in his throat. 

‘I think,’ he says at last, voice like shattered glass, ‘I will return to Tianji Hall.’

Not for long, thinks Di Feisheng. 

He remains silent. 

Where he shall return, he does not know. Not to the Jinyuan Alliance. For him is there no return and no way back; only an empty road ahead. 

He shoots out a hand and holds two fingers to the boy’s wrist. 

The boy’s meridians have been scraped raw. His inner force flutters like a flame in the winds, colder than it ought to be, but the qi-eater did him no severe harm. He will recover. Therefore it bewilders Di Feisheng — because he will not take the word frightens into his heart or his thoughts — that the boy feels so wilted under his hands. His dantian is shallow. The flow of his qi is slow and sodden. 

Di Feisheng is not a physician; he sees no cause for this ailment, can sense no poisons or plagues in the boy. In every way is Xiangyi’s disciple whole, but not hale. He does not understand.

Not whole, he reminds himself. Not dead, not alive. And not whole. Ghosts wander in the night, fade in the light of day. And they have wandered far and wide, in darkened woods and lost roads and hidden passes, in towns and villages filled with wary eyes. Here at the end of their road, they sit in the last light of day, and the skies darken above a bronze horizon. 

Anger stirs in him, as is his wont when he stands before the face of ruin. He is not Xiaobao, not some soft youth born to wealth and laughter, heart thrown wide open. His winds are feral; they do not shy away from grief and anguish and sorrow; they feed on pain and trade him the indomitable strength by which he clawed his way out of the Diyu.  

But under his touch, the young man wilts.

Li Xiangyi would not allow this. 

He stands up, braves the cliff’s edge with no fear in him, draws behind the boy and thrusts his palm between his shoulders. His qi billows, rises within him, flows into the boy’s chakras, swells in his meridians, devours the taint left behind by the qi-eater. Fang Duobing gasps and coughs with the sheer force of the breaths thrusted out of him, fists the fabric of his trousers. When he earns back his breath, his skin is warmer, his eyes clearer. He heaves and dries his brow with his sleeve, brushes his unkempt hair away from his face, but his teeth do not chatter any longer. 

Wearied, Di Feisheng seats himself. When the boy parts his mouth with gratitude painted on his face, he holds up his hand, but when has that ever silenced this pup?

Fang Duobing swallows his words raw, clears his voice. 

‘A hermit’s life,’ he rather says, 'in a cave, maybe by the sea. It’s not so bad. You could take a vow of silence, da-ge.’

I could cut out your tongue too, thinks Di Feisheng. He does not speak. The boy’s voice is brittle glass, and Di Feisheng’s hands do not know how to hold that which is tenuous and brittle. When the boy’s head finds his shoulder, he does not stir. The resonant qi between them still tethers them to each other. 

‘I’m a bit faint,’ lies the boy. ‘He took a fair bite of me, that old ghoul.’ 

He hides his eyes. His shoulders quiver. Di Feisheng entwines his own fingers, closes his eyes, sits still and immutable as the stone beneath them. As his shoulder soaks in hot tears, he does not touch the boy and he does not speak. His own anguish he seals behind his clenched teeth. The wound in his breast is cold to the touch, heavier than stone. No cure is there for this wound, and no balm left to soothe it.

The winds are feral; they shriek for blood, for bridges to be burnt, for flight under empty skies.

Di Feisheng stays. Not of winds, but of stone; a pillar. He stays, so the boy may clutch at the coarse fabric of his coat; may strain the seams and wet his shoulder with his tears.

He stays until the sea swallows the sun. 

At dawn, the boy sleeps on his shoulder, and still he stays.

When they reach the foot of the mountain and the stone path ends in a few broken slats, the mists still drift between dry shrubs and loose waystones.

‘The horses,’ frets the boy. ‘We have been away for longer than I promised them.’

His face is fresher, his shoulders less burdened. In their descent, they flew most of the way, but Di Feisheng doubts it is the want of inner force that leaves the young man so light and threadbare.

The smirk he returns is wry. 

‘You think they will starve to death?’ he taunts, and Fang Duobing swallows the bait and throws his hands out in a mockery of past banter.

‘Starve? What about thirst? What about theft?’ he demands. ‘I have been long enough on the road to have learned that I must stitch my boots to the hem of my trousers.’

Di Feisheng’s wry smile widens. He eyes the boy with callous calm and allows the smirk to speak for him. For what it is worth, the charade seems to soothe the boy.

He never knew how to soothe. Now he learns. The past year has taught him much that the past decades failed to beat into him. But knowledge, say the poets, is the comb gifted to the man who is almost bald. 

‘You left the dog with the horses,’ he allows. ‘At worst, she will lead us to your horse-thieves.’

In the end, they buried the qi-eater. Fang Duobing would not leave him to rot. And so the cave in which the parasite dwelt became his tomb, and the boy left a cheap talisman in the dead man’s hands and prayed for his journey and his rebirth. Di Feisheng sifted through the qi-eater’s possessions; found dried herbs, a few wayfarer’s tools and an old and handsome robe fit for a lord, but little else. He does not know what he hoped to find. 

They sealed the cave before they left. Di Feisheng kept the qi-eater’s sword. He has no need for it, but the boy thought it best to see it delivered to Huang Zun, so he carries the sheathed weapon in his hand. 

‘They’re there,’ the boy tells him as they walk around a waystone. The path bends here, winds amidst the weeds and grasses. To their left, in the thin fog of a young, warm day, the horses stand tethered under a crooked tree. The dog is nowhere in sight. Fang Duobing halts and whistles, waits a while. But there are no rustles in the grass. 

‘Huli Jing!’ he shouts. When the yellow beast does not show herself, he scratches the back of his head. 

Di Feisheng feels the fine hairs on his neck rise. 

‘Huli Jing!’ hollers the boy anew.  

Beyond a low hill ahead, the dog barks in answer, and Di Feisheng’s hand loosens around the hilt of his blade. But though she barks, once and twice, neither of them hear her paws bound towards them, and Fang Duobing hastens his stride.

At the end of the narrow path, the beggar boy awaits them. Huli Jing sits beside him, barks with enthused hope, beats the dust with her tail. 

In his clawlike, maimed hand, the boy holds a threadbare pouch. 

‘You, –’ begins Fang Duobing.

The boy does not smile, does not flee at the sight of them. His face is cold; his eyes those of a man much older than his years.

‘Did you kill him?’ he asks. His eyes fall on the sheathed sword in Di Feisheng’s hand.

Fang Duobing throws out his hands, widens his eyes. ‘What do you mean, did we kill him? You knew there was a murderer in those crags! And you still sent us there, with our ears full of tales and cobwebs! Two-headed dogs indeed! And you warned him! Did you want us to die?!’

‘I had to,’ reasons the boy, unaffected by the show of temper. Di Feisheng does not like his eyes. He has seen them before; in the cavernous halls of his family fortress, in the well of that courtyard when the night was so dark he could see his own face in the water.

He sees more than that. The lies of his old rival he sees, the sharp edge of a keen and guileful mind woven into the arid darkness he carries in his own heart. 

This is what he might have been, if he was born with Xiangyi’s remarkable wit. This is what Xiangyi might have been, if his heart had been of night and not the moon’s silver.

He wonders what to do with the beggar; whether to let him live. 

‘What do you mean, you had to?̈́’ blusters Xiangyi’s disciple. ‘He set traps for us! Is this how you treat travelers who visit your town? Little wonder it looks like some backwater village from three hundred years ago!’

‘He wouldn’t be in the cave if I hadn’t told him about you,’ says the boy. ‘He prefers to stay at the manor, or to travel. So I told him you would come, so he would wait for you there. I did not think you would die.’ The boy steals a look at Di Feisheng. ‘Not with him.’

‘So you, –’ begins Fang Duobing. 

‘So I told him two pilgrims had come to see the immortal of Heishan Crags.’ The beggar stands straight, a bone-thin reed of a child, knees bared through the rifts in his old trousers. ‘I said you would climb to the cave, and that you were both old and had no swords with you.’

‘You said,’ warns Di Feisheng, ‘that we were food.’

The child does not deny it. He rivets his eyes to the sheathed sword, raises the blue pouch above his head when the dog leaps for it.

Di Feisheng feels the gaze of Xiangyi’s disciple on his skin; trades him an unspoken question in return. The boy furrows his brows, gives a faint shake of his head.

 
‘Is that the qi-eater’s sword?’ demands the beggar. ‘Trade it for this pouch. You don’t need it. You have better swords.’

‘Who are you?’ asks Fang Duobing. 

The boy raises his maimed hand. ‘Wen,’ he says. ‘Three-Finger Wen. I’m with old Hu’s lot. But I want that sword. It belongs to –  to our town.’

Di Feisheng folds his arms across his chest. The pouch is of no worth to them; he wishes it burned, buried, thrown back to the sea. He could take it by force; the old anger in the marrow of his bones beckons him to take it, break the boy’s nose and throw him into the shrubs. But this beggar, who reaches him just below his ribs, does not cower from his shadow. He does not fear death, his own or that of others. 

‘Have it,’ says Fang Duobing, though it is Di Feisheng who holds the sheath. The young man bestows him a long look. Di Feisheng meets his eye, acquiesces to the faint nod, throws the sheathed weapon to the beggar.

The boy kneels to pick it up from the dust. Not once does he turn his gaze from the armed wayfarers. He draws the sheath closer with his heel and closes his hand around the hilt, but does not look away. 

‘We won’t harm you,’ smiles Fang Duobing. ‘Run off. Tell your town the qi-eater is dead. For what it is worth, our trek here brought some fortune to your town.’
He turns his back to the child and does not ask for the pouch.

Warmth swells in Di Feisheng’s chest, thaws the edges of hoarfrost he carries around his heart, a white feather against the leaden weight he will bear to the end of his days.

‘You don’t want the pouch?’ shouts the boy after them. A slow bewilderment steals over his face. When neither of them answer, he raises his voice, but wavers with doubt. ‘You kept it near your heart and such,’ he says, ‘I thought it was precious to you. I mean, it’s Mender Mù’s pouch. I know Mender Mù. I wondered if you came to town to find him.’

Di Feisheng hears Duobing’s breath catch. His own never leaves him. 

A silence steals over them, smothers the light in the sky, quiets the birds in the shrubs, entraps the very air. 

He looks over his shoulder. The maimed boy stares back, the same solemn calm written on his face. In the beat of a heart, he has understood that he struck true.

‘Mender Mù?’ Di Feisheng hears Xiangyi’s disciple ask, his voice a distant breeze over the sea.

‘The cure-all from the sea,’ says the maimed beggar. ‘He treats the poor, is almost blind, and has soft hands. He likes sweets but his cures are bitter.’

In the silence, the child’s words swell like ink in water. Three-Finger Wen bites the inside of his cheek, peers at the skies. For one brief while, as he thinks and plucks at the threads of his sleeves, his eyes are a child’s again. 

‘He is clever,’ he says at last. ‘Don’t think he was always a cure-all on the streets.’ He frowns. 'But I don’t need to tell you. You know that.’

He scratches his heel with the toe of his other foot. 

‘He will leave the town soon,’ the boy tells them. ‘I saw him at the market this morning, he bought a sack and a flask and millet and such.’ A smile hides on his chapped mouth. ‘I thought you would want to know.’

They meet each other’s eyes, the two ghosts on the crooked path at the foot of Heishan crags. 

‘The horses,’ breathes Fang Duobing.

With no more said between them, they fly.

Chapter Text

They find him on the shore, his white back turned to the realm.

The sea is quiet on this gray day, her murmurs low under the salt winds. Di Feisheng dares not breathe, dares not hope. The hands that clutch the mare’s reins are not his own; he knows not the beats of his own heart.

Ahead of them, the yellow-coated dog bounds over the shore. Di Feisheng sees sand sputter around her paws, sees the joyous bristle of her tail. Neither of them follow her.

But when they climb down from their saddles, he still catches Fang Duobing’s shoulder; warns him with touch and silence alone. He needs not speak. The boy does not strain against his hold. And so, even when they see the white figure bend down to caress the head of his dog, they stay where they are.

Once, Di Feisheng thought himself beyond hope; thought he burned hope out of his heart with the blood he used to soak his hands in, carved it out with the knives he bore as a boy. Hope was too soft, too tenuous; he carved it out and sculpted desire, needs and wants, a thirst to sate. Here, at the end of the road, he stands with neither, as hollow and light as the breeze over the sea.

He sees not Lianhua, nor Xiangyi. A ghost stands by the water, thin and threadbare in his white furs.

Moon’s silver, he thinks, and wonders how it would be to stand under that pale light again. A tenuous thought is this, a feather on the winds, untethered from his heart. At long last has he learned that the moon’s light can not be bent, will not be bottled, was never his to own. It shines now upon the sea, white and faded, bleak as old bones.

If this is the last time he ever sees the moon’s silver, he will still be content.

He thinks the boy next to him touches his shoulder, but he is not certain. They stand rooted, quiet and still.

The ghost kneels in the wet sands, runs his thin and white hands over the dog’s yellow fur and silks her ears between his thumb and forefinger. Di Feisheng watches the sea touch the white cloak and dye the edges gray.

And then, the ghost turns.

His face is like his brittle hands, thin and wan, his hair cut short. There is so, so little left of him.

But still he takes the first step towards them; draws nearer and nearer. At this distance, Di Feisheng sees that his eyes are clouded, that he must narrow them to see where he treads. What it costs him to keep still and watch those feeble, faltering steps, he will remember to the end of his days.

In his silence hide words; words he wants and must speak, questions he yearns to ask. They scatter at his feet like broken glass; do your eyes pain you, do you hurt when you breathe? Did they harm you here, with their slanderous tongues and their fear of strangers? Or did you find peace in this quiet town, hidden and forgotten by the wider realm? Did you sleep under a dry roof? Was your tea warm?

Did you cook? Did you water your herbs?

His tongue lies dead in his mouth. Some answers he reads from the starved face, from the pallid skin and the crow’s feet at the corner of those strained eyes. Other answers he finds in the winds, in the scent of salt and raw seawater and the gray skies and his own wearied heart.

And others yet, unworded and unshaped even in his mind, he will soon learn.

Under his touch, the boy’s shoulder shakes with tremors. His is the face of anguish; guilt like yellow bile on his brow and cheeks, each wet breath a cry of disbelief.

There are words Di Feisheng wishes to speak. Buried in the past, they rise from their graves, as gray and vaporous as the mists near the waters. On this shore are there but ghosts left.

But he does not. Words are not his way; silence is the tongue he speaks. In the past, Xiangyi could hear him all the same.

Now it is he who listens.

He drinks in the sight of the careworn face, the sorrowful eyes, the small smile hidden at the edges of that mouth. He sees the ghost teeter and try his way over uneven sands and driftwood, unsure of his steps; sees the pale brow frown.

The boy lurches as if to break free, as if he meant to run and catch him. Di da-ge tightens the hold on his shoulder.

‘You stare as if you have seen a ghost,’ greets this man the town calls Mender Mù as he comes to stand before them. He lowers his gaze. The smile is Li Lianhua’s, small and wry and old. ‘But I am just a man.’ He tugs at his own sleeve. ‘Cotton,’ he muses. ‘Too thin for this weather. It is a raw and cold day.’

Di Feisheng offers him his hand. Opens his palm to him. Waits.

The cure-all stares at it with his half-blind eyes, steals a look at his former disciple, his boy, his legacy. He does not look for long. The raw and wet pain he finds there is too much for a threadbare ghost.

‘Where will you take me?’ he asks them, his brow arched, the dry lilt in his voice tinged with warmth.

‘I will not,’ Di Feisheng tells him. ‘If you choose to come, you must walk there yourself.’

Then, with slow, slow steps, the pale one draws closer and touches the offered hand; skims his fingers over coarse skin and old callouses, reads every truth in the furrows he finds there.

He lowers his head, his brow still strained as he holds a quiet counsel with the sands and the skies, with the voices from beyond the grave and old ghosts in the hidden chambers of his heart.

Then he nods to himself, closes his hand around Di Feisheng’s wrist, reaches the other hand for the boy who has named him zhiji.

When Di Feisheng remains still, he allows himself closer, until they stand chest to chest. And then, at last, he lowers his cheek to Di Feisheng’s shoulder, as gently as a sparrow alights onto a branch, as gently as dew rests on grass.

The boy throws his arms around their ghost. He heaves with wet sobs, weeps into the white furs, clings to this thin man as a shipwrecked man clings to a reef lost at sea. The dog dances around their feet, barks her laughter.

Di Feisheng closes his eyes, raises his face to the skies.

Breathes at long last.