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On the beach, they had found him.
In the end, he had let them. In the end, the siren call of dying warm and in their arms had won over his determination to let the cold sea take him.
The dog was there, looking up at him and madly wagging her tail, just glad to see him.
"Huli-jing," he said softly, and bent to pet her head. She was so happy — so happy! He couldn't die on her just now.
Huli-jing was the dog. The men were Fang Duobing and Di Feisheng. They were also Xiaobao and A-Fei. He had been with them before he'd gone to leave everything. Now, to judge from them standing there, with their horses and the same expression on their faces, they were with each other.
They would still be with each other after his death. But they cared about him, and they would make sure that he was warm and comfy, with the dog beside him, while he spluttered out like a candle with a faulty wick.
He turned to smile at them, and rose to walk towards them.
Everything went black.
***
"Li Lianhua!" said an insistent voice.
"Xiaobao?" he murmured, his voice barely obeying him.
Yes, Li Lianhua was his name. And the way the young man said it, he cared about him very much.
"Xiao-Hua-er!!" Xiaobao exclaimed, his voice jumping with joy like the dog would. "You are awake! I was going to give you your medicine. Here, take your medicine!"
A strong young arm raised him into sitting position, and a porcelain spoon touched his lips. He obediently opened up, and something warm, viscous and vile slid into his mouth and down his throat.
"What the fuck, Xiaobao, are you trying to poison me?" Li Lianhua said, shuddering.
"Yao-mo made this," Fang Duobing said. "It is very rare and potent. Now that we don't have to detoxify the bicha any more…"
There was the sound of a door going, of heavy boots and a dog's paws, and Fang Duobing interrupted himself and declared, "Lao-Di, look at him, he is awake and he said my name!"
"I heard," came Di Feisheng's familiar rumble, "he also said 'What the fuck', so I guess that mitigates the sweetness a little."
"But he's awake and he can talk!"
"Yeah, I see that — oh no you don't!"
There was a yelp from the dog.
"Your paws are all muddy from the pond and I will wipe them clean before you track the mud all over Li Lianhua's floors! It was Xiaobao and me who swept them last, but they're still Xiangyi's floors in Xiangyi's home, and you will respect them, dog!"
Li Lianhua opened his eyes, and the first thing he saw in his new life was his beautiful A-Fei, he of the sweet eyes with the long lashes, wearing simpler clothes than he had ever seen him in and a smile as open and happy as the one in the wedding chamber had been, holding his cute white-and-orange dog awkwardly upside-down in his lap, and wiping her paws with an old rag.
"Hello Xiangyi," Di Feisheng said. "It's good to see you."
"His name is Li Lianhua," Fang Duobing grumbled, pushing at his lips with the porcelain spoon again.
"He knows," Li Lianhua said instead of accepting the medicine. "Xiangyi to him isn't the shiny hero of the jianghu that let everyone down, it's the white moonlight he saw and loved over a decade ago. If he says Xiangyi like that, I know. It's all right. Nobody else is allowed, though."
He looked at Fang Duobing, smiled lopsidedly, and opened his mouth for the spoon.
***
The bicha poison was really gone, but Li Lianhua felt weak like a new-born foal. Fang Duobing and Di Feisheng kept feeding him medicines — nasty ones from Yao-mo and slightly less unpleasant ones from Guan Hemeng — and freshly cultivated qi, mixed of Yangzhouman and Beifeng Baiyang, like silk and linen spun together.
They made that when they went upstairs by themselves.
Li Lianhua could still tell the difference, but he couldn't cultivate it any more.
Everybody had a different opinion as to why that was so.
One memorable afternoon, Guan Hemeng and Yao-mo had both stood by his sickbed in the Lotus Lodge and argued technicalities, their voices growing louder and louder as their theories drifted further and further apart.
In the end, Su Xiaoyong (who was there as well) had taken a large cooking spoon and whacked the venerable and scary Medicine Demon of the Jinyuan Alliance over the head.
"Leave him alone!" she shouted. "The noise you're making is bothering him."
"The noise you are all making is bothering our Li Lianhua," Di Feisheng had declared, and pushed all three of them outside.
"The explanation doesn't really matter," Fang Duobing said, his young face stubborn and serious. "The main thing is, you're alive, the bicha is gone, and you're not dying."
That had to be nipped in the bud.
"The bicha may be gone," Li Lianhua said quietly, "but I am afraid I am still dying. There has been a lot of damage — I'm not sure I could even walk further than the kitchen table any more."
Di Feisheng closed the door behind all the doctors.
"Make no mistake, Xiangyi," he said. "You aren't dying — not any more than any living person is, all the time. We are all dying, every day. But for the time being, you can still stay with us. The bicha has ravaged your body, your meridians and your core — some things will never be the same, what is gone can not grow back, but you can heal. We are giving you medicine and freshly cultivated qi, and they are healing you. Soon, you will be able to walk all the way to the cookers and terrorize us with your food again."
"You are hoping…"
"I am checking your pulse several times a day," Di Feisheng said, "and while your life force fluctuates, of course, the tendency is up. You will live; deal with it."
"I will never fight you again; deal with that," Li Lianhua shot back.
Di Feisheng heavily sat on the kitchen bench, and hid his face in his hands. He growled — growled like an angry wolf! — and dropped a number of TMD bombs. Li Lianhua had never heard him curse or use crude language before.
"I don't want to fight you," he finally ground out. "I just want you to go on living with us — with me, and with Fang Duobing. We will keep giving you the inner power we cultivate, so you can finally cook food, grow plants, walk with the dog, and sell smelly plasters at markets. You get to have the mundane life you wanted. You even get to nag and scold us."
"If you make me live," Li Lianhua said, "I will nag and scold you every day of your lives. You will regret this."
"Deal!" said Fang Duobing, almost hysterically cheerful.
Li Lianhua sat up in bed, turned, and put his feet on the wooden floor of his home.
"And you better do what I say," he added. "You live here now, too, that appears to be a fact of life. But the sign still says Lotus Lodge; and the Lotus, that is me. I say what goes, in my home with my name on it. That remains a fact of life, too."
"Most parts of our home came from my wrecked ship," Di Feisheng pointed out.
"And I put in a number of clever apparatuses so we can all live much more comfortably," Fang Duobing added.
"You contraptions are barely mechanisms," Li Lianhua scoffed; he stood up and did not feel the immediate call of the floor's gravity, for once.
He took a few steps over to the apothecary chest of drawers, held on to that, then to the wall, and finally reached the door, which he opened.
The two doctors and Su Xiaoyong were staring at him.
"Come here, you two," Li Lianhua ordered his companions, and they appeared beside him, both so much taller and broader now. He felt especially small and skinny, standing on his own porch again for the first time since they found him on the beach.
"There! It is still there! Look at it and read the characters!"
He pointed at the sign.
"Lotus Lodge Medical Clinic," he read out loud. "And the Lotus is me. I get to say what goes, and this proves it."
"Yes, you do!" Di Feisheng said.
"We have a deal," Fang Duobing said. "You stay alive, and we obey you."
The doctors and Su Xiaoyong gave them a very stupid look.
When they were finally gone, Li Lianhua would probably want to kiss his guys to seal the deal. But of course not now. Not in front of the doctors.
***
Kisses became normal, after that; Li Lianhua got to ask for them the way he asked for food or tea or another blanket, or for the cane they had made for him so he could go outside. He no longer needed to ask for the gourd to pee in, because he could go outside like a normal person; but he also went outside to play with the dog, or pick herbs, or to roast the fish his men had caught over an open fire, then sit with them by the fire until the stars came out.
Soon, Fang Duobing and Di Feisheng stopped going upstairs to dual-cultivate and instead did it right there beside him while he was sleeping, sitting on a large cushion they had put on the floor, one within the other, to pass him the qi when he woke up, still looking flushed and a bit disheveled.
As far as Li Lianhua could tell, they took turns. Sometimes, he woke to their little sounds and kept on breathing deeply, opening his eyes just a tiny crack.
They were lovely when they cultivated together, and seeing them like this warmed Li Lianhua’s heart. Sometimes, they would bare all their skin and their dark hair would swing free and mingle; sometimes, they merely opened their robes the bare minimum so one could sit on the other and take him inside, connected at the root, to circle their inner power through both their meridians.
As the days passed, he noticed more and more how beautiful they were, A-Fei and Xiaobao both, and quietly realized how much he cared for each of them, and how much he loved them for the care they took of him. Watching them on the sly from time to time made something flutter deep in his belly, were his core had been. He realized that, despite all odds, he wanted again.
“Such a sacrifice”, he had joked, a few days ago, when Xiaobao had risen straight from A-Fei’s lap to pass the qi they had made to Li Lianhua, who wasn't even pretending to be asleep at this point.
“Make no mistake, Xiangyi,” Di Feisheng had said, getting to his feet and fastening his robes around himself, “this is no hardship. This never has been any hardship. It has never been difficult to dual-cultivate with Fang Duobing here, or even simply share pleasure. He is a very annoying person, and I want to swat him with a wet dishrag several times a day, but sex definitely is not part of the problem.”
“Same here,” Fang Duobing had said from behind, where he was kneeling on the bed while passing the freshly made qi to Li Lianhua. “Di-mengzhu is a terrible person and I'm glad I get to whack his bottom while sparring every day, but the sex with him, for the sake of giving you qi or not, is definitely glorious. We’re not doing anything we wouldn’t want, just for your sake. And now, A-Fei will hand you the bowl with your morning medicine, and you will be sensible and drink it all by yourself.”
"You do get candy afterwards," Di Feisheng allowed, handing him the bowl while dangling two wrapped pieces of Li Lianhua's favorite sweets between two fingers of the other hand.
A few days after that, Li Lianhua woke to watch them again, and feel the warmth pool in his belly. As A-Fei grew quieter and quieter while Xiaobao grew louder until the both collapsed over each other, drawing in the swirling qi they had made, a decision formed inside Li Lianhua.
They loved him so very much; the least he could do was work with them and show them openly how much he appreciated them.
He cleared his throat.
They looked up. Fang Duobing even blushed a little.
"I think I want to…" Li Lianhua said, diffidently.