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Sisheng peak might be small, poor, and filled with potential enemies, thought the newly named Shi Mei, but at least here no one knew him. They didn’t know his past or the things that made him wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.
Blood, fear, the knowledge that he could be next. The memory of the way his stomach dropped out when his father, a person he thought he could trust implicitly, was revealed to be a worse monster than any he’d ever met. He woke up in the pitch blackness of Sisheng Peak’s dormitory sobbing silently, frantically wiping away the tears that cooled his flushed cheeks in the night air. He could never tell anyone why he cried. He could never let anyone know that he wanted to. Not here.
He had this place by some stroke of luck. There had been one person who did not turn him away. On this peak that prided itself on “protecting common people” a child had nearly been turned out into the night to be devoured by wolves just because he wasn’t powerful like them.
But life meant relying on those same wolves, dressing in their skin.
There was one. A pretty man who did not seem like he wore that skin very well. He wore his emotions on his face and couldn’t smile if he was not feeling perfectly content. He was nothing like the others who would smile at you after licking their lips.
In Chu Wanning’s classes on barrier techniques, Shi Mei and the young master sat at the front of the class but where Xue Meng raised his hand in response to every question, Shi Mei was silent, content to watch and take notes and do well on all the theory tests. It was for the best if he didn’t draw attention to himself.
In classes with other elders though…
“Shi-shizhi, put some effort into it! You won’t be given a chance to fail and retry on the battlefield when your comrades are injured.”
“Yes, Tanlang Elder,” he did his best to push as much energy through his fingertips as possible, the way they’d been instructed but found that he couldn’t do it the way the others could. He simply did not have enough spiritual energy to pull the skin of the little frog he was practicing on back together through brute force. The poor little thing’s body rejected him. All the other disciples had to overpower the frog’s natural qi circulation to impose their will.
But did he have to?
There was a source of energy right in front of him.
He tried targeting a sliver of energy right into that tiny beating heart. Creating a path for the frog to heal itself. It wasn’t as fast as the other students’ work but they seemed more tired than him…
Tanlang elder watched him. “It’s a start. You’ll have to work faster than that.”
That was always the refrain. Work harder. Practice more. Push through. Advice totally useless to someone like Shi Mei. At least his master was someone who was used to finding fiddly little solutions to his problems. The devices he made were always breaking down and Shi Mei had spent hours holding a cloth covered in grease and a squeaky joint, silently watching as Chu Wanning delicately shaved slivers of metal off of a set of gauntlets until they had the range of motion that he wanted. He was generous with his machines. There was something comforting about it. He wouldn’t toss aside something he had worked hard on.
Shi Mei wished Chu Wanning would look at him with the concentration that he luooked at his machines with. But when he saw how much attention Xue Meng demanded, he couldn’t bring himself to ask in that way. If Chu Wanning started to question the circumstances of his disciple’s life he might start to notice things and the thought of that scared him.
He didn’t think he could find anything more frightening than being discovered. Not until he saw Chu Wanning come back from a mission with blood on his robes.
“Shizun, you’re hurt.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Can I…”
“Shi Mingjing, Go study…”
“But…”
“Not now.”
The door slammed.
Shi Mei stared at the closed door.
Why was he learning to heal others if he could not heal his own teacher?
What was the point of that?
Shi Mei went back to his room and studied as he was told. He flipped through his textbooks to find a recipe for a salve to heal wounds faster.
Beeswax and oil as a carrier, rosehip essence to heal without scarring, honey and tea tree oil to purify the wound, mint for cooling, and a ground up pearl formed from a mermaid’s tears for the traces of immortality left in them. All mixed together and infused with spiritual essence. A basic medicine. Something that could plausibly be from someone else.
But would Chu Wanning use an anonymous cream found in his rooms?
Shi Mei scrawled a little receipt and scrawled over it in his best approximation of Xue Zhengyong’s handwriting “Good Work! Get Better Soon! - Xue Zhengyong” and tied it on.
He waited until dinner to finish his plan. He waited until he saw Chu Wanning sitting beside Xue Zhengyong at dinner before slipping away, into Chu Wanning’s pavilion and setting his gift by a bowl that held some bloodied bandages. Chu Wanning would never realize it had been him, so he might accept the gift.
The next day, while receiving instruction, Shi Mei thought he could smell a trace of mint mixed into the haitang perfume Chu Wanning always wore.
He felt a little thrill at the thought of his teacher using something with his spiritual energy suffusing it. He didn’t understand why he felt these things yet. But until then, he would do what he could to keep this safety