A fine rain fell soft as silk. Two figures stood side by side, one tall and one short.
Upon hearing that the tombstone he’d carved was indeed hers, Lu Yuandi silently withdrew half the umbrella, leaving Tao Mian inevitably exposed to the rain.
Tao Mian: …
“Don’t be so petty. You can carve one for me too-fair’s fair.”
How magnanimous of him.
Lu Yuandi clearly had no desire to linger on this topic. She tilted her head to the left, and Gu Yuan’s tombstone entered her view.
“Today is Senior Brother Gu’s death anniversary.”
“…Mm.”
Lu Yuandi had never seen Senior Brother Gu alive. Of everything there was to know about Gu Yuan, Tao Mian had told her seven parts; the remaining three she had investigated on her own.
Gu Yuan was a man of ability. His talent was sufficient to match his ambition, and ruthlessness and cold-bloodedness were the twin blades that helped him cut through every obstacle. He too had borne a wretched past, and he too had chosen the path of vengeance without hesitation. In Lu Yuandi’s eyes, he and she were exactly the same kind of person. Every seemingly vicious measure Gu Yuan had taken, Lu Yuandi understood far better than Tao Mian ever could. They were people who naturally assumed the worst of others. To leave a threat alive was to betray oneself.
Lu Yuandi even knew about the Huo family incident. Gu Yuan had slaughtered the entire Huo clan. Tao Mian had been furious-the bond between master and disciple had nearly been severed in two. Gu Yuan had been the one to lower his head first, pleading for Tao Mian’s forgiveness year after year. But Lu Yuandi knew he certainly never believed he was wrong. Had it been her, she would have done the same.
She would simply have done it more discreetly-at the very least, she wouldn’t have let Tao Mian find out.
But then again, the Tao Mian of those days could still get angry. Now he was indifferent to everything, light as clouds and gentle as wind.
“I remember when I was little, every year on this day, you would go up the mountain alone. You never let me follow.”
Lu Yuandi unconsciously shifted the umbrella back over Tao Mian’s head, watching him wipe the mud spots from the tombstone with a piece of rough linen.
“Weren’t you the one who found it annoying? The first time I brought you here, you threw a fit and swore you’d never come again.”
“What kind of person drags a child of barely a few years old to sit in front of a grave and tells stories for hours on end?” Lu Yuandi recalled it with a helpless sigh. “And wouldn’t let me leave until I’d heard every last one.”
“Ahem-your master was simply overflowing with brilliance. Keeping it all bottled up was suffocating.”
“Later, when you stopped letting me follow, I secretly trailed you twice instead.”
“…I always said you were born with a rebellious streak.”
“I saw you getting dead drunk in front of Senior Brother’s grave.”
Lu Yuandi had been very young then. The most agonizing part of every day was waking up early. Fortunately, her master never pressed her, because Tao Mian was an even worse slugabed than she was. This chapter was copied from novelping.com without permission.
But she knew there was one day each year when Tao Mian would not go back to sleep: Senior Brother’s death anniversary.
One year, she steeled herself to follow him. On the day of Gu Yuan’s memorial, she crept up the mountain to hear what heartfelt words her master wanted to say to Senior Brother. Afraid she would oversleep, she jolted awake in the dead of night and didn’t dare close her eyes again, propping her eyelids open until she heard the sounds of rising and pulling on boots from the room next door.
Through a single layer of window paper, she watched a blurred figure push open the door and step out. She scrambled nimbly from her bed, like a little mouse sneaking around, and crept along behind Tao Mian with the utmost care.
She already knew the exact location of Gu Yuan’s grave. She had scouted the spot beforehand and lay flat in a patch of low shrubs.
Tao Mian was some distance away, but the mountain was so still that hearing his words posed no difficulty.
The master of those days was far from the composed, practiced figure he was now. He missed a few weeds when pulling them. He hadn’t brought enough water to wash the tombstone. There wasn’t a single offering in sight-though he’d carried up quite a lot of wine.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t do it properly. He simply wasn’t in the mood.
After rushing through the earlier steps, he finally arrived at the part where he raised a cup to drink. Tao Mian’s movements in pouring the wine were almost absurdly deft compared to everything before-one cup for his disciple, one cup for himself.
He said, “One Dog, I’ll drink first out of respect.”
He tilted his head back and drained it.
“This cup’s for you.”
He bowed his head and poured it onto the earth.
One cup for him, one cup for Gu Yuan. One cup for Gu Yuan, one cup for him. The ground before the grave reeked of wine, and Tao Mian was drunk too.
“Once you were drunk, you hugged the tombstone and wept.”
Setting aside the possibility of feigning laziness to win a disciple’s sympathy, Tao Mian was an iron man who never shed tears-or so Lu Yuandi had once believed.
So her master, too, had moments of such bone-deep anguish.
He hadn’t said a word. A chest full of unspoken things lodged in his throat, making the scene before her all the more desolate.
The young Lu Yuandi had counted on her fingers. Gu Yuan died at thirty-two. Roughly forty years later, Tao Mian took her in, and then another three or four years passed after that.
Decades on, and Tao Mian still could not walk free of Gu Yuan’s death.
Lu Yuandi thought: perhaps this was the price of longevity. A few decades were nearly a lifetime for mortals, yet for the undying they passed in the blink of an eye. A grief that mortals could cross in a handful of years would take the long-lived decades upon decades to wear away.
“On the way here, I was wondering how the Xiao Tao of today would look standing before Gu Yuan’s grave. It seems the pain has faded for you.” You are reading on novelping dot com, the official source.
Raindrops tapped against the umbrella, making a soft, rustling sound.
Beneath the umbrella, Tao Mian turned to gaze at the lone tombstone nearby. It stood clean and tranquil, like a youth in plain robes sitting quietly.
“‘Faded’ isn’t the right word.”
The immortal shook his head gently.
Memories, he said, were a strange thing. In the first year after Gu Yuan’s death, whenever he thought of how he never got to see him one last time, the grief was enough to make him wish he were dead. In the fifth year, the quarrel between master and disciple haunted him ceaselessly-if only he had said it this way, or put it that way. In the tenth year, he found himself thinking of the disciple who had only just left the mountain, wondering whether that isolated, helpless youth had suffered terribly. If only he hadn’t been so stubborn. If only he could have walked beside him a little further…
Then came twenty years, thirty years, forty years…
In time, those memories tangled with regret and remorse gradually gave way. What Tao Mian remembered instead were the first sixteen years of Gu Yuan’s life. He remembered the youth’s figure practicing swordsmanship, from the early morning when thin dew clung to his robes to the dusk when birds returned to the forest. He remembered that path strewn with mountain blossoms, and the boy trailing behind him, arms full of flowers gathered in the front of his clothes, tottering along. He remembered every squabble between master and disciple-the stubborn One Dog, unable to out-argue him, sitting on the high threshold with his chin propped in his hands, sulking in silence. He remembered the toddler who had just learned to speak, who couldn’t say “father” or “mother,” whose very first word was “Tao”-because everyone in the village called him Master Tao, Daoist Tao, Immortal Tao, and through sheer exposure, Gu Yuan had learned it too.
And at the very end, he recalled that clear afternoon. He had been rushing toward the stream with Consort Lu in his arms when a wooden basin came drifting along the current and floated to a stop before him.
He had held that bewildered infant, grinning so wide his eyes nearly disappeared, and declared that this disciple of his would surely amount to something one day.
“Time… it strips away the dross and keeps the gold. In the end, how is it that only the good stories remain?”
Tao Mian raised his hand and slowly, gently, ran his palm across Gu Yuan’s tombstone.
Lu Yuandi watched her master’s profile. Perhaps it was the fine rain dampening his robes, but in her eyes, even the lines of Tao Mian’s face seemed to have softened.
She thought: how fortunate Gu Yuan was. Even if the world had long forgotten the once-renowned Blue Mist Sect, he still held a small, enduring place in this person’s heart-a place as long as time itself.
“Xiao Tao,” she asked, “will you… miss me like this, someday?”
Miss a greedy villain. A person who would take a mile after being given an inch.
Tao Mian glanced at her and said-
“I hope that day comes as late as it possibly can.”
May all things be well with you. May heaven grant you a hundred blessings. I hope you walk through a life of joy, peace, and clarity.
Lu Yuandi’s hand tightened sharply around the umbrella handle. The rims of her eyes reddened, ripples forming within-then pressed deep down again. Her willow-leaf brows furrowed and slowly eased. A bitter smile surfaced at the corners of her mouth.
It is precisely because you are so endlessly good that I can find no peace.