Lu Yuandi stayed on the mountain for one day. That was already the most time she could carve out for herself as the Son of Heaven.
The day was plain and unremarkable-eating, feeding the chickens, wandering the mountain paths.
When Lu Yuandi appeared at the Daoist temple, the two children were already awake. Chu Liuxue was the first out of her room. The moment she saw the emperor standing in the doorway, every trace of sleep vanished from her body and her face went deathly pale.
“Meal Ticket! Run! The emperor’s come in person to arrest us!”
Tao Mian poked his head out from behind Lu Yuandi.
“Why are you calling for me?”
“…”
The misunderstanding was cleared up, but the siblings still had no idea how to act around the Son of Heaven. The business of her locking Tao Mian away had left things deeply unpleasant between them, and Chu Suiyan in particular held a serious grudge-he refused to so much as look at her.
Lu Yuandi deliberately teased him.
“Little Tao, your Junior Brother doesn’t seem to like me very much. Have you been secretly badmouthing me?”
Chu Suiyan shot to his feet to defend Tao Mian’s honor.
“Master Little Tao would never do that! He’d never talk about someone behind their back!”
“Si Dui understands me best.” Tao Mian materialized from who-knows-where, half a steamed bun still clamped between his teeth. “I always say it to their face.”
Chu Liuxue fought down the urge to roll her eyes.
“You really have the nerve to say that.”
“What’s there to be embarrassed about? This immortal has always been strict with others and lenient with himself. Rather than grinding yourself down with inner turmoil, better to go crazy and wear everyone else out instead.”
“…”
After spending some time together, Chu Liuxue finally believed what Tao Mian had told her: “When the Son of Heaven was little, she was even more trouble than you.”
Lu Yuandi and Tao Mian got up to heaven-knows-what and somehow managed to set Attendant Wu’s rear end on fire.
The rooster flapped its wings and tore across the courtyard, with Tao Mian and his second disciple in hot pursuit. Two humans and one chicken, all equally filthy and ash-covered.
Chu Liuxue, still so young, wrangling two grown adults-it was truly an abuse of both her body and her spirit.
After the midday meal, Tao Mian went for his nap. Chu Suiyan practiced swordsmanship in the courtyard, and Chu Liuxue was supposed to join him, but she was a chronic slacker. She dragged a chair into the shade of a tree and settled in.
Today there were two chairs. The emperor sat beside her, spacing out together.
Lu Yuandi’s mouth, however, did not stay idle. She kept correcting Chu Suiyan without pause-his force was wrong here, his form was off there, and so on. Before long, Chu Suiyan lost his patience and flung his sword aside, puffing his cheeks in a sulk as he waited for his master to wake up and take his side. Follow the newest chapters on novelping dot com.
Chu Liuxue could tell that Lu Yuandi’s pointers were pure nonsense, and asked why she was doing it.
“My younger brother takes cultivation very seriously. He truly regards Tao Mian as his master and has sworn to carry on his teachings.”
“And what about you?” Lu Yuandi turned her gaze on the girl, a trace of curiosity in her eyes. “Little Tao took you as his disciple too. Don’t you have any ambitions of your own?”
Chu Liuxue was equally honest.
“I told Tao Mian that his disciples all seem to have terrible fates. I’ve been drifting and wandering my whole life-never had much luck to begin with. I’m afraid that if I take things any more seriously, even my most humble wish-just living to old age-won’t come true.”
Lu Yuandi hadn’t expected that to be her true feeling. The girl’s utterly sincere conviction that she wouldn’t live long struck her as both touching and absurd, and she couldn’t help but laugh.
She said, “You’re different from the rest of us.”
“From whom?”
“From me, from Gu Yuan, and even from your younger brother. All of us are different.”
Lu Yuandi shifted into a more relaxed posture. It had been so long since she’d sat around this idly that she was almost uncomfortable with it.
“We all carry desires in our hearts. Peach Blossom Mountain doesn’t keep those whose minds are cluttered with worldly ambitions. You desire nothing at all-perhaps that’s precisely why you can remain here for a long time.”
Her gaze drifted to Tao Mian. He lay flat on his back, hands folded over his belly, an old palm-leaf fan draped across his face.
“Tao Mian has taken you to see Senior Brother Gu’s grave, hasn’t he?”
she said softly.
Chu Liuxue didn’t understand why she’d suddenly brought this up, but she nodded honestly.
Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she offered to this Senior Sister Lu-whom she hadn’t known long-the question she’d never been able to bring herself to ask Tao Mian.
She truly wanted an answer.
“I can’t make sense of it. Tao Mian lives forever. Even if his disciples live out their full span, they’ll still leave before he does. Senior Brother Gu’s death must have grieved him deeply-he never says so outright, but I can tell. So why does he keep taking disciples? Isn’t the ending doomed to be sorrowful from the very start?”
Lu Yuandi was quiet for a long time before she answered her Junior Sister’s question. She tilted her head back and gazed at the branches overhead, newly budding with spring growth. Branch crossed over branch, dividing the sky into little frames of all shapes and sizes. Two birds soared high above, two black dots drifting from one frame into the next.
She said, what else could he do? With new disciples come new stories. New stories become new memories. New memories fill new frames, crossing and layering over the old ones, and Little Tao’s life becomes bright and colorful.
How pitiful an immortal would be, if all he could do was clutch at a handful of old days, endlessly turning them over and over in his mind. This story is hosted at g.com.
Lu Yuandi raised one arm high, snapped off a twig bearing fresh buds, and handed it to Chu Liuxue.
“Your origins are far from ordinary.”
Lu Yuandi watched the faint shift in the girl’s expression and smiled.
“Don’t be nervous. I’m not interrogating you. Perhaps this is simply fate. Even if Tao Mian wanted to take in a perfectly ordinary disciple, I don’t think he could manage it. Gu Yuan and I-we both had our own secrets and our own burdens to carry. So do you.”
She paused.
“But you have something we didn’t. You still have a choice.”
Lu Yuandi said no more than that. She had no wish to meddle in her Junior Sister’s thoughts.
Just like her master Tao Mian, she believed that everyone had their own encounters and their own affinities.
She said that whether her Junior Sister chose to go down the mountain or to stay, Tao Mian would not stand in her way. But she should understand one thing: once someone leaves this mountain, it is very hard to come back.
Lu Yuandi’s departure was as sudden as her arrival. She set out before dawn.
Tao Mian saw his disciple off alone.
As she was about to leave, he offered the customary pleasantry-why not stay a couple more days? His disciple’s answer, predictably, sent a chill straight down his spine. She said that if she lingered any longer, she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from setting the mountain ablaze and dragging Tao Mian back to the capital with her.
As the smile at the corner of Tao Mian’s mouth slowly faded, Lu Yuandi laughed instead.
“Master, I’m leaving.”
When Lu Yuandi spoke that farewell, master and disciple understood each other perfectly once more-as though they both knew this was the last time.
The second disciple would never return to Peach Blossom Mountain.
She knew that her feelings for Tao Mian-feelings that had already crossed every line-would only grow deeper with each passing day. The obsession and madness bred into her bones would sooner or later drive her to do something unforgivable. But what could Tao Mian do in return? In the past, when she had come to “assassinate” him night after night, her master had done nothing more than deflect her blade and unravel her strikes, never once harming her. The Peach Blossom Immortal was undefeated in all the world; the only ones who could ever wound him were the disciples he had raised with his own hands.
And Tao Mian would not even craft a kind lie for her sake. He could deceive heaven and earth, spin nonsense as easily as breathing-yet he could not bring himself to betray a sincere heart.
Lu Yuandi thought: this truly was a problem without a solution.
Better not to meet than to meet and long; better to be heartless than to be full of feeling.
So be it. Let this parting set them both free.