This Disciple Is Instructed
Zheng Nanlou did not believe those words.
Because he had never once gotten anything better.
When he was small he had found a wooden sword. The very simplest sort, crudely made and covered in scratches, most likely a toy thrown away by some child of the main house.
It was the first thing he had ever owned that could, by its shape, be called a “sword.”
He had not dared say a word about it, and hid it in his bedding; only in the dead of night did he dare take it out and run his hands over it, and holding it felt like holding his own pounding heart.
This, he thought, was a gift from heaven, the beginning of his escape from the quagmire that was the Zheng family.
But within a few days the older children in the courtyard found the wooden sword and took it away. Naturally he would not accept that; he rushed at them and fought, and still did not get it back.
In the end, held down on the ground by his hair, he did not cry, but told himself stubbornly, over and over:
It doesn’t matter. I will have better.
But the fact was that until he entered the Hidden Snow Sect, he never got a second sword.
So he had understood from very early on that words meant to comfort could not be taken for truth.
All he could do was hold fast to whatever was already in his hands, because he would never know whether there was a next one at all.
He could not pin his hopes on an empty future; he could only keep his eyes fixed on the present in front of him.
Zheng Nanlou was a short-sighted man.
So when Wangyu said that to him, Zheng Nanlou ought to have wanted to laugh coldly.
But in the instant he raised his head and looked at that master of his, the cold laugh turned abruptly into an ache he could not name, rushing up into his eyes, and a second tear very nearly rolled out.
Zheng Nanlou was not a man who wept easily. He had always hated the gesture, which was like cutting his own heart open for someone else to look at, weak and easily broken.
Like himself at this moment.
It should not have been this way.
He opened his mouth and in the end could not get out a single word; there was only a stifling ache in his chest.
Just now he was “trusting” the man before him with his whole heart, so he could not argue, could not question, and certainly could not resent.
He could only look at him like this, and in the end, nod.
The pad of Wangyu’s finger brushed his cheek and was about to withdraw, then paused in the very moment of leaving, as though he had remembered something, and with a trace of hesitation stroked his face twice more.
The touch was very light, and still it set Zheng Nanlou’s heart trembling; he held his breath without thinking, and his body stiffened along with it, as though he feared that the slightest stir would shatter this warmth that seemed hardly real.
But Wangyu’s eyes were as still as ever, reflecting not the least ripple, as though he had noticed nothing at all of the turmoil in the disciple in front of him.
“Master……”
Zheng Nanlou said it low, his voice a little hoarse.
Wangyu did not answer. He drew the hand back quickly and turned away, and as his sleeves stirred he left behind a sentence with no feeling in it at all:
“Let us go.”
By the time Wangyu and Zheng Nanlou came back from the far end of the Sunken Sword Abyss into the dense wood, several elders sent out afterward by the Hidden Snow Sect had already arrived, so searching out the others was not difficult.
The two demonic cultivators must have had some particular means of tracking the Xie bloodline; once they had Xie Heng they felt success was at hand and had no further interest in troubling the other disciples, so most of them had only taken a few injuries.
Lu Zhuobai alone was nowhere to be found.
In the end it was Wangyu who called on his spiritual energy, tracing the presence on Lu Zhuobai’s life tablet for a long while before he could just manage to fix where he was.
Zheng Nanlou did not get the chance to see what sort of place Lu Zhuobai had been trapped in.
As the party followed where the spiritual energy led and drew nearer to a well-concealed cavern, an indescribable reek came at them, enough to make a person retch.
Before Zheng Nanlou could react, Wangyu, walking ahead of him, raised a hand and stopped him.
“Stay here.”
His voice was rather flat, and for a moment Zheng Nanlou could not be sure what he meant by it; but he obediently halted where he stood and went no further.
Wangyu and the other elders were quickly swallowed by the gloom inside the cavern, and all that was left before him was that suffocating smell, still seeping out thread by thread.
Zheng Nanlou did not wait long before footsteps came again from deep inside.
Wangyu came out first, his white robes exactly as they had been going in, still without a speck of dust and without a single crease to be found on them.
The two elders behind him were supporting a man covered from head to foot in blood.
That man’s whole face was nearly buried in dark red, strands of hair stuck to it in disorder, so that his features could hardly be made out.
At the sight of Zheng Nanlou he suddenly grinned, and a flash of white showed in all that red, so quick it could scarcely be seen.
“I really did underestimate junior brother.”
Only when the voice came did Zheng Nanlou realize that this bloody figure was Lu Zhuobai.
He could hardly be blamed for failing to know him. Nothing of the usual manner of the Hidden Snow Sect’s ever-noble eldest senior brother remained. His plain robe had long since been soaked through with blood and had set into patches of brown, dark and light, and a few suspicious threads of shredded flesh even hung from the hem.
And above the neck he was filthier still, likely worse off than a beggar in the street.
Standing beside Wangyu now, not even the blindest man could have brought out that line about this one taking after the Immortal Lord.
Looking at the state of him, Zheng Nanlou frowned outright and let a faint distaste show, even taking half a step back; only his words kept some measure of respect:
“Senior brother has suffered.”
There was no fault to be found in what he said, and yet landing in Lu Zhuobai’s ears it did not sound half so pleasant.
Lu Zhuobai stared at him, the mild smile habitually resting at his mouth long since gone, a gloom in his eyes; he seemed about to say something, but before any sound came the elder beside him laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Your injuries are not light. You had best go back and be treated at once.”
With that they helped him away. Zheng Nanlou watched them the whole way out, and had only just turned back when Wangyu put out a hand toward him, a faintly purplish herb lying on the open palm.
It was precisely the one he had slipped into Lu Zhuobai’s clothes back in the cave.
“Lu Zhuobai is, after all, the foremost disciple under the sect leader. He should not have fallen so easily into a demonic cultivator’s trap.”
Wangyu did not say it outright, and even so it tightened something in Zheng Nanlou, who hurried to explain with a touch of panic:
“Master sees clearly…… it was he who first meant to push me out to draw the demonic cultivators. This disciple…… simply would not stand for it.”
He paused, and his voice dropped lower. “And the scent of this herb only disturbs the five senses for a time. It would not have done him any real harm……”
When he had finished he did not dare raise his head to look into Wangyu’s eyes, and even so that gaze felt as though it had taken on substance, pressing down on him until he could scarcely breathe.
He pressed his lips together and added:
“This disciple knows he was wrong.”
But Wangyu said nothing to him about it. He simply closed his palm, and the herb turned to fine powder in the spiritual energy at his fingertips and went scattering away on the wind that passed through the trees.
“And what do you intend to do afterward?” he asked, out of nowhere.
Zheng Nanlou did not follow. “What?”
“Nanlou.” Wangyu always seemed to like calling his name this way, seemingly close and yet with a coolness running all through it. “You said a moment ago that this is how you have always lived.”
“But if you scheme against him three parts today, tomorrow he will repay you seven. Grievance answering grievance in this fashion, when is there ever an end to it?”
Zheng Nanlou looked up in some surprise. In the mottled daylight falling through the leaves, Wangyu’s face was as clear and unearthly as ever, with nothing out of the ordinary to be seen in it, and his tone was as level as on any day he taught a sword formula:
“If you truly wish to take revenge on a man, it should be one fatal blow, so that he……”
“Can never rise again as long as he lives.”
Zheng Nanlou’s breath caught, and his heart beat like a drum.
He answered in a trembling voice, “This disciple is instructed.”
After they returned to the Hidden Snow Sect from the Sunken Sword Abyss, Zheng Nanlou had a rare stretch of quiet. Presumably those who liked making trouble for him, Xie Heng and his sort, were all shut behind their doors nursing injuries, and had no chance for the moment to come after him.
These few days were quite simply the most comfortable he had passed since entering the Hidden Snow Sect. Apart from the cultivation he had to do, he scarcely set foot outside, but stayed in his room studying 《The Clear Snow Reflection Art》 in earnest.
But the more closely he read, the more he found the art too abstruse and obscure; on his own, he doubted he could find his way into it at all.
He rubbed at the ache between his brows, knowing that forcing it further would do no good and might even turn into a fit of deviation, so he set the book aside for the time being and thought he would go out for some air.
The moment he pushed the door open, the dusk came flooding into his eyes like a tide.
Evening had come, and the distant ranges had been washed by the last of the sun with a faint red glow. On the other side of the sky, among the low-hanging clouds, a full moon had quietly shown itself.
Something tightened in Zheng Nanlou’s chest, and he realized at last that the fifteenth had come round again.
He had lived quietly too long and had actually forgotten: on the fifteenth of each month, the night of the full moon, was the day the gu had to be fed.
He stood in the courtyard in silence a while; in the end he understood that there was no resisting it, so he bit his lower lip, turned back into the room and took a porcelain cup out of the cabinet.
It was one he had gone out of his way to buy, a vessel meant for holding spirit medicine and nothing else.
He cradled it in his hands, and the cool touch seemed to smooth his restless mind a little.
Zheng Nanlou drew a deep breath, and at last set off toward Wangyu’s main hall.