Feeding the Gu
The name love gu did not sound like anything belonging to the Central Plains.
According to the gu master who had come from far away, refining one required first finding a poisonous creature that grew only in the miasma of the southern frontier.
The thing was shaped like a young silkworm but was scarlet all over. Ordinarily it lay buried deep underground, and only on the night of a full moon would it break through the soil to drink dew and the vital essence of other living things.
To catch it, one pricked a fingertip with a silver needle and used one’s own blood for bait, luring it to crawl toward the smell, and then, in the instant it touched skin, swept it swiftly into a specially made box. A moment’s hesitation and it would seize the chance to bore into the body, gnaw through the heart meridian, and kill.
After that came the refining.
The gu master would place seven of the red worms together in an earthen jar, watering them day and night with the blood of the keeper and adding secret sorcery besides, so that under the goad of that blood they fought and tore at one another until only the last of them was left in the jar.
Only then was the love gu made.
Once formed, it was joined to the keeper’s heart’s blood, and it could live inside another’s body, eating silently at bone and heart, so that the one who bore it felt an irresistible attachment to the keeper, and would go willingly to his death for him.
But the love gu was in the end a poisonous creature, so every month it had to be fed on the keeper’s blood to soothe its savagery. Otherwise it would turn on its host and bore into heart and lungs, leaving him unable to live and unable to die.
Zheng Nanlou had heard all this lying on a cold stone bed while the gu master, his face veiled in black gauze, explained it. Perhaps something had been left out of it; most likely his heart had been beating far too fast at the time for him to catch it all.
Bound hand and foot, unable to move, watching the gu master pry his jaw open and put that scarlet worm into his mouth, was not a good sensation. The thing carried an inhuman coldness and crawled down his throat bit by bit, and he could even hear the small, sickening sounds of his own flesh being forced apart.
In the end the worm reached his chest and rooted itself deep in the chamber of his heart.
In the instant the agony arrived, he learned that a person in the worst pain makes no sound at all; the screams that surged and churned and tried to force their way out of his throat became nothing but sweet, bloody foam bursting from his mouth.
Boundless darkness swallowed his sight, and in a pain so great that even his soul seemed to die once through, he finally fainted.
When Zheng Nanlou woke again he had been dressed in the clothes of an inner disciple of the Hidden Snow Sect and lay in the rear hall of Yujing Peak.
Behind the mist-like gauze at the bedside he saw a pair of faintly grey eyes.
For no reason at all they made him think of a winter morning newly clear after snow, and the light behind the parting clouds at the horizon, not yet bright and no longer dark.
He had never seen the man who owned such eyes, and yet he knew him at once.
Only because the gu master had said at his ear the name of the keeper of the love gu planted inside him……
Wangyu.
The name rolled across his tongue and traveled downward, waking the sleeping worm inside his body.
And so an indescribable throb ran through every limb and every bone.
He had never felt anything like it, as though something had burst quietly open in his heart and swelled until his chest ached; and with it came a sweetness he could not describe, rising from the root of his tongue into his mouth, like the malt sugar he had eaten when he was very small.
For no reason he thought that he must have seen these ash-grey eyes ten thousand times in his dreams.
Silent, distant, and still something to drown in.
That was the first time he ever saw Wangyu.
And now, as Zheng Nanlou carried the porcelain cup into that rear hall again, his steps were as heavy as though he were walking into his own graveyard.
The sky had darkened. Wangyu had never cared for too much light, so a single candle burned at the table; its faint flame left half his face, bent over a book, dim and indistinct.
He did not raise his head even when Zheng Nanlou knelt.
So Zheng Nanlou could only lift the cup above his head and bow until a length of pale neck showed, like a prisoner stretching out his throat for the blade:
“I ask Master…… to grant the medicine.”
The unsteady words fell, and the hall returned to silence, until nothing was left but that one flame, letting out a faint “crackle” now and then.
Zheng Nanlou waited a long while before Wangyu moved at all.
With his head down, all he could see was a falling hem, the hidden pattern embroidered in thread the same shade as the plain brocade stirring faintly with each step, like a cold mist drifting in out of the night.
The “cold mist” came at last to a stop in front of him.
A very light sigh came from above him, like helplessness, or like some cruel sort of pity.
“Why must you do this,” he said.
“You know perfectly well…… that you cannot resist it.”
The words drifted down light as anything, and were a sentence passed upon him.
But Zheng Nanlou did not move. He held the cup as he had before, as though he were holding the last pitiful scrap of his dignity.
Wangyu said nothing more, and raised his hand.
With the small sound of a blade parting skin, a familiar scent suddenly spread through the room.
When it first appeared it was like an epiphyllum opening at midnight, a faint fragrance drifting; but as the smell thickened, that familiar cold bitterness grew clearer and clearer.
A dark red bead of blood fell onto the jade tile in front of Zheng Nanlou, like a red plum blossom opened on snow.
His whole body went rigid, and he could not stop himself from raising his head. In the dim light, on that wrist as flawless and white as jade, there was a fresh wound seeping blood.
A scarlet line wound down over the bones of the hand and dripped from the fingertips, falling to the floor one drop after another.
That red was too vivid, so brilliant against the cold white skin that a man could not take his eyes off it.
And so the cup he had held so long slipped at last from Zheng Nanlou’s trembling fingers, struck the ground, and shattered into countless pieces.
But he only stared blankly at that dark red blood, and then, as though something had taken hold of him, put out his tongue and caught a drop halfway through its fall.
The taste of rust mixed with that cold epiphyllum scent filled his mouth and surged into his chest, raising a strange warmth that set him shivering beyond his control.
Deep in his heart meridian the gu worm gave a sated, trembling hum, and a numb, prickling itch spread up his spine along with it.
A powerful craving seized his thoughts entirely, and without thinking he shuffled half a step forward, not even noticing the shards of porcelain driving into his knees.
His whole mind had long since been carried off by the blood welling out in front of him.
Zheng Nanlou swallowed, and even his breathing turned heavy.
First he licked at the wound to test it. The thick taste of blood burst across his tongue, and countless small shocks close to pleasure ran up the back of his skull, reddening the corners of his eyes and leaving the whole sea of his consciousness dim and heavy.
A stifled gasp slipped out between his teeth, and he could no longer hold off a craving so close to instinct. Both hands seized Wangyu’s wrist and pressed it wholly against his scalding lips, and he sucked at it eagerly, like a young animal.
More warm blood poured into his mouth.
The taste was hardly a good one, a bloody sweetness threaded through with a chill like frost and snow, and still it left Zheng Nanlou trembling and sinking deeper; in the silence of the hall every satisfied swallow could be clearly heard.
With each mouthful he swallowed the love gu stirred a degree further, and that burning pleasure gathered another layer.
“Slower.”
Wangyu’s voice came suddenly, as calm and indifferent as ever.
The hand that was not held came to rest on Zheng Nanlou’s head, the fingers passing through hair disordered by his movements and catching a strand with the lightest pressure, which seemed at once to check him and to urge him to take it deeper.
Dazed, Zheng Nanlou raised his head. Wangyu’s eyes were lowered on him; he stood plainly very close, and yet somehow seemed very far away.
For some reason, in all the blur of his vision those grey eyes stayed clear; and they were as they had been at first sight, gentle and mild to look at, seemingly within reach, and yet in their depths there was still a layer of hard ice that would not melt.
And on the surface of that ice was reflected what Zheng Nanlou looked like now.
On both knees, the front of his robe in disarray, his eyes fervent and greedy, for all the world a stray dog wagging its tail and begging for scraps.
The realization came down over his head like a basin of cold water and tore him free of the love gu’s hold in an instant, leaving him cold from head to foot.
As though startled awake from a dream of the utmost absurdity, he let go of Wangyu’s wrist at once, his eyes opening wide and blank, and murmured low, as if to himself:
“It shouldn’t…… it shouldn’t be like this……”
But Wangyu lifted his chin and made him tip his head back and look at him again.
“Nanlou.” His voice was gentle. “Stop being stubborn.”
Before Zheng Nanlou could react, Wangyu’s hand dropped, caught him at the small of the back, and with the slightest effort lifted him bodily up.
After a spell of the world turning over, he was pressed down into the soft bedding of the couch beside them.
Wangyu bent over him, a few unbound strands of hair falling against the side of his neck, carrying that familiar cold fragrance.
“Be good.”
The bleeding wrist was brought to Zheng Nanlou’s lips again, pressing toward his mouth in a way that allowed no refusal.
Zheng Nanlou went stiff and cold all over. The love gu was still restless in his chest, and the pain of a hunger left unsoothed, burning at the heart meridian, was already surging up wave after wave; and still he bit down hard on his lower lip and would not open his mouth.
Wangyu’s thumb brushed lightly at the corner of his mouth, with something coaxing in it.
“You want it,” he said.
That low voice was like the strongest poison in the world, and bit by bit it broke down his futile resistance.
At last Zheng Nanlou, trembling, licked at the wound again. Warm blood spread over his tongue, and two lines of tears rolled out beyond his control, running from the corners of his eyes into the hair at his temples, gone in a blink.
He closed his eyes, helpless.