But after waking from sleep, Miao Shuang gave up on that thought.
Perhaps there was no need for him to poison anyone at all — the man surnamed Qi would die of illness first anyway.
In the latter half of the night, Qi Yan had started running a fever. Miao Shuang was too lazy to get up, and ignored it, expecting him to bring his own fever down. But by morning, the fever had only gotten worse.
The physical constitution of these mortals was absurdly poor — it was only a few hundred insects.
Miao Shuang was thoroughly irritated. He brought over the medicine he’d heated up and called for Qi Yan to wake up and drink it, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t wake him.
Just as he was about to pry his mouth open and pour it down directly, the other man’s eyelashes trembled, and he finally stirred awake.
“Hurry up and drink the medicine,” Miao Shuang’s patience had already run out. “With a body like yours, you still want me to heal your injuries? King Yama owes you nine lives, more like it.”
Qi Yan was completely dazed, and hadn’t even heard clearly what was being said. He struggled to sit up and drank the medicine with the other man’s help.
The medicinal smell made his brain ache, and his already parched throat hurt even more. He couldn’t help but cough twice.
After finishing the medicine, he wanted to lie down and keep sleeping, but Miao Shuang grabbed hold of him. “Eat something before you sleep. You haven’t had a single bite since yesterday noon — how much meat do you even have left on you to be starving like this?”
Qi Yan truly had no appetite — a bowl of medicine was enough to wipe out any desire to eat — but Miao Shuang had already sat down at the bedside with a plate of pastries. “Try some. Lai Fu just bought them, they’re still warm.”
The soft, warm pastry was pressed against his lips, and Qi Yan instinctively opened his mouth and took a bite. The light sweetness diluted the bitterness in his mouth. He chewed and swallowed slowly, and finally felt a bit hungry.
Just as he was about to take another bite, Miao Shuang had already impatiently slapped the remaining half of the pastry into his palm. “Hold it yourself.”
Qi Yan: “……”
Who exactly was it that said this man had a good temper?
Miao Shuang walked off to the side with the plate, leaving Qi Yan to hold the pastry himself, nibbling at it slowly by his lips. After nibbling for a while, his gaze shifted, landing on his own wrist.
Where had this wrist guard come from……
He gently touched it. The snow-white wrist guard was extremely smooth and soft, like rabbit fur.
He had been stationed at the border for over a decade. The grasslands there had a great many wild rabbits, but the little creatures were alert and cunning, not easy to catch — though they made good targets for archery practice on horseback.
During the idle time between training troops, he often led his brothers-in-arms in hunting these wild rabbits. The rabbit meat caught was used to supplement meals, and the rabbit hide could also be skinned and made into hats or shawls.
Sometimes, to obtain an intact rabbit hide, they would deliberately aim the arrow an inch off, letting it graze past the rabbit’s body. Startled, the rabbit would play dead, at which point one only needed to step forward, lift it by the ears, and snap its neck.
It was just that the wild rabbits on the grasslands were mostly gray, and their fur wasn’t nearly this soft and smooth.
Stroking the snow-white rabbit-fur wrist guard, he said, not quite lucid. “Rabbits are very cute.”
Miao Shuang turned back in surprise. “Huh?”
Qi Yan: “But rabbit meat is really delicious.”
Miao Shuang: “……”
Could this guy have been fevered into stupidity?
Qi Yan stuffed the last bite of pastry into his mouth, raised his head, and smiled at him. “It’s quite good. Is there any more?”
Miao Shuang froze.
That smile was very weak; he didn’t even know why Qi Yan was smiling. He had rarely seen any emotion show on Immortal Lord Bo Yan’s face — even though this Qi Yan now had far richer expressions than the Qi Yan of before, after all these days of contact, this was still the first time he’d seen such a pure smile, unmixed with any impurity.
He did indeed like this face of Qi Yan’s very much. When it smiled, that touch of gentleness diluted the innate coldness between his brows, so much so that he was dazed for a moment before he reacted — the other man saying “delicious” wasn’t referring to rabbit, but to the pastry.
He gave him the rest of the pastries, muttering, “Didn’t you say you weren’t hungry.”
“I’m hungry now,” Qi Yan took the plate, and smiled again. “Thank you for the wrist guard.”
Miao Shuang: “……”
So he really had gone stupid after all.
Better stay far away from fools, lest he catch it too.
Miao Shuang retreated off to the side, washed his hands, and began picking out medicinal herbs from the clay jar, preparing to mix a fever-reducing medicine. He didn’t use a scale to measure — he just went by hand.
After a while, he heard Qi Yan’s voice coming from behind the bed curtains again. “Have you ever seen snow in the great desert?”
Miao Shuang was baffled. “What?”
“Boundless white snow, covering endless yellow sand…… That’s a rare and wondrous sight,” Qi Yan looked at the pastry in his hand, “It’s a lot like this pastry.”
Miao Shuang: “……?”
Wasn’t it just glutinous rice flour and soybean flour? What sand, what snow, what was he even talking about.
“Ever since His Majesty transferred me back to the capital two years ago, I’ve known that in this lifetime, I’ll never again get to see the snow of the great desert.”
Miao Shuang fell silent.
He knew about this matter — the original novel had described it in detail. The Qi family had served as generals for three generations, stationed at the northern border since the previous emperor’s reign. That place was south of the great desert and north of the Yin Mountains, the single most crucial line of defense blocking the Dili people from advancing south.
At sixteen, Qi Yan had formally taken the military tally from his father’s hands, and with it, Great Yong’s strongest army, the Yan Gui Army. For ten years he had firmly held the northern border for Great Yong, not letting the Dili set foot on Great Yong’s territory by so much as an inch.
But where there was no external threat, there was bound to be internal trouble — and Great Yong’s greatest internal trouble turned out to be the emperor himself. Ever since the new emperor had ascended the throne, there had not been a single peaceful day within or beyond the imperial city. Ji Yuan was excessively suspicious, deeply wary of Qi Yan who held such military power in his hands, fearing that one day he might raise an army in rebellion and seize the throne Ji Yuan had fought so hard to obtain.
On top of this, within Great Yong’s borders there was an ancient road connecting the Yin Mountains directly to the capital, Yan’an, a military road built a thousand years ago — fifteen hundred li from south to north, a mere three days’ journey at full gallop. It had originally been built to resist the Dili and facilitate the transfer of troops and messages, but in Ji Yuan’s eyes it had become a shortcut for Qi Yan’s rebellion. The Yan Gui Army, which had expanded Great Yong’s territory and guarded its borders against invaders, became wolves and tigers in his eyes, as if at any moment they might come charging down that ancient road, horses’ hooves thundering straight through Yan’an.
Ji Yuan lived every day in anxious dread over this. Even his dreams were of Qi Yan leading troops to the city gates, forcing his way to seize the throne. Two years ago, finally unable to bear it any longer, he had found a way to transfer Qi Yan back to the capital, putting him in command of the imperial guard, having him handle trivial, meaningless affairs.
Though it was called commanding the imperial guard, in reality, aside from routine troop training, he held no real power at all — to mobilize troops without going through the emperor was harder than ascending to heaven.
This move, a promotion in name but a demotion in substance, had thoroughly broken the wings of this hawk that once soared over the frontier, locking him in a birdcage.
But even so, the emperor still wasn’t at ease, feeling that keeping him around was bound to be a future disaster. So he made a great fuss over the matter of the Sacred Gu, wanting to thoroughly finish off Qi Yan to eliminate future trouble — which was, in fact, the very plot they were currently living through.
“Father always taught me to be a loyal subject,” Qi Yan poured the pastry crumbs that had fallen into his palm into his mouth. “But I’ve often been puzzled and unable to understand — the Qi family was loyal and virtuous for generations, so why did it end in the execution of the entire household?”
Miao Shuang didn’t know what to say.
He could hardly say, “Because you ran into an incompetent, foolish dog of an emperor — hurry up and kill him and take the throne yourself,” could he?
Although the Qi Yan in the book had indeed done exactly that.
But Qi Yan wanting to rebel on his own, and him egging Qi Yan into rebelling, were two different things.
“At that time I knelt before my father’s memorial tablet, and I truly wanted to ask……” Qi Yan closed his eyes, seeming somewhat exhausted, his brow furrowing with what looked like pain.
“To be a loyal subject — in the end, should one be loyal to the ruler, or loyal to the people?”
His voice gradually grew smaller, until there was no more sound at all. Miao Shuang lifted the bed curtain and saw him leaning against the headboard, already asleep.
Miao Shuang’s expression was complicated.
To actually be able to ask such a devilish question as “loyal to the ruler or loyal to the people” — say what you will, but he truly was prime material for rebellion.
If he went into the palace right now and reported these words to the emperor, the emperor would surely abandon even the Sacred Gu and have Qi Yan executed by slow slicing on the spot.
Miao Shuang sized up the person on the bed, roughly estimating just how many more slices of flesh this skeletal frame had left to offer.
If it were the original host of this body, he might really have chosen to betray Qi Yan to win the emperor’s trust. But he was different — to serve a ruler was like accompanying a tiger, and the emperor had never truly trusted him, not even after he’d personally offered up his Life Gu blood.
From the day he and Qi Yan had become husband and wife, they had already been grasshoppers tied to the same rope. The day the emperor obtained the Sacred Gu, he would kill Qi Yan — and he would kill him too, just the same.
Even setting that aside, taking ten thousand steps back……
He was the supreme sovereign of the demonic path, and Qi Yan was the foremost of the immortal path — there was no room for anyone else between the two of them, not in the cultivation world, and not in this mortal realm of red dust either.
Miao Shuang set aside the unfinished pastry, helped Qi Yan lie back down, and pressed his fingertips against his wrist, taking his pulse.
The skin at his wrist was scorching hot, his pulse weak and frantic to a frightening degree — he probably wasn’t far from death.
Better reduce the fever first.
He lit a fire under the soaking medicinal herbs to decoct them, then fetched a basin of cold water and dipped a damp cloth in it, meaning to bring down Qi Yan’s temperature. But as he looked up, he saw——
The white snake, which had been hiding somewhere unknown until now, had emerged again, lying on top of Qi Yan, covering his forehead with its own cold snake body.
Miao Shuang’s eyelid twitched, and he looked at it darkly. “What are you doing?”
The white snake flicked its tongue at him, its small bean-like eyes, like red agate, showing a touch of innocence.
“……Get down off him.”