The white snake not only didn’t come down, it crawled forward another stretch, replacing the section of its body that had been warmed by Qi Yan’s body heat with a section that was still cool.
This bizarre action made Miao Shuang’s expression turn extremely strange, and the corner of his mouth curled up sinisterly. “Get. Down. Here.”
The white snake would rather die than comply. Miao Shuang finally couldn’t bear it any longer and grabbed it in his palm, staring at it with a heavy gaze.
Realizing it had really angered its master, the white snake used the tip of its tail to hook at his finger in an ingratiating manner, looking utterly pitiful.
Miao Shuang narrowed his eyes.
Idiot.
How exactly had such a stupid creature won the battle for the Gu King’s throne — by being cute? Had it cutened the other Gu insects to death?
He flung the snake aside with disdain and ordered. “Behave yourself and stop causing trouble for me.”
He pressed the cool towel against Qi Yan’s forehead and found that the white snake indeed didn’t come cause trouble again, but instead stood guard beside him with its upper body upright, looking exactly like it was… supervising the work.
Miao Shuang’s brow twitched wildly; it took great effort to restrain himself from throwing it out the window.
The fever-reducing medicine was soon decocted. Miao Shuang sat by the bed holding the bowl of medicine, hesitating for three seconds between “forcibly waking Qi Yan up” and “prying his mouth open and pouring it in,” before finally choosing to pick up the spoon and scoop out a spoonful of medicine.
The medicine, freshly ladled out, was still steaming. He blew on it gently and brought it to Qi Yan’s lips, feeding it in along the seam of his lips.
His Adam’s apple rolled; even in his sleep, Qi Yan tasted the bitterness, his brows knitting slightly.
Miao Shuang fed him a second spoonful. Qi Yan’s jaw clenched rather tightly this time, and it took some effort to get it in.
The third spoonful… for the third spoonful, Miao Shuang simply tossed the spoon back into the bowl.
He looked at the medicine in the bowl, which hadn’t decreased in the slightest, then looked at the completely uncooperative General, and set the medicine bowl down heavily on the bedside table.
The Demon Lord’s patience was like water in a bamboo basket — not a drop more could be added. He stared darkly at Qi Yan for a moment, then suddenly turned his gaze to the snake supervising beside him.
He grabbed the snake and pressed it down next to the medicine bowl. “Wanted to take care of him, didn’t you? Here’s your chance — you feed him.”
The white snake: “???”
It stared at its own master with a face full of shock — if a snake could indeed show an expression of “shock.”
After staring each other down with the snake for a moment, Miao Shuang found it pointless and decisively stood up. “Lai Fu!”
Lai Fu was in the middle of reconciling the accounts for custom-made furniture with the bookkeeper. Hearing himself called, he immediately set aside what he was doing and followed him into the room.
The moment he saw Qi Yan lying half-dead on the bed, Lai Fu couldn’t help but freeze: “What’s wrong with the General…?”
“What do you think’s wrong — he’s about to die,” Miao Shuang said irritably.
“What?!” Lai Fu was alarmed. “Wasn’t the General perfectly fine just yesterday?”
Miao Shuang: “…”
He had no idea which eye had seen him as “perfectly fine.”
Too lazy to explain, he handed the medicine bowl over. “Hurry up and get him to drink it. If the fever doesn’t break, he really will die.”
“Oh, okay!” Lai Fu hurriedly took it.
He sat by the bed feeding Qi Yan the medicine, while Miao Shuang stood to the side watching. The longer he watched, the more his whole body felt a creeping unease, as if small bugs were crawling on him.
As a servant whose job was to attend to people, he naturally had the patience for it — when Qi Yan didn’t cooperate, he fed him slowly, wiping away the medicine that spilled out with a handkerchief… nothing about it was objectively wrong, and yet something felt wrong.
Finally, Miao Shuang couldn’t stand it anymore and snatched away the bowl, still a little less than half full, commanding, “Get out of the way.”
Lai Fu: “Huh??”
He stepped aside with a face full of bewilderment, scratching his head in confusion, utterly mystified.
Wasn’t he the one told to feed him the medicine? It wasn’t even finished yet, so why wasn’t he allowed to feed him anymore…
“You’re not needed for this. Go tell the kitchen to make some easily digestible food for the General at noon.”
“Yes, I’ll go right away.”
Lai Fu bustled off. Miao Shuang looked at the remaining medicine, picked up the bowl, and downed it in one gulp.
He leaned down and pressed his mouth over Qi Yan’s scorching-hot lips, forcibly passing the medicine into him.
The medicinal liquid wetted his lips, cracked from the high fever. Miao Shuang gently gripped his jaw, feeling that something was still missing.
He bit down hard on those lips again, twice, until a thread of blood-scent emerged, the fishy taste of blood and the bitterness of the medicine intertwining in his mouth. He looked at the wound at the corner of Qi Yan’s mouth and was finally satisfied.
That’s more like it.
Even if this Qi fellow really died tomorrow, he’d have to die carrying his mark.
He couldn’t stand anyone else touching Qi Yan — letting Lai Fu help massage him was already the absolute limit; touching his lips was utterly out of the question.
Back at Myriad Demons Peak, those tactless demons under his command had always wanted to rush ahead of him to cross blades with Qi Yan to show their loyalty, but back then all he’d wanted was to kill them along with that swarm of righteous-path cultivators who pestered him like flies.
Qi Yan’s only opponent could be him, and his only opponent could be Qi Yan.
He licked his lips somewhat thirstily, an expression on his face that looked as if he very much wanted to chew up and eat the person in front of him, his crimson eyes sizing him up as if searching for the best place to bite.
The white snake crawled out from under the covers, slithered along the pillow, and touched the towel on Qi Yan’s forehead with the tip of its tail.
Miao Shuang came back to his senses.
The towel had already gone warm. He took it off, soaked it in cool water again, and put it back on Qi Yan’s forehead, casually shoving the snake aside in the process.
He stayed by the bed helping to cold-compress the man’s forehead to bring his temperature down, lest he really burn his brain stupid. Not long after the fever-reducing medicine had been forced down, it began to take effect — Qi Yan broke out in a sweat all over and finally, miserably, woke up.
The moment he opened his eyes, he saw Miao Shuang sitting in front of him, saying to him, “Awake? Perfect timing, saves me the trouble of waking you. Get up and eat.”
Qi Yan was still somewhat dazed, and not hungry at all, but Miao Shuang had already propped him up without waiting for his consent, picked up a bowl of plain noodle soup from the bedside table, scooped up a chopstick-full of noodles from it and brought it to his lips, saying with a beaming smile. “Open up.”
Qi Yan: “…”
Nothing in this world was more terrifying than Miao Shuang smiling while feeding him. He looked at that face so close to his own, and every hair on his body stood on end.
The fever breaking had cleared his head completely; he looked down at the noodles in the bowl and almost suspected that the white things weren’t noodles but insects.
Had Miao Shuang fed him something this morning too…? He seemed to recall him saying something as well, but his brain had been complete mush from the fever, and he couldn’t remember any of it at all.
The more he thought about it, the more unsettling it felt. Qi Yan hurriedly took the chopsticks and bowl, used his not-yet-recovered right hand to clumsily stir it a couple of times, and gulped down the whole bowl of noodles, broth and all.
Seeing that he’d finished, Miao Shuang paid him no more attention and sat down to the side to eat his own. Qi Yan stared at him for a good while before he slowly began to taste the flavor of that bowl of noodles lingering in his mouth — his sense of smell, dulled by the high fever, gradually reviving, and he found the smell of Miao Shuang’s bowl of noodles maddeningly fragrant.
There was a poached egg in it, plus half a bowl of glistening, tempting char siu, garnished with bits of tender green scallion, making him can’t help but swallow. “Why do you get to eat so lavishly, while I only get plain noodles?”
Miao Shuang glanced at him. “The General is still ill. It’s not advisable to eat anything too greasy — it’s easy to get indigestion.”
Qi Yan: “…”
“Though, it’s not that I couldn’t let you have a taste,” Miao Shuang deliberately picked up a piece of meat, showing it off to him. “Come over here, and I’ll feed you.”
Qi Yan looked at the distance between the table and the bed, then looked at the wheelchair that had been pushed off somewhere far away by who-knows-who, and gave a cold laugh.
Miao Shuang hadn’t really intended to give it to him anyway, and put the meat in his own mouth, mocking, “Can’t come over? Never mind then.”
Without the wheelchair, he couldn’t even get off the bed, and now he had to endure Miao Shuang eating well right in front of him, a sick man. Qi Yan was thoroughly infuriated — never had he wanted to recover quickly more than at this moment.
He tried moving his right hand; it could move a little now, but was still stiff and painful.
“Exactly how long until it heals?”
“At least three to five days, at most ten days to half a month, depending on your recovery ability,” Miao Shuang said while eating. “Though with the way you are — not eating medicine, not eating food unless I force-feed you — it’s bound to be slow.”
Qi Yan: “?”
A bowl of medicine that tasted horrendous to the point of being lethal — no normal person could possibly enjoy drinking that, and after having a bowl like that forced down his throat, it would be a miracle if he could even manage to eat anything after.
His stern brow lowered. “If you didn’t keep doing that filthy thing to me every time I’m passed out, I might recover faster.”
Miao Shuang looked at his lips.
Filthy? What was filthy about it?
It was just a kiss.
“That counts as filthy?” His face wore something between a smile and a smirk. “Then there’s plenty more filthy things I plan to do in the future — General might as well start getting used to it.”
Qi Yan: “…………”
He couldn’t help but be shocked at the shamelessness of this Miao person.
Doing that kind of thing with his body in front of his ancestors in the ancestral hall didn’t even count as filthy — then what exactly would count as filthy?
If Miao Shuang hadn’t drained him completely dry these past few days, how else would his vital energy and blood have become so depleted that he’d be felled by a few mere insects?
Qi Yan’s face darkened, feeling prickly all over his body; and due to the effect of the fever-reducing medicine, plus having just eaten a hot bowl of noodles, he was now sweating all over, his clothes damp and sticking stickily to his skin, making him even more uncomfortable.
“Give me the wheelchair,” he said coldly. “I want to bathe.”
“You’ve only just had your fever break. Bathing now risks catching a chill, and if you catch cold again, not even a reincarnated Hua Tuo could save you.”
(tn: 华佗 (Huà Tuó)= this is a real historical/legendary figure (famous ancient Chinese physician) used here as an idiom meaning “even the most miraculous doctor”)
“So I’m just supposed to stay like this?” Qi Yan frowned. “Won’t you be sleeping with me tonight?”
Even the faint smell of medicine on him seemed something to be disdained.
Miao Shuang thought it over and decided he still couldn’t bear to make things hard on himself — after all, finding a comfortable bed anywhere in this General’s residence wasn’t easy. All the valuable furniture had been hauled off when the place was ransacked, and everything worthless had been smashed to pieces. The newly ordered furniture hadn’t arrived yet, so these past few days the servants in the household had all been sleeping on makeshift wooden boards.
Only this bridal chamber, bestowed by the Emperor, was still presentable. Aside from making do sharing a bed with Qi Yan, he had no other option.
“I’ll get you a basin of water, and you can wipe yourself down,” Miao Shuang said.
Since bathing was out, being able to wipe down was better than nothing. Qi Yan had to settle for the lesser option. He took off his sweat-soaked clothes and took the warm towel Miao Shuang handed him, attempting to wipe himself down.
Though his left hand wasn’t as capable as his right, he could still manage this small task. He wiped himself thoroughly clean all over, except his back, which he simply couldn’t manage no matter what.
Left with no choice, he asked Miao Shuang for help again. “Help me with this.”