Qi Yan went to rest after lunch; in fact, there was nothing else he could do now besides rest.
Miao Shuang was happy to have the peace and quiet, and instructed Lai Fu to go to the market to buy some things, negotiated prices to prepare to hire a new batch of servants, and dismissed the ones currently in the household, ordering them to move out within a day.
Someone had already died in the residence before, and Eunuch Zhu had already returned to the palace, so there was no one backing them up anymore — these servants naturally fled as fast as they could, and by the next morning, only Lai Fu remained in the residence.
“Ran off quite fast,” Miao Shuang said, smiling without any real warmth. “A bunch of cowardly, lazy good-for-nothings — Eunuch Zhu really does have a good eye for people.”
Lai Fu inexplicably felt he’d just been subtly insulted, and spoke up weakly. “This lowly one… is different from them.”
Miao Shuang glanced at him.
A gust of wind swept through, blowing down a few more withered yellow leaves in the courtyard. Lai Fu looked at the gloomy sky.: “Looking at this weather, it’s probably going to rain. Madam should go inside early.”
He picked up a broom and began sweeping the fallen leaves in the courtyard. “Once this autumn rain falls, the weather will turn a few degrees colder. Madam should add more clothes, and the General is in poor health too, so he needs to be even more careful — Madam should urge him as well.”
“Why don’t you go tell him yourself?”
“The General won’t listen to this lowly one,” Lai Fu scratched his head, somewhat embarrassed. “In the first few days after this lowly one arrived, the General didn’t want this lowly one to wait on him, and never paid him any attention either. It’s only Madam’s words that carry any weight.”
Miao Shuang raised an eyebrow.
The wind grew colder still, with a faint dampness already in the air — the rain would definitely arrive within the next half hour.
No wonder Qi Yan had seemed listless today; it was probably because his body was reacting to the coming rain. Earlier, when Miao Shuang had examined him, he’d found many old injuries left over from years of campaigning, on top of the suffering endured in prison — it would be a miracle if he felt well at all now.
He felt unwell in body but said nothing about it; well, if he wasn’t going to say anything, then Miao Shuang would act like he didn’t know — let this Qi fellow suffer and enjoy it.
Miao Shuang picked up a set of new clothes — ones Lai Fu had gone to the tailor’s to have custom-made yesterday, delivered today — and tossed them to Qi Yan. “Try it on, see if it fits.”
Qi Yan slowly picked up the clothes thrown beside him; his whole body ached unbearably right now, let alone changing clothes — even lifting his arm was difficult.
Miao Shuang then watched him, face pale, struggle through changing into the clothes, and say in a low voice, “It fits.”
His voice didn’t sound as hoarse anymore, but it was weak and lacking in strength.
Miao Shuang pretended not to notice and turned to leave. When he reached the doorway, Qi Yan finally called out to stop him. “Is there still wine in the house?”
“What do you need wine for?”
“To ward off the cold.”
“Lai Fu, bring in a brazier.”
Lai Fu quickly brought over a brazier. Qi Yan looked at the burning charcoal inside and sighed. “This won’t help.”
“Even a brazier won’t help — are you trying to ascend to heaven? Or should I go ask His Majesty to borrow the palace’s underfloor heating system for you?”
Qi Yan: “…”
“This household of yours has been stripped cleaner than your own face — where am I supposed to find wine for you?” As Miao Shuang spoke, he pulled a small wine gourd out of his sleeve and tossed it to him through the air. “I happen to have wine here, so make do with this.”¹
Qi Yan caught the palm-sized wine gourd and looked at him with some surprise. “Where exactly do you usually hide all these little bottles and jars?”²
“That I naturally won’t tell you.”
Qi Yan pulled out the stopper and sniffed it; an indescribable smell shot straight to the crown of his head — if the liquid hadn’t still looked so clear, he would have suspected the wine had already gone bad.
Considering that things from the Miao Territories were always different from the ordinary, he pinched his nose and took a sip; what hit his mouth first was the wine’s sharp bite, and after the sharpness passed, an intense, lingering bitterness rose up.
The bitterness swirled in his throat, growing stronger the more he tasted it, to the point where it almost made him want to vomit. He forced himself to swallow it and asked, “What kind of wine is this?”
“Medicinal wine,” Miao Shuang said with a smile, “wards off cold, relieves pain, clears the meridians and invigorates the blood — perfectly suited for you.”
Qi Yan was half-convinced, half-doubtful; he hesitated for a moment, then forced himself through the nausea to drink two more mouthfuls.
By the time he’d drunk most of it, Miao Shuang leisurely added the second half of the explanation. “Besides seven or eight kinds of medicinal herbs, I also added twenty or thirty bugs, carefully soaked for forty or fifty days — oh, don’t worry, I only filtered out the clear liquid, there’s absolutely no bug legs or bug wings or anything like that in it.”
Qi Yan: “……………….”
He suddenly felt like this wine was a bit scratchy going down his throat.
Wordlessly, he handed the now-empty wine gourd back to Miao Shuang.
Forget it — he still had a Gu worm inside his body right now that had wandered off to who-knows-where; if he wasn’t afraid of a living bug, why would he be afraid of a dead one.
Although this wine tasted terrible, its effects were remarkably fast — Qi Yan soon felt much warmer throughout his body, and the aching soreness in his muscles and bones wasn’t as unbearable anymore.
The autumn rain fell down in a steady patter; the roaring brazier kept the damp and cold at bay, temporarily keeping the room warm.
Qi Yan wrapped his clothes tightly around himself and curled up under the blanket; his eyelids gradually grew heavy. His alcohol tolerance wasn’t actually bad, but who knew what else had been added to this wine — before long it had plunged him into a deep sleep.
Miao Shuang stood by the bed, looking at this person’s pale face and the brows still furrowed tight even in sleep, his expression complicated.
Mortal bodies really were inferior — it was just a bit of rain.
If he didn’t get this guy proper treatment soon, he probably wouldn’t make it through this winter.
In the original novel, Qi Yan, because he hadn’t been able to get timely treatment, had his body improve somewhat in the later part of the story but never fully recovered — every time it was overcast and rainy he’d be in agonizing pain, and there was even a time-limited return appearance of the wheelchair.
Clearly the author’s fetish for suffering was reassuringly consistent.
Although the taste of navel oranges wasn’t necessarily bad, Miao Shuang still didn’t want to be the one putting in the effort every single time — using the same position too much got tiresome too; compared to pleasuring himself, he still preferred to just lie there.
(tn: “脐橙的滋味” — “the taste of navel oranges” is almost certainly author slang/innuendo rather than a literal fruit reference. In Chinese danmei/BL web fiction, “橙子” (orange) and related fruit terms sometimes get used as cutesy or euphemistic stand-ins for sex acts or related content)
After thinking it over, he picked up an oiled-paper umbrella and went out to buy medicine.
Seeing him about to go out in the rain, Lai Fu wanted to go in his place, somewhat fearfully, but Miao Shuang waved him off and refused, telling him to stay home and watch over Qi Yan, so that the guy didn’t stop breathing the moment nobody was paying attention.
Other matters could be left to Lai Fu, but buying the medicine had to be done by Miao Shuang himself — not because he didn’t trust him, but simply because he didn’t know the Central Plains names for certain medicinal herbs, and had to go confirm them in person on site.
He spent the whole afternoon making the rounds of a dozen or so large and small medicine shops throughout the capital, and managed to buy seventy or eighty percent of what he needed; some of the remaining herbs weren’t produced in the Central Plains at all — either out of stock, or priced sky-high, and would need to be pre-ordered in advance.
The two chests of jewels the emperor had bestowed weren’t enough for him to squander like that, so he could only let it go for now.
While waiting for the pharmacy assistant to prepare his medicine, Miao Shuang suddenly felt something was strange.
Whether it was this scene or this heavy smell of Chinese medicine, both carried a subtle sense of familiarity, as if he’d experienced it all before.
He even found that the moment the assistant lifted his hand, he already knew how many liang and qian the herb in his hand weighed, and how much it differed from what he needed — and when it was placed on the scale, it matched his estimate down to the last fraction.
Although medicine and poison shared the same root, and the original body had been skilled at using poison and well-versed in pharmacology, the novel had never mentioned he had this kind of talent — and besides, half the medical formulas in his mind came from the original body’s memories, while the other half belonged to the cultivation world.
Strange.
He was a demonic cultivator — why would he understand medicine so well? Demonic cultivators had always only concerned themselves with killing people, never with saving them.
“Young master, your medicine is ready… young master?” The assistant handed over the bundled paper packet, calling out to him.
Miao Shuang came back to his senses. “Thanks.”
He picked up the paper packet, held up his umbrella, and walked into the curtain of rain. On the street, people hurried along, their lowered umbrellas hiding each other’s faces from view, so no one paid any attention to his appearance, so different from an ordinary person’s.
By the time he returned to the General’s residence, it was already late; there was one crucial herb he hadn’t managed to buy, so the medicine couldn’t be decocted yet — he could only have Lai Fu pack the herbs into a ceramic jar for storage for now.
Qi Yan was still asleep, so Miao Shuang didn’t disturb him; once he’d finished his own business, he rested too, climbing over him to lie down on the inner side of the bed, and stealing half the blanket from him again.
By the dead of night, Miao Shuang was suddenly woken by a rustling sound; he didn’t open his eyes, but he sensed the person beside him had gotten up.
Qi Yan tried as much as possible not to make any noise, but with his body as it was, it still took considerable effort to move himself into the wheelchair. Miao Shuang heard his suppressed breathing and guessed that the painkilling effect of the medicinal wine must have worn off by now.
The weather was cold and the rain heavy; no one wanted to leave the warmth of their blankets in the middle of the night. Miao Shuang couldn’t be bothered to deal with it and simply turned over quietly, planning to see what he was getting up to do.
The wheelchair left the room, and from the direction, it didn’t look like he was going to relieve himself.
After lying there a while longer, Miao Shuang still ended up frowning and getting up, throwing on some clothes to follow after him.
He used Gu arts to conceal his presence and followed at a distance behind Qi Yan; the sound of the rain covered his footsteps, and Qi Yan didn’t notice him at all.
The wheelchair passed through the covered walkway, traveling a long while, and finally stopped in front of the ancestral shrine.
The shrine was pitch black inside; he slowly lit a candle, his fingers trembling slightly — whether from cold or from pain, it was hard to say.
When the household had been raided and the property confiscated before, the shrine too had been thrown into disarray, with the ancestral tablets scattered all over the floor; over the past two days Lai Fu had picked them up one by one and wiped them clean, carefully placing them back in their original positions.
Qi Yan stared at the names on the ancestral tablets for a long while, then braced himself up out of the wheelchair and knelt down before them.
His knees struck the ground heavily; the tendons that had long since been severed sent back pain too great to bear, like a blunt blade gouging into the gaps of his bones, yet he didn’t make a single sound. He pressed both hands together against the cold ground and slowly bowed his head all the way down to the floor.
The candlelight flickered, making the gold characters on the tablets flash bright and dim.
Through the unclosed door drifted threads of rain, and a blurred human shadow stretched out long and slanted across the ground.
“Qi Yan is incompetent,” a low, hoarse voice rang out in the silent shrine, “I have failed to live up to my clan’s high hopes, brought shame upon the Qi family, implicated the whole clan through the fault of one man, and caused my kin to die wrongful deaths. I have betrayed His Majesty’s gracious favor, betrayed my father’s cultivation of me, am unworthy before Heaven, unworthy before the people — disloyal, unfilial, without benevolence, without righteousness… my crimes are too numerous to record, ten thousand deaths could not atone for them.”
The trembling voice echoed through the empty shrine. Miao Shuang watched that gaunt, thin figure, his brows slightly furrowing.
These words… sounded strangely familiar.
Some distant memory stirred awake in the depths of his mind — once, too, a figure had knelt on the ground just like this, though what he’d faced then wasn’t ancestral tablets in a shrine, but an endless, winding staircase stretching upward out of sight —
“This disciple is foolish and dull, I have failed to live up to my parents’ high hopes, unable to repay the debt of being given life, and have also violated the sect’s immortal precepts, disregarding my master’s teachings, idle and undisciplined, unable to achieve anything great — unfilial, disrespectful, without propriety, without trustworthiness… Today I bid farewell, with no date of return.”
The young man kowtowed heavily toward the cloud-wreathed immortal ascension stairway, every word filled with reluctance to part, his voice nearly breaking into sobs.
This voice… was it himself?
How could that be…
Demonic cultivators like them had always been free and unfettered, coming and going alone — what parents could they have, what sect, what master… none of this made any sense.
No, wait.
Demonic cultivators were people too, and if he was a person, he should have an origin, should have parents — who were his parents, how many kin did he have, where did he come from? He couldn’t remember any of it at all.
He had indeed been the Demon Lord for a long time, occupying Myriad Demons Peak for seventeen hundred years — but before that? How had he become the Demon Lord, why had he cultivated the demonic path — he couldn’t recall a single bit of it.
It was as if a needle had viciously pierced through his temple; his head began to ache without any warning.
Miao Shuang’s figure swayed; instinctively he reached out to steady himself on something, and his hand landed on the door panel — the door moved slightly, letting out a faint creak.
This small sound startled Qi Yan, and he slowly raised his head, the blood-shot wetness still lingering in his eyes. “Why are you here?”
The inexplicable memory and the sudden headache left Miao Shuang somewhat irritable, and he said testily, “Came to see what our great general is doing up in the dead of night instead of sleeping.”
Qi Yan pressed his lips together. “Did I wake you?”
“What do you think?” Miao Shuang walked up to him and kicked his calf. “Get up. Kneeling on the ground in weather like this — do you really not want these legs anymore?”
Qi Yan remained unmoved, still kneeling. “A crippled body — wanting it or not makes no difference.”
Miao Shuang drew out his bone blade. “Then let me help you cut them off right now.”
Qi Yan glanced at the three-inch bone blade and gave an enigmatic smile. “That thing of yours is fine for slitting a throat, but it’s far too short for cutting off a leg — I’ll have bled to death before you even finish the cut. Better find a longer one.”
Miao Shuang: “…”
He looked into the other man’s eyes but couldn’t find the slightest trace of amusement there — only deep, dark gloom and weariness.
“Were you being serious just now?” he asked. “Do you really think you deserve to die?”
Qi Yan smiled again. “I led troops to drown Miao Village in blood, forcibly seized your clan’s sacred relic, killed your people and destroyed your home — in the eyes of the Great Shaman, don’t I deserve death?”
The blade in Miao Shuang’s hand turned, pressing against his neck.
Qi Yan straightened his kneeling body and closed his eyes.
“…Has the pain in your body hurt your brain stupid?” Miao Shuang said, his fingertip applying slight pressure, the blade’s tip cutting a thin line of blood across his neck. “If you truly wanted to die, why bother handing that empty box over to the emperor?”
Qi Yan said nothing.
“You knew perfectly well it was a trap, and yet you rushed to jump into it anyway. You already knew the emperor meant to kill you — if you’d obtained the Sacred Gu, you’d be of no more use to him; if you hadn’t obtained it, he’d punish you for failing in your mission — either way, you were as good as dead.”
Miao Shuang pressed the blade’s tip against his throat. “And yet you specifically handed him an empty box — the suspicious emperor couldn’t help but doubt himself: did the Sacred Gu even really exist, had you secretly kept it for yourself, and if it was real, where had you hidden it? So he had no choice but to spare your life, lock you in prison, and interrogate you day after day — you endured it, stiff-necked, for three whole months without giving up a single word, and now you’re telling me you want to die?!”
Miao Shuang himself didn’t know where this anger was coming from — he’d dreamed of killing Immortal Lord Bo Yan countless times; Qi Yan was supposed to fight and struggle against him to the death, to have his proud spine personally snapped by Miao Shuang’s own hands, to be cast down from the clouds — not to be like this, kneeling on the ground, offering up his neck for the slaughter.
He had no interest in crushing an ant.
He used the tip of the blade to tilt up his chin, forcing him to look at him: “I won’t kill you, General. You killed my people, seized my clan’s sacred relic — how could I possibly let you off so easily by dying? That would be far too cheap for you.”
He stroked the other man’s face, his thumb prying along the seam of his lips, his smile in the dim candlelight unusually sinister. “You want to die before you’ve even tasted the full range of my Gu poisons? No such good fortune exists.”
Qi Yan’s reddened eyes were fierce and malevolent. “You don’t kill me today — one day, I will kill you.”
“I’ll be looking forward to it.”