Chapter 38: Theatre Troupe (III)
A number of small mountains lay between Guanyin Port and the nearest town to the north. Because of the slippery snow, those paths were extremely difficult to maneuver. Some routes had even been completely blocked out by the falling snow, and required travellers to make detours.
Such was the situation that the scarred man had encountered today––
The first carriage had stopped in an extremely dangerous position. Only one zhang ahead of them was a drastic cliff. Normally, there were two bridges on the cliff that could bring them to the two mountain paths ahead –– one east and one west –– which allowed them to avoid the massive, unscalable peak in the middle.
"What's wrong?" Having cooled himself down temporarily on Xuanmin's neck, Xue Xian was in a better mood. Pretending that nothing was wrong inside the carriage, he pushed open the door and stuck his head out, calling to the troupe. "Do you need a hand?"
From afar, the scarred man called back, "It's fine. The bridge that we'd planned to cross has snapped. We have to take a detour..."
The horse at the front of the train continued to whinny and seemed extremely agitated. If it hadn't been for the scarred man stopping them at just the right time, that horse would long have tumbled down the side of the cliff.
"How could a bridge just snap?" An old man descended from one of the carriages ahead. "Did we take the right turn? What did I say? We still need these old horses to show us the way."
"Old Li, stop wheedling me. I do know the way," the scarred man said. "Get back into the carriage. Don't get out for no reason, or you'll freeze your throat and lose your singing voice."
Xue Xian saw that the old man surnamed Li did not obey the scarred man and return to the carriage. Instead, he walked through the snow toward that first horse. He took a look, then cried out, "What the hell? How could it snap so cleanly?... Huh. So now we have to take the eastern path?"
But unlike the scarred man, this Old Li seemed extremely reluctant to take the detour, as though to take that other path would curse his family with eight hundred years of bad luck.
Xue Xian's hearing was far sharper than humans', so he could hear every word of the men's exchange. He asked, "Is the eastern route bad?"
He had not tried to project his voice, but nonetheless, his words were carried by the eddies of wind into the ears of the men at the front.
The two men were stunned. Then they shouted, "It's fine, don't worry. It's just that the eastern route is longer, and rocks fall onto it often. But if we're careful, we can still get through."
"Is it really fine?" Jiang Shining asked, his face gaunt.
Xue Xian strained his eyes past the thick snow to study the men's expressions. Squinting, he shook his head and said, "They don't seem too bothered, but... I don't know how to say it. Let's just go."
The always silent Xuanmin stirred next to him and pushed the curtain aside. "Don't worry. Let me see."
His serene tone helped everyone in the carriage relax. Even Xue Xian, who had constantly been bothering him in the past few days, had to admit that –– never mind anything else –– this bald donkey was handy for solving problems.
Then, just as the thought flashed through the haughty dragon's mind, he stopped himself again. Why would I randomly describe the bald donkey as 'handy'...
It just seemed like the way you'd describe something dear to you, that you kept near you at all times –– for something to be 'handy', you had to have it in your hand...
Still leaning out of the door, Xue Xian pondered this. Then he chastised himself. He decided that he must have ingested rat poison, to suddenly have such a weird thought.
But the bald donkey was a simple mortal. Once Xue Xian fully returned to normal, he'd be a divine dragon, and would easily be able to pick up the monk in his claw. So...
Never mind holding him in his hand, even to dangle him from his teeth was as simple as opening his mouth. So there!
As Xue Xian followed that train of thought, he began to feel majestic again.
As he concocted an elaborate fantasy of a battle between man and dragon, Xue Xian couldn't help but sneak a peek at Xuanmin inside the carriage.
Xuanmin noticed this. As he had no idea what was going through the dragon's mind, he felt intrigued.
With his detached disposition, he never usually thought too much about whether or not others were staring at him. He decided that the dragon was simply overheating and in a bad mood, and did not want to add oil to the fire, so only glanced at Xue Xian, then went back to peering out the window.
But in a way, that brief look of curiosity had, in fact, been oil to the fire.
When Xue Xian saw the frosty way in which Xuanmin dismissed him, he felt an itch in his hand –– a strong urge to go ahead and fight the monk. Although he knew that this made no sense –– this was not his first day with Xuanmin, and he had long gotten used to the neither cold, nor hot way in which Xuanmin treated those around him –– Xue Xian just... didn't feel good.
It was as though the qi that had been happily swimming around his body had suddenly gotten blocked somewhere –– it wasn't a big deal, nor was it painful, but it was just uncomfortable.
Another mass of hot air swelled inside Xue Xian's body, lapping up at him like incessant waves. He could not keep it at bay for long at all, and it seemed that it would never go away.
Annoying.
At the front of the train, the scarred man was gripping the rope binding the horses to the carriages, and trying to move the animal toward the eastern bridge. But the horse was even fussier than Xue Xian. It snorted and whinnied, pounding its hooves on the ground, and refused to budge.
"We've tried the whip, we've tried the carrot, and we've tried calming it. Why won't it take a single step forward? It never used to be like this. How strange," Old Li mumbled angrily.
"It just won't cooperate with us today. They all say that horses have innate magic. Perhaps it was startled earlier and now senses danger ahead, and doesn't want to go," the scarred man said. But he patted the horse's neck. He alternated with harder and softer pats, and, finally, the horse grunted and reluctantly took a few steps forward.
Slowly, the wheels of the train began to turn again. Old Li hurried back into his carriage, but his expression seemed still to be one of panic and worry. Before he disappeared into the carriage, he looked back at Xue Xian and forced himself to replace his anxious look with a placating one. "It's fine. The horse didn't want to go, so we had a delay. But we're moving again now."
The small incident on the road seemed to have been solved. It was annoying, but it was far from what Jiang Shining had feared.
Xue Xian nodded at Old Li as a word of thanks, and shut their own carriage door, but remained sitting there with his arms wrapped around himself. He seemed no longer intent on using Xuanmin to cool himself off, and did not speak, either. He seemed unusually idle.
The bridge that the scarred man was now taking was slightly wider than the original one. The horses and mule carried them gently across the ravine, and there was even extra room on the sides of the train. Nothing seemed to be wrong.
Then they got onto the path on the other side, and the horse's behavior changed again –– it kept starting and stopping.
Each time, they could hear the men ahead trying to persuade the horse to go on, at times coaxing, at times scolding. The sounds of the wheels crunching against the snow and the horse's irritated whinnies were pierced, every so often, by the cracks of a whip. As they headed deeper into the mountain range, the feeling became increasingly unsettling.
"Has it really been solved? Why do I feel so nervous?" Jiang Shining said, his face full of worry. He sat as rigidly as a pin on a pincushion and seemed a completely different person compared to his normally sluggish self.
After another bout of fretting, he seemed also to realise how unusual his behavior was. Finally, he said, "Why have I been so anxious ever since we entered the mountain range?"
Xue Xian's voice didn't betray any hint of emotion when he said, "Lots of yin energy."
Normally, there was always a specific and lively tone to his voice. Sometimes he sneered and other times he mocked, but he always displayed a wide range of complicated, interlocking emotions, and was obviously the kind of person who could never be quiet.
So the dull and mild tone he employed now was too different from his normal demeanor, making Jiang Shining wonder if something was wrong.
But Jiang Shining decided that it was best not to say anything, in case he provoked the dragon. But he couldn't ignore the rising sense of panic derived from the four words Xue Xian had uttered.
What did 'lots of yin energy' mean?
It was Twenty-Seven who clutched his bundle of sticks and said, "If I remember correctly, that boatman said there was a landslide in Anqing Prefecture."
"Huh?" Jiang Shining turned to the boy.
Blank-faced, Twenty-Seven stared back at him and said in a dull voice, "Do you think there are dead people from the landslide on this mountain?"
Jiang Shining gulped. Was this kid doing it on purpose? Why did he sound like he was telling a ghost story?
Stone Zhang looked like he was about to cry again. "How old are you, boy? Stop trying to scare people for no reason!"
Twenty-Seven rolled his eyes and tapped at his sticks.
Xue Xian felt that his palms were burning up again, but sat unmoving in the corner with those passive, half-closed eyes. He seemed not to be planning any further mischief, and yet it only made the others in the carriage feel even an even stronger sense of foreboding.
As the carriage fell into silence, Jiang Shining couldn't tell if it was just his paranoia, but he had the feeling that the peaceful silence was a pot of soup, in which they were all stewing...
They were taking forever to traverse this mountain path, and the horse was still acting off. It would run for a couple of steps, then slow down to a walk, and then slow down more to a shuffle...
An hour passed before they'd even made it halfway through.
Xuanmin was still using a hand to hold the curtain open, staring out of the window in contemplation. Because he said nothing, Jiang Shining took this as a reassuring sign.
Actually, Xue Xian's palms were extremely uncomfortable –– he could not even accurately describe them as burning anymore. As he languished, he did not even feel like finding something with which to direct the heat anymore.
And now that he had no cause for mischief, he found that he had lost interest in anything and everything.
The heat isn't completely unbearable yet. Let it burn, he muttered inside.
Just as that roiling heat began to clamber up his wrist and spread across the rest of his body, a slender hand suddenly appeared before Xue Xian's eyes.
Stunned, Xue Xian rubbed his eyes and looked around. He saw that Xuanmin was still sitting by the window with one hand against the curtain, staring out peacefully –– but his left hand was now hovering in front of Xue Xian's face, palm up.
For some reason, Xue Xian's heartbeat quickened.* But he quickly came back to his senses and said in a cold tone, "Why are you suddenly showing off your hand to me?"
Finally, Xuanmin temporarily tore his gaze away from the window and glanced at Xue Xian, whose hands were still clinging tightly to his own shoulders. "You don't need to cool down?" he asked.
Then, he went back to looking outside. His hand continued to hover in front of Xue Xian. He had not taken it away.
All the anger Xue Xian had been keeping inside of him suddenly evaporated.
But Xue Xian still had a shred of that untouchable pride in him. As he gazed down at Xuanmin's hand, he bit down on the tip of his tongue and frowned, thinking. Finally, he wiggled his chin and said in a demurring voice, "Fine. For once that you're making sense... Don't mind if I do."
Eagerly now, he reached out those two claws and wrapped one tightly around the cool hand that Xuanmin had given him. The other of Xue Xian's hands crept slowly in the direction of Xuanmin's face, trying to lock itself there.
But was pushed away.
As Xue Xian felt the heat settle a bit, he relaxed and sighed a happy sigh. But then Xuanmin suddenly frowned.
"What is it?" Seeing Xuanmin's expression, Xue Xian followed the monk's gaze and peered out of the gap in the curtain too.
As the path curved around the side of the mountain, they could see some of the route far ahead. Part of it was completely covered in a massive pile of fallen rocks. The rocks blocked a large part of the road, and were in disarray, but Xue Xian could see something crushed beneath them.
"Is that... a horse-drawn carriage crushed beneath the boulders? Are there still people inside?" Jiang Shining exclaimed as he stuck his head out, too. He could not see much from his perspective, and strained his neck to get a good view.
"It is a carriage..." Xue Xian said. Then, gloomily, he added, "Keep looking. Don't you think that carriage looks awfully familiar?"
Jiang Shining froze in shock. He suddenly understood why Xue Xian had told him not to get too close to the scarred man and his troupe...
"You mean... they.... they're all..."
"Shhh," Xue Xian interrupted. "When you encounter such people, a certain word is taboo. If you say it out loud, they'll wake up."
He paused. Then he added, "We can't let them see..."
Xue Xian paused again. He gestured outside with his chin. "Or else, the peace will be broken."
But the horses were trotting that way, and there was only the one narrow path on the mountain. There was no way to turn back.
"How in the world can we avoid it?" Jiang Shining asked.
Chapter 38: Theatre Troupe (III)
A number of small mountains lay between Guanyin Port and the nearest town to the north. Because of the slippery snow, those paths were extremely difficult to maneuver. Some routes had even been completely blocked out by the falling snow, and required travellers to make detours.
Such was the situation that the scarred man had encountered today––
The first carriage had stopped in an extremely dangerous position. Only one zhang ahead of them was a drastic cliff. Normally, there were two bridges on the cliff that could bring them to the two mountain paths ahead –– one east and one west –– which allowed them to avoid the massive, unscalable peak in the middle.
"What's wrong?" Having cooled himself down temporarily on Xuanmin's neck, Xue Xian was in a better mood. Pretending that nothing was wrong inside the carriage, he pushed open the door and stuck his head out, calling to the troupe. "Do you need a hand?"
From afar, the scarred man called back, "It's fine. The bridge that we'd planned to cross has snapped. We have to take a detour..."
The horse at the front of the train continued to whinny and seemed extremely agitated. If it hadn't been for the scarred man stopping them at just the right time, that horse would long have tumbled down the side of the cliff.
"How could a bridge just snap?" An old man descended from one of the carriages ahead. "Did we take the right turn? What did I say? We still need these old horses to show us the way."
"Old Li, stop wheedling me. I do know the way," the scarred man said. "Get back into the carriage. Don't get out for no reason, or you'll freeze your throat and lose your singing voice."
Xue Xian saw that the old man surnamed Li did not obey the scarred man and return to the carriage. Instead, he walked through the snow toward that first horse. He took a look, then cried out, "What the hell? How could it snap so cleanly?... Huh. So now we have to take the eastern path?"
But unlike the scarred man, this Old Li seemed extremely reluctant to take the detour, as though to take that other path would curse his family with eight hundred years of bad luck.
Xue Xian's hearing was far sharper than humans', so he could hear every word of the men's exchange. He asked, "Is the eastern route bad?"
He had not tried to project his voice, but nonetheless, his words were carried by the eddies of wind into the ears of the men at the front.
The two men were stunned. Then they shouted, "It's fine, don't worry. It's just that the eastern route is longer, and rocks fall onto it often. But if we're careful, we can still get through."
"Is it really fine?" Jiang Shining asked, his face gaunt.
Xue Xian strained his eyes past the thick snow to study the men's expressions. Squinting, he shook his head and said, "They don't seem too bothered, but... I don't know how to say it. Let's just go."
The always silent Xuanmin stirred next to him and pushed the curtain aside. "Don't worry. Let me see."
His serene tone helped everyone in the carriage relax. Even Xue Xian, who had constantly been bothering him in the past few days, had to admit that –– never mind anything else –– this bald donkey was handy for solving problems.
Then, just as the thought flashed through the haughty dragon's mind, he stopped himself again. Why would I randomly describe the bald donkey as 'handy'...
It just seemed like the way you'd describe something dear to you, that you kept near you at all times –– for something to be 'handy', you had to have it in your hand...
Still leaning out of the door, Xue Xian pondered this. Then he chastised himself. He decided that he must have ingested rat poison, to suddenly have such a weird thought.
But the bald donkey was a simple mortal. Once Xue Xian fully returned to normal, he'd be a divine dragon, and would easily be able to pick up the monk in his claw. So...
Never mind holding him in his hand, even to dangle him from his teeth was as simple as opening his mouth. So there!
As Xue Xian followed that train of thought, he began to feel majestic again.
As he concocted an elaborate fantasy of a battle between man and dragon, Xue Xian couldn't help but sneak a peek at Xuanmin inside the carriage.
Xuanmin noticed this. As he had no idea what was going through the dragon's mind, he felt intrigued.
With his detached disposition, he never usually thought too much about whether or not others were staring at him. He decided that the dragon was simply overheating and in a bad mood, and did not want to add oil to the fire, so only glanced at Xue Xian, then went back to peering out the window.
But in a way, that brief look of curiosity had, in fact, been oil to the fire.
When Xue Xian saw the frosty way in which Xuanmin dismissed him, he felt an itch in his hand –– a strong urge to go ahead and fight the monk. Although he knew that this made no sense –– this was not his first day with Xuanmin, and he had long gotten used to the neither cold, nor hot way in which Xuanmin treated those around him –– Xue Xian just... didn't feel good.
It was as though the qi that had been happily swimming around his body had suddenly gotten blocked somewhere –– it wasn't a big deal, nor was it painful, but it was just uncomfortable.
Another mass of hot air swelled inside Xue Xian's body, lapping up at him like incessant waves. He could not keep it at bay for long at all, and it seemed that it would never go away.
Annoying.
At the front of the train, the scarred man was gripping the rope binding the horses to the carriages, and trying to move the animal toward the eastern bridge. But the horse was even fussier than Xue Xian. It snorted and whinnied, pounding its hooves on the ground, and refused to budge.
"We've tried the whip, we've tried the carrot, and we've tried calming it. Why won't it take a single step forward? It never used to be like this. How strange," Old Li mumbled angrily.
"It just won't cooperate with us today. They all say that horses have innate magic. Perhaps it was startled earlier and now senses danger ahead, and doesn't want to go," the scarred man said. But he patted the horse's neck. He alternated with harder and softer pats, and, finally, the horse grunted and reluctantly took a few steps forward.
Slowly, the wheels of the train began to turn again. Old Li hurried back into his carriage, but his expression seemed still to be one of panic and worry. Before he disappeared into the carriage, he looked back at Xue Xian and forced himself to replace his anxious look with a placating one. "It's fine. The horse didn't want to go, so we had a delay. But we're moving again now."
The small incident on the road seemed to have been solved. It was annoying, but it was far from what Jiang Shining had feared.
Xue Xian nodded at Old Li as a word of thanks, and shut their own carriage door, but remained sitting there with his arms wrapped around himself. He seemed no longer intent on using Xuanmin to cool himself off, and did not speak, either. He seemed unusually idle.
The bridge that the scarred man was now taking was slightly wider than the original one. The horses and mule carried them gently across the ravine, and there was even extra room on the sides of the train. Nothing seemed to be wrong.
Then they got onto the path on the other side, and the horse's behavior changed again –– it kept starting and stopping.
Each time, they could hear the men ahead trying to persuade the horse to go on, at times coaxing, at times scolding. The sounds of the wheels crunching against the snow and the horse's irritated whinnies were pierced, every so often, by the cracks of a whip. As they headed deeper into the mountain range, the feeling became increasingly unsettling.
"Has it really been solved? Why do I feel so nervous?" Jiang Shining said, his face full of worry. He sat as rigidly as a pin on a pincushion and seemed a completely different person compared to his normally sluggish self.
After another bout of fretting, he seemed also to realise how unusual his behavior was. Finally, he said, "Why have I been so anxious ever since we entered the mountain range?"
Xue Xian's voice didn't betray any hint of emotion when he said, "Lots of yin energy."
Normally, there was always a specific and lively tone to his voice. Sometimes he sneered and other times he mocked, but he always displayed a wide range of complicated, interlocking emotions, and was obviously the kind of person who could never be quiet.
So the dull and mild tone he employed now was too different from his normal demeanor, making Jiang Shining wonder if something was wrong.
But Jiang Shining decided that it was best not to say anything, in case he provoked the dragon. But he couldn't ignore the rising sense of panic derived from the four words Xue Xian had uttered.
What did 'lots of yin energy' mean?
It was Twenty-Seven who clutched his bundle of sticks and said, "If I remember correctly, that boatman said there was a landslide in Anqing Prefecture."
"Huh?" Jiang Shining turned to the boy.
Blank-faced, Twenty-Seven stared back at him and said in a dull voice, "Do you think there are dead people from the landslide on this mountain?"
Jiang Shining gulped. Was this kid doing it on purpose? Why did he sound like he was telling a ghost story?
Stone Zhang looked like he was about to cry again. "How old are you, boy? Stop trying to scare people for no reason!"
Twenty-Seven rolled his eyes and tapped at his sticks.
Xue Xian felt that his palms were burning up again, but sat unmoving in the corner with those passive, half-closed eyes. He seemed not to be planning any further mischief, and yet it only made the others in the carriage feel even an even stronger sense of foreboding.
As the carriage fell into silence, Jiang Shining couldn't tell if it was just his paranoia, but he had the feeling that the peaceful silence was a pot of soup, in which they were all stewing...
They were taking forever to traverse this mountain path, and the horse was still acting off. It would run for a couple of steps, then slow down to a walk, and then slow down more to a shuffle...
An hour passed before they'd even made it halfway through.
Xuanmin was still using a hand to hold the curtain open, staring out of the window in contemplation. Because he said nothing, Jiang Shining took this as a reassuring sign.
Actually, Xue Xian's palms were extremely uncomfortable –– he could not even accurately describe them as burning anymore. As he languished, he did not even feel like finding something with which to direct the heat anymore.
And now that he had no cause for mischief, he found that he had lost interest in anything and everything.
The heat isn't completely unbearable yet. Let it burn, he muttered inside.
Just as that roiling heat began to clamber up his wrist and spread across the rest of his body, a slender hand suddenly appeared before Xue Xian's eyes.
Stunned, Xue Xian rubbed his eyes and looked around. He saw that Xuanmin was still sitting by the window with one hand against the curtain, staring out peacefully –– but his left hand was now hovering in front of Xue Xian's face, palm up.
For some reason, Xue Xian's heartbeat quickened.* But he quickly came back to his senses and said in a cold tone, "Why are you suddenly showing off your hand to me?"
Finally, Xuanmin temporarily tore his gaze away from the window and glanced at Xue Xian, whose hands were still clinging tightly to his own shoulders. "You don't need to cool down?" he asked.
Then, he went back to looking outside. His hand continued to hover in front of Xue Xian. He had not taken it away.
All the anger Xue Xian had been keeping inside of him suddenly evaporated.
But Xue Xian still had a shred of that untouchable pride in him. As he gazed down at Xuanmin's hand, he bit down on the tip of his tongue and frowned, thinking. Finally, he wiggled his chin and said in a demurring voice, "Fine. For once that you're making sense... Don't mind if I do."
Eagerly now, he reached out those two claws and wrapped one tightly around the cool hand that Xuanmin had given him. The other of Xue Xian's hands crept slowly in the direction of Xuanmin's face, trying to lock itself there.
But was pushed away.
As Xue Xian felt the heat settle a bit, he relaxed and sighed a happy sigh. But then Xuanmin suddenly frowned.
"What is it?" Seeing Xuanmin's expression, Xue Xian followed the monk's gaze and peered out of the gap in the curtain too.
As the path curved around the side of the mountain, they could see some of the route far ahead. Part of it was completely covered in a massive pile of fallen rocks. The rocks blocked a large part of the road, and were in disarray, but Xue Xian could see something crushed beneath them.
"Is that... a horse-drawn carriage crushed beneath the boulders? Are there still people inside?" Jiang Shining exclaimed as he stuck his head out, too. He could not see much from his perspective, and strained his neck to get a good view.
"It is a carriage..." Xue Xian said. Then, gloomily, he added, "Keep looking. Don't you think that carriage looks awfully familiar?"
Jiang Shining froze in shock. He suddenly understood why Xue Xian had told him not to get too close to the scarred man and his troupe...
"You mean... they.... they're all..."
"Shhh," Xue Xian interrupted. "When you encounter such people, a certain word is taboo. If you say it out loud, they'll wake up."
He paused. Then he added, "We can't let them see..."
Xue Xian paused again. He gestured outside with his chin. "Or else, the peace will be broken."
But the horses were trotting that way, and there was only the one narrow path on the mountain. There was no way to turn back.
"How in the world can we avoid it?" Jiang Shining asked.
