At a residence in the capital, Lang Junxia heads inside, closing the gates behind him. Duan Ling watches him with trepidation; Lang Junxia hasn’t said a single word along the way as he brought Duan Ling here. Duan Ling knows that if Lang Junxia really has the heart to kill him, then there’s no way he can run no matter how hard he tries. A lot of things are meant to be from the very beginning, which in turns make it all the calmer to face.
“Is this your home?” Duan Ling asks.
“It’s the house His Majesty conferred to me. I stay in the palace for the most part.”
“Where’s my dad?”
“Still out there looking for you. Aside from the several days he stayed in the capital last month he hasn’t been back at all.”
“Hurry and send him a letter.”
“When I saw that knife I knew it had to be you, so I already secretly sent someone to get word to him. Currently Mu Kuangda’s influence overshadows all other officials’ in the imperial court, and he essentially controls what information His Majesty gets to hear. Before His Majesty returns, you mustn’t show your face before the court.”
Duan Ling gives him a nod. Lang Junxia says, “Have a bath first. I’ll tell you everything in detail once you’ve had dinner.”
The official mansion is lavishly furnished, but there are hardly any servants, and Lang Junxia gets a bath ready for Duan Ling in the side wing. Soaking in the water, Duan Ling finally lets out a breath of relief. He has too many questions to ask but he has no idea where to begin asking.
There’s a knock on the door and Lang Junxia comes in. Duan Ling lies back in the bathtub just the way he did as a child while Lang Junxia rolls up his sleeves and bends over to wash his hair for him.
“Dinner is ready.”
“That day, you …”
“That day, Chancellor Mu told me to come to Shangjing, kill you, and bring His Highness your head.” Lang Junxia answers absentmindedly as he washes Duan Ling’s hair, “I didn’t want to say it because I was worried that Mu Kuangda had other spies planted in the city. At one point I suspected that it may have been Xunchun.”
“I had no orders, and I didn’t dare go see His Highness either, so I made a unilateral decision to take you away and lie low for a while to keep you from being used as a hostage.”
As he speaks Lang Junxia digs out something from a purse at his waist — it is that very same jade arc, pure and translucent.
He ties the jade arc around Duan Ling’s neck, and Duan Ling is instantly overcome with astonishment.
“Where … where did you find this?”
“The apothecary village. Don’t lose it this time. I thought you died at first, and dared not hand it over to His Majesty — I thought of it as leaving him an idea to hold onto. Fortunately, heavens bless our Great Chen, you’re still alive.”
“Xunchun didn’t betray me. She escorted us all the way out of the city.” Duan Ling replies, “She sacrificed herself.”
Lang Junxia doesn’t say more. Duan Ling finishes his bath, and by the time he gets out of the bathtub he has started to feel a bit embarrassed.
“You’ve grown,” Lang Junxia says.
He wraps a new robe around Duan Ling and has him put it on, and just like how he used to do when Duan Ling was a little boy, holds his hand to walk him through the gallery to the dining room.
Lang Junxia has made a few simple dishes. As soon as Duan Ling sits down he picks up the chopsticks and starts eating.
“Once His Majesty returns I’ll bring him over to see you. The situation at court isn’t stable at present. We must consider any decision we make after this at length.”
“Why?”
After a brief silence, Lang Junxia begins to speak again, “The Fourth Prince has no heir, and he has married Mu Kuangda’s younger sister, Mu Jinzhi. They’re hoping Mu Jinzhi will give birth to a child. If you never appeared, then the throne will come under the Mu family’s control.”
“But my dad wouldn’t let them do whatever they …”
“He doesn’t want to come back. He said that as long as he doesn’t find you he won’t come back to Xichuan. He’s lost Xiaowan already; he can’t lose you too.”
Duan Ling goes quiet, staring at Lang Junxia blankly like a sad child.
“You’ve met my mother, right?”
Lang Junxia doesn’t reply, and takes a sip of his wine.
Duan Ling stares at Lang Junxia in a daze, and he suddenly feels a bit dizzy. There’s a sharp pain in his stomach.
“Lang Junxia, my stomach hurts.”
Lang Junxia stares at Duan Ling as if in a trance. A heartbeat passes, and Duan Ling seems to understand what this pain is all about.
And so, just like that, they stare at each other as the pain in Duan Ling’s stomach grows more intense, until in the end he’s biting down on his lower lip with a deep furrow between his brows and he feels as though his entire body has been plunged into ice water, his mind turning delirious.
He opens his mouth, but no words come out at all. Slowly, he collapses over the table, finally closing his eyes, the world going completely dark. In the very last moment, he sees Lang Junxia’s hand reaching out to him to close over the back of his hand. The hand is missing a finger.
The last thought in Duan Ling’s head is: who hurt you?
The whole time, Lang Junxia has been softly holding Duan Ling’s hand. Cai Yan says quietly from his perch outside the window, “Look, he didn’t ask about me. Perhaps he thought I perished as well.”
Lang Junxia remains quiet for a time before saying, “Don’t you want to see him?”
Cai Yan never does come in. At last, Lang Junxia unties the jade arc, sets it down on the table, and picks up Duan Ling. In the very instant he steps through the door, Cai Yan swiftly dodges out of the way to disappear at the end of the corridor.
Duan Ling’s hand is hanging at his side. He’s just had a bath, so his skin is clean and his hair is untied; his eyes are tightly shut as though he’s in deep sleep.
Lang Junxia walks through the corridor to the back courtyard with Duan Ling in his arms, putting him down in a pull cart.
He bends down and solemnly straightens Duan Ling’s clothes, taking off his outer robe, leaving only the unlined underclothes. Then he gently caresses Duan Ling’s forehead.
There’s the crack of a horse whip, and Lang Junxia drives the carriage away from the back courtyard towards the city gate.
Cai Yan stands behind the second floor window with the jade arc in his hands, staring out silently.
Peach blossoms are everywhere, filling the sky and covering the ground as they fly through the night. Beneath the moon the carriage stops at the shore of the Min River. The rushing river surges towards the east.2
Lang Junxia picks Duan Ling up from the carriage, and with Duan Ling in his arms, he walks in moonlight towards the cliff overlooking the river.
Behind him, peach blossoms drift to and fro, scattering moonlight as each petal goes its own way in the wind towards some far-off place.
He holds Duan Ling in his arms the way he did on that very day he brought him away from Shangzi, out of death and into the warmth of spring. Now he’s taking him away from this warm spring night, taking him into eternal darkness.
In the gentle and winding melody of a flute song he carries Duan Ling from a battlefield filled with spears and armoured horses to an orchard of peaches, their blossoms paving the ground ten miles long; through the windstorm-ridden desert into lush green Jiangnan.
Yet life is as ethereal as a waking dream; how much joy can we ever hope to gain?3
All living again falls into deep slumber, for ever and ever more.
From the edge of the cliff, Duan Ling’s body falls straight down into the Min River. There is a splash as he hits the water, where the undertow in the darkness drags him under into the fathomless whirlpool beneath.
Late in the night, a carriage stops outside the palace gate. A guard opens the curtain and helps Cai Yan step down.
“Your Highness.”
Cai Yan attaches the jade arc to his waist as he walks. The guard says quietly, “Wuluohou Mu drove the carriage to the shore, and then he threw a corpse into the river.”
Cai Yan asks, “Did he stop anywhere along the way?”
The guard shakes his head, and Cai Yan gives him a nod. Another guard comes up to him. “His Majesty is awake. He’s looking for you.”
“Once Wuluohou Mu comes back to the palace, tell him to go get some sleep. He doesn’t need to come see me.”
Cai Yan quickens his pace to see the emperor, his figure blending into the darkness.
A tributary of the Min River, on a rocky beach shore:
Hoofbeats approach from a great distance, and a girl on horseback in men’s clothing gallops this way with the tails of her gown flying up behind her in the breeze. Two hunting dogs run along the shore, sniffing at a corpse on the beach washed up by the river. The young woman stares at the underbrush with puzzlement.
The hunting dogs are barking as they sniff at Duan Ling’s face. A man catches up to her on horseback. “Princess!”4
The young woman would be the daughter of Princess Ruiping and the Marquess of Huaiyin, Princess Congping, and her name is Yao Zheng. She’s come out of the city in men’s clothing today to race along the Min River on horseback, and has trotted her way into the mountain paths. The two beloved dogs she keeps have been dashing along the hillside so freely that she manages to lose them, and so Yao Zheng has chased them all the way here. Finding the body of a young man on the rocky beach has her feeling rather baffled.
The man is dressed all in black, the end of his belt whipping up in the wind as he gallops after her. The sun shines down on his face, and it’s light is so dazzlingly bright that he can’t keep his eyes open. It’s Wu Du.
“Princess,” Wu Du doesn’t know what to do with her. “The mountain paths here are difficult to travel on, and springtime means there are lots of snakes and venomous insects here. It’s not safe. Let’s head back.”
“And who are you exactly? When do you get to tell me what to do?” Yao Zheng says, “If you don’t want to accompany me then head back on your own!”
Seeing that there’s no one on the beach, and it’s sunny and bright with all the flowers in full bloom, Wu Du can only get off the horse to check around. Only once he’s sure there are no snakes or scorpions and other such venomous dangers does he give Yao Zheng a nod without speaking, and stands by the river shore with his hands to his sides.
Zhao Zhen giggles out loud. Wu Du does his best to pacify the anger in his heart. He looks around with a tight knot between his brows, and noticing the two dogs barking in the underbrush, he heads over that way. Yao Zheng gets off her horse and stands at the edge of the river with an evasive expression.
“Princess,” Wu Du turns again to say to her, “You mustn’t get too close to the river. There’s a lot of turbulence around here.”
Yao Zheng ignores him. In the underbrush, Wu Du finds Duan Ling’s battered body, covered in cuts and bruises.
Yao Zheng stands around for a while before she walks over. When she sees Duan Ling she says, “Eh, why is there a dead person here?”
Wu Du gets down on one knee to check Duan Ling’s breath, and realises that he’s already stopped breathing.
Wu Du says, “There are no fatal wounds on his body. Whose child is this?”
“He’s dead, right,” Yao Zhen says. When Wu Du goes to press fingers into the side of Duan Ling’s neck, she adds, “Let’s go.”
“Wait a moment,” Wu Du says.
Yao Zheng says derisively, “If we don’t head back soon, you’ll get yelled at by your master later.”
Wu Du turns to shoot a glance at Yao Zheng, as if he’s about to say something, but in the end he keeps it to himself. Right then, the meridian in the side of Duan Ling’s neck pulses lightly once.
Wu Du has a deep furrow between his brows as he mumbles to himself, “Poison?”
Yao Zheng suddenly says, “Hey, Wu Du, I heard that you can poison the living to death, but that you can also bring back the dead. Why don’t you try it? If you manage to bring back a dead person, I’ll say something nice in front of my dad for you about whatever it is that you want.”
“My conduct is upright and proper, and I don’t really want anything. Whatever I said in front of the Marquess of Huaiyin is nothing more than the truth.”
Wu Du kneels on one knee at Duan Ling’s side with a somewhat puzzled expression on his face, then he produces a porcelain bottle from his apothecary sack and pours out a pill.
“You can really bring him back to life?” Yao Zheng finds Wu Du downright impervious to reason.
Wu Du doesn’t answer her. He kneads the pill into a powder and feeds it to Duan Ling, massaging his throat to make it go down. He rises to his feet and says to Yao Zheng, “But if he really does live, are you going to honour your wager?”
Yao Zheng raises an eyebrow, watching Wu Du. After staring at him for a while, she walks past the beach to hop back on her horse. From her perch she stares down at the water from above, and soon she speaks again, “I do tend to keep my word, so of course the wager will be honoured.”
Wu Du’s expression darkens again as he has discerned the ridicule in Yao Zheng’s words. A short time passes before he says, “Look, he’s already breathing.”
“Oh forget it.” Yao Zheng feels as though Wu Du is like a sandbag who never talks back, and if you slap him he just turns the other cheek. He hasn’t said anything along the way either, and she simply finds him boring. She says without thinking, “I’m off to go play with Wuluohou Mu. You don’t have to follow me around anymore.”
“Wait!” Wu Du’s about to run up to her, but Yao Zhen has already galloped down the mountain path like a gust of wind. The two dogs bark at Wu Du several times before they run after Yao Zheng, and even their barking is full of disdain as though they’re laughing at his misfortune.
At the cusp of spring Xichuan’s palace is filled with petals drifting through the air. Cai Yan sits outside the main palace hall in the warm breeze.
Li Yanqiu is washing up, and so Cai Yan waits for him outside.
“Is the crown prince here?” Li Yanqiu asks.
“Your Majesty,” the palace maid replies, “His Highness has been waiting outside the whole night.”
“Let him come in then.”
Cai Yan enters the room then, and pays his respects to Li Yanqiu, coming forward to wait on him.
“By the time I came back last night, you were asleep again, uncle. Have you not been sleeping well lately?”
“I had a dream.” Li Yanqiu says, “That’s why I thought of you. I felt restless and wanted to ask you what you were up to.”
The inside of the palace hall is a flurry of activity. Li Yanqiu sets his hand down on the table, and the maid and eunuch helps him put on his rings. Cai Yan takes out the other piece of the jade arc from a wooden box and gets on one knee, carefully attaching it to Li Yanqiu’s belt.
“I dreamed of the day you came back.” Li Yanqiu gives him a gentle smile. “You were all by yourself, and everything was blurry so I couldn’t see your face. I felt so very anxious.”
Li Yanqiu is wearing a wistful smile, but Cai Yan doesn’t smile back. His eyes are filled with sorrow.
A palace maid is holding up a bowl of medicine in both hands above her head.
Li Yanqiu doesn’t even bother looking at it before taking it from her and drinking it.
“I didn’t sleep well last night either. I dreamed of my dad.”
“Perhaps he’s trying to send you a message through your dreams.” Li Yanqiu heaves a sigh. “He hasn’t come into my dreams all this time though. He must be blaming me still.”
“He would never think that way. You worry too much, uncle.”
“Never mind.” Li Yanqiu gives him a quick smile and says casually, “Did your cousin come see you?”
Cai Yan shakes his head, and so Li Yanqiu turns to a guard, “Send someone over to the princess with an invitation for us to have lunch together.”
When Yao Zheng returns to the palace in the afternoon, she’s still dressed head to toe in men’s clothing, and there’s even mud on her boots as she greets Li Yanqiu and Cai Yan. Cai Yan didn’t sleep well last night so he’s a bit lightheaded and dizzy.
“Hey, Rong.” Yao Zheng says, “Where’s Wuluohou Mu?”
“I couldn’t fall asleep last night and went out for a walk. He wanted to come with me, but I told him he didn’t have to wait. I’ll send for him right now, he can keep you company in the afternoon but where’re you going?”
“I haven’t thought about that yet, so we’ll see. I thought I’d go up Mount Wenzhong first. You coming or not?”
“I’m not going. I have memorials to approve.”
“Hey,” Yao Zheng doesn’t even know what to say to that.
Li Yanqiu asks Yao Zheng, “When’s your dad sending someone to get you?”
Yao Zheng says, “I thought maybe I should just stay here permanently.”
Li Yanqiu says, “Well then this will be a good opportunity to find you a match.”
Yao Zheng’s expression darkens, and after some thinking an awkward smile overtakes her face. “Heheh, uncle, um …”
“When you’re at home they push you about getting married so you come over here to your uncle’s, but even if you’re here you have to marry blind by the matchmaker all the same. You’re on your own.”
Yao Zheng doesn’t dare speak up again. She simply keeps her head down and picks her way through the meal. Someone outside announces that Wuluohou Mu has arrived, and so Cai Yan tells him to wait outside. Li Yanqiu bids a servant to send down some food to let him eat in a hall next to theirs.
Another eunuch announces, “Wu Du wishes to speak to the Princess.”
Li Yanqiu says without thinking, “Tell him to go. What’s he doing coming here so often for?”
That person then leaves to send Wu Du away.
At this time Wu Du doesn’t possess a token for him to enter the palace at will, so he’s waiting outside the palace gates holding the reins to a horse. There’s something on the back of the horse, covered by a cloth.
He has waited for a full hour before a palace guard gives him the message telling him to leave, and that the princess won’t see him. And so Wu Du leads the horse around the streets and returns to the place of his residence — a remote courtyard house within the Grand Chancellor’s estate.
The Chancellor’s estate is set up in four great layers;5 it has forty-eight courtyards, consists of more than a hundred buildings, and it keeps many retainers.6 At its most remote corner an outlying courtyard has been set up with three buildings, one courtyard house with one stable and one woodshed. After Li Jianhong’s sacrifice, those in Xichuan had to fall into new lines. Wu Du was recruited by Mu Kuangda and found himself a place to stay.
He was often ridiculed as a "slave with three surnames’’7 — first he followed Zhao Kui, then he briefly worked under Li Jianhong, and at last he ended up in Mu Kuangda’s estate, becoming his retainer. Over all these years, the four great assassins have reached historic fame: Wuluohou Mu escorted the crown prince back to the capital and gained much merit to his name; Zheng Yan is living in Huaiyin in seclusion, and while he publicly declares that he doesn’t care about what goes on in the world, in reality he is the Marquess of Huaiyin Yao Fu’s confidant; Chang Liujun has always been important to Mu Kuangda; only Wu Du remains down on his luck — every single mission of his has ended in failure. His first two masters have died one after the other, and like a stray dog he has no choice but to pledge himself to the Mus.
His other retainers even tried to warn Mu Kuangda that Wu Du is fated to be a hex upon his masters, and Mu Kuangda would be better off not taking him in. There are also those who suspected that Li Jianhong was assassinated by Wu Du; in the midst of all these divergent views, Mu Kuangda merely smiled, and accepted Wu Du’s pledge of loyalty regardless, leaving him a seat at the banquet among his many retainers.
After all, Wu Du knows too much about Zhao Kui, and all he can do with someone like that is to either kill or recruit him; simply discarding him isn’t a proper thing to do. And besides, even though he’s close to having his name struck from the list, an appellation like one of the four great assassins is still good for something.
Ostensibly Mu Kuangda is treating Wu Du as a valuable adviser, but in reality he doesn’t really call for him. Most of the time he’s kept as a layabout, and Chang Liujun downright looks down on him. Thus Wu Du has started to live in the chancellor estate this way, and mostly nobody cares about what he does day to day.
Chang Liujun once reminded Mu Kuangda that Wu Du may be lying low here and that some day he’s going to take revenge for Zhao Kui. Yet Mu Kuangda’s answer to this was, “Most definitely not. Wu Du was never a rival for any of you to begin with, and it’s for no reason other than that he has never known what he wanted. He merely muddles along.”
When Chang Liujun thinks about it, he agrees with the sentiment — Wu Du doesn’t have too much persistence, and his martial arts isn’t really good enough, and so he stops paying much attention to him. At first, there were several servants in this courtyard house to wait on him, but seeing that the Mu family doesn’t really value Wu Du, they spent their days slacking off. Finally Wu Du blew up at them one day and drove all of the servants away, leaving him the only person who lives here.
Once Wu Du gets home, he pulls back the cloth, takes Duan Ling down, and lays him out in the courtyard before scooping out a bowlful of strong liquor to splash it onto Duan Ling’s face. Duan Ling gasps violently for breath, but he doesn’t wake up. Wu Du checks him over, but then someone has come to the courtyard to tell him the Chancellor would like to see him.
Wu Du has no choice then but to go.
I do not monetise my hobby translations, but if you’d like to support my work generally or support my light novel habit, you can either buy me a coffee or commission me. This is also to note that if you see this message anywhere else than on tumblr, do come to my tumblr. It’s ad-free. ↩︎
The Min river runs north-south, but when it joins the Yangtze it quite famously goes east. The metaphor of “water flowing east” stands for the inevitability of having regrets, as the Yangtze flows perpetually least. ↩︎
From Preface to a Spring Evening Banquet in a Peach Garden, by Li Bai. (Poems are linked off the ref page as well.) ↩︎
There are many levels to princesses in imperial China, but in English they’re generally all translated to Princess. Princess Congping wasn’t born with a title, and she won’t be inheriting her father’s, since only the first born son of the principal wife gets to do that, and that’s probably why she was conferred a title. Her title is generally translated to “sovereign princess”. ↩︎
The size of a courtyard home — a “siheyuan” was measured in 進 / jin / entry. Four entries through four great gates generally get you to the master’s courtyard in a four-jin siheyuan, but the layouts are not standardised. A chancellor’s estate is the size of a small village. ↩︎
Retainers were a social group in imperial China. ↩︎
In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Zhang Fei called Lu Bu the slave with three surnames as a way to ridicule his lack of loyalty. Lu Bu’s three surnames were his own and his two successive foster fathers’. He killed both of his foster fathers. A bit of trivia: Feitian seems to have a preference for Lu Bu as a character and have written him as an ML twice in two different novels. ↩︎
At a residence in the capital, Lang Junxia heads inside, closing the gates behind him. Duan Ling watches him with trepidation; Lang Junxia hasn’t said a single word along the way as he brought Duan Ling here. Duan Ling knows that if Lang Junxia really has the heart to kill him, then there’s no way he can run no matter how hard he tries. A lot of things are meant to be from the very beginning, which in turns make it all the calmer to face.
“Is this your home?” Duan Ling asks.
“It’s the house His Majesty conferred to me. I stay in the palace for the most part.”
“Where’s my dad?”
“Still out there looking for you. Aside from the several days he stayed in the capital last month he hasn’t been back at all.”
“Hurry and send him a letter.”
“When I saw that knife I knew it had to be you, so I already secretly sent someone to get word to him. Currently Mu Kuangda’s influence overshadows all other officials’ in the imperial court, and he essentially controls what information His Majesty gets to hear. Before His Majesty returns, you mustn’t show your face before the court.”
Duan Ling gives him a nod. Lang Junxia says, “Have a bath first. I’ll tell you everything in detail once you’ve had dinner.”
The official mansion is lavishly furnished, but there are hardly any servants, and Lang Junxia gets a bath ready for Duan Ling in the side wing. Soaking in the water, Duan Ling finally lets out a breath of relief. He has too many questions to ask but he has no idea where to begin asking.
There’s a knock on the door and Lang Junxia comes in. Duan Ling lies back in the bathtub just the way he did as a child while Lang Junxia rolls up his sleeves and bends over to wash his hair for him.
“Dinner is ready.”
“That day, you …”
“That day, Chancellor Mu told me to come to Shangjing, kill you, and bring His Highness your head.” Lang Junxia answers absentmindedly as he washes Duan Ling’s hair, “I didn’t want to say it because I was worried that Mu Kuangda had other spies planted in the city. At one point I suspected that it may have been Xunchun.”
“I had no orders, and I didn’t dare go see His Highness either, so I made a unilateral decision to take you away and lie low for a while to keep you from being used as a hostage.”
As he speaks Lang Junxia digs out something from a purse at his waist — it is that very same jade arc, pure and translucent.
He ties the jade arc around Duan Ling’s neck, and Duan Ling is instantly overcome with astonishment.
“Where … where did you find this?”
“The apothecary village. Don’t lose it this time. I thought you died at first, and dared not hand it over to His Majesty — I thought of it as leaving him an idea to hold onto. Fortunately, heavens bless our Great Chen, you’re still alive.”
“Xunchun didn’t betray me. She escorted us all the way out of the city.” Duan Ling replies, “She sacrificed herself.”
Lang Junxia doesn’t say more. Duan Ling finishes his bath, and by the time he gets out of the bathtub he has started to feel a bit embarrassed.
“You’ve grown,” Lang Junxia says.
He wraps a new robe around Duan Ling and has him put it on, and just like how he used to do when Duan Ling was a little boy, holds his hand to walk him through the gallery to the dining room.
Lang Junxia has made a few simple dishes. As soon as Duan Ling sits down he picks up the chopsticks and starts eating.
“Once His Majesty returns I’ll bring him over to see you. The situation at court isn’t stable at present. We must consider any decision we make after this at length.”
“Why?”
After a brief silence, Lang Junxia begins to speak again, “The Fourth Prince has no heir, and he has married Mu Kuangda’s younger sister, Mu Jinzhi. They’re hoping Mu Jinzhi will give birth to a child. If you never appeared, then the throne will come under the Mu family’s control.”
“But my dad wouldn’t let them do whatever they …”
“He doesn’t want to come back. He said that as long as he doesn’t find you he won’t come back to Xichuan. He’s lost Xiaowan already; he can’t lose you too.”
Duan Ling goes quiet, staring at Lang Junxia blankly like a sad child.
“You’ve met my mother, right?”
Lang Junxia doesn’t reply, and takes a sip of his wine.
Duan Ling stares at Lang Junxia in a daze, and he suddenly feels a bit dizzy. There’s a sharp pain in his stomach.
“Lang Junxia, my stomach hurts.”
Lang Junxia stares at Duan Ling as if in a trance. A heartbeat passes, and Duan Ling seems to understand what this pain is all about.
And so, just like that, they stare at each other as the pain in Duan Ling’s stomach grows more intense, until in the end he’s biting down on his lower lip with a deep furrow between his brows and he feels as though his entire body has been plunged into ice water, his mind turning delirious.
He opens his mouth, but no words come out at all. Slowly, he collapses over the table, finally closing his eyes, the world going completely dark. In the very last moment, he sees Lang Junxia’s hand reaching out to him to close over the back of his hand. The hand is missing a finger.
The last thought in Duan Ling’s head is: who hurt you?
The whole time, Lang Junxia has been softly holding Duan Ling’s hand. Cai Yan says quietly from his perch outside the window, “Look, he didn’t ask about me. Perhaps he thought I perished as well.”
Lang Junxia remains quiet for a time before saying, “Don’t you want to see him?”
Cai Yan never does come in. At last, Lang Junxia unties the jade arc, sets it down on the table, and picks up Duan Ling. In the very instant he steps through the door, Cai Yan swiftly dodges out of the way to disappear at the end of the corridor.
Duan Ling’s hand is hanging at his side. He’s just had a bath, so his skin is clean and his hair is untied; his eyes are tightly shut as though he’s in deep sleep.
Lang Junxia walks through the corridor to the back courtyard with Duan Ling in his arms, putting him down in a pull cart.
He bends down and solemnly straightens Duan Ling’s clothes, taking off his outer robe, leaving only the unlined underclothes. Then he gently caresses Duan Ling’s forehead.
There’s the crack of a horse whip, and Lang Junxia drives the carriage away from the back courtyard towards the city gate.
Cai Yan stands behind the second floor window with the jade arc in his hands, staring out silently.
Peach blossoms are everywhere, filling the sky and covering the ground as they fly through the night. Beneath the moon the carriage stops at the shore of the Min River. The rushing river surges towards the east.2
Lang Junxia picks Duan Ling up from the carriage, and with Duan Ling in his arms, he walks in moonlight towards the cliff overlooking the river.
Behind him, peach blossoms drift to and fro, scattering moonlight as each petal goes its own way in the wind towards some far-off place.
He holds Duan Ling in his arms the way he did on that very day he brought him away from Shangzi, out of death and into the warmth of spring. Now he’s taking him away from this warm spring night, taking him into eternal darkness.
In the gentle and winding melody of a flute song he carries Duan Ling from a battlefield filled with spears and armoured horses to an orchard of peaches, their blossoms paving the ground ten miles long; through the windstorm-ridden desert into lush green Jiangnan.
Yet life is as ethereal as a waking dream; how much joy can we ever hope to gain?3
All living again falls into deep slumber, for ever and ever more.
From the edge of the cliff, Duan Ling’s body falls straight down into the Min River. There is a splash as he hits the water, where the undertow in the darkness drags him under into the fathomless whirlpool beneath.
Late in the night, a carriage stops outside the palace gate. A guard opens the curtain and helps Cai Yan step down.
“Your Highness.”
Cai Yan attaches the jade arc to his waist as he walks. The guard says quietly, “Wuluohou Mu drove the carriage to the shore, and then he threw a corpse into the river.”
Cai Yan asks, “Did he stop anywhere along the way?”
The guard shakes his head, and Cai Yan gives him a nod. Another guard comes up to him. “His Majesty is awake. He’s looking for you.”
“Once Wuluohou Mu comes back to the palace, tell him to go get some sleep. He doesn’t need to come see me.”
Cai Yan quickens his pace to see the emperor, his figure blending into the darkness.
A tributary of the Min River, on a rocky beach shore:
Hoofbeats approach from a great distance, and a girl on horseback in men’s clothing gallops this way with the tails of her gown flying up behind her in the breeze. Two hunting dogs run along the shore, sniffing at a corpse on the beach washed up by the river. The young woman stares at the underbrush with puzzlement.
The hunting dogs are barking as they sniff at Duan Ling’s face. A man catches up to her on horseback. “Princess!”4
The young woman would be the daughter of Princess Ruiping and the Marquess of Huaiyin, Princess Congping, and her name is Yao Zheng. She’s come out of the city in men’s clothing today to race along the Min River on horseback, and has trotted her way into the mountain paths. The two beloved dogs she keeps have been dashing along the hillside so freely that she manages to lose them, and so Yao Zheng has chased them all the way here. Finding the body of a young man on the rocky beach has her feeling rather baffled.
The man is dressed all in black, the end of his belt whipping up in the wind as he gallops after her. The sun shines down on his face, and it’s light is so dazzlingly bright that he can’t keep his eyes open. It’s Wu Du.
“Princess,” Wu Du doesn’t know what to do with her. “The mountain paths here are difficult to travel on, and springtime means there are lots of snakes and venomous insects here. It’s not safe. Let’s head back.”
“And who are you exactly? When do you get to tell me what to do?” Yao Zheng says, “If you don’t want to accompany me then head back on your own!”
Seeing that there’s no one on the beach, and it’s sunny and bright with all the flowers in full bloom, Wu Du can only get off the horse to check around. Only once he’s sure there are no snakes or scorpions and other such venomous dangers does he give Yao Zheng a nod without speaking, and stands by the river shore with his hands to his sides.
Zhao Zhen giggles out loud. Wu Du does his best to pacify the anger in his heart. He looks around with a tight knot between his brows, and noticing the two dogs barking in the underbrush, he heads over that way. Yao Zheng gets off her horse and stands at the edge of the river with an evasive expression.
“Princess,” Wu Du turns again to say to her, “You mustn’t get too close to the river. There’s a lot of turbulence around here.”
Yao Zheng ignores him. In the underbrush, Wu Du finds Duan Ling’s battered body, covered in cuts and bruises.
Yao Zheng stands around for a while before she walks over. When she sees Duan Ling she says, “Eh, why is there a dead person here?”
Wu Du gets down on one knee to check Duan Ling’s breath, and realises that he’s already stopped breathing.
Wu Du says, “There are no fatal wounds on his body. Whose child is this?”
“He’s dead, right,” Yao Zhen says. When Wu Du goes to press fingers into the side of Duan Ling’s neck, she adds, “Let’s go.”
“Wait a moment,” Wu Du says.
Yao Zheng says derisively, “If we don’t head back soon, you’ll get yelled at by your master later.”
Wu Du turns to shoot a glance at Yao Zheng, as if he’s about to say something, but in the end he keeps it to himself. Right then, the meridian in the side of Duan Ling’s neck pulses lightly once.
Wu Du has a deep furrow between his brows as he mumbles to himself, “Poison?”
Yao Zheng suddenly says, “Hey, Wu Du, I heard that you can poison the living to death, but that you can also bring back the dead. Why don’t you try it? If you manage to bring back a dead person, I’ll say something nice in front of my dad for you about whatever it is that you want.”
“My conduct is upright and proper, and I don’t really want anything. Whatever I said in front of the Marquess of Huaiyin is nothing more than the truth.”
Wu Du kneels on one knee at Duan Ling’s side with a somewhat puzzled expression on his face, then he produces a porcelain bottle from his apothecary sack and pours out a pill.
“You can really bring him back to life?” Yao Zheng finds Wu Du downright impervious to reason.
Wu Du doesn’t answer her. He kneads the pill into a powder and feeds it to Duan Ling, massaging his throat to make it go down. He rises to his feet and says to Yao Zheng, “But if he really does live, are you going to honour your wager?”
Yao Zheng raises an eyebrow, watching Wu Du. After staring at him for a while, she walks past the beach to hop back on her horse. From her perch she stares down at the water from above, and soon she speaks again, “I do tend to keep my word, so of course the wager will be honoured.”
Wu Du’s expression darkens again as he has discerned the ridicule in Yao Zheng’s words. A short time passes before he says, “Look, he’s already breathing.”
“Oh forget it.” Yao Zheng feels as though Wu Du is like a sandbag who never talks back, and if you slap him he just turns the other cheek. He hasn’t said anything along the way either, and she simply finds him boring. She says without thinking, “I’m off to go play with Wuluohou Mu. You don’t have to follow me around anymore.”
“Wait!” Wu Du’s about to run up to her, but Yao Zhen has already galloped down the mountain path like a gust of wind. The two dogs bark at Wu Du several times before they run after Yao Zheng, and even their barking is full of disdain as though they’re laughing at his misfortune.
At the cusp of spring Xichuan’s palace is filled with petals drifting through the air. Cai Yan sits outside the main palace hall in the warm breeze.
Li Yanqiu is washing up, and so Cai Yan waits for him outside.
“Is the crown prince here?” Li Yanqiu asks.
“Your Majesty,” the palace maid replies, “His Highness has been waiting outside the whole night.”
“Let him come in then.”
Cai Yan enters the room then, and pays his respects to Li Yanqiu, coming forward to wait on him.
“By the time I came back last night, you were asleep again, uncle. Have you not been sleeping well lately?”
“I had a dream.” Li Yanqiu says, “That’s why I thought of you. I felt restless and wanted to ask you what you were up to.”
The inside of the palace hall is a flurry of activity. Li Yanqiu sets his hand down on the table, and the maid and eunuch helps him put on his rings. Cai Yan takes out the other piece of the jade arc from a wooden box and gets on one knee, carefully attaching it to Li Yanqiu’s belt.
“I dreamed of the day you came back.” Li Yanqiu gives him a gentle smile. “You were all by yourself, and everything was blurry so I couldn’t see your face. I felt so very anxious.”
Li Yanqiu is wearing a wistful smile, but Cai Yan doesn’t smile back. His eyes are filled with sorrow.
A palace maid is holding up a bowl of medicine in both hands above her head.
Li Yanqiu doesn’t even bother looking at it before taking it from her and drinking it.
“I didn’t sleep well last night either. I dreamed of my dad.”
“Perhaps he’s trying to send you a message through your dreams.” Li Yanqiu heaves a sigh. “He hasn’t come into my dreams all this time though. He must be blaming me still.”
“He would never think that way. You worry too much, uncle.”
“Never mind.” Li Yanqiu gives him a quick smile and says casually, “Did your cousin come see you?”
Cai Yan shakes his head, and so Li Yanqiu turns to a guard, “Send someone over to the princess with an invitation for us to have lunch together.”
When Yao Zheng returns to the palace in the afternoon, she’s still dressed head to toe in men’s clothing, and there’s even mud on her boots as she greets Li Yanqiu and Cai Yan. Cai Yan didn’t sleep well last night so he’s a bit lightheaded and dizzy.
“Hey, Rong.” Yao Zheng says, “Where’s Wuluohou Mu?”
“I couldn’t fall asleep last night and went out for a walk. He wanted to come with me, but I told him he didn’t have to wait. I’ll send for him right now, he can keep you company in the afternoon but where’re you going?”
“I haven’t thought about that yet, so we’ll see. I thought I’d go up Mount Wenzhong first. You coming or not?”
“I’m not going. I have memorials to approve.”
“Hey,” Yao Zheng doesn’t even know what to say to that.
Li Yanqiu asks Yao Zheng, “When’s your dad sending someone to get you?”
Yao Zheng says, “I thought maybe I should just stay here permanently.”
Li Yanqiu says, “Well then this will be a good opportunity to find you a match.”
Yao Zheng’s expression darkens, and after some thinking an awkward smile overtakes her face. “Heheh, uncle, um …”
“When you’re at home they push you about getting married so you come over here to your uncle’s, but even if you’re here you have to marry blind by the matchmaker all the same. You’re on your own.”
Yao Zheng doesn’t dare speak up again. She simply keeps her head down and picks her way through the meal. Someone outside announces that Wuluohou Mu has arrived, and so Cai Yan tells him to wait outside. Li Yanqiu bids a servant to send down some food to let him eat in a hall next to theirs.
Another eunuch announces, “Wu Du wishes to speak to the Princess.”
Li Yanqiu says without thinking, “Tell him to go. What’s he doing coming here so often for?”
That person then leaves to send Wu Du away.
At this time Wu Du doesn’t possess a token for him to enter the palace at will, so he’s waiting outside the palace gates holding the reins to a horse. There’s something on the back of the horse, covered by a cloth.
He has waited for a full hour before a palace guard gives him the message telling him to leave, and that the princess won’t see him. And so Wu Du leads the horse around the streets and returns to the place of his residence — a remote courtyard house within the Grand Chancellor’s estate.
The Chancellor’s estate is set up in four great layers;5 it has forty-eight courtyards, consists of more than a hundred buildings, and it keeps many retainers.6 At its most remote corner an outlying courtyard has been set up with three buildings, one courtyard house with one stable and one woodshed. After Li Jianhong’s sacrifice, those in Xichuan had to fall into new lines. Wu Du was recruited by Mu Kuangda and found himself a place to stay.
He was often ridiculed as a "slave with three surnames’’7 — first he followed Zhao Kui, then he briefly worked under Li Jianhong, and at last he ended up in Mu Kuangda’s estate, becoming his retainer. Over all these years, the four great assassins have reached historic fame: Wuluohou Mu escorted the crown prince back to the capital and gained much merit to his name; Zheng Yan is living in Huaiyin in seclusion, and while he publicly declares that he doesn’t care about what goes on in the world, in reality he is the Marquess of Huaiyin Yao Fu’s confidant; Chang Liujun has always been important to Mu Kuangda; only Wu Du remains down on his luck — every single mission of his has ended in failure. His first two masters have died one after the other, and like a stray dog he has no choice but to pledge himself to the Mus.
His other retainers even tried to warn Mu Kuangda that Wu Du is fated to be a hex upon his masters, and Mu Kuangda would be better off not taking him in. There are also those who suspected that Li Jianhong was assassinated by Wu Du; in the midst of all these divergent views, Mu Kuangda merely smiled, and accepted Wu Du’s pledge of loyalty regardless, leaving him a seat at the banquet among his many retainers.
After all, Wu Du knows too much about Zhao Kui, and all he can do with someone like that is to either kill or recruit him; simply discarding him isn’t a proper thing to do. And besides, even though he’s close to having his name struck from the list, an appellation like one of the four great assassins is still good for something.
Ostensibly Mu Kuangda is treating Wu Du as a valuable adviser, but in reality he doesn’t really call for him. Most of the time he’s kept as a layabout, and Chang Liujun downright looks down on him. Thus Wu Du has started to live in the chancellor estate this way, and mostly nobody cares about what he does day to day.
Chang Liujun once reminded Mu Kuangda that Wu Du may be lying low here and that some day he’s going to take revenge for Zhao Kui. Yet Mu Kuangda’s answer to this was, “Most definitely not. Wu Du was never a rival for any of you to begin with, and it’s for no reason other than that he has never known what he wanted. He merely muddles along.”
When Chang Liujun thinks about it, he agrees with the sentiment — Wu Du doesn’t have too much persistence, and his martial arts isn’t really good enough, and so he stops paying much attention to him. At first, there were several servants in this courtyard house to wait on him, but seeing that the Mu family doesn’t really value Wu Du, they spent their days slacking off. Finally Wu Du blew up at them one day and drove all of the servants away, leaving him the only person who lives here.
Once Wu Du gets home, he pulls back the cloth, takes Duan Ling down, and lays him out in the courtyard before scooping out a bowlful of strong liquor to splash it onto Duan Ling’s face. Duan Ling gasps violently for breath, but he doesn’t wake up. Wu Du checks him over, but then someone has come to the courtyard to tell him the Chancellor would like to see him.
Wu Du has no choice then but to go.
I do not monetise my hobby translations, but if you’d like to support my work generally or support my light novel habit, you can either buy me a coffee or commission me. This is also to note that if you see this message anywhere else than on tumblr, do come to my tumblr. It’s ad-free. ↩︎
The Min river runs north-south, but when it joins the Yangtze it quite famously goes east. The metaphor of “water flowing east” stands for the inevitability of having regrets, as the Yangtze flows perpetually least. ↩︎
From Preface to a Spring Evening Banquet in a Peach Garden, by Li Bai. (Poems are linked off the ref page as well.) ↩︎
There are many levels to princesses in imperial China, but in English they’re generally all translated to Princess. Princess Congping wasn’t born with a title, and she won’t be inheriting her father’s, since only the first born son of the principal wife gets to do that, and that’s probably why she was conferred a title. Her title is generally translated to “sovereign princess”. ↩︎
The size of a courtyard home — a “siheyuan” was measured in 進 / jin / entry. Four entries through four great gates generally get you to the master’s courtyard in a four-jin siheyuan, but the layouts are not standardised. A chancellor’s estate is the size of a small village. ↩︎
Retainers were a social group in imperial China. ↩︎
In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Zhang Fei called Lu Bu the slave with three surnames as a way to ridicule his lack of loyalty. Lu Bu’s three surnames were his own and his two successive foster fathers’. He killed both of his foster fathers. A bit of trivia: Feitian seems to have a preference for Lu Bu as a character and have written him as an ML twice in two different novels. ↩︎
