Chapter 103: Hatred Born, Part Twenty-One: 6

Clan Leader Jiang's words always carried their three parts of mockery, only this time the one he mocked was no other than himself.

Then, all at once, he said, 'I'm sorry.'

Wei Wuxian was taken aback, and said, '...You don't need to tell me you're sorry.'

At this point there was simply no reckoning who owed an apology to whom.

Wei Wuxian spoke again. 'Take it as my returning what belonged to the Jiang family.'

Jiang Cheng lifted his face, the whites of his eyes laced through with blood, his rims red as he looked at him, and rasped, '...Returning my father? My mother? My sister?'

Wei Wuxian pressed at his temple and said, 'Let it go. It's past. Let's not bring any of it up again.'

This was not some old matter he delighted in turning over and over. He had no wish to be forced to relive what it had felt like to have his core carved out while fully awake, nor to be made, again and again, to dwell on what kind of giving it had been, and how vast the price.

Had this been laid bare in his former life, he would most likely have laughed it off and turned it round to comfort Jiang Cheng instead — 'Honestly it's no great matter; look at me, all these years without that Golden Core and still I've thrived, made my own weather. Beat whoever I please, kill whoever I want dead.' But now, he truly hadn't the strength to feign such breezy, unruffled ease.

In all honesty, he was not nearly so unburdened as that.

Was such a thing so easily put behind one?

Impossible.

At seventeen or eighteen, Wei Wuxian had in truth been no less proud than Jiang Cheng. Once his Spiritual Power too had run strong, his gifts surpassing others. Days idled away netting birds, nights spent scaling walls to play his tricks, and still he stayed far out in front, leaving the other disciples who slaved at their books eighteen streets behind.

And yet, on the deep still nights when he tossed and turned and could not sleep, thinking that for the whole of this life he would never again ascend to the summit by the orthodox path, never again loose that single dazzling stroke of the sword that left onlookers slack-jawed with awe — when he turned it about and reflected that, had Jiang Fengmian not carried him back to Lotus Pier, he might well have gone his whole life a stranger to the immortal way, never knowing the world held a road so wondrous and resplendent, no more than a little gutter ringleader who fled at the sight of a dog, or a country boy herding oxen and pilfering vegetables, blowing on a flute and drifting through his days with no means to cultivate, much less any chance to form a core — when he thought it through this way, his heart eased a great deal.

Take it as repayment, or as atonement. Take it that he had never possessed that Golden Core at all.

Talk himself round often enough and he could truly seem as carefree and unfettered as he looked on the surface, and as a bonus murmur to himself a half-sincere word of praise for so lofty a frame of mind.

But that, already, was a thing of the life before.

Wei Wuxian said, 'Ah, you... don't go holding onto it forever either. I know that, with a temper like yours, you're bound to keep it in mind always, but, how should I put it...'

He gripped Lan Wangji's hand tight, and said to Jiang Cheng, 'Right now I really do feel... it's all in the past. It's been far too long. There's no need to keep tangling over it.'

Jiang Cheng scrubbed hard at his face, wiped away the tears, drew a deep breath, and closed his eyes.

Just then Nie Huaisang, draped in Lan Xichen's outer robe, came slowly to. He let out a few small, plaintive cries, hauled himself half upright, and said in a daze, 'Where am I?'

Who would have thought that the moment he rose he caught sight, across from him, of Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji pressed tight together on a single cushion — the Yiling Patriarch all but settled in Hanguang-jun's lap — and on the spot let out a wretched shriek, as though about to faint clean away again. At the very same moment, from behind the great hall of the Guanyin Temple there came a strange hissing sound, as if something had been sprayed out, and a moment later that whole company of digging cultivators cried out in agony as one.

The expressions of the several within the hall changed in an instant, and soon a faint, acrid odour came drifting out; even as Lan Xichen raised his sleeve to cover his face, a shadow of worry stole across his brow. Hard upon it, two figures came staggering and stumbling out.

Su She held Jin Guangyao up, both of them ashen-faced, while the wailing behind the hall went on still. Su She said, 'Clan Leader, how are you?!'

A faint cold sweat beaded on Jin Guangyao's forehead, and he said, 'It's nothing. Just now I owed it to you.'

His left arm hung limp and would not lift, the whole limb trembling as though he bore down hard against the pain; his right hand reached into his robe and drew out a vial of Medicine, wishing to open it, though one hand made the work awkward. Seeing this, Su She quickly took the vial, shook out a pill and set it in his palm. Jin Guangyao bowed his head and took it, swallowed it with a knit brow, and the furrow swiftly smoothed away.

Lan Xichen hesitated a moment, then asked, 'What's happened to you?'

Jin Guangyao gave a slight start, and only then did a trace of colour rise to his face as he managed a smile. 'A moment's carelessness.'

He took out a medicinal powder and scattered it on his hand; from the back of the left hand to the wrist there had risen a patch of red, and looked at closely that skin seemed like meat scorched in a blast, the very grain of it rotted through. Jin Guangyao tore off a strip of snow-white collar, his fingers trembling faintly, and said, 'Minshan, bind my wrist tight.'

Su She said, 'Poison?'

Jin Guangyao said, 'The venom is still working its way up. It's no matter; a brief turn of breath-regulation will force it out.'

Once Su She had seen to his wound, Jin Guangyao made to go behind the hall and look, and Su She said quickly, 'Clan Leader, let me go!'

That acrid reek thinned and dispersed by degrees, and Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji rose together as one. Beside a deep pit a high mound of earth had been heaped up, and slantwise against it lay a coffin of considerable refinement and craft, atop which rested a lacquer-black box; both had been opened, and from them a thin white smoke still seeped slowly out. That biting stench was this very smoke, which had to be some lethal poison. About the coffin sprawled bodies this way and that across the ground, all the cultivators who only moments before had toiled at the digging, now turned each into a corpse rotted soft and through, the Sparks Amidst Snow Robe and the monk's garments upon them alike eaten away until nothing remained but charred and blackened scraps — proof enough of how virulent this white smoke was.

He pressed forward ahead of the rest, scattering the lingering poison-smoke with the force of his sword, and with the sword's tip flicked at that pitch-black box. The iron box turned over. Empty, nothing within.

Jin Guangyao could bear it no longer, and lurched stumbling to the coffin's edge; the colour that had only just returned drained away clean in a breath. One had only to read his look to know — the coffin too was empty.

Lan Xichen came over and saw the carnage behind the hall as well, and said, shaken, 'What in the world did you bury here? How could this be??'

Nie Huaisang took but a single glance and was already frightened to his knees, retching without end. Jin Guangyao's lips quivered, but no words came. A bolt of lightning split down and lit his face stark white. That expression of his was truly fearsome, enough to set Nie Huaisang shuddering, so that he dared not even retch aloud, and clamped a hand to his mouth and shrank behind Lan Xichen, trembling — whether from cold or from fright none could say. Lan Xichen turned back and spoke a few words to soothe him, while Jin Guangyao had not even the strength left to play, as before, at being gentle and approachable.

Wei Wuxian said, 'Zewu-jun, here you do Clan Leader Jin a wrong. The things in this place were never buried by him at all. And even were they buried by him to begin with, by now they must long since have been switched out by another's hand.'

Su She levelled his sword at him and said coldly, 'Wei Wuxian! Is this some trick of yours?!'

Wei Wuxian said, 'It's not that I lack modesty. Had it been my doing, your clan leader would by now likely be nursing rather more than one arm. Clan Leader Jin, do you still recall, up on Koi Tower, that letter Qin Su brought you?'

Jin Guangyao's gaze moved slowly toward him.

Wei Wuxian said, 'The one who told Qin Su of all your fine deeds was Bicao, once Madam Qin's maid — but as for why Bicao should suddenly decide to lay it all bare, do you truly believe there was no hand behind it, driving it on? And that Miss Sisi you shut away — who was it that spirited her off, who taught her to go with Bicao to the Yunmeng Jiang Clan and, before everyone, shake out your secret? If he could trace, item by item, all those hidden passages of your past, get a step ahead and come here to swap whatever you meant to dig up for poison-smoke and a hidden trap, ready to hand it to you when you arrived — then what, pray, is impossible?'

At this, one of the monks said, 'Clan Leader, the earth here bears the marks of being turned. Someone has dug their way in from the other side!'

Sure enough, another had got there first. Jin Guangyao turned and drove a fist into the empty coffin; none could make out his expression clearly, only that his shoulders trembled faintly.

Wei Wuxian said with a smile, 'Clan Leader Jin, has it crossed your mind — tonight you are the mantis, but there is yet an oriole behind. That one who has watched you all this while may, at this very moment, be peering from the dark at your every move. No — perhaps it is not a person at all...'

The muffled thunder rolled on, the rain poured down in torrents. At the three words 'not a person,' across Jin Guangyao's face there flickered, for an instant, something that could almost be named fear.

Su She sneered, 'Wei Wuxian, spare us these empty, bluffing words meant to frighten...'

Jin Guangyao raised his right hand to stop him, that flicker of fear vanishing in a breath, every emotion swiftly brought to heel. He said, 'Don't waste breath on pointless quarrel. See to the wounds on your body; once I've dispersed the poison, I'll muster the rest at once and we set out.'

Su She said, 'Clan Leader, the thing that was dug away?'

Jin Guangyao's lips paled faintly, and he said, 'Since it has already been dug away, then it surely cannot be recovered. This is no place to linger.'

Su She said, 'Yes!'

In the struggle just before, Su She had been raked in many a place by Fairy, his arm and his chest both with cloth torn through, and at the chest especially the claw-marks bit into the flesh and through to the bone, blood seeping out across the white robe in many a stain; left unseen to and dragged on, it might ill serve him against whatever sudden turn could yet come. Jin Guangyao drew a packet of Medicine from his robe and passed it to him; Su She took it in both hands and said, 'Yes.' True enough, he traded no further words with Wei Wuxian, but turned away, loosened his clothes, and set to dressing the wounds on his body. Jin Guangyao's left hand, seared by the poison-smoke, still would not answer to him, and he could only sit on the ground and bend his whole mind to regulating his breath and driving out the venom. The remaining cultivators paced to and fro through the Guanyin Temple, sword in hand, keeping watch on patrol. Nie Huaisang, at the sight of all this naked steel, was stricken stiff-eyed; with no guard at his side he dared not so much as breathe loud, and shrank into the corner behind Lan Xichen, sneezing several times over.

Wei Wuxian thought to himself, 'This Su She turns his sneering airs on everyone, and toward Lan Zhan above all the grudge runs deep — yet toward Jin Guangyao he is all respect and deference.'

Thinking this, he could not help but glance at Lan Wangji. Who would have thought he would catch, just then, a thread of cold flickering through his eyes.

Lan Wangji said coldly to Su She, 'Turn around.'

Su She was bent low, applying medicine to the several claw-marks on his chest, his side turned to them, when he heard that one line from Lan Wangji in a tone that brooked no defiance — and, against his own will, he turned round.

At that turn, both Jiang Cheng and Jin Ling went wide-eyed. The smile on Wei Wuxian's face drew in all at once as well.

He said, in disbelief, '...So it was you!'