Encountering a Snake C7

Chapter 7: Ill Again

Shen Qingxuan was gravely ill.

When he woke now and then on the bed and they poured soup, pills, and medicinal broth into him, he did his best to cooperate. Physicians came in an endless stream and left in an endless stream.

On the winding path outside the villa, carriages and horses ran without pause again, and sedan chairs did not cease.

Shen-laoye demanded of the servants why the Young Master had suddenly fallen so ill again. The servants looked at one another. No one dared step forward to take the blame for drinking until the third watch that night, or for letting the master bathe in cold water. Each shook his head.

Shen Qingxuan lifted a hand with effort, telling them not to press further. After all, he himself had wanted the banquet.

The illness stretched on day after day. He understood in his heart that this attack had come fierce. Ordinary medicine could not hold it.

The dregs of decoctions in the courtyard had already piled into a small hill. He showed no sign of turning.

Heat and cold took him by turns. When the heat rose he truly wanted someone to bring an egg and crack it on him, to see if it would fry. When the cold came he felt himself back in childhood, back at the instant he fell into the ice cave, desolate beyond measure.

When the misery in his body passed what he could bear, he lay on the bed unable even to turn. Hate was not absent from his heart.

He hated that he had indulged too far that night and drunk himself drunk. He hated that the servants had failed in their duty and let him bathe in cold water after wine. He hated that on Mid-Autumn night the servants had told those fox-immortal and ghost stories so lingeringly that, soaking in cold water, he had still made a spring dream.

His body had always been frail. Hot wine, then cold water—the heat inside him struck by the chill: how could he not fall ill? Added to that, he had done that thing in the water. His essence was damaged. Frost upon snow.

He hated, too, that he had lived until today without a single person who would think of him with real care.

After grinding his teeth in his heart for a while, he grew tired. Even the hate thinned. He only thought it would be better to die sooner and be spared the living torment.

While he waited to die he often thought of Yi Mo.

He even thought of the dream in the cold water that night. He could no longer recall the woman’s face, only that she had been gentle and beautiful.

What stayed sharper was the sudden feeling of an icy body wrapping around him. He knew it was only a dream caused by soaking in cold water, yet he could not drive it away.

And that voice he had heard only once and never forgotten, whispering at his ear—clear antiquity and smelted brilliance, grace born of itself.

It was clearly Yi Mo’s voice.

Whenever he reached that point he could not help shivering, and dared not think further.

He felt danger by instinct. He avoided danger by instinct.

Another day’s medicinal broth was poured in until his stomach was full. The taste was extremely nauseating, yet he cooperated and forced it down. By evening his stomach began to heave like a river in flood. The bitter juice surged to his throat again and again. He swallowed it down; the juice rushed up more wildly. After holding it back for a long time he could bear it no more. He opened his mouth. A great mass of medicine shot out like an arrow. Bed, quilt, pillow—all soaked through.

He retched in great gulps until the juice in his stomach, and the pills that had not yet broken down, were all gone.

Maids and servants panicked, bringing basins and water, rushing in a line.

He could take no more medicine.

Even the smell of it would make him vomit bile as well.

He lasted three more days. He lay on the bed, face white as paper, breath faint. Now and then he opened his eyes and looked at the blue-and-white canopy, and thought of Yi Mo again and again.

He thought of that first bite. He thought of the hidden form and those regular characters. He thought of him going down the mountain to look for a skin… The thought made him laugh. After the laugh a sudden sorrow came. He had promised to guard him through the tribulation. Now he feared he would not last until then.

Yi Mo, why have you still not come back?

At that, a nameless grievance rose. His eyes stung. After a while he could not help thinking fiercely: you legless, hornless long worm, truly useless. Your own skin was stolen. More than a thousand years of cultivation wasted. Why didn’t someone catch you, peel you, bone you, and stew you into snake soup?

He thought, and cursed, and laughed as well.

He did not know how the people watching him jumped in their skins at the sight of him lying there with a thread of breath, eyes closed, furious one moment, smiling the next, and then as if about to weep.

That night a rumor moved quietly through the villa: the Young Master had perhaps been caught by some nightmare; perhaps he had run into an evil.

The servants and maids who had drunk together that night gathered in secret, talked a while, took out some silver, pooled a fair amount, and slipped down the mountain to buy paper money, incense, and candles. After asking an older cook for the proper rules, they hid and made offerings, begging those ghosts and spirits to spare their Young Master.

Yi Mo returned just in time for that scene in the dark deep mountain: scattered lamps, green smoke and ash floating together like ghosts.

Shen Qingxuan’s mind was drifting. He did not know Yi Mo had arrived. In a haze he recalled the woman in the earlier dream, who said wine had been spilled on her. He thought, I only poured a cup of tea on Yi Mo, and that was that. Why would I pour wine on you? He was slow for a moment, then remembered it had only been a dream. Then he thought, perhaps because I poured a cup of tea on Yi Mo and came to know him, I dreamed of ghosts and made another scene of pouring this and that in order to meet.

While his thoughts ran wild, he clearly felt a hand cover his forehead. Then a stream of icy qi bored from his brow into the marrow of his brain and flowed into his limbs. The cold woke him.

In that instant he caught the cold, fresh scent. It was nothing like the medicinal smell that hung around him all day and never left.

He opened his eyes, stared at the person before him, and formed the words without sound: You finally came back… I thought I would not last.

He had not expected Yi Mo to take his palm away, glance over him from head to foot, and say mildly, “You are… truly foul-smelling just now.”

The breath Shen Qingxuan had just recovered was nearly knocked out of him again by that single sentence.

That night everyone in the villa toppled this way and that, asleep on the ground.

A great black wind rose suddenly before them. In it, faintly, a human shape could be seen.

It swept straight toward the hot spring at the mountain peak.

After Yi Mo spoke those words, Shen Qingxuan came back to himself, caught his breath, and of course would not let him off. He also refused to have water heated for a bath. The cold tub of those recent days had cost him so much suffering that he would rather die than enter a tub now. He could only pull at Yi Mo and tell him to take him to the hot spring on the peak.

Yi Mo brought him to the spring. He moved a finger slightly. The clothes on Shen Qingxuan’s body came apart at once and fell like leaves in the wind.

The owner of those clothes had already gone red to the face.

—

Third watch : About eleven at night to one in the morning.

Paper money : Fake money burned as an offering to ghosts and gods.

Qi : Breath or vital energy; here a cold current used as a technique.