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63. Grasping at Threads
🕑 Added 2021-11-26 03:56:40 +0000 UTCThe sun slowly rose. At last, daylight flooded over the horizon. Xue sat up and blinked, looking around. “Jingwen… huh? What happened?”
“Before that, elder sister, could you release me?” Hui requested.
Xue glanced down at Hui, wrapped in her arms. She released him and stepped back. “Eh? What’re you doing there?”
“Jingwen didn’t tell me the release command,” Hui grumbled, shaking himself off. ‘Let go’ didn’t work, ‘release,’ ‘go away,’ ‘back off,’ what was I supposed to say? Of all commands to make weird, why was it that one?
“Release command for…?” Xue prompted.
Hui looked at her. He opened his mouth, then sighed and shook his head, defeated. “I… you’ll hear from the others, I’m sure.”
Xue shot him a perturbed look. Already calloused to it, Hui ignored her. I can’t do it again. I’ve already spent all night reassuring Li Xiang.
“What happened with Jingwen, though?” Xue asked. She reached the threshold of the room and hesitated, rope too short for her to cross it easily. After a second, she sat down, swung her legs over, and climbed back to her feet.
“No idea. She ran off before anyone else showed up, and that was it. I think she wanted you to kill me, and when that didn’t happen, she… I don’t know. She didn’t want to get her hands dirty? She couldn’t bear the idea that you liked me better than her? I couldn’t tell you what’s in a maiden’s mind.” Hui put an index finger on his forehead and silently issued the command for the skin to remove itself. The mouth opened wide, peeling off his mouth, and then it regurgitated him all at once. He knelt and folded it, then swapped it for the flint. The technique familiar now, he drew the death qi from his dantian and coiled it back into the flint as he followed Xue over the threshold.
“And you somehow ended up wrapped tight in my embrace all night?” Xue asked, tipping her head.
“At least I got some practice in.” Hui put a hand to his dantian. After the tea shop, my next meridian was ready to break open; it was just a matter of sitting down and doing it. Two meridans left to go.
Xue frowned. “Alright, there’s something really wrong with you.”
“Huh?”
“You didn’t even object to my phrasing! What happened, Hui? Are you okay?” she asked, concerned. She clapped his cheeks between her hands and peered into his eyes.
Hui looked at her, then sighed. Gently, he pushed her hands away. He gazed out the window to the distant horizon, all the years of his lives wearing on his face. How can I object to your phrasing when the entire clan already thinks that’s what happened?
“Hui, did Jingwen take your innocence?” Xue asked.
Hui choked on air. He coughed, startled. “W-what?”
“Well, you’re so obviously a virgin, I thought… maybe, after I turned, she ravaged you by force, and that’s why…”
“How… how on earth did your mind end up there?” Hui spluttered.
Xue shrugged.
“No one took my innocence,” he sighed.
“Oh, you are a virgin,” Xue said, nodding.
Hui narrowed his eyes at her. Excuse this small disciple for being an eighteen-year-old boy, okay? I still have my morals from the original world! I wasn’t going to do anything… icky, and I only just turned legal! Ah, it wasn’t my fault I was unlucky in love in my first life, either. Who was going to date a kid with debts up to his neck? Before that, when was I supposed to find love? On the tuna boat? Sharing my woes with addicts and other idiots? You think I had money to go to a bar and pick up chicks? The loan sharks would snatch that beer out of my hand before I got to taste it!
This time, I have a long immortal life ahead of me! I’ll find love, I guarantee it, so don’t look down on this small virgin!
Er—I mean, small disciple!
She stretched, letting out a long breath. “Well, shall we go face the day? You came here for a reason, no? Don’t let me keep you from it.”
“Actually…” Hui told her of the letter. “Do you know any clans having their hundredth anniversary soon?”
“Hundredth anniversary? That would be a young clan. Maybe some of the smaller ones? The ones that only have a few ‘experts’ at second stage?” Xue suggested.
Hui frowned. No. How would they know Master? It’s someone in Bai clan, I’m almost certain of it. I suppose it was stupid to think the hundred years might mean something to Xue—honestly, she’s probably several hundred years old, herself! But who? Why? What’s going on in Bai clan? So far, everything seems…
He paused. Well, there were the assassins last night. But that’s just because Jingwen wants Bai Xue and I showed up, isn’t it?
Argh. I feel like it’s there, right before my eyes, and yet… out of reach. Hui shook his head. “Let’s take a look around town. Those lotus pills… I can’t help but shake the feeling that the letter is connected to them. They’re the biggest issue in the city right now, right?”
“Mmm—wait, the lotus pills?” Xue frowned, thoughtful.
Hui nodded.
“Come to think of it, it’s been a hundred years since they first showed up. Almost a hundred years. Soon… no, tomorrow, it will have been a hundred years since the first time a lotus-pill blossom bloomed in our city.”
“You’ve been dealing with this for a hundred years?” Hui asked.
Wait. A hundred years. Isn’t that… what the invitation said?
Xue shook her head at his surprise. “We had no idea what we were dealing with at first. The first twenty or so years, lotus pills were extremely rare, and bloomings even moreso. The kind of people who take—or are forced to take—lotus pills often don’t survive long enough for the lotus to bloom. That kind of nothing-to-lose cultivator tends to find themselves enslaved and worked to death, or turned into a living corpse, or some equally unpleasant death or vanishing.
“We thought it was a naturally-occurring parasitic plant, then a disease, then some kind of demonic technique. By the time we realized the extent of the problem, almost fifty years had passed, and the pills were well and truly ingrained in our city.”
“Fifty years?” Hui asked, startled.
“To be fair, many things could cause that kind of effect. In the first fifty years, we probably saw five bloomings in public. Even after that, they were barely a problem for a long time, and there were plenty of other problems in the meantime. The rise of demonic sects, crime in our Twin Elements City, the Midnight Massacre, just to name a few. Lotus pills only became a big problem recently. Almost as if… someone was deliberately cultivating them, and recently had some kind of breakthrough…” Xue put a hand on her chin, brows furrowing.
“The Midnight Massacre?” Hui asked.
“Eh? Oh—I suppose for lofty sects like Starbound Sect, where you rarely have to interact with smaller clans and sects, you wouldn’t have heard about it. No, it was a big problem about… hmm, about thirteen years ago, now? One night at midnight, thousands of mortal children all spontaneously dropped dead. Many of the dead are thought to have had the potential to cultivate, meaning that generation’s crop of cultivators is unusually sparse.”
She waved a hand. “Well, for a big sect like Starbound, where you can travel all across the continent to pick up disciples, I suppose it didn’t affect you. My clan wasn’t hit hard either, but some of the smaller sects around Twin Elemental City were troubled.”
“Wait… thirteen years ago?” Hui asked, startled. Thirteen years. When I was five. That was—that was the year I woke up in this body! Is it related? Is that—is that, maybe, why I was able to take over this body? Did the original Xiao Hui die in the Midnight Massacre?
Xue nodded. “For a time, it was all the cultivation world talked about. Everyone suspected a demonic sect was behind it, but why kill mortal children? No one could find any sign of the formation or spell array that would have benefited from the thousands of deaths, especially not thousands of deaths spread across the entire continent. There was no sudden surge of qi, blood qi, or otherwise. The greatest geniuses from each sect were summoned to lead a special investigation into it, but nothing ever came of it.”
Hui frowned. This Midnight Massacre… I have to look into it. Thirteen years ago? That can’t be a coincidence.
Wait, the top geniuses from each sect? “Was Mast—was Weiheng Wu tapped for the squad?”
Xue nodded. “He turned it down. For a time, that cast suspicion on him, but it turned out he was on the verge of a breakthrough and didn’t want to interrupt his cultivation.”
Didn’t want to interrupt his cultivation… I can believe that. Hui nodded, then stopped, brows furrowing. Wait. But… that’s when he gathered me as his disciple. Fair, he immediately returned to cultivating, but it’s far too much of a coincidence. The Midnight Massacre. Weiheng Wu picking me. Thirteen years. My arrival in this world.
Again, the feeling that he had almost all the threads in his hand passed over Hui. Almost all the threads—except one: the one that tied them all together. He groaned, frustrated. Argh! What am I missing?
He shook his head. Let’s focus on the mystery at hand first. When I get back to the sect, Lan Taijian or no, I’m heading directly to the library. There’s got to be more information on the Midnight Massacre in there!
“Let’s go see if we can find any more information on my letter,” he said, heading for the door.
“Sure. When we get back, I’m going to corner Jingwen and make her explain herself,” Xue said, brushing dust off her shoulders.
As they walked outside, Li Xiang pushed off the wall and joined them. “Did the two of you have a good night together?”
“Li Xiang,” Hui said flatly, too tired to fight it.
Xue looked at Hui and frowned. “Seriously, Hui, are you okay?”
