Chapter 29

“Old Huang.”
The pitch-black torture chamber bloomed with a small pool of warm light. As the bean-sized flame of a candle drew near, the wrinkled face of an old man came into view.
“Your Highness, do you want some water?” Old Huang asked.
Li Daoxuan tugged faintly at his arms. “Unlock me.”
Under the dim light, one could see that he wore a dark robe, the collar slightly loosened from his earlier struggles. His bloodless wrists, his waist, and his neck were all encircled by iron chains as thick as a baby’s fist. The chains shackled his every move.
Old Huang’s face went ashen. “Ah? B-but it’s not time yet! Your Highness, please reconsider!”
Li Daoxuan shut his eyes and gritted through another wave of agitation and pain. “I won’t say it twice.”
The moment the words left his mouth, Old Huang fumbled out a jade key and hastily undid layer after layer of locks. Once the heavy chain at his neck crashed to the floor, Li Daoxuan got to his feet at once, took up his sword, and strode straight for the door without a backward glance.
Holding the lamp, Old Huang scurried after him and stammered, “Y-Your Highness, where are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
Old Huang could only stand there and watch as the prince, still in the middle of a flare, walked away without looking back. Inwardly, he prayed over and over that His Highness wouldn’t lose control, wouldn’t kill anyone.
Under normal circumstances, whenever the moon was full, the gu worm in the prince’s body would act up for three days.
During that time, it would gnaw relentlessly at his internal organs and flesh, clouding his mind and driving him into a state of near-madness. When the pain became too great, the host would sometimes lose all reason, reduced to a lunatic who only knew how to kill to vent his rage.
Old Huang had first discovered the gu in the prince’s body when His Highness was eight years old. At that time, Xiangyou was wreaking havoc across the land. The realm was steeped in misery, and law and order were in shambles. Noble Consort Gao and the young prince were kidnapped right out of the palace; even after the Emperor sent people searching high and low, they found nothing. Three months later, a wandering priestess happened to save the prince, who had been beaten to a bloody pulp and left barely alive.
As for Noble Consort Gao, they said she hadn’t survived. Her body was never found.
The prince had been hanging by a single breath. The priestess said that if they wanted to save him, there was only one way: planting a gu. But once the gu was set, the price he’d pay would be a lifetime of side effects that ordinary people could never bear.
In his panic, Emperor Jingren had no space to weigh the consequences. To keep his son alive, he waved his hand and ordered the priestess to do it. Later, the prince’s shattered meridians were indeed mended. The priestess disappeared without a trace, leaving behind only a note: The gu can be broken ten years from now.
Along with it came a list of medicinal ingredients. The herbs on it were rare, but not impossible to find, except for one thing. That one thing made everyone rack their brains and scour the realm in vain: Glass Heart. This Glass Heart had to be willingly offered by its owner to be of use. Naturally forming Glass Hearts were useless in breaking the gu.
Glass Heart was a blood-red stone. Only after sending men across the entire empire did Emperor Jingren finally obtain a clear description of its appearance. Yet even so, no one could find a single trace of it.
It was only at the next full moon that they finally understood what the gu’s side effects were.
That night, young Lord Gu was in the prince’s quarters visiting him. One moment they were chatting just fine; the next, the prince was clutching his head and slamming it against the wall in agony. Lord Gu tried to stop him, but the prince clamped down on his wrist with his teeth. The boy’s scream shook half the residence.
After that, once the episodes passed, the prince’s body slowly recovered, but his heart grew more and more closed off and heavy. He could go an entire day without speaking a single sentence to anyone, and the only people who could coax a few words from him were his childhood companions.
Fortunately, once he grew older, he never earned a nickname like “little scourge of the world” the way Lord Gu did. But under Lord Gu’s bad influence, the prince’s temperament still loosened up and grew more unruly.
All in all, having him more lively wasn’t a bad thing. It was better than him being that tight-lipped, lifeless fish-face.
So Old Huang thought, even as his gaze followed Li Daoxuan’s departing back with deep concern.
Back on the pleasure barge, after several rounds of effort, the water fiend finally shattered beneath the golden spirit rings into a mess of broken bones. In no time, the bones melted into a puddle of water and seeped into the cracks of the deck.
The golden rings themselves seemed disgusted by the creature’s rotted flesh. The moment it was destroyed, their golden light snapped shut, and they shrank back to their original size, clattering to the floor as plain bracelets.
Cuizhi, still not fully recovered from the fright, hurried to snatch them up. With trembling fingers, she pulled out several silk handkerchiefs and carefully wiped the golden spirit rings over and over before returning them to Shen Qing.
Shen Qing slid the bracelet back onto her arm, then skirted around the panicked crowd and quickly made her way to the noble young lady whose face had been covered by the lotus. She felt for the girl’s pulse and found that she was still alive, but one of her three souls had been sucked out through her seven orifices by the lotus spirit.
Humans were born with three souls and six spirits. The three souls were Embryonic Light, Bright Spirit, and Hidden Essence.
This girl had lost precisely her Bright Spirit.
Bright Spirit was the transformation of yin energy and belonged to the Five Elements. It governed wealth and fortune and determined a person’s intelligence, insight, and quickness of reaction.
If they did not retrieve her Bright Spirit in time, this girl would likely spend the rest of her life muddle-headed, unable to grasp changes in the world or the subtleties of human feeling, what people would call a simpleton or half-wit.
Shen Qing let her gaze sweep the deck. Though the guests were terrified, in their scramble to flee they’d managed not to step on or kick the lotuses, so no one else had been attacked.
She peeled the lotus off the girl’s face. It was obvious at a glance that the young lady’s complexion had gone ashen-gray. If they failed to recover her missing soul, she would, at best, live out her days in a stupor; at worst, she might end up bedridden and comatose, and if her soul remained outside her body for fifteen days, she could die.
The noble girl’s face was familiar, but Shen Qing couldn’t remember where she had seen her before, so she didn’t dwell on it. She instead took out talismans and stuck them over the seven orifices of the girl’s face one by one, plugging them to prevent any further leakage of her soul.
The missing Bright Spirit had vanished somewhere after being sucked out by the lotus; it had not remained attached to the flower.
These lotus spirits were still low-level. They could only ride the east wind onto the barge and attack people by catching them off guard. This one here was even weaker than most.
Ordinarily, lotus spirits devoured all three souls and six spirits, digesting them to raise their cultivation. This one could barely pull away a single soul and couldn’t even digest it properly, it had no idea where it ended up spitting that soul off to.
They needed to find it quickly. With that thought, Shen Qing lifted her hand and drove her dagger straight through the still-struggling lotus. With a sharp, piercing cry, the lotus shriveled in her grip, wilting and rotting in an instant.
She casually tossed the corpse of the flower back into the middle of the pond. The burly stewardess, following Shen Qing’s instructions, wasted no time in carrying her unconscious mistress back to the inner cabin.
The rear deck on the first floor was now a danger zone, and the noble girls could no longer care about appearance or propriety. They all rushed en masse for the stairs to the second floor.
Zhang Gaoze, having just checked on his fainted elder sister and still looking ghastly, happened to be heading down the wooden ladder when he saw Shen Qing leading a cluster of people up toward the second floor. Behind her, a stewardess was carrying an unconscious young lady whose face was covered in talismans.
Rage flared in Zhang Gaoze’s eyes at once. He glared at Shen Qing. “What are you doing now? Why are you plastering talismans on another person’s face for no reason?”
He knew that aside from Shen Qing of the Xuanji Pavilion, no ordinary girl would be walking around with talismans on her person.
Shen Qing had no time to argue with him. “There’s a great demon about. Are you scared, Young Master Zhang?”
Zhang Gaoze puffed up like an overinflated goatskin bag, ready to burst at the slightest poke. “What great demon? What demon? Today is my mother’s birthday banquet, and ever since you set foot on this barge, you’ve done nothing but stir up trouble. You’re clearly making things difficult for the Zhang family on purpose!”
The stewardess and maids of the unconscious young lady couldn’t stand it anymore. They spoke up in turn.
“How can Young Lord Zhang say such a thing! We all saw it with our own eyes, if not for Miss Shen, the demon would not have been subdued!”
“How is this ‘stirring up trouble’? Please, sir, step aside and don’t delay my lady’s life!”
Though he was still highly skeptical of their words, Zhang Gaoze couldn’t completely ignore them. His gaze drifted to the girl lying limp on the maid’s back, and, in the end, concern for a stranger’s life won out. He moved aside, letting them pass.
Shen Qing walked past him without looking back. Just as she was about to follow the stewardess, he spoke up again. “You are no physician, Young Lady. Why are you going as well?”
She turned her head and gave him a sidelong look. “She’s lost a soul,” she said crisply. “I’m going to call it back.”
Zhang Gaoze let out a derisive snort. “You’d even tell a lie like that? Miss Shen, do you really think I’ll believe you?”
To his surprise, Shen Qing only looked genuinely puzzled. “Since when do I need Young Master Zhang’s belief to do anything?” she asked. “What does this have to do with you?”
She paused, gave it some serious thought, and concluded, “It doesn’t, does it.”
With that, she pushed the obstacle out of her way with one palm and followed the stewardess off without another glance.
But calling back the soul would not be the first thing she did. Soul-calling required certain ritual tools; she hadn’t brought everything she needed today and could only hope Li Daoxuan arrived with the right items on him.
For the moment, she needed to set up a formation, to shield everyone on board.
Because she had no idea what other demons might be lurking beneath the waters of Huachun Pond.
In no time at all, a band of blue light that no ordinary person could see rippled out across the ship like a string of bubbles, spreading until it wrapped around the entire pleasure barge.
On the second floor, behind an embroidered screen in one corner, a man lifted a cup of tea and took a sip, then remarked, “Cold.”
Behind him stood a figure wrapped head to toe in black, even his head wrapped in a dark cloth. “Useless things,” the black-clad man said.
The man behind the screen covered his lips with a soft laugh. “Aren’t they? A bunch of useless things, can’t even handle a woman. Tell me, what else can we use to get rid of her?”
The black-clad man replied, “Just so happens he’s awake. Why not send her on ahead of schedule, then send the rest of the Shen family down to keep her company later.”
The man said, “True enough. Since we’re all here and we’ve run into her anyway, we might as well settle it early.” He patted the black-clad man’s shoulder. “She’s yours.” With that, he rose and walked away.
After a long moment, the man in black raised his hand and formed a seal. The great formation Shen Qing had just set up shattered at once, light as mist, not costing him the slightest effort.
Shen Qing abruptly spat a mouthful of blood, shocking everyone present.
The stewardess of that noble girl reacted the most violently. “Miss Shen, are you all right?! Are you feeling unwell?” In her heart she kept repeating: Please let Miss Shen be fine, my lady’s life is still hanging on her!
Shen Qing’s expression grew heavy. Her gaze passed through the window lattice, out toward the lake. The sky outside was pressed down by roiling black clouds like a thick quilt, smothering enough to make breathing difficult. Faint streaks of red light flashed within them, light that ordinary eyes could not discern. Heaven’s omens were falling. A great demon was about to be born.
Her face went even paler in an instant. In her last life, the strange vision over the East Market had been exactly like this, a sky pierced by eerie red light.
So… it’s early this time?
Then what about the Shen estate? Are there omens there as well? Will the fiend appear ahead of time?
She had no time to think it through. Through the panic in everyone’s eyes, she suddenly noticed that, at some point, a puddle of water had appeared at her feet.
A moment later, a wave of weightlessness swept over her. Her head spun harder and harder. The puddle under her soles turned into a swampy whirlpool, as if countless unseen hands were dragging her down by the ankles. Before the water closed over her head, she heard Cuizhi’s heart-rending shriek:
“Miss!”
Then even that scream was swallowed by silence. All that was left in her ears was the endless roar of rushing water.
At the very moment Shen Qing was swallowed completely by the watery vortex beneath her, a figure in dark robes suddenly appeared above her head.
In that spinning dizziness, she felt a cold, broad hand clasp her own. Instinctively, she tightened her grip, clutching it hard like it was her last strand of hope.