Chapter 30

Drip, drip,
From high above in the rock wall, water kept dripping down. The sound was hollow and crisp. Splashing droplets landed on Shen Qing’s eyelids, bringing a sharp, icy sting. After a moment, she swayed and slowly opened her eyes.
All she could see was black, as if no one had ever lit a lamp here.
When sight is gone, hearing and smell grow sharper. The dripping of water in her ears became clearer and clearer, accompanied by a rancid, fishy stench.
After a few sluggish heartbeats, Shen Qing finally pushed herself up and got to her feet. In an instant, her memories surged back.
She remembered, she had just set up a protective array, and it had been broken by someone. Then a water vortex had appeared beneath her feet out of nowhere, and she’d been sucked down by it.
Shen Qing froze for a second. Right before she’d been pulled under, it seemed like someone had grabbed her hand… but it could have been her imagination.
Just as that thought formed, someone patted her on the shoulder. Startled, she instinctively yanked out her hairpin and stabbed backward, only for her wrist to be caught in a swift grip as a hand covered her mouth.
“It’s me,” a calm voice said.
There was no way to read emotion from that voice.
Shen Qing paused. “Li Daoxuan…” she said in her heart.
So it hadn’t been an illusion. The one who’d seized her hand earlier really had been him.
“If you don’t want to die, don’t shout,” Li Daoxuan said.
Shen Qing relaxed her body and gave a small nod to show she understood. The hand covering her lips released as she wished.
“Your Highness, this place is… where?” Now that her mouth was free, Shen Qing immediately lowered her voice to ask.
Li Daoxuan didn’t answer right away. Instead, he twisted his wrist, flicking the blood from his sword. The ground around them spattered instantly with red.
A thick, fishy reek grew stronger, fish stench tangled with the sour smell of blood. It was foul beyond belief.
Unconsciously, Shen Qing held her breath. Just when she thought he wouldn’t answer at all, he finally said, “A palace beneath the earth.”
After a beat, he added, “The underground palace of the great demon beneath Huachun Pond.”
Shen Qing murmured, “Why… would I end up here…”
The corner of Li Daoxuan’s mouth curled in a mocking smile. His refined features were clouded by irritation and impatience. He leaned down, his lips close to her ear as he said in a low voice, “That’s something I should be asking you. That water vortex was aimed at you and you alone. While you were unconscious, you drew in quite a few water fiends as well. They all came straight for you.”
“This prince would very much like to know, just what have you done to attract these things?”
So the stench in the air was from the corpses of those water fiends.
Shen Qing tilted her chin, pretending not to understand. She praised blindly instead. “Is that so? Then those must have been dealt with by Your Highness. To be able to cut down so many demons out of thin air in a place this dark, Your Highness is truly formidable. I can only hope you’ll continue taking me along and lead this little girl safely out of here.” As she spoke, she shrank her neck a little. “This little girl is very afraid of these things.”
Li Daoxuan noted the words “place this dark” from her lips. He looked around at the brightly lit stone walls, glowing like daylight from the lamps set into them. No matter how he looked at it, it did not match what she’d just described.
When his gaze returned to her blank, unfocused eyes, and he recalled the cloud of poisonous vapor that had sprayed down as they fell, he suddenly understood and let out a quiet, amused breath.
So… blind, is she.
When they were dropping at that terrifying speed, Li Daoxuan had been gripping Shen Qing with one hand and gouging his sword into the wall with the other. The blade scraped against rock as hard as refined black iron, throwing sparks wide and bright.
It was stupid, but it worked; it slowed their fall. When they reached a certain point, his sword must have struck some hidden mechanism, the sound of gears grinding echoed in the dark, and clouds of white mist spewed from the walls. Li Daoxuan had only been able to hold his breath; he’d had no way to shield unconscious Shen Qing.
Once they burst through that layer of mist, he picked his moment, shoved the sword into a narrow crack in the stone, and used it like a step beneath his foot. Fortunately, the gap wasn’t far from the ground. In a few heartbeats, he had them both safely down.
When he went back, using his light footwork to retrieve his sword, he saw a pack of water fiends drooling as they crawled toward the spot where Shen Qing lay, scrambling over one another.
Li Daoxuan’s blade rose and fell, lopping off their heads like chopping melons. The killing intent in his chest, long reduced to cold ashes, flared up again. The exhilaration of slaughter raged through his limbs. Under the gu’s influence, the more he killed, the more that wild pleasure boiled instead of cooling.
It felt like his blood and flesh were being brought to a rolling boil beneath his skin, surging through organs and meridians, trying to seize his mind and blind his eyes, turning him into nothing but a killing mechanism. And the only medicine that could calm that tide of bloodlust and pain, for the moment, was the girl lying unconscious on the stone.
All he had to do was bite through that soft, thin skin, drink down that fragrant blood, and the rage in his heart would quiet, the gu’s gnawing agony would ease.
The craving was so strong it nearly drowned him. But he knew that doing so would be nothing more than ladling water onto a boiling pot.
Back at Lishan, when the girl had thrown herself into his arms, he’d already felt the dormant gu inside him begin to stir. He’d known then that something was wrong.
So once he returned to his residence, he began combing through old texts. And sure enough, he found the answer.
Those afflicted with Vermilion Gu would, under the influence of the worm inside them, be drawn to the person who carried the antidote. They would crave them. When the gu flared, they would be unable to stop themselves from wanting to drink that person’s blood, to tear their flesh, just to make the torture stop.
But even if drinking that blood eased the pain for a while, it did not address the root, it only made things worse.
The blood he drank would not be absorbed by his own body, but by the gu within him. Because the gu had “food,” it would temporarily spare its host during an attack.
The next time, however, having tasted that sweetness, if the gu could no longer get the blood it wanted, it would turn on the host with double the ferocity. When the host could no longer endure it, he would again resort to poison disguised as medicine. Over and over in a vicious cycle, and within at most three years, the host’s organs would be eaten away and he would die a bag of bones.
Li Daoxuan valued his own life far too highly. So after he finished slaughtering the water fiends, he simply leaned quietly against the stone wall and forced himself to calm down alone.
Even so, he had been affected. His emotions were dangerously unstable.
Now, realizing the girl had gone blind stirred up another, very different feeling in him, dark and subtle. He couldn’t stop thinking: If she can’t see, then for the foreseeable future, she can only rely on me. Like a dodder vine, fragile, rootless.
Without my protection, in a place like this, she’s nothing but a guttering candle in a storm, ready to be snuffed out by any stray demon that passes by.
Before, she had hidden behind the Glass Heart, plotting and using him over and over, performing her clumsy little acts he had to pretend not to notice.
Now, without him, she would be treading thin ice with every step, clinging to life by a thread. Her life would be firmly held in his palm.
How pitiful.
Beneath his calm gaze, waves were surging. He bent toward her slightly, looking down from on high with something like pity as he said, “Shen Qing, it isn’t that this underground palace is dark. It’s that you’re blind.” A streak of scarlet flashed in his eyes.
As he’d expected, her face showed a moment of pure panic. Unfortunately, before he could fully savor it, he watched her forcibly steady herself and ask, in a voice that tried hard to sound calm, “May I ask, Your Highness, when we entered the underground palace, did anything happen while I was unconscious? Was there some kind of poisonous gas?”
Li Daoxuan answered truthfully, “Yes. While we were falling, a cloud of poison sprayed out. This prince held his breath, but Miss Shen was not awake. I could do nothing for you.”
At that, Shen Qing finally let out a quiet breath. That meant her blindness was the result of the poison. In a demon’s lair, running into toxic miasma was nothing unusual, and such vapors were rarely too strong. Blindness from them was generally temporary. With the right antidote pill, her sight might return at once.
Just as she was about to reach for the brocade pouch at her waist, the person behind her hooked his toe with a faintly amused curve of his lips and gave the slightest flick.
Shen Qing’s outstretched hand froze mid-air. Instinctively, she felt for the object that had fallen into her arms, and her palm sank into something sticky. A thick, clotted stench of blood all but turned into viscous liquid, forcing its way into her nose. She held her breath at once.
Her waist tightened. Shen Qing was pulled into Li Daoxuan’s arms. He twirled his sword in a showy flourish, hooked up the thing in her lap with the blade, flung it to the ground, and then, with an exaggerated stab, said lazily, “Ah, dead.”
The water fiend’s stubbornly lingering remains finally dissolved into a slick puddle and seeped away.
Li Daoxuan let go of her and bent down, carefully examining the girl’s expression. The corners of his eyes were tinged red from excitement. In those dark irises, transparent, fractured pleasure glinted faintly.
In his other hand, he slipped a small, finely made brocade pouch into his sleeve without leaving a trace.
Only after all this did Li Daoxuan say, “How could Miss Shen be so careless? The head hanging from that wall niche fell just now, and you didn’t even think to dodge.”
One glance around would tell anyone he was talking nonsense. Aside from the small lamp brackets, the walls on both sides were smooth as polished stone. There wasn’t a niche in sight.
Li Daoxuan went on, “That head without its body wasn’t quite dead yet, either. Its fangs were bared, both eyes popped from their sockets, drool all over… it got your whole hand, red and white all mixed together. Just a little closer and those fangs would have, ”
“Li Daoxuan!” Shen Qing’s breathing turned rapid as she cut off whatever madness he meant to say next.
Just hearing him describe it was enough for that bald, greasy, water-swollen ghost face to surge up in her mind. Paired with the revolting sensation she’d felt in her hand just now, Shen Qing felt her scalp crawl, not from fear, but from pure disgust.
She had a cleanliness obsession. A very serious one.
Whenever servants entered her room and had to touch her bedding, they were required to wear white silk covers over their shoes and sleeves over their hands before they were allowed to dust.
Any cup she drank from was only ever used once. Even brand-new clothes were worn a single time and then put aside; she never wore them a second.
When she was small, a maid who served her had once believed some nonsense about cats being “inauspicious” and, disobeying her wishes, quietly gave away the pet civet she’d been raising. By the time the civet was found and brought back, it had already grown close to its new owner and even turned around and bitten Shen Qing. Tiny as she was, Shen Qing’s face was like ice as she had both the civet and the maid thrown out of the Shen estate together.
She loathed sticky, filthy evil things. She loathed disloyal people. She loathed things that betrayed their master.
For a moment, a long-lost surge of irritability and nausea crashed together in her chest. Coupled with the void in front of her eyes that reminded her of the despair before her death in her previous life, Shen Qing felt like her head might split open.
From Li Daoxuan’s perspective, however, Shen Qing’s face only looked cold, which made a trace of boredom creep into his heart.
He wanted to see her panic. See her afraid.
So he suddenly “came to his senses,” his tone carrying a hint of apology. “Forgive me, I must have frightened Miss Shen. I saw you reaching for something just now. Why don’t you tell me what it is, and I’ll fetch it for you?”
Shen Qing forced herself to calm down. She no longer cared to argue whether that “head” had fallen on its own or been tossed over by a certain someone taking the chance for petty revenge. Right now, all she wanted was to detoxify herself. Only once her sight returned would she have a better chance of getting out of this underground palace.
If she had to rely solely on Li Daoxuan, she was certain that unless she shed at least one layer of skin, this man would never just escort her out so easily.
He was, after all, the long-“renowned” madman of Chang’an. How could he possibly be willing to let someone scheme against him repeatedly and still play the accommodating clay idol?
Everyone has a temper. All the more so someone who’d been worshipped like a living ancestor his whole life.
Shen Qing wearily closed her eyes for a moment. “I must trouble Your Highness to open the brocade pouch at my waist. There’s an antidote pill inside that can cure the poison in my eyes.”
Li Daoxuan really did behave himself for once and reached for her waist. But his hands wandered there for quite some time without doing anything further. Just as Shen Qing was about to lose patience, she suddenly froze.
Because both of his palms circled her waist, but she felt no obstruction at all.
In short, her waist was smooth and bare. There was nothing there. Not even the brocade pouch.