Chapter 31

She’d tied the pouch with a dead knot. Unless the cord and pouch together had been cut off and thrown away, no amount of tugging would have loosened it. Just thinking about it was enough to know whose handiwork this was.
Inwardly, Shen Qing let out a cold laugh, but her face gave nothing away.
Sure enough, a moment later she heard that falsely puzzled voice say, “There’s no brocade pouch here. Is it possible Miss Shen’s misremembered?”
Shen Qing frowned lightly and sighed, going along with it. “Perhaps it fell somewhere along the way. Forget it. This place is dangerous. Let’s get out first and talk after.”
A smile played at Li Daoxuan’s lips. “Demons and fiends strike without regard for eyes or faces,” he said, putting heavy emphasis on every word. “Miss Shen had better keep close.”
His answer was a slender pale hand that climbed onto his sleeve, and in the blind darkness of her eyes, a shard of cold light briefly flashed. “Then I’ll have to trouble Your Highness.”
Li Daoxuan slanted a look at the girl pretending to be so pitiful and fragile, and said, “You’re too polite, Miss.”
Shen Qing thought coldly: You want to play? Then this young lady will play with you. We’ll see in the end whether you’re the little bastard who turns the heavens upside down, or whether I’m the one a cut above.
If Li Daoxuan sensed any of this, he gave no sign. He simply lifted his sword and took the lead. The corridor was gloomy and narrow; every now and then, strange noises echoed out of nowhere. Shen Qing unconsciously leaned a little closer to him.
Taking advantage of this, she calmly wiped her hands back and forth on his sleeve until every trace of that sticky, slimy feeling was gone. Only then did she let go in satisfaction.
A few moments later, several sharp “clack-clack” sounds reached them. Shen Qing heard a jumble of footsteps, like countless bones clattering against the floor, the rhythm utterly chaotic.
In truth, her guess was not far off. Around the bend ahead of them, dozens of skeletal figures were charging toward them with broadswords in hand. Their eye sockets were nothing but empty holes, yet somehow they gave off a chilling aura of killing intent.
Their throats rasped as they shouted, “Intruders, must die.”
Li Daoxuan lifted his sword and glanced back, eyes gleaming with a hint of mischief. “Miss Shen, don’t be afraid. I’m here.”
Shen Qing had no idea what he was plotting, but as the owner of the Glass Heart, no matter how much they were at each other’s throats, he would not simply stand by and watch her die in the hands of these monsters. With that belief, she said, “Your Highness, be careful,” and quietly took a step back.
Li Daoxuan said nothing. His sword answered in his place as he rushed forward to kill.
With this living King of Hell present, those skeletal fiends might as well have been children waving knives. They had no ability to resist at all. Li Daoxuan easily sliced off both their feet, sending them crashing to the ground.
Once he’d knocked them down, he could have simply ended them with a single strike. Instead, he deliberately chose the cruelest method.
One by one, he chopped off each skeleton’s limbs until they hit the floor like human hogs, helplessly thrashing. All they could do was drag themselves toward him using their heads alone, inch by inch, their mouths still repeating, “Intruders, must die.”
Then Li Daoxuan used his sword to pick apart their spines vertebra by vertebra. Other than their skulls, their bones could no longer move at all.
He seemed to have discovered some new amusement. The killing intent boiling in his eyes roared for more. He took a slow step, then another, and each time his boot came down on a skeletal head, it shattered like a melon under his heel.
As for whether these skeletons could feel pain, no one knew. All they could do was stare up at him with those hollow eye sockets as they waited for the little fiend to descend.
Meanwhile, in the space he couldn’t see, Shen Qing had already laid her own plans. Putting on a convincing mask of terror, she turned away and crouched down, fishing a detoxification pill from her hidden sleeve and swallowing it without a second thought.
She’d known he would play dirty, so she’d kept something in reserve and never mentioned that she also carried antidotes in her inner sleeve. As soon as she found a moment to clean her hands, she’d taken the pill.
Barely moments after she swallowed it, a cool current rose from her dantian, slowly flowing through her limbs and bones, sweeping away the foul poison inside her. A heartbeat later, a sharp pain struck her chest and she coughed up a mouthful of blackened blood.
Shen Qing pulled out a handkerchief, wiped the blood from the corner of her lips, and when she looked up again, a faint light was beginning to bloom before her eyes.
She blinked a few times. That patch of light grew larger, brighter, until it gradually expanded into a complete picture. Then the brightest point of light shrank again to the size of a bean sprout, hanging unsteadily on the wall, swaying back and forth. Her vision finally cleared completely.
She waved both hands before her eyes, then turned her head, just in time to see Li Daoxuan’s foot come down. The skull beneath his boot turned to bone dust on the spot, and in his eyes was a thick, almost congealed madness.
She stared, clearly seeing that something was wrong with him, though she couldn’t say exactly what.
At this moment, Li Daoxuan was nothing but wrongness from head to toe. Twisting, crazed killing intent poured off him. He was no longer the aloof Prince Cang, Li Daoxuan, but something that had crawled from the mire, filth struggling and rolling in the dark, a madman to the core.
Just then, Li Daoxuan looked back. The emotion churning in his eyes was something Shen Qing couldn’t read, but it was enough to make her wary.
Immediately, she let her gaze go slack again and put on the look of a blind girl.
Sword dragging at his side, hair loose and wild, Li Daoxuan walked toward her. The point of the blade scraped against the stone floor, shrieking in the still corridor, as if broadcasting the turmoil in his heart.
He’d gone wild with killing just now. The gu in his body, which had quieted for a moment, began to flare again.
Once he was close, Li Daoxuan suddenly lifted his robes and dropped into a crouch.
He took her hand, slowly pulling her to her feet.
“The way ahead is clear. Miss Shen need not be afraid, just follow me.”
His voice was gentle, even coaxing, but this behavior, so far from his usual self, made Shen Qing’s scalp prickle.
What’s he playing at now?
His palm was slick with sweat, and cold. Shen Qing’s cleanliness instincts flared again; she wanted to pull away, but his grip, not too tight yet not loose either, made it impossible.
He chuckled. “Be good, Miss Shen. With this prince leading you, you’ll be safe.” He emphasized the last words.
Shen Qing was half-dragged, half-pushed forward. His strength left her no room to resist.
As they drew closer to the pile of bones, she finally saw what lay underfoot, countless razor-sharp bone spikes carpeted the ground. A single careless step, and they would easily pierce straight through the sole of a person’s foot.
Rage surged up in Shen Qing’s chest; inwardly she cursed, You mangy bastard! So this is what you were waiting for!
In the moments in between, she began to think of a countermeasure.
The place where they had fallen was a dead end; ahead was the only path. If they wanted to escape, they had no choice but to keep going forward, and the patch of bone spikes was the only way through.
When they were almost upon that forest of jagged bone, Shen Qing suddenly twisted her ankle with a sharp cry.
Just moments ago he’d been gripping her so hard she could barely move, but now it was as if he’d suddenly lost all strength. He simply watched as Shen Qing pitched to the ground, making no move to help her.
When she hit the floor, her nose stung; in an instant her eyes filled with tears. Her gaze went empty and unfocused. One hand clutched her ankle, the other braced against the ground as she whispered weakly, “Your Highness, I twisted my ankle.”
Li Daoxuan stared at her in silence for a long moment, then the corner of his mouth curved. “Is that so.”
How very convenient.
Shen Qing added, “I can’t walk any farther. Your Highness… could you perhaps lend me a hand?” As she spoke, she lowered her head as if shy, a faint flush blooming across her cheeks.
Her heart was pounding. She was betting that he still had enough sanity left that he wouldn’t just abandon her here.
Fortunately, she won that bet.
Li Daoxuan might be half-mad, but he still remembered that nothing could be allowed to happen to the Glass Heart. His original intent had been to leave her with a few more injuries so she would be more like a soft, harmless dodder vine, forced to draw in her fangs and claws and cling obediently to him.
He did intend to take her out. He also intended to exact a little revenge along the way.
After a brief standoff, Li Daoxuan finally moved. Turning his back to her, he crouched down. “Your hand.”
Their sleeves pooled over the ground, overlapping and tangling together. Shen Qing blinked, then looped her arms around his neck. There was a light lift under her, and suddenly her body felt weightless.
Li Daoxuan hoisted Shen Qing onto his back and strode forward.
Shen Qing’s breath hitched as she stared at the nape of his neck.
His stance was steady as always; even riding on his back, she hardly felt any jarring.
The dim lamplight traced the line of his cheek, softening his usual coldness with a muted warmth. For once the two of them were at a fragile, temporary truce. Shen Qing’s thoughts drifted, and the thin, wavering flame hanging ahead of them slowly blurred into a slender crescent moon.
In her last life, Li Daoxuan had carried her on his back like this too.
Their relationship then had never been as strained and on edge as it was now.
While they were tracking the fiend, the group had passed through a desolate city.
Shen Ling had ignored her senior brother’s warning and insisted on picking the fruit from a tree in the city. In doing so she’d enraged the great demon guarding it, a water buffalo spirit that had watched over the fruit for a long time, waiting for it to ripen, only for a human to snatch it away halfway.
Furious, it lashed out at them. Shen Qing took a blow to the back of her shoulder, and Shen Ling was chased far off by the enraged buffalo. Li Daoxuan had leapt atop a tree the moment things went wrong, staying above it all, a bystander.
Before long, only the two of them remained in the city. Shen Qing was pale and sweating, curled up on the ground from the pain. She’d been pampered all her life, then suddenly gone mad and trained with the sword for two years; her body had never been strong, and all that torment had long since wrecked her foundation. Taking a direct hit now was no small matter.
Li Daoxuan finally came down from the tree.
The moment Shen Qing saw him, irritation flared. She snapped at him without the slightest politeness, “Why don’t you go save your precious sweetheart? What are you looking at me for?”
Li Daoxuan looked down at her for a while, then bent and pulled her up. “I’m not close with her,” he said quietly. After a pause, he added, “Liu Jiyue is over there. As long as she doesn’t die, that’s enough.”
All he wanted was the Glass Heart. Shen Ling’s condition for the trade was that he protect her life, not that he keep her safe from harm.
So what did her injuries have to do with him?
The wound at Shen Qing’s shoulder blade already hurt, and his rough tugging made it worse. Besides, anything that had to do with Shen Ling, Shen Qing despised, despised with a bone-deep loathing.
The whole party had suffered more than enough thanks to Shen Ling, and hearing from Li Daoxuan that even their senior brother was on Shen Ling’s side made all the grievance pent up in her chest surge up at once. She slapped Li Daoxuan across the face with a sharp crack. “Let go!”
His cheek still bore the clear imprint of her hand when he saw her burst into tears first, her face a mess of tears and snot, her sobbing choked and pitiful. His head throbbed. “The ground is cold. Don’t sit on it.” He pulled out a small bottle of medicine and handed it to her. “Put this on. If the bruise doesn’t disperse, it’ll hurt worse tomorrow.”
“I don’t want it.”
“If you don’t, it’ll scar. It’ll be ugly.” The sound of her sobbing stuttered.
In the end, Shen Qing reached out and took the bottle.
Then both of them froze. To apply the salve, she would have to bare the skin. With a wound that close to her back, there was no way she could undress in broad daylight, even if the city was devoid of living people.
So Li Daoxuan naturally crouched down. “Get on.”
Clutching the medicine, Shen Qing asked coldly, “What for?”
“To take you somewhere you can put it on.”
Shen Qing didn’t move.
So Li Daoxuan simply turned, took her hands, and placed them on his shoulders, then caught her off guard and hoisted her onto his back.
With the girl’s startled cry, the clouds parted and the moon poured down. On the ground beneath the moonlight there were now two shadows, one of a youth walking steady and sure, the other of a girl clinging carefully to his shoulders.
Under that moonlight, a seed called “fluttering heart” quietly took root, sprouting in the soil of her chest, then slipping out at her shoulders.
As the tense curl of her fingers slowly relaxed and smoothed out, the small bump at his shoulder disappeared. In the next instant, the silhouette on the ground was perfectly flat again, and the tender sprout might as well have been an illusion.
Bracing herself against his shoulders, Shen Qing tried to put some distance between them. She had no intention of getting down; a free mount was a free mount, and she would be a fool not to use it.
She stopped crying, though her voice was still a little nasal. “I want a clean place.”
“Mn.”
“Not a speck of dust.”
Li Daoxuan knew she was being difficult, but he still answered, “Mn.”
Shen Qing fell quiet.
After a while, his voice sounded again. “I thought you would dodge.”
“Mn?” Shen Qing’s brows lifted.
“The water buffalo’s strikes are heavy and clumsy. With your footwork, you should have been able to avoid it.”
Shen Qing said, “Is that so? Then you guessed wrong, Li A-Man.”
Li Daoxuan replied, “Mn. I guessed wrong.”
She lapsed into silence again.
Everything around them grew very quiet. The thin crescent moon in the sky became all the more striking.
She stared at it in silence, feeling the rhythm of the youth’s strides.
The moon’s light grew dimmer and dimmer. Shen Qing’s eyes went wide, as if she could keep the darkness from swallowing the only light in the sky, but she could only watch as the brightness faded.
She tightened her arms around Li Daoxuan’s shoulders and lowered her head to look at his profile.
His lips were moving, opening and closing as if he were saying something. Shen Qing leaned closer, trying to listen, but she couldn’t hear a thing, and her vision was swallowed by pitch black.
All she could do was hold onto him and rest her head on his shoulder, feeling the vibration in his chest.
His body clearly tensed for a moment, then slowly relaxed.
Shen Qing quietly listened. When the vibration faded, she made a small “mm” in response.
She didn’t know how long he kept talking; eventually he fell silent, but his heartbeat only pounded harder.
Her breathing rose and fell in time with that heartbeat until they were in sync. The panic and fear that had swept up in her chest slowly smoothed out.
Silently, Shen Qing thought, I don’t know why I couldn’t dodge that strike just now. In the past, I could have avoided it with ease.
She didn’t know how long they went on like that. Gradually, her sight returned; the moon came back out, though everything at her ears was still wrapped in silence.
She noticed the faint curve at the corner of Li Daoxuan’s lips.
“Li A-Man,” Shen Qing asked, looking down, “do you know your heart is beating very fast?”
He said three words. Shen Qing more or less made them out: “I know it.”
So she smiled, her eyes curving. “Your stamina is really awful. Just carrying me a little while and you’re already worn out.”
At that, Li Daoxuan’s smile vanished. Then he abruptly leapt up onto a high rooftop with her on his back and ran in long strides.
The wind he raised flung both their hair high, tangling it together in mid-air. His vivid red hair tie lashed against her face, stinging. Shen Qing lifted her hand and yanked it off.
His black hair spilled loose like a bolt of dark moonlit silk: soft and smooth, threaded with the faint scent of grass and wood.
Shen Qing buried her face in the hollow of his neck and drew in a shallow breath, letting his hair drown her.
She heard a low chuckle. “What sort of habit is that?” he murmured.
She shot back, “None of your business.”
His hair was soft and fluffy, the texture like a puppy’s sleek fur under her fingers, and she stroked it a few more times.
Then, lulled by the night wind, she slowly drifted off to sleep on his shoulder.
Just before everything blurred, she seemed to hear someone say, “Don’t ever…”