Chapter 248: Up and Down
Chapter 248: Up and Down
Translator: Transn Editor: Transn
Standing by the edge of Ghost Cliff, Gu Shenwei managed to get his head together with much difficulty and began to practice the seventh chapter of Wayless Qigong.
The chill within his body, nevertheless, did not abate as a result. Instead, the rapid circulation of Genuine Qi in his meridians caused a frigid pain. Gu Shenwei clenched his teeth and endured for some time, but was finally unable to hold on any longer and fell headlong on the ground.
When he woke up, he saw Maid Lotus kneeling beside him while wiping sweat off him using a silk handkerchief. Her hair was somewhat messy and she looked deeply concerned, as if she was in as much pain as him.
"I'll let you die now if you beg me to," Maid Lotus said in a soft and soothing voice. Her other hand was clutching her sword shaft.
Gu Shenwei felt that his nasal passages were finally clear once again. He forcefully inhaled the chilly air of the peak such that his chest began to undulate violently. However, his mind was still in a numb and dazed state, and thereby the girl in front of him was a stranger. He gawked at her and understood neither the reason why she was sad nor the meaning of her words.
As his memory gradually recovered, the young girl's face turned indifferent, as if the earlier scene was just his hallucination. He would "rather die" than beg her for anything.
"Have you killed her?"
Maid Lotus took out Luo Ningcha's ring and tossed it off the cliff. "She was struck by my throwing knife. It now depends on her luck."
This was the reason why concealed weapons and crossbows were not valued by killers. Because of their long distance, it was impossible to tell whether the target stayed alive or died. Accidents happened all the time. But there were too many guards beside Luo Ningcha, and thus Maid Lotus did not want to take the risk of rushing in.
Gu Shenwei was unconcerned about that woman's death or otherwise. The chill was becoming increasingly severe, and a giant block of ice seemed to have formed in his abdomen. He tried to conceal his pain but his body began to tremble involuntarily. He had suffered a qigong deviation because of his inverse practice of the seventh chapter of Wayless Qigong. He subsequently sought to rectify this through the standard practice, but the result was contrary to what he wanted.
Maid Lotus hesitated for a while before she held him in her arms. She knew very little kung fu and did not know how to transmit Internal Breath to relieve his pain, and thereby could only use her body temperature to help reduce his chill.
A solitary deep horn was heard. As the Golden Roc killers mostly communicated through whistles, this was the first time Gu Shenwei heard a sound like this in Stone Castle.
"They're coming." Maid Lotus turned her head towards the castle.
What the two young killers did not know was that the horn was Stone Castle's highest level alert. This was the first time it had been sounded in the castle since Shangguan Fa became the Supreme King. Even the black-masked assassins who were hiding in the deepest places were summoned towards the designated location to await orders.
"I'm sorry, I may not be able to withstand the qigong deviation." Gu Shenwei too looked towards the castle, his emotions stirring. For no reason, he thought back to a day three years ago when he was riding a pony near his manor, so excitedly chasing after the hares and birds that he forgot the time. As the sun began to set, he peered at the silhouette of his manor and felt that his home was distant and unreal. Yet, his heart was filled with a strange sense of affinity as a result.
"Nobody can kill you except me." Maid Lotus' tone became cold and flat, and she seemed to have made up her mind. She drew the Golden Roc Fort saber and threw it off the cliff. Next, she pulled out Gu Shenwei's "Yun" sword and stuck it in the ground. "This is for killing you." Finally, she grasped her own "Huan" sword. "And this is for killing them and myself."
A large group of killers would be surging towards them any time now. They had nowhere left to run.
"It isn't worth it to die like this after all that trouble stealing Wayless Book."
"I've delivered it already. Sooner or later, New Moon Hall will invade Stone Castle to take revenge for me as well as for you."
Gu Shenwei's enemy was not Golden Roc Fort, but he did not say anything further. This was a delicate moment when there was no enmity, and instead only an inexplicable compassion and a tacit understanding, between the killing side and the killed one.
The Golden Roc killers did not immediately arrive, and thus Maid Lotus had time to shift Gu Shenwei under a tree beside which she guarded. She suddenly asked without cause, "Why are you called Gu Shenwei? It's such an odd name."
Gu Shenwei remained dazed for some time as he thought, before replying, "It came from a line in an ancient text. 'A gentleman should be cautious of doing (shen wei) good, for doing good naturally garners fame, which naturally creates personal benefits, which naturally causes disputes.'"
"'Do good with caution'? It turns out that your father intended for you to never do good things from the time he came up with this name."
Gu Shenwei laughed and did not explain further that the meaning of the line was not what she thought it was. As a matter of fact, he did not quite like the name himself, but his father considered it to be highly appropriate.
"How about yourself? What's the saying behind the name 'Huo Yun'?"
"Nothing. It's a very common name."
The duo was chatting casually when the gate of Firewood Yard suddenly opened, and out ran someone who looked in all directions but did not see the two killers behind the tree and thus had no choice but to shout loudly, "Yang Huan! Are you here?"
Surprisingly, it was Xu Yanwei. Gu Shenwei had initially intended to secretly send her to Stone Castle to meet Xu Xiaoyi but eventually forgot about it.
"I'm over here."
Gu Shenwei stood up and waved his hands while Maid Lotus leaped up the tree and hid. As before, she was responsible for covertly protecting Gu Shenwei when he was meeting someone.
Xu Yanwei frantically hurried over, and did not stop to knock the dust off when she fell down on the way. She reached the tree in a few steps and handed a cloth bundle to Gu Shenwei, her cheeks flushed and her breathing difficult. "Tenth Young Master gives this to you and Maid Lotus."
Gu Shenwei opened the bundle astoundedly. Inside were two sets of black clothes, a waist token with the highest-level inscription "Du", and a few disguise tools. "She... how did you know I'm here?"
Xu Yanwei shook her head and inhaled a deep breath before explaining incoherently, "Tenth Young Master passed these to me last night. She said that you two might still be in Stone Castle, but because she was being watched closely, that I should hand them to you on her behalf. Everyone has been talking about you two since the attack on her. I heard the killers saying that they're ready to surround Firewood Yard, and so quickly ran here with her waist token in hopes that I'm still in time."
Gu Shenwei was a little touched. She was undoubtedly taking a bold risk to run here at this critical point in time, and it was extremely rare for her to do something like this, even if her actions would come to nothing for it was impossible to deceive the killers or to save his life.
As he neared death, he became somewhat more emotional than usual.
"Your younger brother..." Gu Shenwei wanted to tell her about Xu Xiaoyi's whereabouts so that the siblings could reunite, but it was too late. The assassins in black came pouring out of Firewood Yard one after another.
They were not in a hurry to catch their prey. Instead, they fanned out and surrounded the youth.
"Is Miss Ru dead?"
"Not yet, but her injury is serious." Xu Yanwei's voice began to quiver. She had already exhausted her courage, and was thereby frightened out of her wits, like a mouse among a destruction of cats, as she faced the dozens of killers who remained in grave silence.
"Go find her. If she isn't dead, beg her to protect you. And remember this: she needs you."
Xu Yanwei did not know whether she would remain alive to see the mistress, or even why she ran all the way here only to cause trouble for herself. She walked towards the people in black with her body as if already fallen into pieces, such that before every step she took, she had to reassemble her limbs, bones, and viscera.
Treating the frightened girl as if she was invisible, the killers watched apathetically as she walked towards them with her body tottering and close to collapse. But when she reached the gate of Firewood Yard, one of them pressed on her shoulders, causing her body to buckle and fall on to him at once.
Gu Shenwei took backward steps until he neared the edge of the cliff, while at the same time, more and more killers continued to join the surround. He had never seen so many men in black appear together like this before. Every one of them kept silent, as if their sole purpose for being here was to form a human wall.
Blademaster Shen Liang walked out from among the crowd with a smile on his face. This was his victory. The impact of Slave Huan's arrival was greater than he had imagined. The wrath of the Supreme King would deal a heavy blow to Lady Meng, who was so greedy that she wanted to concentrate all power in her hands. She absolutely would not have thought that she would fall out of favor because of a young killer.
Gu Shenwei was slightly disappointed that Shangguan Fa did not show up in person. Moreover, he thought that Shen Liang would say a few words, whether to reprimand or to humiliate him, but instead nothing was heard. The veteran blademaster would by no means waste his breath on an ordinary killer.
Gu Shenwei had several things to talk about himself - his real identity, his deepest hatred, and to curse viciously, as was a common thing to do. But his many years of training as a killer eventually prevailed. Spreading his arms, he decided that he had no need to speak.
Speaking might make one feel cathartic, but the satisfaction it provided was illusory and unreal. Even if he verbally vilified Golden Roc Fort and the Shangguan family with all the righteous indignation in the world, his words would just be empty rhetoric with no effect whatsoever.
There was nothing strange about the fact that some people succeeded at taking revenge while others failed.
Within the six great divisions in the wheel of karma, there was never enough to kill, and also never enough to hate. He considered himself to have done something world breaking by destroying the enemy who killed his family, but it was in actual fact nothing more than a regular activity in Golden Roc Fort, and it left no impression on the Supreme King at all.
He raised his head and looked at Maid Lotus who was hiding in the tree above. This peculiar girl had pulled out all the stops to make him undergo qigong deviation and die, yet at the final moment staked everything on a "Huan" sword to preserve the last vestiges of his life. This showed that hatred was just one of the seven emotions and six sensory pleasures, and that even the strongest of hatreds could not control a person's entire heart. There would always be other emotions hiding in the recesses of one's heart which could surge up powerfully at any given time.
He subsequently lowered his head and looked towards the bottom of the cliff, only to see two men in black clinging on to the cliff wall. The killers had to set up an escape-proof net because the Supreme King wanted to catch him alive.
Once they realized they had been discovered, the two killers leaped back on to the top of the cliff and grabbed hold of the resistance-less youth.
Maid Lotus swooped down from the tree unhesitatingly the moment she turned her head and saw what was going on.
With two clean strikes of her sword, Maid Lotus performed her first openly-seen killings. This was also the first time the swordcraft from Death Scripture was witnessed by living but unknowing people. Her name would be forever remembered by every Golden Roc killer from this moment onwards.
The smile disappeared from Shen Liang's face. He certainly had to comply with the Lord's orders to capture the youth alive. Nine out of ten times, the two highly-experienced killers who hid on the cliff wall would have done the job. But with this girl and this swordcraft...
Maid Lotus pulled the "Huan" sword out of the ground using her left hand and looked at the youth who was standing by the cliff. This was not her ideal ending, but an even better one than that.
There was a smile on Gu Shenwei's face. At this point, he felt that this was the final smile of his life, and that no person or thing would interest him henceforth.
Aside from the Wayless Book in his arms and the Death Scripture in his heart, he possessed nothing in Stone Castle and therefore had nothing to lose. Furthermore, he had nothing left to want from people and therefore had no more debts to repay.
The youth inclined his body and fell into the abyss.
The "Huan" sword in Maid Lotus' hand had been an inch away from his body but did not pierce into him after all. A moment later, she too made the jump.
"No!" Shen Liang bellowed.
The crowd of killers did not remain expressionless this time. Having failed to complete their Lord's orders for a live capture, an ominous panic began to grow in their and the blademaster's hearts.
They ran towards the edge of the cliff, when all of a sudden, a gale began to sweep up sand and stones all around them. Everyone halted their footsteps involuntarily and used their hands to protect their eyes as they witnessed an unbelievable sight: a giant black bird soared high into the sky and entered the clouds, and on its back kneeling on one leg was the youth, expressionless.
Many years later, people would still remember this scene, and would even consider it to be an omen of all turbulent events and killings. At this time, however, it was only a fleeting spectacle, and the killers standing at the back did not even get to see it for themselves.
"Look, there's a rope!" A killer exclaimed.
Indeed, a fine rope was tied around the tree next to the cliff, while its other end dangled towards the bottom of the cliff.
The two young killers had escaped from Stone Castle, one after the other.
(End of Volume I)
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