Chapter 69: Old age must not be met in the mortal world (VI)

The yowls of cats and the cries of dogs drove away the depths of night; the pale dawn light seeped faintly through the sky; the group returned to the small residence from Mount Jinyun, the groaning and creaking, old-fashioned building's stairs moving heavily, rising and falling as it met those arriving back, and only then was willing to fall asleep.

The moonlight was covered up partway by the curtains, and it was as if there was a supernatural spotlight, striking the lustrous white calves; Li Shiyi sat at the bedside with crossed legs, watching Song Shijiu wrap the wounds on her ankles with loop after loop of bandages with lowered brows. The young lady's fingertips were more teasing than feathers, softly and pricklingly stroking her ankles, the protruding bones' desire provoked, and the shallowly indented pit bore the weight of the surplus tenderness. Li Shiyi's gaze rose, moving over Song Shijiu's face; she couldn't remember when the last time she herself had been cared for was. A Yin wouldn't be unwilling to get angry because of an injury as small as this, and shifu, even more, wouldn't not look at it directly; there was only Song Shijiu who, with her hair looking larger than the sky, earnestly bit her lip meticulously without one thread loose.

It seemed as if she wasn't the same woman who, the night before, had abandoned all restraint in unfulfilled desire.

The back of Li Shiyi's ears heated slightly, but she oddly felt that this fanciful emotional thing gained a shape in the advance and retreat of the tips of Song Shijiu's fingers; when possessing, close, and when comforting, withdrawing, like the first dance she'd learned, clumsy yet causing one to be charmed. In the decades Li Shiyi had walked, there were people who had been infatuated by her, and people who had invested in her, and even people who had disregarded their lives to sacrifice for her, but there was no one who, like Song Shijiu, loved her dearly like this. Liking she could skip over, sacrifice she could repay; only this cherishing often caused her to be at a loss for what to do.

So, she pulled Song Shijiu's hand up, and said quietly, "It's fine." She wasn't an argumentative woman, but she had, intentionally or not, caused Song Shijiu to loop a couple extra loops; her indulgence was just in these extra loops, and was absolutely not greedy.

Song Shijiu allowed her to tug her hand, her gaze still on the gauze, and she suddenly said, "If in the past I wasn't well, you would absolutely forgive me."

"What?" Li Shiyi pressed her lips together.

Song Shijiu's brows furrowed in a rare occurrence; she had a hard time expressing this anxious fright, but she also didn't want to be restrained in front of Li Shiyi. and she exhaled a small breath, raising her eyes to say, "It's that I feel like today's matters have something to do with me." For the past few days, she'd been dreaming, seeing in her dreams Xia Ji saying—Jiu-daren smiled.

Jiu-daren smiled as she looked at Xia Ji, ruthlessly returning the years stripped from her in double.

Then, what sort of person was she? Heartless? Ruthlessly severe? Reckless and wild? Or unreasonable?

Regardless of what sort, they all were unimaginable to Song Shijiu. She was like an invalid who was suffering from amnesia; not having the choice to avoid, nor the ability to avoid, about to confront her previous life.

Li Shiyi thought for a moment, and then smiled with indistinct dimples. "Then how would you like to apologise?"

Song Shijiu was stunned, her large almond eyes staring at her, the white and black distinct. Li Shiyi's face didn't have any surplus expression, and she only indifferently said, "A Luo said to me that when the flowers in the Yellow Springs didn't open too well, Ling Heng would also frequently not be revitalised. And then the ghost officials who tended the flowers would offer up the most magnificent flowers to come and apologise. Tell me, when apologising, what was it they would say?"

"What would they say?"

Li Shiyi raised her eyes to look directly at her, her lips twitching, the four soundless characters in her profound eyes. "The Lord may choose as you please."

Song Shijiu's eyes widened, her face even more flushed than the flowers in Li Shiyi's words.

Li Shiyi tucked her reaction away, and then laughed, her nostrils flaring, and shook her head. "In truth, I also don't know." With neither hurried nor slow words she consoled Song Shijiu. "The common saying goes: what was planted yesterday dies yesterday; what is planted today lives today. I'm me, not Ling Heng. You're Shijiu, not anyone else either."

Song Shijiu, in the midst of her words, gradually claimed, her head lowering to pillow on her knee, her long hair pouring down in streams, swaying and winding as it brushed against the calves of her beloved.

They'd stayed up for a long time, and any more tired and they wouldn't be able to sleep; the sound of tipsy people floated up in a rustling from downstairs; A Yin and Wu Qian, with lowered voices, were playing finger-guessing, going around in a hubbub of gambling for a while, not confining themselves to winning or losing anymore, each holding and pouring from a wine pot. A Yin shuffled in her slippers and sat down by the door, gazing at Wu Qian, who had returned from relieving himself, and, thinking of Li Shiyi's instructions from before, suddenly became interested. "I say, your dragon's decoction^[1] is effective this quickly; is it the urine of a boy?"^[2]

Wu Qian was startled, and only after a long while did he raise his skirts and sit down, feeling that in the dead of night, A Yin's voice was really quite loud, and he awkwardly furrowed his brows, only then saying, "It's not."

"It's not?" A Yin was astonished, and took measure of him. "There's a story."

Wu Qian shook his head. "There isn't any story. In the Song dynasty, I met a woman, Xiu Niang, whose needlework was incredibly beautiful; the right side of her face had a dimple." He lowered his head, still looking unremarkable. He had said there wasn't a story, but when mentioning that person, his teeth couldn't help but strike out a few characters.

"And after that?" A Yin's character was pressing, and she could never help but add on a couple phrases.

Wu Qian once more aptly paused for a bit, and said, "She caught the attention of a great family in the city, and wanted me to marry her; I was honest to her about my identity; she knew I was a ghostly official, and she assumed that if she entered the Yellow Springs early, we could stay together forever, so she drank poison."

A Yin drew in a chilly breath; Wu Qian licked his lips, his right hand indifferently scratching at the dry skin on his left hand's index finger.

"Her becoming a ghost, wouldn't that be good?" Now, Wu Qian was all alone in the world; one didn't have to think carefully to know the result; A Yin, looking at him, couldn't help but have a degree of pity in her expression.

Wu Qian shook his head without speaking; A Yin pressed on, asking, "You and A Luo have a friendship; come to think of it, Ling Heng also regarded you highly; wanting to marry a minor ghost really wasn't possible?"

Wu Qian lowered his head. "Above Futi-daren is Fujun-daren, and above Fujun-daren is the archive registry." Beneath the primal chaos were dying, unaging gods; the gods controlled the three realms of people, ghosts, and beasts. Nüwa and Fuxi controlled the human realm, the ghost Lord Ling Heng controlled the spirit realm; restricting the two realms of mortal and ghost was the archive registry. "In the archive registry, it's written that the human race is born, grows old, gets sick, and dies; once they reach the end of the book, they can return to Mount Tai; if, without authority, a ghost changes a person's time of death, and turn a person into a ghost, then they've crossed a boundary.

"She was originally meant to be married into Master Zhao's family as a concubine, and give birth to three sons and a daughter, enjoying thirty-six years of riches and honour; yet because of me, she met death early. The archive registry judged her," Wu Qian's jaw twitched, and he said, "as Mount Tai's seat has no prison, she was chosen to be ground for two-hundred seventy-eight years, and once her love, hatred, anger, and sentimentality was ground up, she then entered the wheel of reincarnation."

A Yin's heart groaned as it moved, as if hearing the sound of a grindstone turning; that grinding harnessed the flow of her meridians, crushing her ribs, crushing the minute hope in her heart to scattered fragments. She breathed, nostrils fluttering a few times, her spirit not returning for a while. Her expression had some absentmindedness as she muttered quietly, "The, what about you?" Then, what of the ghost official of Mount Tai's seat?

"I was stripped of my face," Wu Qian replied.

A Yin's eyes widened, her peach blossom eyes drawn and trembling with fear.

"Originally, my appearance wasn't this one; after I was stripped of my face, only a face that didn't incite any impression in people remained; ordinary people, on meeting me, won't be able to remember it; when she met me, she couldn't remember either." Wu Qian grinned, and continued, "If you close your eyes now, would you know if my face is round or square, if my eyelids are mono-lidded or double-lidded?"

Wu Qian rarely spoke this much. From the time his appearance was covered up, his remaining feelings all disappeared; his speech increasingly become less, now, when he spoke, it was bumpy and undulating, character after character jumping towards A Yin's ears, disturbing such that they made a buzzing sound in her head, no matter how they were linked not able to be assembled together. She couldn't help but shift her gaze, placing it on the flagstones, striving the think, yet her mind didn't have any image of Wu Qian. Her mind was astonished, and she suddenly turned to look at him. It was as if she wanted to remember his features, refusing to concede defeat.

Wu Qian's average features quivered faintly, and he laughed silently; when he laughed, there wasn't the liveliness of others, only lifeless tree bark. A Yin's brows furrowed and twisted with fear; it wasn't clear what she was thinking, her shoulders shaking slightly.

The second day, the beating sun was suspended high, yet when it fell to the ground, none of the warmth remained; A Yin seemed to not have regained her own spirit from last night's shock, and it was only when she came to the jangle of the instruments of the glutinous rice sesame candy sellers that it returned. Feeling rather novel, she walked at the front; an old man carried a basket on his back, one hand holding a bent steel plate, the other holding a hammer and striking upwards; seeing he'd attracted customers, he attentively took off the basket on his back, and brushed away the candy papers that were covering the top, revealing a great loaf of milky white sweet cake.

A Yin bent over, gazing at the sweet scent spreading from the sweet piece, and was just hesitating, when she heard another man say, "Give me one."

A Ping leaned over, smiling at her; he still wore the slightly wrinkled Western attire of that day. The old man replied with jubilation, the percussive instrument in his hand acting as a spade, working with the small hammer to gently strike a small piece off of the white candy, wrapped in brittle bubbles, the turn of the wintery chill of the steel making it even colder. A Yin swept a glance across the old man's hands, chapped in the chill of the late autumn. and said, "Just these, go on and wrapp them up."

The old man wrapped the candy up in newsprint, folding it into a square and passing it over; only on receiving A Ping's money did he put the basket back on his back and continue walking the streets and alleys.

"Do you want coffee?" A Ping asked.

The coffeeshop wasn't warm in the slightest, and it seemed as it it was a bit colder than the outdoors; the south was always like this; when the weather was cold, there wasn't any difference within and without the indoors; A Yin missed the heated beds of the north, always hot enough that a person's face was bright red.

A Ping's words were as trivial as before; he spoke over and over about various experiences, as if wanting to cram full the differences between himself and A Yin of all these years; A Yin gazed at his mouth, and suddenly felt that this insipid experience wasn't half bad; it was the exit of his speech, yet it seemed to be an entrance to an entirely different world; that world didn't have any fantastic anecdotes, not the slightest bit of uninhibited ups and downs, only existing in the relations that this man couldn't even elegantly speak.

She'd met far too many men; naturally, she understood the reason for A Ping patiently telling her all of this; she even could see, in his eyes, an excitement at having lost and regained and having his wishes fulfilled. But what distracted her was that she understood far too well why she, herself, was spending this time listening to him speak of these boring things.

The exhausted stirring and yearning in her heart were haunting her; she began to comb through her shambling, collapsing life; from when she was six, she began to lead a wandering existence, and forever didn't know where she'd pass her next year; yet A Ping could cause her to see the full of it in one glance, see a courtyard and three meals, even children running around parents' knees.

A Yin had, in the past, loved Li Shiyi, who had no fixed residence; afterwards, she had gotten tangled up in A Luo, who was as different as could be; now, she fast a commonality like a cup of warm water.

A Ping, speaking, had gotten a bit warm, and fine beads of sweat seeped from his forehead; he pulled out a handkerchief, wiping at it, then put it away, and finally began to ask A Yin: "What was your purpose for coming here, then?"

A Yin's gaze flickered about lazily, her shoulders crooked as she leaned against the back of the sofa, and carelessly said, "Originally, I wanted to ascend Mount Jinyun and look for something."

"Mount Jinyun?" A Ping's expression suddenly changed.

"What is it?" A Yin looked at him askance.

A Ping wiped at the sweat once more. "I went to this mounting two years ago; it's truly extraordinary."

A Yin furrowed her brows; Li Shiyi had been ambushed; him, lacking the strength to even truss up a chicken, had unexpectedly come down from that mountain?

A Ping said, "Two years ago, when I'd just come to Chongqing, I rested at the foot of Mount Jiyun; one day, I entered an old tomb in that mountain, and unexpectedly, in a split second, the sky spun and the earth turned, and I fainted; when I woke, I was laying outside the cave, and I hurriedly left the mountain, and haven't returned since."

"An old tomb?" A Yin repeated.

"Yes," A Ping nodded, recalling, "on the southwest side of Mount Jinyun, not far above the foot of the mountain."

A Yin bit her lip, considering a few moments, then rose and picked up her overcoat, her hand brushing a few silver coins in her bag and setting them on the table, and availed herself of A Ping not having yet opened his mouth to stop his words. "You paid for the candy; I'll pay for the coffee. Many thanks." She raised her brows, and walked away slowly and proudly on her heels.

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Translator's notes:

[1]: 回龙汤 (huilongtang); human urine.

[2]: The urine of boys under twelve is used in traditional Chinese medicine.