At the sound of that voice — ethereal, crystalline, refined to so impossible clarity — Song Qingshu drifted open his eyes. The Heavenly Devil Flower’s poison had ravaged his sight; all he could make out was the blurred outline of a woman in white standing nearby. Perhaps it was simply his mind playing tricks on him, but she seed to have stepped out of cloud and mist, like a celestial maiden descended from the highest heavens.
Song Qingshu couldn’t help but laugh. “I always assud a man as fond of beauty and pleasure as myself would go straight to the eighteenth level of Hell. I never imagined a celestial maiden would co to escort
to Paradise instead.”
The woman in white pressed a hand to her forehead in what appeared to be profound exasperation. Song Qingshu felt a flicker of genuine amusent. So even celestial maidens aren’t entirely without feeling, he thought. I’d better put all my accumulated talents to good use and win the heart of this heavenly sister — otherwise things could beco uncomfortable in the afterlife.
Seeing his mouth open again as though more words were about to spill out, the woman finally let a note of irritation enter her voice. “You’ve been gravely poisoned. Stop talking and wasting your strength.”
“Since the celestial sister commands
to be silent, I shall be silent,” Song Qingshu murmured. The Heavenly Devil Flower had blurred the line between what was real and what was not.
Seeing that he was still, however faintly, conscious, the woman in white furrowed her brows and knelt beside him, lifting his head gently into her lap. She drew a small porcelain vial from within her robe, and a thread of amber liquid, crystalline and translucent, flowed slowly into his mouth.
“So sweet… is this the celestial nectar of the immortal realm…?” Song Qingshu murmured, smacking his lips.
The woman in white recoiled as though she had touched a fla, snatching her fingers back. Song Qingshu, in his stupor, had latched onto the mouth of the vial like an infant at the breast — and in doing so had managed to close his lips around her fingers.
She shot him an indignant glare, then straightened him into a sitting position and pressed her fingers against several vital acupoints along his back. Pure, refined inner energy began to flow steadily into his body.
After roughly the ti it takes to burn a stick of incense, Song Qingshu opened his eyes again. The cloudiness drained from his gaze and clarity returned. When he finally saw the face of the woman beside him — that face of absolute, otherworldly beauty — he gasped aloud:
“Little martial sister — why is it you?”
Before him stood a woman wrapped in white as light as gauze, as though she existed sowhere between smoke and mist. The pale moonlight fell across her face, illuminating features of a beauty that had no equal in the mundane world. Who else could it be but Xiao Longnu?
“I am not the nine-heavens fairy you were imagining.” Xiao Longnu spoke quietly, though at the corners of her brows, the faintest trace of sothing — not quite a smile, but its shadow — stirred. “Are you disappointed?”
Song Qingshu’s face coloured. He still had a hazy impression of the spectacle he had just made of himself, but his skin was thick enough to weather it. He smiled. “Disappointed? How could I be? Little martial sister is far lovelier than any nine-heavens fairy.”
“Still slick-tongued, even with death at your door.” Xiao Longnu’s brow furrowed slightly — she was plainly unaccustod to such direct praise. “I just fed you Jade Bee Royal Jelly, and channelled my inner energy to support it. Even so, I cannot purge the poison from your body. I can only slow its advance. Before long, you will…”
“To have a mont of clarity, to see this beautiful world one last ti — and to et you before the end.” Song Qingshu had long anticipated this answer. He would have been almost offended had the Heavenly Devil Flower’s venom, so famously declared incurable in the original tale, yielded to a simple redy. “I’m content.”
“You take it calmly.” Xiao Longnu replied, flat and brief, and said no more. She had always been this way — when old Granny Sun, who had raised her from childhood, died before her very eyes, not a ripple had crossed her face. Song Qingshu was hardly likely to stir more.
Now it was Song Qingshu’s turn to feel aggrieved. “Co now — given our history, couldn’t you offer
a word or two of comfort? Then I could put on a graceful, unbothered air and declare that I’ve made my peace with life and death. That’s how these scenes are supposed to go.”
“What history do we have?” For reasons she could not quite na, Xiao Longnu suddenly recalled that mont in the Ancient Tomb — the two of them entwined, unclothed, skin against skin. Even her habitual composure could not entirely hold; a flash of sothing — sha, or anger, or both — crossed her face.
Song Qingshu caught the faint bloom of rose-pink that crept across that jade-white cheek, and was briefly struck speechless. Xiao Longnu was matchless in her beauty at the best of tis, but with that delicate flush of colour, she was devastatingly, ruinously lovely.
“Suddenly I’m rather reluctant to die,” he said softly. The thought that death would an never again beholding such a sight was, in its way, more than he could bear.
“Everyone dies in the end,” Xiao Longnu replied, having recovered herself. “Whether sooner or later makes no real difference.”
“Right, please — don’t comfort
anymore. The way you do it only makes things worse.” Song Qingshu could not suppress a bitter laugh.
“Oh.” Xiao Longnu acknowledged this, and — true to her nature — promptly said nothing further.
Three-nothing girl to the last, he thought. Song Qingshu was, at heart, a man who liked company; he had no wish to die in such bleak silence. “How did you co to be here?” he asked at last.
“I was already here,” Xiao Longnu said, the faintest warmth touching her expression. “You simply didn’t notice .” This was not, strictly speaking, the full truth. She had indeed been resting in this cave — further in, in a deeper recess — when Song Qingshu blundered through the entrance. Disoriented as he was, he had neither expected to find anyone in such a remote wilderness, nor possessed the energy to search the full depth of the cave.
Xiao Longnu had woken the instant he entered. Upon recognising him, her expression had passed through a series of stages that would have been remarkable to witness. Because of what had happened between them in the Ancient Tomb, she had no desire to face him again; she had gone very still and hidden herself in the shadows. With his inner energy all but extinguished, Song Qingshu had no ans of sensing her presence.
She had told herself at first that he had simply stumbled in by chance and would soon be gone — patient as she had always been, she waited. But as she watched, she began to notice that sothing was deeply wrong with him. Once she understood he was dying of poison, she could conceal herself no longer.
She would not let a man die before her eyes — not even him. He was her sister’s husband. And he had saved her life more than once.
It was only a pity that even her full effort could do no more than delay the inevitable.
“I see.” Song Qingshu was about to say more when voices broke in from beyond the cave entrance.
“There’s a cave here! The Song fellow could easily be hiding inside — everyone, go in and search!”
Xiao Longnu turned to him with a startled look. “These n are hunting you?”
Song Qingshu gave a rueful nod. There had been a ti when he had moved through an army of a million soldiers and taken a general’s head as easily as plucking a leaf. Now here he was, cornered by common foot soldiers with nowhere to turn. A tiger brought low to the flatlands, harassed by dogs.
A group of soldiers poured into the cave. When they spotted Song Qingshu, their eyes lit up — his head was worth ten thousand taels of gold and three steps of promotion.
But when they saw the woman beside him, the noise of the cave died all at once.
Every man present had the sa thought rise unbidden in his mind:
How can there be such a woman in this world?
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