Chapter 24: Licking Blood

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Ye Minwei and Wen Ci gazed at each other in silence. The carriage rocked and jolted along, and the only sound around them was the rumble of its wheels.

Swaying with the carriage, Ye Minwei’s gray-black eyes were filled with confusion, as though veiled by mist. She tilted her head and pointed at herself.

“I drank your blood for thirty years?”

Wen Ci gave a languid nod. “Mm.”

Ye Minwei leaned toward him. Then she suddenly reached out and touched the wound that was about to heal. Pressing hard beneath the veins that still glimmered with blue light, she made the wound split open again. Blood instantly gushed out, covering her fingers.

Wen Ci hissed in pain and slapped her hand away.

“Ah! Ye Minwei, what the hell are you doing?”

Unmoved, Ye Minwei brought her bloodstained fingers to her lips and extended her tongue to lick them once.

Wen Ci stared.

She frowned, apparently unsatisfied. Then she extended her tongue again and carefully licked every trace of blood from between her fingers. Her crimson tongue swept over her rounded fingertips, and the blood smeared across her pearly teeth, luridly vivid.

Wen Ci’s pupils contracted. He clenched his fists and turned his head away.

“It tastes awful,” Ye Minwei concluded with certainty.

“…”

She savored the taste in her mouth, licked the blood from the corner of her lips, and asked in genuine puzzlement, “If it tastes so terrible, why would I drink it for thirty years?”

Wen Ci still refused to look at her. Enunciating every word, he said, “You’re sick.”

Ye Minwei took him literally and pressed on. “Can your blood cure my illness?”

“That’s right.”

“What illness do I have?”

“Your brain is the real problem—hard as a block of wood on the outside and stuffed with pig’s brains inside!”

Ye Minwei held Wen Ci’s face and turned his head toward her. “Look at me.”

His face had been forced around, but his eyes refused to follow. He stared fixedly at the swaying curtain beside the window. He felt Ye Minwei lean toward him again, her face drawing extremely close. From the corner of his eye, he could even see her white hair falling beside him.

Irritation roughened Wen Ci’s voice. “If you can’t see clearly, put on your vision stone. And stop getting so close to me…”

“Wen Ci, have we ever been intimate?”

Ye Minwei’s words struck like a thunderbolt.

Wen Ci’s eyes flew wide. He turned his gaze toward her at once, meeting her clear and innocent eyes head-on.

At that moment, Xie Yuzhu was sitting in the carriage behind them, lifting the curtain to look toward the carriage ahead.

The carriage jolted along a forest path beneath the moonlight. Leaning against the doorframe, she turned her head and asked anxiously of the person inside, “Do you think I was right or wrong to ask First Master to look after Second Master? They won’t start arguing, will they? They won’t start fighting, will they?”

Cangzhu sat inside with his hands tucked into his sleeves and replied leisurely, “No. They’re having a pleasant conversation.”

Xie Yuzhu grew curious and leaned closer. “Did you calculate that, Master Cangzhu? Could you teach me fortune-telling?”

Xie Yuzhu was once again displaying her fondness for taking on as many teachers as possible. She had barely begun learning anything, yet already she had found something new she wanted to study.

Cangzhu answered without the slightest hurry, “You may. But in my profession, an inaccurate prediction is useless, while an accurate one inevitably leads to a hard life, a ruined family, death, and homelessness. Knowing that, do you still wish to learn?”

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“…Forget it, forget it. One who bites off more than she can chew will choke. I still haven’t fully mastered the silk-thread box.”

That afternoon, Xie Yuzhu had finally made up her mind and declared that she wanted to use the silk-thread box. First Master had immediately drawn her a diagram, and Xie Yuzhu had just as promptly responded that she could not understand it.

While caring for Wen Ci that afternoon, First Master had drawn her three more diagrams. Xie Yuzhu had not understood a single one. First Master had explained for half an hour, and she had understood none of it. Discouraged, Xie Yuzhu could only feel that her mind truly was too dull, that she would never grasp the point, and that she was unfit to become a disciple of the Sect of All Things.

In the end, she gave up trying to understand how the silk-thread box worked on the inside. Under Ye Minwei’s hands-on instruction, she barely managed to attach the main thread, transform the clay figures into human shapes, and control them awkwardly.

There were only two of them, and at a glance it was obvious that neither looked like a normal person.

“How is First Master’s brain even made? This thing is so complicated to use—how did she design it? How do those spirit channels work? Spirit reservoirs, spirit surges, spirit plugs, spirit transformations… I don’t understand any of it.”

“Come to think of it, First Master knows a great many things. Back when we were at the Moon-Picking House, I often saw her reading books while doing her accounts. I used to wonder how anyone could read and calculate at the same time. The pages would be turning so fast they went flutter-flutter, and she read at an astonishing speed. The Book of Changes, The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art, The Exploitation of the Works of Nature… Oh, I even saw First Master reading The Spring Palace Illustrations…”

Xie Yuzhu propped up her chin and clicked her tongue in amazement. “I thought that anyone who had lived as long as First Master would have seen through the mortal world and severed all attachment and desire. I never imagined she’d be interested in books like that. I suppose becoming a grandmaster really does require gathering knowledge from every source.”

Meanwhile, in the carriage ahead, Wen Ci stared at Ye Minwei’s eyes for a long while before saying, “How did you… know?”

Ye Minwei made a small gesture with her hand. “I once read a book that said when people engage in intimate relations, they bite and lick each other’s blood to heighten the pleasure. Is that why I drank your blood?”

A vein throbbed on Wen Ci’s forehead. He shoved Ye Minwei away and sat up, furious.

“Damn it! What kind of filthy nonsense have you been reading?”

“But you just said we’ve been intimate.”

“…Yes. So what?”

Wen Ci answered righteously. After a pause, he gave a light laugh. “At the time, I looked no older than a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy from the Central Plains. You still had the heart to lay hands on me. You’re truly despicable.”

Ye Minwei looked surprised. “So I was the one who took the initiative? Did I seduce you, deceive you, or force you?”

As she spoke, she moved closer. Wen Ci kept retreating until his back struck the carriage wall. He shifted his gaze away uneasily.

“That’s right,” he replied.

She braced one hand beside him and looked up at him, her expression filled with innocent confusion.

“Then why didn’t you resist?”

The question struck the heart of the matter. Wen Ci wanted to say something but could not. In the end, he could only grit his teeth.

“Ye Minwei!”

When he failed to answer, Ye Minwei simply reached out with both hands and wrapped them around his neck. Just as the boy in her dream had once embraced her, she gradually tightened her arms until her body fit perfectly against his. Beneath her arms, she could feel the powerful pulse in his neck.

Wen Ci’s eyes flew open. For a moment, he forgot to stop her.

Ye Minwei calmly pressed her face against his still-burning cheek. Her hair brushed against his ear. After remaining silent for a moment, she lifted her head and looked at him.

“You’re very warm. It feels rather nice. Shall we try it again?”

Wen Ci’s face went deathly pale, and the flush at the roots of his ears vanished completely.

He suddenly turned them over and pinned Ye Minwei beneath him on the couch. His wound split open again with the movement, and drops of blood fell onto the snowy whiteness of her robe, spreading into a crimson stain.

Wen Ci bent down to look at her. Driven to the brink of fury, he laughed instead. Color rose across his pale face, making him breathtakingly beautiful.

“Haha. Try it? Again with ‘try it.’ Ye Minwei, what do you take me for? Some object you can experiment with whenever you feel like it, then discard the moment you lose interest? I’m not one of your spiritual instruments. You can’t handle me however you please, or test me however you please. I’m a damn human being!”

Ye Minwei lay on the couch. Apart from Wen Ci’s bloodshot eyes, everything in her vision was blurred. Those eyes trembled, dark hatred surging within them, more intense than any anger she had ever seen from him.

He never showed kindness to anyone, and he lost his temper at the slightest provocation, but that was not genuine anger.

Since meeting him, she had seen him truly angry only twice. The first time was when they had met and she had asked him, “Who are you?”

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And the second was now.

“So?” Ye Minwei asked, honestly perplexed.

Those reddened eyes froze for a moment, then slowly closed. Wen Ci suddenly let out a low laugh. He straightened and leaned against the carriage wall, as though mocking someone—or perhaps unsure whom he ought to mock.

Perhaps the whole world was laughable.

“I almost forgot. When have you ever treated me as a human being?”

“So, Ye Minwei, get the hell out.”

In the carriage behind them, Cangzhu suddenly began gathering his luggage. Xie Yuzhu watched him in bewilderment.

“Master Cangzhu, what are you doing?”

“Moving things in a little while.”

As he spoke, he carefully placed a kettle into his bundle and murmured, “This medicinal soup has to come along. It’s highly restorative.”

Xie Yuzhu stared at him speechlessly. That afternoon, they had taken Wen Ci to see a physician, and Cangzhu had conveniently asked for a restorative prescription as well. Ginseng, wolfberries, rehmannia, chrysanthemum, and a whole assortment of other ingredients had been piled together, meant to replenish his energy and improve his eyesight.

Despite looking like a frail skeleton on the verge of death, Cangzhu was extremely particular about maintaining his health. He rose early and retired early, and now he had even begun drinking nourishing medicinal soups.

Cangzhu’s explanation was that precisely because his constitution was weak, he had to be especially careful—particularly when it came to protecting his one precious eye, the last of its kind.

Xie Yuzhu could only silently pay the bill.

The moment Cangzhu finished packing, Xie Yuzhu suddenly felt the floor beneath her vanish. She dropped onto a heap of wild grass. When she looked up, she found herself surrounded by a pack of hungry wolves, their eyes glowing green as they prowled eagerly around her.

She gave a terrified jolt.

A pale and handsome man stepped out from among the wolves and said coldly, “Get your First Master back here for me, and send Cangzhu over instead.”

Wen Ci turned to leave, then seemed to remember something. He turned back and looked down at Xie Yuzhu.

“So you’ve decided to stay with me and Ye Minwei?”

Xie Yuzhu nodded, her little face deathly pale.

Wen Ci seemed to realize that the atmosphere of the conversation was rather ominous. He waved a hand, and the wolves vanished like smoke, leaving behind only a stretch of darkness.

“Then have you also decided to take me as your master?”

Xie Yuzhu nodded, then hesitated. “But… I’m… I seem to be rather stupid. When I was young, my family always said studying was too hard and that I shouldn’t trouble myself with it. I suspect they looked down on me and thought I couldn’t learn. That only made me want to study more… But perhaps they weren’t wrong. I really am not very clever…”

Xie Yuzhu muttered gloomily. Wen Ci raised an eyebrow and crouched down before her.

“Stupid? Not clever? What kind of fool could follow us for less than ten days and, simply by observing and guessing, figure out our history?”

“But First Master explained the construction of the silk-thread box to me today. She said it more than ten times, and I still couldn’t understand. I can’t even use it properly!” Xie Yuzhu complained miserably.

Wen Ci snorted and clapped his hands dismissively. “I thought it was something serious. What’s so remarkable about that? I don’t understand it either.”

“You don’t understand it either?”

“She’s explained it to me more than ten times before—hundreds of times, even. If you don’t understand it, you don’t understand it. Who could understand the things inside her head? Just do as she says.”