Zhuge Yang (6)
"I miss Zhuge Yang..."
Barely a day out of Longzhong, and I already ached with how much I missed her. I soothed the part of me that wanted to weaken and quickened my pace. If my resolve crumbled here—if my feet turned back even for a moment—it would all be over. Because if Zhuge Yang were to beg me to stay, I didn't have it in me to coldly refuse her and walk away.
I was headed for Mount Heng. The destination Yeon Hwa and I had settled on at the end of our conversation.
"What business brings you to me at this hour of the night?"
The night before, when Yeon Hwa had come out to meet me alone at my request, her face had been clouded with worry. I hadn't told her about the pain Zhuge Yang had been suffering—and I knew Zhuge Yang wasn't the type to go around speaking of it either. So what else could explain the worry written all over her face? There was only one conclusion. She had already known... The thought made my blood boil, and my tone turned curt before I could help it.
"I'll ask you plainly. Does Yang suffer from the illness where the Nine Yin Severed Meridians and the Pure Yin Body appear together?"
"How did you—!"
Of course, her eyes went wide at the gravity of it, and she was in no state to call out my insolence.
"Does that matter? And is it also true that the only cure is to take a Ten-Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng?"
"Hah... I don't know how you found out, but every word you've guessed is true."
Watching Yeon Hwa heave a sigh of sheer frustration, I felt my own chest tighten in step with hers. What in the world had the Zhuge Family been doing all this time, while things came to this?
"And her family? She's tied to the Zhuge Family one way or another, isn't she? Surely they'll act!"
"...The Young Miss is the daughter of the head of the Zhuge Family. But the family has no will to seek out a Ten-Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng."
Not that they lacked the means—the will...? Their daughter was living on borrowed time, dying before their very eyes. Shouldn't they have sold off the entire clan if that was what it took to save her? No, hold on—before she turned twelve, a Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng would have been enough, wouldn't it?
"Was the illness discovered too late?"
"No."
"Did they fail to obtain a Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng?"
"...They obtained one."
I doubted my own ears. They obtained it? Shouldn't the answer obviously have been that they'd failed? Lost for words, I let a silence stretch between us.
This time, Yeon Hwa spoke first.
"The Young Miss is... a twin. Her elder sister suffered from the very same illness."
A twin... She had a twin sister. Surely not...?
"Suffered... as in, not anymore?"
"...That is so."
No—don't tell me they'd fed the entire Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng to the elder sister?
"And the Zhuge Family, greatest under heaven, never even knew that splitting the ginseng between them could have saved both daughters?! A fact that even a kid like me worked out just from skimming medical texts!"
I was beside myself. To blunder that badly without even knowing what young Zhuge Yang had discovered on her own—wasn't the Zhuge Family supposed to be a gathering of nothing but brilliant minds? To squander so carelessly a priceless chance to save both of their lives...!
"Hah... there seems to be a misunderstanding..."
"What misunderstanding?"
"It's not that they didn't know."
What was she saying? If not ignorance, then what—had it been a race against the clock, where only the elder sister took benefit, and Zhuge Yang, dosed a breath too late, was beyond saving?
"Don't tell me she was given it too late, or..."
Yeon Hwa's head snapped up. By then, the emotion burning in her eyes was fury.
"The Young Miss was cast aside! By them! They chose to heap the entire Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng upon a single daughter, to maximize the comprehension born of the Nine Yin Severed Meridians and the blessings of the Pure Yin Body!"
What was she on about? Maybe exhaustion was getting to me, because every kind of nonsense seemed to be reaching my ears.
...Why did the world suddenly feel like it was spinning?
I waited a long while. Had the dizziness settled? No. There had never been any dizziness to begin with.
Then why—why couldn't I bring myself to believe what I'd heard?
For a reason that flimsy, that laughable, that small and lovely child had been sacrificed?
Barely—only barely—I dragged myself out of denial. I clenched my molars and asked.
"Who... grrgh, who made that decision...?"
"...I heard it from a comrade who once escorted the Family Head. He was the first to propose it... and in the end, the Madam and... every one of the elders gave their consent..."
Did the Zhuge Family breed nothing but the worst of humankind? Even the woman who was their mother had consented?
"Why would they make such a decision..."
"The Greatest Family Under Heaven. The Zhuge Family has always dreamed of that title. Blessed with intellect but starved of martial power, they have lingered at the foot of the Five Great Families—no, there was a time they sank beneath even that... I imagine a fine opportunity finally came knocking for them."
The Greatest Family Under Heaven—what kind of bullshit excuse was that supposed to be? Sure, in my old life I'd dreamed of being the strongest in the world and stepped into the fighting circuit, but if it had ever put my parents' lives on the line, I'd have walked away without a flicker of hesitation.
I barely managed to choke the anger back down. There was something more important right now than weighing those people's humanity.
"They're searching for a Ten-Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng even now... aren't they?"
I had let myself hope that, regretting what they'd done, they might at last be striving to save Zhuge Yang.
"It has been a year since the notices went up, proclaiming that the clan's surplus funds would be poured into raising a new corps of warriors. Raising even one such corps devours an astronomical sum..."
Ah! So that was what the notice I'd seen in the market long ago had meant! No wonder Zhuge Yang had looked so forlorn the day she read it.
Hoping for anything further from the Zhuge Family was a waste of time. Zhuge Yang must have judged the same—wasn't that exactly why she was setting her affairs in order? In the end, the only ones we could count on were ourselves.
"Then why has no one left to find a Ten-Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng, even now? You know perfectly well that Yang is putting her life in order as we speak."
"The Young Miss did not wish it. The people of the Zhuge Family... do not pour their hearts into hopeless ventures that hang on heaven's favor. The Young Miss is cut from the same cloth, it seems... She wished only to live out her days quietly and be laid to rest here..."
Yeon Hwa looked to be in agony. Then again, her loyalty through a full year of watching over the girl was staggering. How often must Zhuge Yang's stubbornness have wrung her heart?
The illness had already declared itself; she had to stay and tend to Zhuge Yang. And she could hardly leave a man behind at the Young Miss's side and set off down a road with no promise of return.
Which left one answer, and one answer only. Just as I had resolved before ever seeking out Yeon Hwa—I had to go myself.
"Then I will go and find it. Where would the odds be greatest?"
"...You?"
"Yes. You've known all along, haven't you? In your heart you must have made that journey dozens, hundreds of times already. I have never lived anywhere but here—I don't know a single road beyond it. Please tell me. I swear I will bring it back."
And so the place we settled upon was Mount Heng.
The Central Plains had their Five Great Mountains.
Mount Song in the center. Mount Tai in the east. Mount Hua in the west. Mount Heng in the south. And Mount Heng in the north.
Some dismissed such things as legend, yet records existed of Ten-Thousand-Year Snow Ginsengs being unearthed on Mount Song, Mount Tai, Mount Hua, and the northern Mount Heng—and beyond those five, there was said to be Tianshan. Since no Ten-Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng had ever been recorded on the southern Mount Heng, Yeon Hwa and I agreed that I would stake everything on that untouched possibility.
Zhuge Yang had less than two years left. I had to move fast. Even at a diligent march, Mount Heng lay a good two months from here.
"Honestly, Won, my boy. Your wounds haven't even healed yet—what are you doing heading out already?"
"Sorry, mister. A day I don't work is a day I don't eat."
"Aigoo... Well then, be careful this time."
"I will. Thank you for worrying about me."
Parting from the herb gatherer I'd come to know, I leaned on my wooden staff and started up Mount Heng once more. In the woven sack slung over my shoulder, my short blade and hoe clattered against each other with every step. The wounds on my back from tumbling down the slope yesterday still stung, but whenever I thought of Zhuge Yang, I couldn't afford to let a single day go to waste.
After no small share of hardships, I had reached Mount Heng and was living as a herb gatherer, lodging in a nearby village. For a boy as ignorant of the world as I was, the road to Mount Heng alone had been brutal. Yeon Hwa had shaken out her own savings to the last coin, so travel money was never the problem—but the distance was long and the roads, unpaved, were merciless. After well over two months of accepting strangers' charity in small villages and sleeping under the open sky, I had finally arrived, only to stand dumbfounded before the sheer, rugged bulk of the mountain itself.
Fortunately, my luck had turned: an herb gatherer on the verge of retirement took me in and taught me how to read the mountain and how to tell one herb from another. I had the characteristics of the Ten-Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng memorized cold.
"Shall I try over that way today?"
Looking up at the peak soaring into the sky, I set off. A full year had already slipped by, but I was not worn down. The thought of Zhuge Yang, waiting only for me to come home, gave me the strength to keep moving even on the days I was dead on my feet. And yet just yesterday I had misstepped and rolled down a hillside for my trouble.
"So a place like this existed...?"
How deep in had I come, leaving markers behind me as I went? It was only natural to feel a stranger's unease on a path I had never walked, but I had pushed into terrain where not one trace of human passage could be found. Or perhaps the grass had simply grown back thick in the meantime, erasing every trace there ever was.
Somehow... the feeling was strange. As if I were on the verge of pulling off something outrageous. I don't mean some absurd mix-up like mistaking murim for the Three Kingdoms—I was tasting a rising exhilaration, the heady sense that I was about to accomplish something.
Parting the dense sea of grass with my wooden staff, I carved the first human trace into it. Following not my reason but my instinct, before long I came upon a wide clearing.
Warm sunlight poured down, bright and gentle, upon that clearing where not a single weed grew. And at its very center, I saw a bluish-green leaf.
It couldn't be...?
Up close, the leaf was broad and rounded, its tip long and pointed. And decisively, its edges bore a faint serration, like the teeth of a saw.
A snow ginseng!
The instant intuition told me what that leaf was, a shudder ran through my whole body. The leaves were far thicker, and a far deeper green, than even the century-old snow ginsengs I knew. My body shook uncontrollably; my heart thundered in my chest.
The first thing that surfaced in my mind was, of course, that small and lovely child. The girl whose dimples, pressed softly into her cheeks, were her most unforgettable feature.
This was absolutely not the moment to go bellowing "Eureka!" No one was anywhere nearby, I was certain—but I didn't want to leave even the slimmest margin for things to go wrong. I simply bowed my head in respect toward the mountain god of Mount Heng and offered my thanks in silent prayer.
Then I drew out my hoe, gently scraped away the soil around the plant, and dug the ginseng out with painstaking, devoted care.
At last, an immensely thick and firm snow ginseng revealed its radiant form.
A Ten-Thousand-Year Snow Ginseng!