The Immortal (1)
Yijing Tower had been captured, quite literally, in the blink of an eye.
We had won with barely any resistance at all—so easily that even I felt dazed by it.
"……"
Yuan Shao especially, who had spent long years locked in petty skirmishes with Gongsun Zan, wore an expression that defied all description.
I turned my gaze toward the tallest of the watchtowers inside Yijing Tower's walls. Gongsun Zan's plan, no doubt, had been to spot any suspicious movement from up there and personally take command of his troops…
And yet it was unnaturally, almost eerily quiet. Going by the history I knew, Gongsun Zan should have killed his own family the moment Yijing Tower fell, then set the watchtower ablaze and taken his own life with it. Yet with not even a whiff of anything like that afoot, something must have happened to the man. I could tell as much just from watching the enemy drift about in a daze even as our soldiers poured in like a tidal wave. Normally, when an enemy comes attacking, the supreme commander is supposed to decide on a course—resist or surrender—and give the order. But with no instructions coming down from above, the men below simply floundered in confusion until they gave up.
"For all the stubborn resistance they put up until now, they're collapsing in a pretty deflating way…"
Lü Bu, who hadn't strayed so much as a step from my side since I'd been injured, let a faintly bored expression cross her face. Watching her, I threw out a playful remark.
"Right. Even you make that face sometimes, Lü Bu."
"Hm? What's that supposed to…"
Lü Bu cocked her head at my words, then abruptly flushed scarlet, as though she had grasped everything at once.
"What, don't you remember? How you put up such a valiant resistance in bed too…"
"S-SHUT UP!!"
When I hit her with that bit of lewd teasing, Lü Bu cried out and clapped a hand over my mouth.
"Stop seducing people all the time!"
"……"
"Behave yourself! Behave!"
Hold on, that's why she's mad? She wasn't angry at being the target of a dirty joke—she was angry that I wasn't conducting myself with proper decorum… Somehow I felt like the whole conversation had gone badly off the rails.
"……"
The very moment even Seo Yeo fixed me with an unreadable look, the banner of Gongsun Zan that had been flying at the heart of the fortress toppled completely. It was the moment that proclaimed Yijing Tower had changed hands for good.
"My lord."
"Hm?"
At the voice calling me, I turned to find Zhou Yu standing there, beautiful as ever. She delivered her report in a voice of studied calm.
"Yijing Tower has been fully occupied by our forces, and the soldiers are sweeping the fortress and restoring public order."
"I see."
When the news came that our soldiers, under their commanders' direction, were securing every corner of Yijing Tower, I nodded.
"I ask only to be sure—there's no one looting the civilians, is there?"
"No, my lord. The units are being kept under strict discipline."
That was a relief. These were people who had already been dragged here against their will by Gongsun Zan and put through every hardship imaginable; there was no reason to treat them harshly on top of it. That bastard had mobilized nearly the entire population of You Province for forced labor just to raise a single fortress, and no one could imagine how many had died in the process. Had he set a generous deadline and cared even a little about safety, none of it would have happened—but since when was Gongsun Zan that kind of man? The more bodies he ground into the works, the faster the walls rose, so he must have whipped them harder and harder, gleefully playing the second coming of Qin Shi Huang.
Leaving Sun Ce to rampage alongside Sun Jian, I fired my next question straight at Zhou Yu, who had returned without her.
"What happened to Gongsun Zan?"
"……"
In a way, that was the most important question in the current situation. Just what on earth had happened to that bastard, that he had gone completely silent even while his own fortress was under attack?
"Was he already dead?"
"No."
Zhou Yu answered in her lovely voice.
"He has not lost his life, but… he is, quite literally, little more than a breathing body. Calling him 'alive' would be generous."
"Hmm?"
What was that supposed to mean? Did she really mean he was merely still breathing? When I made a puzzled face, Zhou Yu bowed politely.
"Though I am ignorant of the healing arts and cannot describe Gongsun Zan's condition in detail, judging by everything I have witnessed in my experience thus far…"
Having said that much, she paused briefly, then looked at me.
"He resembled the vagrants who wander the slums, eyes clouded and vacant."
"……"
It had been only two months since word came that Gongsun Zan had come to his senses and broken out of his seclusion, and the man apparently couldn't last even that long before throwing himself headlong into something else. As I weighed what to do about this and sat in a brief silence, I finally managed to speak.
"…I'll have to observe him myself before making any judgment. Let's move."
"Yes, my lord. I shall follow behind you."
Just what could have happened to reduce him to the state of a vagrant wandering the slums? Whatever else you could say about the man, he certainly knew how to pique one's curiosity.
Just as everyone had predicted, Gongsun Zan was holed up inside the watchtower that stood a full twenty meters tall. To be more precise, he was staying in the pavilion built atop that watchtower.
But… how should I put it. The sight of Gongsun Zan up there.
"Uuurk… gck…"
"…He really has lost his mind completely."
He was, by anyone's standard, not well. Froth at the corner of his mouth. A body that flinched and shuddered without pause. And a bleary, haggard face with a darkened complexion and deep hollows under the eyes. I'm not one to reach for this sort of comparison lightly, but Gongsun Zan right now bore the exact appearance that springs to everyone's mind at the words strung-out junkie.
"You… you're…"
Bound tight from head to toe, the captured Gongsun Zan stared at me with dim, unfocused eyes. I said, letting a note of surprise into my voice.
"Huh. So you actually recognize me?"
Going by his looks alone, he seemed like an addict incapable of thought beyond his next fix. I had expected him to take in the situation the moment he saw me and fly into a rage, but Gongsun Zan showed a truly unexpected reaction instead.
"Heh heh… Heh heh heh!"
He had begun to laugh like a man who had lost his mind over something. No, forget like a man who'd lost his mind—he had genuinely lost it. Just as the people nearby began grimacing at his obviously deranged state, he muttered:
"You are a pitiful wretch."
"…Hm?"
Hearing Gongsun Zan's bizarre words, I was mildly dumbfounded. What was he suddenly on about? If anyone here looked pitiful, it was you, not me. When I showed that I was willing to at least hear him out, the officers around us grimaced but quietly held their places.
Gongsun Zan's words kept coming.
"I have been through something you could never even imagine."
"…And what would that be?"
Let's hear it, then. When I prompted him, Gongsun Zan, as though he had been waiting for exactly that, flashed a smile of pure euphoria and cried out:
"Heh heh, don't be alarmed! I was chosen by an immortal and attained eternal life!"
"Ah… is that so."
Yep. He's definitely gone mad. I couldn't help but wear a pitying expression as I gazed at Gongsun Zan, who had completely let go of his senses.
Eternal life. A word just about everyone has heard at least once—a four-character idiom meaning to live long without ever growing old. And it didn't simply mean staying young-looking; it meant living out one's entire life without aging at all. One step beyond that lay its loftier cousin: never aging and never dying, true immortality… and honestly, that one hardly needs an introduction. Anyone who knows their history knows how Qin Shi Huang drove himself through every wild goose chase imaginable in search of the herb of immortality, gulping down mercury by the mouthful in his desperate bid to live long—only to fail, in the end, to see even his fiftieth year.
I addressed Gongsun Zan, who was still letting out that bizarre laughter.
"Fine. Setting aside whether you really achieved eternal life—who exactly is this immortal of yours?"
"Hahaha! So you, too, desire eternal life!"
Gongsun Zan burst into hearty laughter, apparently having interpreted my question in an entirely different way. No, all I want to know is which con artist took this idiot for a ride… But whatever I said now, it seemed unlikely to reach Gongsun Zan, sealed away as he was inside his own little world.
"Brace yourself to be amazed!"
Gongsun Zan shouted with the fervent energy of a diehard fan meeting their beloved idol for the very first time.
"I have met Liezi!"
"Liezi?"
I puzzled for a moment over who Liezi was before the name finally surfaced. That, uh… wasn't he the one ranked alongside Laozi and Zhuangzi as a celebrated thinker of the Daoist school? …Though between us, he's less famous than those other two, if we're being honest. Had I not been born into this world and spent years listening to the scholars around me chew him over ad nauseam in their discourses, I wouldn't have known he existed at all. In any case, as a marquee name of the very school that would later lay the foundations of immortal-sage thought, a fair number of commoners firmly believed he had become an immortal. Laozi, after all, is honored with the grandiose title of Taishang Laojun—the Supreme Old Lord—while Zhuangzi is likewise revered as Nanhua Laoxian. Yes, that Nanhua Laoxian: the very immortal who handed the Taiping Yaoshu to Zhang Jue. But Liezi? He never got a title that made you think, ah, so that's the one. Why not, I wondered. Was this simply what a gap in popularity looked like?
"Haha! How about it! If you, too, wish to gain eternal life, then you had best treat me generously…!"
Tuning out whatever Gongsun Zan was shouting, I sank into thought.
An immortal, huh… Well, I trust I have no connection with any of them.