The Immortal (3)
Gongsun Zan, who after meeting an "immortal" had gone about claiming that he himself had attained eternal life.
As only made sense, it did not take long for that laughable delusion of his to come crashing down.
When Sima Yi — the one managing our roster of high-value prisoners — remarked, "This Gongsun Zan fellow looks like he'll be dying soon, doesn't he?", I hurried to the prison to examine him myself.
"Uuugghh...."
"Aigoo... look at the state of him."
I muttered as I took in Gongsun Zan, who now looked less like a man than a walking skeleton. Only a week ago, pumped full of drugs as he'd been, he had at least still passed for human.
Apparently his condition had been far worse than I'd realized. Just what on earth had that immortal who met with Gongsun Zan made this man swallow? My prediction that he wouldn't last two weeks had proven correct — but his life had fallen into danger far earlier than even that. In the brief moment my gaze had wandered, he let out a strangled squeak, looking for all the world as though he could die then and there without it seeming the least bit strange.
Crouching down in front of his cell, bars between us, I spoke.
"If you've attained eternal life, why are you trying to starve yourself to death?"
"Ugh...."
Even addressed directly, Gongsun Zan showed no reaction at all — only a thin trickle of pained sounds.
Starvation was, without question, one of the cruelest deaths a human being could endure — and what made it especially vicious was that you died feeling extreme agony for a very, very long time. They don't say hunger drives the eyes to roll for nothing. Humans devouring other humans, even turning their hands against their own children — it was savagery beyond all description.
Which meant, oddly enough, that the most agonizing way to torture a person was also the simplest. Deny them sleep, feed them hardly at all, and with each passing day you could watch a beast take shape, shrieking out every unearthly sound imaginable. The one flaw was that the pain ran so deep the prisoner rarely lasted long: they either lost their minds outright or ended their own lives the instant you looked away. That was why those who prided themselves on their mastery of torture didn't much favor the method.
I heard they ranked themselves by how long they could keep a perfectly healthy prisoner suffering. The men who ordinarily carried out a prisoner's sentence — the torture technicians — were that breed. People whose values were twisted at the very root.
...Truly a terrifying lot, when you thought about it.
Then again, it was a trade built on torturing fellow humans, carrying out punishments, and wading through blood day after day. Naturally, no ordinary person could stomach it.
"If Your Excellency the General-in-Chief ever has some detestable fellow on his hands, he need only seize him and bring him here, any time at all."
Hmm....
The way they'd said that with a bright, easy grin — even now, I couldn't get used to it.
"At this rate, we won't be getting much of a conversation."
Gazing at Gongsun Zan, who lay there meekly as if he lacked even the strength to groan, I turned to the guards.
"This much is all the confirmation I need, so get some food into him. He's a prisoner who isn't permitted to die yet."
"Yes, sir."
Her Majesty had, after all, once urged me to bring Gongsun Zan back alive no matter what. When exactly had that been, now?
Ah, right. It was when word spread that I had rescued Liu Yu, Inspector of Youzhou, and was keeping him under my protection. Gongsun Zan denounced me with truly naked venom.
"A heart as black as night and conduct like a dog's — you ungrateful bitch! What face do you have left to show the world?!"
That was what Gongsun Zan had roared at Yuan Shao for breaking the promise made between them. One line, and you could already gauge his gift for vitriol, no?
Once in a while in life you meet someone spectacularly gifted at cursing, and Gongsun Zan was exactly that type. As for me, I was treated to a long harangue about how contemptible it was, skulking about with Her Majesty at my back, and on and on and on....
He said a great deal, in short. Having denounced me so thoroughly, it was hardly a surprise that Gongsun Zan landed squarely on the wrong side of Her Majesty the Empress, who never once failed to shield me.
"How amusing."
"...Your Majesty?"
"General-in-Chief, see to it that this insolent cur is dragged before Us without fail."
Her Majesty crushed the letter Gongsun Zan had sent me in her fist, a faintly terrifying smile curving her lips.
"There is something I have long wished to try with a man such as this."
"...As You command."
I had no idea what she meant to do, but of one thing I was certain: it would be nothing good for Gongsun Zan.
Watching the guard who had received my orders hurry about his business, I turned my head back toward the cell.
"I'll come again tomorrow, so we'll have ourselves a nice long talk. Got it?"
"......"
"I'll be off, then."
There was scarcely anything left for me to handle these days anyway, and I was bored stiff. Everyone around me insisted that rest came first and barred me from working, so my sole occupation at the moment was teasing whatever easy target presented itself. Besides, a General-in-Chief roaming about and popping up out of nowhere was hard on his subordinates' hearts. Even now, the guards snapped rigid the instant they entered my line of sight.
And as I strolled through the prison — scrubbed spotless by those same guards, no doubt — Lü Bu muttered beside me.
"Uuu... Jeong Reung, are you gonna end up like that too, sooner or later?"
"...No."
A person had to starve for over a week to end up in that state — what on earth was she saying? She was forever hauling me off by the arm at the first mention of food, so I was already eating a good five meals a day as it was.
"Keep each meal small, but take them often." I was following Hua Tuo's prescription to the letter. The trouble was that trimming each portion meant little when you ate five times over; the total making its way into my stomach had only grown.
Come to think of it, my grandmother had been exactly like this — forever pressing food on me, insisting I needed to put on more weight. A truly horrifying scheme, when you got right down to it: fatten the boy up like a pig, then eat him. Thank goodness my childhood self had made it out in one piece.
The difference was that the woman directing the campaign now was Zhang Jue, a physician of rare brilliance, so I couldn't mount even token resistance.
My venerable ancestors over there on the right, after all, polished off five meals a day without breaking stride — and each meal, I'm told, came with a huge bowl heaped to the brim with rice. In other words, picture an entire people inhaling food at the level of a professional mukbang broadcast. A Joseon king's single meal, converted into modern portions, supposedly came to a full fifteen servings.
...How was that even possible? Were we, in truth, not people of the Korean Peninsula at all, but some other creature entirely?
The records tell us that Yeongjo, the longest-lived king of the Joseon dynasty, cut his five daily meals down to three and reduced his portions besides — and those around him worried he was eating far too little. High and low alike, everyone hoovered up rice like a vacuum cleaner, and there is even an unlaughable footnote that the business of running the country suffered for it — but let's let that pass.
My thoughts had wandered off on that tangent for a while, but the problem was sitting right in front of me: a situation where eating too much was, ironically, ruining my health. For an ordinary person, gorging on nutrition wrecks the body — yet I was steadily losing weight, as though something had gone wrong with my digestive system.
"......"
I didn't advertise it, but I knew perfectly well that my condition was poor. At thirty-odd, still young, I could hold out. But what if a little more time slipped by? The aftereffects of old wounds press in harder the older the body grows. What would happen when I reached my forties — middle-aged by modern reckoning, all but elderly in this era? And past that, into my fifties, my sixties? Even a hale man found it hard to live long into those years; for a sick one, it bordered on the impossible. True, we had a Divine Physician whose medical arts leapt ahead by centuries — but measured against the modern age, a gap remained, and that was simply the truth of it.
If nothing else, that Jebe fellow was a man Genghis Khan needed to ransom back at the earliest possible date. If he remained in the Han once my shield was gone, he would suffer for it — that much was certain. Genghis Khan knew full well what he had gotten up to, so he would say little, but a faint rumble of discontent from within the Mongol Empire would be impossible to avoid.
People aren't machines. However sound the reasoning, emotion can never be wrung out of politics entirely.
"Mmm...."
Well — I had never entertained the notion of living out my full natural span, not from the moment I first threw myself onto a battlefield, so all I felt was that what was bound to come had finally come. Death is the thing every person fears and flees from. I was no different in that respect....
Still, there was no telling how the future would flow. You never really knew, did you? Perhaps I would simply be plagued by aftereffects and live on and on. Or perhaps some mountain-god sort of being would appear out of nowhere, declare that it would mend my body, and patch me up in a flash.
...Was that going too far? Well, so what. Imagination is free.
History had left behind some genuinely entertaining records — like the tale of Qin Shi Huang, caught in a storm during an inspection tour, hurling the Heirloom Seal of the Realm into the water in haste, whereupon the Dragon King who received it was so pleased that the wind and waves subsided. In a world where beings of impossible strength and divinity truly existed, wasn't that exactly the sort of thing that could happen?
And if not — oh well. Of course, the supernatural rarely showed itself so readily; going an entire lifetime without glimpsing one was the norm....
"Hmhm. How intriguing, indeed."
"......"
What the—? Who is this man?
"That little pipsqueak of a girl guards you so devotedly, I simply had to see what manner of man you were. Quite the amusing one, aren't you?"
I froze mid-step at the sight of the old man standing there, as though he had teleported into being.