Piercing the Conception and Governing Vessels (1)
"Khuk—!"
A man collapsed, coughing blood across the ground.
At a glance he might have been any laborer off the docks — clothes worn thin and shabby, skin burned a deep copper from long hours under the sun — and even now he was scrabbling on the floor, desperate to crawl his way out of this place.
I have to get word of this to the Zhuge Clan.
Ordinary as he looked, he was in truth one of the elite agents the Zhuge Clan had sent. His charge had been to pass as a harbor hand and report the purpose and movements of every ship coming and going through Sichuan. Among all the Zhuge agents planted in the province, he ranked the highest — and looked the most utterly commonplace.
Of late those agents had been going silent, one after another. He had tried to pin down where they were, but the instant he touched another thread of the clan's intelligence net, he was dragged into a back alley, and his life was forfeit.
How do they know exactly who we are...? Has the intelligence... leaked...?
Someone had turned traitor. Not a fellow agent. Someone high in the Zhuge Clan itself.
"Is this the last of them?"
"According to the word from our man inside the Zhuge Clan, this is the last agent they dispatched themselves. The rest were hired on site. Disguise our identities, and we can fool them."
"See that you do."
Granted his superior's leave, the hunchbacked man grinned a nasty grin and rolled over the corpse of the agent who had died with grievance still burning in his eyes.
"Fool. If you'd only kept your post at the harbor until that sly wench of the Zhuge Clan showed up, you needn't have died. Not that you'd have learned a thing about us, mind."
With a thin silver thread he peeled the skin from the face, a soft hiss of parting flesh, then folded it with care into the linen he had brought and put it away. Later, he meant to work it into a human-skin mask, so the dead man might be worn like a change of clothes.
"I'll come looking again in half a month. By then, have everyone who agreed to cooperate in Sichuan gathered in one place."
"What do you mean to do?"
"Men wearing the faces of the Zhuge agents will deal with them. After that we say the traitors have been cleaned up by the Zhuge Clan, so the brethren of Sichuan may set their hearts at ease... Something to that effect."
A play of their own staging: soothe them first, and then finish the work.
"So, Face-Stealing Ghost. By then, have the human-skin masks taken from those agents' faces ready and waiting."
"Kikiki... Understood. Just thinking of those stupid Central Plains fools swallowing it whole — ah, it stirs the blood."
He stroked the linen bundles stuffed with facial skins, and his mouth watered. Revolting as the sight was, the Face-Stealing Ghost's art was indispensable if they meant to sink roots in secret through the Central Plains: the craft of flaying a living face and working it into a mask of exquisite precision.
A slogan slipped from the superior's lips, and the Face-Stealing Ghost — only lately brought into the fold — answered a beat too late.
"The black moon shall devour the world."
"Th— the false world shall meet its end."
"Remember. Half a month from today."
"Don't you worry. Heeheehee...!"
"Junior Sister. Spare me a moment? Come up to the room."
"Could you give me just a little time? I'll be right up."
Two days had passed since the bout with Ban Gyuseong. Today marked exactly one month since my junior sister and I had taken up in Sichuan.
Thirty days since the three of us came down off the mountain where our little family had lived — and one month since, in the last moments before that descent, our master had performed the vessel-and-blood cleansing on her.
Ever since she absorbed the virtue of the snow ginseng she had looked well enough, but the master, unwilling to trust appearances, had still given her a light cleansing once a month. Not enough to spend True Origin Qi, as in the old days — only enough to look her body over. Now that we had left him behind and come down, the turn to look after her had fallen to me.
She looks perfectly fine on the outside. Healthy, even. And yet...
Her temper was mild, that was all. The moment she moved, or put her martial arts to use, she all but took to the air, and more than once I caught myself wondering whether she might actually be stronger than I was.
Even so, strength and health are different things. Wuxia novels and the stories beside them are full of that old type — the sickly master, frail enough to look a breath from death, whose arts are strong past all comparison.
Up to now she lived in clean, open wilderness and tempered her inner energy there, so her body stayed sound. Living in a great city like Sichuan, turbid qi may have settled in her. I ought to check with care.
You never really know what will happen to a person. And my junior sister, inside this novel, was fated to die young. I had to be careful of every smallest thing.
More than that — lately she seems to be out wandering on her own an awful lot.
Before, unless I took her somewhere, she kept quietly to the inn, and if she wanted to see the sights she would cling to my sleeve and pester me — Senior Brother, Senior Brother — sweet as anything. These days she came and went perfectly well alone.
For me, who needed hours to myself if I meant to cut off the hidden organization's plot, it was something to welcome. And yet when she vanished without a word to the person who shared her room, and came back the same way, I couldn't help feeling a little... slighted.
"Hah. Listen to me. Thinking like a child."
I was turning all of this over when I sensed her presence. Still seated, I sent a light palm-wind and popped the door's latch.
"Hm? Did you just wash?"
Water still beaded at the tips of her hair, and the faint scent of perfumed oil rose from her. She had come straight from the bath set up in the cellar.
"Yes. Today's the day you're helping me, so... I thought I ought to have myself clean."
I'd meant to do the cleansing through her clothes...
With Ban Gyuseong I had set my hands on bare skin purely to work more efficiently — he was just another man, as far as that went. But however close we were as senior and junior under the same master, I had no intention of laying a hand on my junior sister's bare skin. Men and women were to be kept strictly apart. What kind of conduct would that be?
"You don't have to do that next time."
"Yes, Senior Brother."
In truth, even our master had performed the cleansing through a thin layer of cloth, save for when she was very small or when she was in danger. How could I, who didn't share a drop of her blood, set my hand on her bare skin? A pat on the head, a hand held — that was the limit. Touch the skin beneath her clothes and I'd be out of my mind. The master would come running and crack my skull open before anything else.
"All right, then. Sit. I'll start by reading your pulse."
Perhaps because her health had always been the worry, our master had taken in not only martial arts but the fundamentals of medicine as well. As his disciple, I had a working share of that knowledge myself. They say that if there's a patient in the house, the rest of the family picks up medicine whether they mean to or not. This was more or less that.
In the modern age there are hospitals on every corner and medicines to spare. In the world of a wuxia novel, unless you stumble onto some heaven-sent encounter or lay hands on a specially refined elixir pill, medicine rarely shows much effect — so one leans all the more on the skill in one's own hands.
She offered me an arm still faintly damp. I took her slender wrist, closed my eyes, and fed in a thread of inner energy, drawing hers into accord with mine until the two ran in concert.
Let's see... the flow through the vessels is sound, at least...
Ordinarily, breathing qi into the vessels of a trained martial artist is brutally difficult. Inner energy resists. But she and I had shared the same boiled snow ginseng, and from childhood we had learned the same arts and raised our inner energy side by side — a peculiar case, and the reason a sharing like this was possible at all.
I could confirm all of it like this, couldn't I?
Her energy moved along my qi-sense almost as simply as if it were my own body. Concentrate, and I could manage the examination without even touching her — a diagnosis from across the room.
The cleansing might not even be necessary...
Before we came down the mountain, the master had said as much himself. Until now he had only given her a light cleansing, just in case; if I judged that she had grown healthy, there was no need to keep at it. Checking her vessels now and then, and making sure nothing was blocked, would be enough.
Good. So she's well and truly healthy now.
I was still wondering how to give her the good news — that there was no need for a separate cleansing — when I let go of her hand.
Rustle. Rustle.
The moment my hand left her, she turned to the wall and began to undo the front of her robes. Until now, the pulse-reading had always been followed at once by the cleansing, and her body simply moved as it had been trained to move.
"Ah... Junior Sister?"
"......"
No answer. She was bracing herself, gathering her focus against the pain of the cleansing.
I really don't think we need to do it today...
I hesitated a moment. It hurt, yes — but the cleansing was good for the body. Telling myself it was for her health, I carefully set my hand against her back.
Ngh...! What is this... suction?
The nearer my hand came, the more I felt my palm being drawn in, the way a magnet hauls at iron filings. Our inner energies were of the same nature, and it seemed they carried, on top of that, a will to gather and become one.
Careful.
I gave my hand over to the pull of her inner energy and laid it on her back, and her soft skin clung to my rough palm as if it meant to stick there.
She trained in the sword, after all. By any ordinary reckoning her back ought to have been ridged with muscle. But this was the world of a wuxia novel. Cultivate inner energy, and muscle does not come easily. My junior sister, whose inner energy ran deep and heavy, had nothing of the sturdy, thickset build — only the soft, slender line of her back.
Don't think strange thoughts. The back under your hand is your junior sister's back... Family. She's just family.
Keeping my eyes open felt like an invitation to every stray thought I owned, so I shut them and carefully breathed inner energy into her back.
She won't collapse from spent vitality the way she used to, so there's no need to pour a great deal in. Lightly. Like giving her a massage...
Through the heart of my palm I sent inner energy into the softness of her back. There was no call for much of it. Even a very fine thread was enough to set the inner energy within her moving in sympathy with mine — and then, as if osmosis were drawing dense brine across into fresh water, her inner energy began to be pulled back into my body in reverse.
It's only because our inner energies are of the same quality... even so, it's uncanny.
I followed the power running through her, meaning to clear the impurities lodged here and there in the acupoints. As expected, the master had tended those points since she was small. Now and then something caught, but otherwise it ran clear and exhilarating, the way you'd fly down an eight-lane highway with every lane blown wide open.
Hm? But I'm supposed to slow down here.
The stretch where the Conception and Governing Vessels lay. By rights that place was blocked, and one was meant to ease off and take the long way around — yet her flow did not stop.
We're going to collide...!
I seized the current and tried to cut its speed. She did not stop.
Wham!
"Hkk—!"
The shock was like someone clubbing the back of my skull. I nearly blasted the breath clean out of my lungs, but if my breathing broke here, internal injury was the least of it. At worst, qi deviation.
And in the very worst case, she and I would fall into qi deviation together. I set my teeth and held the flow of qi.