The Auspicious Flower (0)
I had been frail since before I could remember. My family was so poor they sold me off—me, a child without even the strength to lift a spoon—for three copper coins.
The one who bought me was a Daoist known as Master Zixu. He must have wanted a companion for his twilight years, because he pestered me at every turn with idle chatter about nothing at all.
"Pyeong, come here a moment. Have a look at this."
"What is it?"
"Isn't this leaf simply lovely?"
The old man's home was a small Daoist hermitage halfway up a mountain—a place where flowers bloomed whenever you turned your head, and birds sang whenever you lent an ear.
At first I thought the old man was full of nonsense, but somewhere along the way—I couldn't tell you when—I came to my senses and found myself at his side, holding forth about birds and flowers as if I'd always done it. I must have been starved for company too. Or for love, I suppose.
The old man also took my pulse.
"The illness that ails you is called the Cold Yin Severed Meridians."
According to him, mine was a freak affliction that only befell souls so wretchedly unlucky they would break their nose falling over backward. Cold qi rose up through the whole body until, around the age of twenty, the sufferer finally froze into a single blossom of ice. That was why my hands and feet had been cold since I was little, and why I had been pale as snow from head to toe, as though draped in freshly fallen white.
"If there is any mercy in it, you are an immortal talent, so I can at least teach you arts that will do you some good."
"What's an immortal talent?"
"It means you have the gift for cultivating the Dao."
"You're saying I have talent?"
I couldn't bring myself to believe him. If I had been worth anything at all, my price would not have been three coins.
"You are far more than you imagine."
The old man chuckled, low and pleased. It would be a long, long time before I understood what that laugh meant.
And so I came to learn even his mystic arts.
The arts he taught me could slow the disease's advance, but they could not defeat it. To conquer the illness, I would have to reach the Realm of Ascension—and that was a height no amount of human striving alone could ever attain.
"This world is very, very old," the old man said, his voice worn thin with spent vigor. "If only you could obtain the inner core or the fruit of an auspicious creature, then you might overcome your illness and become an immortal. But whether anything remains in a world grown as old as I am that could still serve as medicine—I truly cannot say."
"What good would living long do me? I'll just live the life I was dealt and go when I go."
I had little attachment to life. I figured my fate was simply to keep the old man company until the proper moment came to breathe my last.
"Don't talk such foolishness. It is because you are alive that you get to look upon scenery this beautiful."
The old man never gave up on me. He took me from the jungles of Yunnan to the deserts of Xinjiang, tramping every last corner of the world with me at his side. He was my friend, my master, and my father. It didn't matter that we never found the medicine. I only wished the days beside him would last one day longer, and then one more. The life he taught me was so sweet that merely tasting it hurt.
Then one day, in a valley in Jilin, the old man passed quietly away in his sleep.
I could not believe he was gone. It felt as though his closed eyes might open at any moment, his shut lips parting to offer some trifling remark, same as always.
But he never drew breath again.
I raised a hut on that spot. For his grave, I chose—following the tastes he held in life—a place where flowering trees grew thick. Perhaps because I had lost the only person I could lean on, my condition deteriorated rapidly. I chose the ground beside the old man as the place where I, too, would lie down.
It was exactly forty-nine days after he left this world. That day, as always, I visited his grave out of habit.
"Gramps, can you still see the flowers from over there?"
I was in the middle of my listless rambling when I noticed it: a sprout at the edge of the grave that had not been there the day before. A frail stem, thin enough to snap, hung with a red bud at its very tip. From the seams of the still-closed bud seeped a soft, gentle radiance, shimmering in all five colors.
The Udambara flower.
The auspicious plant the old man had searched for until the day he died.
My eyes burned as though seared by fire. And once the tears began to flow, they showed no intention of stopping.
I want to live.
Even past twenty, I want to live.
The will to live swelled up inside me like a mountain. Whether the old man's spirit had come to me, or Heaven had opened a road before me, I couldn't say. But of one thing I was certain: this was my last chance.
I unfolded formations, layer upon layer, and walled in the grave on every side. Then I let time flow past, endlessly, waiting only for the flower to bloom.
Three years slipped by like that.
Three days before my twentieth birthday, I woke with a terrible premonition clinging to me. When I opened the door and stepped out of the hut, I saw a middle-aged man standing in the pale gray light of dawn. He wore a black bamboo hat and black clothes, and at his waist hung a single longsword.
"What a remarkable coincidence," the man murmured, hands clasped behind his back. "To think I would find a fortuitous opportunity in so remote a corner of the world."
The flower stalk slipped from his hand and fell to the ground. My gaze traced it down. Where the Udambara should have been, there was nothing left but a broken stem.
"...What did you just do, you bastard."
"Such a foul mouth, for one so young."
"I asked what you did!"
"The grave tells me there is a story behind this. Even so, treasure has its rightful owner. Believe the Udambara was never meant to be yours, forget it, and live."
"Says the thief? Forget it and live? What kind of lunatic talk is that?"
I could barely breathe. For the first time in my life, the desire to kill a man came boiling up from somewhere deep.
"I am no thief. I am Gong Yong, the Sword Saint. Of late, I am more often called the Number One Under Heaven."
"So? Does being the Number One Under Heaven mean you get to steal what belongs to other people?"
"It means know your place, insolent wretch."
I clutched hard at my chest. Rage had twisted my qi and blood awry. Blood surging backward froze into icicles and dropped, one by one.
"...The Cold Yin Severed Meridians."
He frowned. "The one who laid these formations must have been your late master. Such refined craft that even I found no easy way through. Out of respect for a departed senior, I will overlook your rudeness today—but see that you mind your manners next time."
"Shut up!"
I gripped my right forearm with my left hand. The instant I pointed at him with the tips of my right hand, an enormous flame roared up and coiled around him.
"What in the—!"
I heard the shock in his voice. I did not stop. I poured down fire, thunder, and ice. I conjured avatar after avatar and turned earth and sky upside down.
He wasn't simply taking it lying down, either. His longsword, laden to bursting with sword qi, hunted for my throat. But a single blade could never close the distance between us.
The arts the old man had taught me were never techniques for killing people. They were the struggle of a mortal body to reach the heavens.
"Hah... hah... cough, cough..."
In the end, I burned the flower thief to a charred black husk.
Or did I freeze him?
...I couldn't say. He was far too insignificant a man, and the pain was so horrific my consciousness could not carry on any longer.
The price of spending every last ounce of my strength came back as a rampage of the Cold Yin Severed Meridians. By now, even with the Udambara, nothing could stop my body from freezing over.
Staggering, I leaned against the old man's grave. Head bowed, I coughed up a fistful of ice mixed with blood.
"......Ha."
A funny thought occurred to me, of all things—if I was going to become a flower of ice anyway, I hoped I would at least make a pretty sight for the old man to look upon.
For a long while, I was swallowed by a darkness without end.
Don't tell me death means drifting through that dark for all eternity. Just as the question took shape, the blackness above me lifted as though a curtain had been drawn back, and a cold, damp, deeply unpleasant sensation came pressing in.
"Oh dear, oh dear—whatever shall we do!"
"The lady is bleeding!"
Pain wracked me as if thousands of blades were carving my body to shreds. I truly believed I had fallen into the Avici Hell, the deepest of all hells. I had killed a man, after all—it was more than plausible.
"My lady!"
A young woman's shriek tore through the air. "The blood—the blood is freezing over!"
"Fetch a healer, quickly!"
The frantic exchange went on, though I could make no sense of any of it. Still, I could feel things going very, very wrong. I raised my Daoist power to drive out the chill—and felt nothing but emptiness.