Something Hot and Blazing (1)
I let out a scoff as I watched the assassins flee like their lives depended on it. I could have tracked them to wherever they scattered if I had wanted to, but the answer was obvious anyway. Chris.
"Bow down."
I gave the order in my mind, and as the armor bent at the waist, I slid lightly down its shoulder to the floor.
The corridor was a wreck. All around the shattered flagstones lay the weapons the assassins had discarded in their flight.
I intended to leave every last one of them where it fell. The palace household needed its vigilance sharpened. They ought to know that their "young master" had just faced a serious threat.
Then again, sending assassins after your own little brother? That was genuinely unhinged. Did they not have a single adult over there capable of reining in a five-year-old? Or was I the naive one? For all I knew, it was a joint production between an adult and a child.
In any case, the strategy of sowing confusion with the formation and finishing things off with the puppet had worked.
The puppet's performance in particular had been impressive.
How much power the armor would lend depended entirely on Colin's will, and his condition had been, how should I put it, a little worked up.
"Ho ho ho, do you like me that much?"
"And how about this, then?"
That day, he had played with me for over three hours. I had to send him back after that, out of concern that the spell would not hold up to any more.
Thanks to all the power it had absorbed from Colin, the armor was venting energy like a live volcano. Honestly, it was getting to be a bit much to handle. Before I could call that thing truly my puppet, I would need to raise my Daoist cultivation to the Foundation Establishment realm, and soon.
Moreover, while carving the spell into it, I had learned something new: the material used to make the armor was not mere steel. It was something far harder than steel.
"Let's head back."
The armor thudded along ahead of me. The formation was still active, but getting that hulk back to my room unseen meant choosing my route with care.
Once we reached my bedchamber, I gave the armor a pat by way of thanks for its trouble.
Armor? Calling it that over and over was starting to make me feel guilty. We had made quite a good team tonight, after all.
I wanted to give it a fitting name, but naming things was not exactly my forte either.
So I decided to simply borrow the name of the armor's original owner.
Ivan.
There we go. From this moment on, you are Ivan.
The next day, the palace was thrown into an uproar. Soldiers on patrol discovered traces of the intruders and reported them to the officer in charge of security.
Come morning, investigators in uniform arrived on horseback one after another. Every soul in the palace was summoned for questioning: maids, gardeners, cooks, night watchmen, even the stablehands.
Colin reached the palace before the investigators did, then turned me over front and back any number of times to confirm I was unharmed.
"Those good-for-nothing rustbuckets...!"
Colin's voice was thick with fury.
"What in heaven's name is this outrageous business? Do they truly think they will not be satisfied until the child lies buried in his mother's grave beside her?"
The old man was raging at some unseen target.
And it was through his words that I learned my mother had passed away.
So that was why no portrait of her hung in my room. One look at a painting, and my curiosity would have been stirred.
I offered up a silent prayer for my mother's soul. There was no doubt that I held a considerable share of the blame for her dying in the flower of her youth.
It was also on this day that I first laid eyes on the men called "knights."
"Isn't that Sir Vitten over there?"
"Good heavens, Dame Thalia has come!"
The maids fussed over each of them the moment they appeared, as if their very presence might dispel the darkness and bring salvation with it.
I had some idea how they felt. In the terms of my past life, it must have been something like watching young, exceptional, rising masters of the martial world.
Whether Chris judged that he had drawn too many eyes, or simply found the knights posted everywhere too much of a bother, he stayed silent as the dead for a while.
In the meantime, I finally graduated from those godforsaken diapers. Scarier than any assassination threat had been the menace of a bowel movement that could strike at any moment, in any place.
I went through a seizure as well.
A seizure of the Severed Yin Meridian is a dramatic affair. The whole body locks rigid, frost blooms across the bed where you lie, and bloody water laced with ice pours ceaselessly from nose and mouth. Anyone who witnesses it even once seems to end up choosing one of two things.
To see me as a monster, or to love me all the more.
"...Hrk."
"Young master, stay with me!"
Lily let out a shrill scream.
"You must not close your eyes. Do you hear me? Keep them open and look at me!"
She patted my cheeks briskly and wiped my body down without pause, warm towel after warm towel.
Clutching the fraying thread of my consciousness, I managed a smile. The chill was freezing my body stiff, but my chest alone felt warm and fluttery.
The seizure tormented me for three days and nights before it gradually died down.
Somehow, the power of the Severed Meridian felt far stronger than before. Had I not bored open my middle dantian in advance, it might well have devoured me whole.
Lily took the seizure with the gravest seriousness, but I seemed to have passed beyond resignation into acceptance.
I already know, after all.
I know that nowhere under heaven exist dragons, White Tigers, Vermilion Birds, Black Tortoises, Qilin, Haetae, dream-eating tapirs, Tengu, phoenixes, three-legged crows, nine-tailed foxes, ten-thousand-year foxes, azurite stone-elixirs, or human-shaped snow ginseng.
Only one thing had ever been true:
the flower my master's soul had coaxed into bloom,
the deep, deep crimson of the udumbara.
"How is the young master's condition?"
A girl with violet hair swept back and tied stepped into the bedchamber and asked. A young man with red hair loose like a mane followed at her heels.
So the violet-haired girl was Thalia, and the red-haired young man was Vitten.
The two of them were the core of the newly reinforced guard detail. I had heard they were remarkably young and promising knights, and my own instincts agreed.
"He is much better now."
When Lily answered, Thalia let out a sigh of relief.
"Thank goodness. The moment I received my posting, I heard the young master had fallen ill, and I worried a great deal."
While Thalia and Lily spoke, Vitten came around to the head of my bed and began clowning with goofy waves of his hands and feet.
"Sir Vitten. What exactly do you think you are doing."
Thalia rebuked him in a stern voice. Vitten sheepishly scratched the back of his head.
"Well, I only thought the young master might be bored."
"And what do you suppose the young master will think, watching your nonsense? That knights have always been a frivolous lot, no doubt."
"My nieces and nephews always love it when I do this, though..."
Vitten grumbled under his breath.
Sorry, Vitten. If I could have let myself go just a bit more, I would have cheered you on.
"But what illness exactly does the young master suffer from? Surely Bishop Colin can heal most any ailment?"
"It is not an illness but an Awoken Ability, they say, so even prayer can do nothing for it."
"An Awoken Ability?"
"Yes, one that gives off cold. Normally he is perfectly fine, but at times the chill grows strong enough to freeze his very blood."
"An Awoken Ability that harms its own bearer. That is a rare case indeed."
"What worries me is that the young master's body seems to grow a little colder with each passing day. Even someone as gifted as Bishop Colin can do nothing, so if this goes on, I do not know what will become of him..."
Lily's voice trailed off.
What would become of him, that much I could tell her. A child with the coldest heart of anyone would live more hotly than anyone, then exit the stage leaving behind a single glittering ice blossom.
The only thing I could not tell her was whose grave that flower would be laid upon in this life.
"If the problem is that his body is cold, can we not simply warm him up?"
Vitten cut in out of nowhere.
"Sir Vitten."
Thalia's tone turned glacial.
"If it will not help, do not bring it up in the first place."
"No, I am only tossing out ideas here... If you are cold, you warm yourself. That is just common sense, is it not?"
"The thought is appreciated. We are doing everything we can ourselves to preserve the young master's body heat."
Lily showed off the thick padded garments and the stones heated glowing hot. Thalia gave Vitten a pointed look, as if to say, see for yourself.
But Vitten would not be deterred.
"What I am saying is this. If nothing you try looks like it will ever work, then why not put something unimaginably hot inside his body instead? Awoken Ability or whatever else it is, we drill it so hard it never dares activate again."
So that was his idea: feed me food brimming with yang energy.
It was a method my master had tried in the early days. Thanks to that, I had downed brews of precious camphor ginseng, steeped a twin-headed root into wine, and tried the pressed juices of ginger and garlic.
And then there was the other thing I had been made to try...
"You know, like the core of a lava elemental, or the lungs of a phoenix,"
...Hm?
"Or perhaps the heart of a red dragon."