Chapter 56 of 90
Wiping Away the Blood
Li Yuguo and the others had scattered.
He carried Nalan Meng on his back and trotted the whole way. He did not stop. But he had used a great deal of strength in that fight, and though he had eaten some snake meat beforehand, it was not enough. His legs were going. His breath was going.
When he came to a little canyon, walled in with green trees on both sides, he finally stopped. He knelt and set Nalan Meng down on the moss with her back against a rock.
"Wife," he said. "How are you?"
She did not answer.
He looked at her face, and saw at once that something was wrong. She was frowning, her whole face pinched with pain. The wound in her shoulder had stopped bleeding; the Poison Emperor's seal had held. But around the place where the arrow had gone in, the flesh had turned black.
The bow had been poisoned. The arrow too.
"So hot!" He put his hand on her forehead and snatched it back. She was burning up.
She had fallen into a coma.
He looked around. There was no one. Nothing but the trees, and the moss, and the sound of a stream somewhere further down.
He had no choice.
He untied her clothes.
Not all of them. He did not tear anything off. He loosened the crimson silk at her shoulder and drew it down, and her big red skirt still covered her below the waist. But as the silk came down, her breasts came out into the green light.
He looked at them.
He could not help it. For one moment, he could not look anywhere else. Full and round and heavy, white as milk, the nipples soft and pink. The most beautiful breasts in Nalan City. His wife's breasts.
What an amazing pair, he thought, with a bitterness that surprised him. And everyone except me is playing with them.
Her shoulders, too, were bare to him now.
He had to admit it. Long years of training had given Nalan Meng a perfectly proportioned body. Her shoulders especially were narrow, almost delicate—there seemed to be so little flesh on them. He wondered how there could be so much strength in a body like hers. Where did it all come from?
But he did not let himself think about it for long.
He opened Alimama in his mind, and searched for what he needed. And when he saw his balance, he smiled bitterly.
He had been so busy spending lately that he had forgotten to earn. The wages of the people working the fields. The pensions. The pills he had bought for his own cultivation. All of it added up. He had only two thousand taels of silver left.
Money's hard to make, he thought, and easy to spend. He sighed.
He bought what he needed anyway. Sterilized blades, wrapped in paper. Clean gauze. A brown bottle of iodine.
He had written a lot of books. To write them, he had had to look up a lot of things. In some ways, he was a walking encyclopedia—though he only knew a little about medicine. A little would have to do.
He cut away the rotten flesh around the wound. Quickly, cleanly. Then he leaned close, and put his lips toward her shoulder, to suck the poison out.
His mouth was a finger's width from her skin when she turned her head in pain, and her eyes opened.
"You—" Her voice was cracked. "What are you doing?"
She saw. Her clothes, open. Her breasts, bare. Her husband's face, bent over her.
Shame and fury flooded her face. She clenched her fist and punched him.
It landed on his chest. It had no strength in it at all. It was like being hit by a pillow.
"So I was right. You're poisoned," said Li Yuguo calmly. "But a thief's poison is nowhere near the Poison Emperor's. Otherwise you'd already be dead."
He bent toward her again.
Nalan Meng bit her lip.
Even Li Yuguo. Her own husband. In all the years since they had married, he had never so much as touched her hand.
He stopped.
"I respect your choice," he said. "If you don't want me to help you get the poison out, I won't. With your constitution, this poison won't kill you. I just need to get you some medicine to bring your fever down. But you'll recover very slowly, because of it."
He said it seriously. But inside, he was thinking something else.
You'll wear those almost-naked outfits and serve strangers every night. But you won't let your husband look at your breasts to save your life.
Nalan Meng did not know what he was thinking.
But she knew where they were. Ling Snake Mountain was dangerous everywhere. If she did not get her strength back—if she could not fight—she would only be a burden on Li Yuguo. And then the two of them might very well both end up dying here.
She bit her lip harder.
"Then—then be gentle."
He sucked out another mouthful of the black blood, and spat it aside. Then another. Then another. Until the flesh around the wound had gone back to its own color.
Then he began to bandage it. Before that, of course, he swabbed it with iodine, which made her hiss through her teeth. And over the iodine, he smeared some of the golden sore ointment that was used in this world, thick and yellow and smelling of herbs.
Nalan Meng looked down at the neat white bandage on her shoulder.
Then she looked at him, and her face was very complicated.
"I didn't expect it," she said. "That you didn't take advantage of me just now. I'm… impressed."
"That doesn't count as taking advantage," said Li Yuguo. "You and I are husband and wife. There's nothing wrong with something like that. It's normal." He wiped his mouth. "But I know you don't want it. I won't call myself a good man, but I won't force you to do things you don't like. If you hadn't been poisoned, I wouldn't have touched you."
He said it flatly. Decisively.
The words were harsh. And they made something in Nalan Meng's chest twist and ache.
"Hey…" she said. "Do you really hate me that much?"
Li Yuguo was shocked. But he did not say anything. He took out a fever-reducing pill, and a bottle of mineral water. "Here. Take this pill first."
"What kind of pill is this?"
Nalan Meng had obviously never seen a capsule before. Li Yuguo did not have to explain it, of course. "It's just medicine. You're very weak right now."
She put it in her mouth. "It's really sweet," she said, surprised. She looked at the clear plastic bottle in his hand. "And what kind of water is this?"
"Spring water." Li Yuguo looked up at the sky.
It was getting late. The light in the canyon was going gold, then gray. "Looks like we'll have to spend the night out here. It's not safe to travel in the dark."
He broke off some branches and made a simple shelter. A lean-to of boughs against the rock, thatched over with leaves and moss. From the outside, it looked like a heap of dirt and brush.
He had always liked watching wilderness survival shows. Bear Grylls, especially, and the others like him. They had been his idols. And so Li Yuguo had his own unique understanding of how to survive in the wild.
"You have skills like this?" Nalan Meng looked at the shelter with something like admiration. She could see at once how well hidden it was. It would keep out wild animals. Nobody passing would see it at all.
"After my father fell," said Li Yuguo, laughing, "I came all the way to Nalan City by myself to find you. I slept in the wind the whole way. If I hadn't had these skills, I'm afraid I'd have been eaten by monsters."
That was the plot, of course. He knew it. In the original, after General Li fell, his son had disguised himself as a beggar and made it all the way to Nalan City alive.
"Why didn't you ever tell me that?"
"You never asked." Li Yuguo glanced at her. He took a blanket out of his bracelet and covered her with it.
"Aren't you going to sleep?" Nalan Meng looked at him.
Li Yuguo sat down on a stone. "I'll keep watch."
The moon had come up over the canyon. He sat on his stone in its light with his elbows on his knees, watching the dark between the trees.
To Nalan Meng, lying under the blanket, the sight of him like that was very warm. She did not know why. But there was a feeling in her heart she had not had in a long time—a feeling of being safe.
"Actually," she said, "I'm not really a princess…"
She had not meant to say it. She had suddenly remembered some sad things, that was all.
"What?" Li Yuguo looked at her, surprised.
Nalan Meng drew the blanket closer around her.
It smelled of him. She noticed that, and her face went a little hot. Then she said:
"My father sent me away. My brothers and sisters are all in the capital. I'm the only one who was sent out to Saibei."
"Actually," said Li Yuguo, "I've always wanted to ask about that. But I never had the chance. And I was afraid you'd hate me for asking."
He smiled, and struck a light, and set a small fire going in a ring of stones. The warmth of it came up between them, and flushed both their faces.
Nalan Meng laughed at herself.
"My mother was a prostitute," she said. "To put it crudely—a woman from a brothel. My father got drunk one night and spent the night in the house, and my mother had me." She looked into the fire. "Actually, by the agreement between my father and yours, it was my Eighth Sister who was supposed to marry you. But Eighth Sister is my father's favorite daughter. So it was me."
"That's understandable," said Li Yuguo. "When my father died, I was left with nothing. I had no value to the Third Prince at all. It was good enough to let you marry me."
He meant it. A wife in name was better than no wife at all.
And besides, he had been single for thirty years before he came here. Even if Nalan Meng was only his wife in name, even if nothing had ever happened between them—his wife was still his wife. And she had taken him in at his worst. That was a kindness.
"Don't you hate him?"
"Why?"
"For giving you me instead of Eighth Sister."
Li Yuguo smiled. Then he put a hand over his stomach and started laughing.
Nalan Meng was annoyed. "What are you laughing at?"
"I'm laughing at you," said Li Yuguo. "One tigress is plenty for me. If he'd swapped the tigress for a real princess—that would've killed me!"
Nalan Meng snorted. "Call me a tigress one more time, and I'll teach you a lesson."
"Go on, then. Hitting is kissing, scolding is love, and kicking is the deepest love of all!" He pushed his face toward her.
"Disgusting!"
But she was laughing too.
All of a sudden, she felt that Li Yuguo was a very interesting person.
And she blamed herself. For having been so prejudiced against him at the start. For three years of it. She felt that she owed him a great deal.
She pressed her lips together and glanced at him sideways, faintly, from under the blanket. I'm strange, she thought. I won't let him touch me. But I wouldn't let him look for other women outside, either. It was a contradiction. A ridiculous one.
"Daughter-in-law."
Li Yuguo glanced at her.
Nalan Meng was startled. "What?"
"When we get back," said Li Yuguo, "let's make Nalan City strong. A real city. And prove it to the Third Prince."
The words went into her like a thousand-year arrow. Straight into the softest place in her heart, all at once.
She bit her lip. Her eyes went suddenly hot. And then she was crying.
"Moved to tears?" Li Yuguo teased.
"You're the one crying. It's windy today. The sand got in my eyes," she said stubbornly.
Li Yuguo smiled and did not say anything.
There was no wind tonight.
The sky was full of stars. The moon was bright. The trees around them stood quiet and far away.
After a while, a few fireflies drifted down out of the dark and hung around Li Yuguo, blinking. He opened his hand, and they settled in his palm, glowing softly, green-gold.
"Look!" he said, and turned.
Nalan Meng had already fallen asleep.
She slept peacefully. Sweetly. Her face had gone soft and young in the firelight, without the cold mask she wore all day. She had turned on her side under the blanket, and it had slipped, and the crimson skirt was pulled tight across her hips—tucked down into the cleft of her ass so that it showed, perfectly, the full round shape of her.
He looked at it.
He wanted to touch it. Just to rest his hand there. But he held himself back. Because of the guilt. Because every night, she was going to Heaven Lust to be played with by strangers for Shi Dacheng's debt—and he had let it happen. Had helped it happen. Sold the outfits. Taken the points.
He had no choice. He knew that. He needed the points to live.
But if I have to, he thought, then I'll make total use of that beautiful ass.
"Silly girl," he murmured, shaking his head.
But he was surprised too. In the original book, there had been very little written about Nalan Meng. He had never given her a mother at all. Never written the brothel, or the Eighth Sister, or the drunk prince. That whole relationship between father and daughter had appeared out of nowhere.
It had come out of this world, not out of his book.
He could not help wondering. Is this world only a story? Or is it a real world?
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he called up his new skill.
Secret Eye.
A window opened over her sleeping face.
[ Name: Nalan Meng ]
Status: Immoral
Secret: Working as a slutty waitress in Heaven Lust Bar.
He read it twice.
Immoral. That would be the title. King of Cuckolds. Every woman connected to him, flagged.
But it was the other word he could not stop looking at. Slutty. Not working as a waitress. Not serving tables. The system did not use words carelessly.
What is she doing in that bar, he thought, to earn a word like that?
"Forget it." He rubbed his eyes. "Thinking about it too much gives me a headache!"
He jumped up into the branches of a dead tree beside the shelter, and lay back along a bough with his legs crossed and his hands behind his head, and looked at the stars.
And at that moment, far off between the trees, he saw a light.
A fire. Coming closer.
He sat up very slowly, and looked.
Torches. A line of them, bobbing through the forest at the mouth of the canyon. And at their head, a figure in blue and white he would have known anywhere.
Ye Qiong.
He looked at Ye Qiong. Then he looked down at Nalan Meng, asleep in the shelter beside the fire. And a very bad feeling settled into his stomach.
He dropped out of the tree and kicked dirt over the fire. It went out.
And in the last of its light, he saw the ground.
Blood. A trail of it. Dark drops on the moss, leading from the mouth of the canyon straight to the shelter. From Nalan Meng's shoulder, while he had carried her.
"So that's it," he breathed.
Ye Qiong had followed the blood.
More than ten masters of the True Yuan Sect, against him alone, with a wounded wife. It was no different from suicide.
He went down on his knees in the dark, and began, as fast as he could, to wipe away every drop of blood on the ground.
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