Chapter 18#
A Benefactor#
His consciousness drifted in and out. A dull pain pressed without stopping against his chest. Somewhere between waking and sleep, Yin Yuheng found himself back in that dark, overcast forest.
The savage demon beast reared up and brought its claws down across his chest.
The thirteen-year-old boy collapsed, beyond all control — and even so, gathered the last of his strength to thrust his sword forward. The beast let out a shriek and shut its eyes, furious to the last.
Behind him, Li Guanghan’s voice carried a note of anguish as he called out. Yin Yuheng hit the ground, face-down in blood and mud, shaking with pain.
“I’m fine. I’m fine…” The boy kept murmuring it, not knowing what he was saying — only stubborn, refusing to concede.
Refusing to concede to fate.
Someone’s trembling hand closed around his — Li Guanghan, it must have been.
Li Guanghan’s voice was raw. “To save me — you actually—”
Save you?
Yin Yuheng wanted to laugh, but moving made his chest split with pain, so he stopped.
He hadn’t saved anyone. He had been trying to save himself.
Xiao Bai was crying out in his inner sea, voice breaking, saying the plot wasn’t supposed to be this bad, the injury wasn’t supposed to be this severe… Yin Yuheng had nothing left to comfort him with.
In the original plot, there was indeed a scene of self-sacrifice — but nothing this agonizing, nothing this brutal. He had taken far worse wounds than the plot described. He knew why. This was fate’s punishment and its warning.
He had refused to leave Chaoge for Fengliang, and so nine blades had found him in an assassination attempt, leaving him unconscious and carried here by force.
He had refused to save Li Guanghan, and so the beast had tracked him down and carved through his heart meridians, compelling him to perform the heroic act regardless.
The more he resisted, the more relentlessly fate drove him forward — and the worse it hurt, the more ruinous the toll. This was how it penalized him for refusing to comply without a fight.
Heaven and earth, a cage. Forcing him along the predetermined track.
Yin Yuheng kept his ragged breathing as quiet as he could. He gathered what remained of his strength, dug his nails into the earth, and hauled himself upright. His dark hair was scattered in tangles all around him, the ends dark with blood, the hem of his robes gray with dirt. Disheveled as he was — when he raised his head, he was still strikingly, arrestingly beautiful.
Li Guanghan was beside him. Yin Yuheng didn’t look at him.
He looked up at the churning black clouds in the sky above, and said, without sound —
I will not. I will never yield.
…
“His Highness has an old wound to the heart meridian that has flared up…”
“He must rest completely — he cannot be near any spiritual objects with forceful auras, which could further disturb his meridians…”
“A Lingsui Pill has already been administered…”
The voices around him blurred together into noise. Yin Yuheng frowned, irritated, and dragged his eyes open.
“His Highness is awake!” the royal physician called out with evident relief.
Immediately the room filled with movement — people lifting the curtains, swapping out the warming brazier, feeling his pulse, bringing medicine — louder than ever.
The person holding the medicine bowl was Yin Shaozhu.
Yin Yuheng stared at his older brother’s expression, dark as a storm, and thought better of reaching for the bowl. He shifted further back into his blankets.
“Drink,” Yin Shaozhu said, squeezing the word out through his teeth.
Yin Yuheng glanced at him twice, then took the bowl with deliberate slowness.
“Explain. What happened.” Yin Shaozhu kept his face rigid. “I heard you went to Junzhou, then stopped at the Guoshi Manor, and ended up like this?”
“…You’ve obviously already looked into it, Elder Brother,” Yin Yuheng said meekly, cradling the bowl. “The qilin horn’s aura was too forceful — it jarred my meridians, and the old wound got set off…”
Yin Shaozhu’s temper ignited. “What does a qilin horn matter? Is any gift for Li Guanghan worth this? You could have grabbed anything from the palace treasury — why go all the way to Junzhou yourself? And you didn’t tell me you were in pain?”
Yin Yuheng listened with the appearance of humble contrition, while privately thinking: telling you wouldn’t have helped. The plot sent me to find the qilin horn — even if I hadn’t gone myself, fate would have found a hundred ways to drag me there.
Over the years, Yin Yuheng had learned to stop fighting the current head-on.
He offered no further explanation, sat quietly, and waited out Yin Shaozhu’s anger. It took some time before he finally managed to coax his brother into leaving.
Wiping the cold sweat from his forehead, Yin Yuheng thought sourly: he’d probably be kept under restrictions for the next few days. He definitely wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the Guoshi Manor for a while.
…
After the attendants cleared out, the room was finally quiet. Yin Yuheng looked up and noticed someone leaning against the doorframe — arms folded, sword at his side, standing there for who knew how long.
“Lu Yan? Why are you standing so far away?”
Lu Yan said nothing. He came over in silence.
“I just met the First Prince,” he said quietly.
Yin Yuheng blinked. “How was it — did Elder Brother give you trouble?”
“You were ill enough that he didn’t have attention to spare for me.” Lu Yan paused. “When you were unconscious, I heard him speaking. He seems to have a considerable opinion of Li Guanghan.”
Yin Yuheng leaned back against the headboard with a helpless smile. “Elder Brother has never been fond of Shifu…”
If not for Li Guanghan’s formidable cultivation level — and the fact that the Emperor’s seclusion meant the capital still needed someone of authority to anchor it — Yin Shaozhu’s opinion would likely be even less favorable.
“I feel the same,” Lu Yan said, cutting him off.
Yin Yuheng paused.
“I also don’t like him,” Lu Yan said, his voice flat. “I think he treats you poorly.”
“Shifu is good to me — he’s just occupied…”
“If he were truly good to you, how could he let you leave the Guoshi Manor alone, coughing up blood?” Lu Yan’s voice sharpened. “Is it worth deceiving yourself for a lifetime, just because he saved you once years ago?”
Yin Yuheng had once told Lu Yan that he cared for Li Guanghan because of an inadvertent kindness — Li Guanghan had unknowingly saved his life.
Lu Yan had not forgotten it.
Yin Yuheng opened his mouth, and found nothing to say.
“He may not even have meant to save you — it could have been pure chance. Everything you’ve given him since then has more than repaid whatever debt there was.” Lu Yan leaned forward, eyes fixed on Yin Yuheng’s.
Yin Yuheng looked away, almost without thinking. After a long moment he murmured: “…Even so. I just — can’t let go.”
Hearing that, Lu Yan felt the heaviness he’d been carrying grow worse. He smiled despite himself, something sour and aching underneath it. “Just because of a life saved — you’d give yourself over without reservation, a hundred times? If the person who saved you that day hadn’t been Li Guanghan — would you still feel this way about him?”
“There’s no use in what-ifs,” Yin Yuheng said, helpless. “From the moment he saved me, I couldn’t forget him…”
He stopped abruptly, as if something had occurred to him. He didn’t finish the sentence.
Lu Yan assumed the silence was grief and said nothing more. He knew he couldn’t change Yin Yuheng’s mind — and so he let it go. But a restless discomfort lingered in him, sourceless and persistent.
Why was he so unsettled?
Perhaps, he told himself, because he couldn’t bear to watch a dear friend lose himself this way, and suffer for it.
He had to think of something. He couldn’t let his friend keep sinking like this.
Lu Yan’s hand moved, without thinking, to his chest — where the piece of qilin horn Yin Yuheng had given him was kept.
The larger piece. By far the larger piece.
Something in him settled, a little.
He cut off the bigger half and gave it to me — doesn’t that mean I matter to him too?
Then a different thought surfaced, unbidden and reluctant.
If the person who had saved Yin Yuheng that day hadn’t been Li Guanghan — but had been me — would things have been…
Lu Yan stopped himself.
What was he hoping for?
…
Yin Yuheng had been unconscious, and Xiao Bai had been frantic the entire time. Only when Yin Yuheng opened his eyes did the tension ease.
“Heng-ge, what are you thinking about?”
Yin Yuheng lay in bed with the appearance of quiet rest, but his mind had been turning for some time.
Xiao Bai could see how absorbed he was, and grew curious.
“I’m thinking about something that happened five years ago.”
“Five years ago? When Li Guanghan saved you?”
Five years ago, Yin Yuheng had traveled to Lizhou to hunt demons and break through to the Golden Core stage. He had been badly wounded by a powerful demon and was on the verge of death — when at the critical moment, a streak of sword light split the sky, and the demon fled in panic. Yin Yuheng had survived by the narrowest margin.
Li Guanghan happened to have been in the area at the time. And so Yin Yuheng had concluded that the sword must have been his.
That had been the reason Yin Yuheng gave for his feelings toward Li Guanghan.
“That’s the one.” Yin Yuheng said quietly. “I’ve been thinking — there’s something interesting about it.”
“What do you mean?” Xiao Bai was confused.
Yin Yuheng smiled faintly, and didn’t answer directly. “Tell me — why does Li Guanghan have feelings for Zhu Anning?”
Xiao Bai answered immediately: “Because he mistook his savior’s identity — he thinks Zhu Anning was the one who saved him back then…”
Xiao Bai suddenly understood where Yin Yuheng was going.
Sure enough, Yin Yuheng was wearing a smile that said far more than it showed.
“I never actually saw who struck that blow and drove the demon off.”
“So why was I so certain it must have been Li Guanghan?”
“Li Guanghan mistook someone’s identity. Is it so impossible that I could have done the same?”
Yin Yuheng’s tone was perfectly even. Xiao Bai felt as though struck by lightning — struck completely speechless.
“That can’t be right,” Xiao Bai said, disbelieving. “The plot says—”
“The plot says I fell for Li Guanghan because of that sword light,” Yin Yuheng said. “There is not a single line anywhere that directly states, in so many words, that Li Guanghan was the one who struck.”
Xiao Bai began to tremble — because Yin Yuheng was right.
The phrasing in the plot had been carefully chosen to make the reader instinctively equate the unknown swordsman with Li Guanghan. But examined closely, there was not one sentence that plainly, unambiguously named him.
“This story has been setting traps everywhere,” Yin Yuheng said, with a quiet laugh.
He abandoned the pretense of resting and sat up. He thought it over for a while, then got out of bed and called for his staff.
He dealt with a few matters first. Then, at a carefully chosen moment, Yin Yuheng said, as if it had only just come to him: “Shifu went to Lizhou at some point, didn’t he?”
Lizhou was the place Yin Yuheng had been demon-hunting five years ago.
His staff, hearing the Crown Prince ask about this, smiled. “He did, Your Highness — the National Preceptor spent some time in Lizhou that year.”
“Good.” Yin Yuheng smiled. “Then have someone look into what Shifu was doing in Lizhou during that period.”
His expression was warm, his voice gentle as he added: “I want to understand Shifu better. Perhaps if I do, the next gift I give him will actually please him.”
His staff exchanged glances, aware in a vague way of the Crown Prince’s long-standing devotion toward Li Guanghan. They said nothing more, and went to carry out their orders.
Yin Yuheng smiled to himself, a smile that meant considerably more than it let on.