TN: Chapter 29 & 30 was edited (05/24/24)
Wei Yun tugged at the corner of his mouth, glancing at Wei Jing standing beside him.
Immediately, Wei Jing lifted his foot and stomped hard on the man’s injury, causing bright red blood to flow out and the man to scream in agony once more.
“I don’t have much patience,”
Wei Yun took a few steps forward, crouched down, and stared at the man being stepped on by Wei Jing with his dark, heavy eyes, “You better hand over everything you stole from me.”
“I won’t let you die.”
Wei Yun’s voice was gentle and slightly deep, yet it carried a bone-chilling coldness, “But I will make you afraid to live.”
After all, sometimes living is far more painful than dying a thousand times over.
The man’s pupils contracted, and he trembled uncontrollably. He mumbled something, as if making a decision, and his tongue touched his teeth.
At that moment, Wei Yun promptly used the hilt of the sword he held to hit the man’s lower jaw hard, almost dislocating his chin and temporarily losing the ability to bite normally.
As Wei Yun held his chin, the bright red blood flowing from the man’s mouth stained his knuckles. He frowned slightly and released his grip.
He took a clean brocade handkerchief passed by Wei Jing and leisurely wiped the bloodstains on his hands, then carelessly threw it on the man lying on the ground.
In the deserted courtyard at night, the screams shattered the deep silence, crows hidden among the tree shadows flapped their wings, emitting clear and eerie sounds, making the surroundings even more desolate.
The man was almost a bloodied figure, his blue robe soaked with blood, making it difficult to recognize. He lay there, with external medicine sprinkled on him by Wei Jing. The crude medicine powder burned his wounds, causing him pain and a burning sensation, making him shiver like a sieve.
In the end, Wei Jing pried open his mouth.
This man was a spy under Song Jinian, but he had been engaging in thievery in the past years because of his exceptional lightness skill, stealthily breaking into others’ residences at night to steal without being caught by the authorities for many years.
Until a few years ago, when he committed a crime again and defiled a young lady from a prominent family.
That family had a very close cousin relationship with Song Jinian. Because the cousin asked for help, Song Jinian personally took charge of the matter and carefully set a trap to catch him.
However, after capturing him, Song Jinian did not kill him. Instead, he found a death row inmate to take the fall publicly as a way to satisfy his cousin while secretly turning this man into a spy for his Prime Minister’s mansion.
What Song Jinian valued was this man’s exceptional lightness skill.
And over the years, this man indeed managed to uncover many secrets for Song Jinian, but this time, he made a big mistake with Wei Yun.
Taking advantage of the night Wei Yun was summoned into the forbidden palace by Emperor Qi and Di, Song Jinian ordered this man to spy on the Imperial Advisor’s mansion, wanting to probe Wei Yun’s secrets.
Thus, at this moment, the encrypted letters from the hidden compartment under Wei Yun’s desk might already be in Song Jinian’s hands.
“Besides these, what else did you take?” Wei Yun was not very satisfied with the difficult answer the man gave. He looked down at him, as if looking at a dying ant, without a trace of warmth.
The man breathed slowly, and when he coughed violently, he spat out another mouthful of blood.
It took him a long time to realize what exactly Wei Yun was referring to.
The study was dimly lit at the time. Using the moonlight that filtered through the window panes, he found a coded message and discovered a box.
Because he couldn’t see it clearly at the time, he mistook the copper round object inside the box for gold.
Blinded by greed, he casually took it.
“Where is the item?” Wei Yun asked.
Due to the Emperor Qi and Emperor Xuan’s hasty announcements, Wei Yun was also worried that if the copper pendant were to suddenly return to its original form while he was carrying it, it might bring unnecessary trouble.
To avoid these incidents, he locked the pendant in a box.
Unexpectedly, it was stolen by this person.
The man shakily extended his still intact left hand, pointing towards the pond in the courtyard covered with lotus stems.
This courtyard was a place where he occasionally stayed while on missions.
Realizing it was just an ordinary piece of copper and not gold, he casually threw it into the pond in the courtyard.
Wei Yun turned his head, glanced at the pool of withered stems.
His furrowed brows finally relaxed, and then he turned to his bodyguard behind him and said in a deep voice, “Go find it.”
The night was long, but it eventually came to an end.
When the sky gradually began to lighten, Xie Tao had already woken up.
She stared blankly at the glass window with the curtains half-open, as the sky slowly became brighter, curling up in her blanket until her alarm clock went off, and then she moved slightly.
Today was Wednesday, and she still had to go to school.
Life seemed to become particularly peaceful all at once, so peaceful that she felt every day was just repeating the same things, making her feel no difference at all.
The blank WeChat account lying quietly in her phone, she couldn’t help but look at it many times every day.
She had already noticed that everything about him seemed unusual.
From the day she returned to Nan City, the world, in her eyes, had become even more mysterious and unknown.
Just like his sudden appearance.
She couldn’t delete his WeChat no matter what. Initially, she thought it was a problem with her phone, but she had no issue deleting Song Shiman’s WeChat.
Xie Tao instinctively felt that all this was no coincidence.
But she didn’t dare to try deleting his WeChat again; she was afraid of what would happen if she really did delete it.
From the day she noticed something strange with the delivery, she felt more and more that there was too much mystery about him that she couldn’t imagine.
The messages she sent him were all marked with a red exclamation mark.
And it was also when this connection suddenly interrupted that Xie Tao realized she didn’t really understand him at all.
He never told her from the beginning where he really came from, never revealing too much information to her. Instead, it was she who, with all her enthusiasm, talked ceaselessly.
Perhaps on the night of her birthday, he never took her drunken murmurs to heart?
Maybe on her eighteenth birthday, his “as you wish” was nothing more than a reluctant response, unable to bear refusing her?
Perhaps, he never took it seriously?
Over so many days, numerous guesses, both good and bad, flashed through Xie Tao’s mind.
After school in the afternoon, Xie Tao saw Xie Lan at the school gate, still wearing flip-flops, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a pair of light-colored ripped jeans.
“Little Sister Tao Tao, Brother Lan is inviting you to have hotpot, wanna go?” Xie Lan casually scratched his head and strolled up to her in his slippers.
Xie Tao, preoccupied with thoughts and having looked listless these past days, shook her head silently in refusal.
But in the end, she was dragged into a hotpot restaurant by Xie Lan.
“Come on, order whatever you like!”
Xie Lan threw the menu in front of Xie Tao and patted his chest, “Your Brother Lan can afford whatever you want!”
Xie Tao stared at him for a while, then symbolically marked a few dishes.
Xie Lan took the menu, saw that she had only marked a few dishes, nowhere near enough to eat, and swiftly added many more meat dishes.
“Do you know how long it’s been since I had hotpot… Actually, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a proper meal,” Xie Lan lamented, handing the menu to the waiter, resting his chin on one hand.
“Why?” Xie Tao didn’t understand.
“It’s all because of Old Xi, he doesn’t allow it, says to cut off from worldly desires, can’t be tainted by too much of the mundane world, but damn, I’m a mortal through and through! He won’t let me eat this or that, just makes me eat that stuff he cooks, in District D.” As soon as Xie Lan started talking about Old Xi, he went on and on, venting his frustrations.
“Then why are you able to eat today?”
After the waiter brought the spicy soup base, turned on the stove, and walked away, Xie Tao finally asked him.
“It’s all thanks to you,”
Xie Lan grinned, showing off his white teeth, “Old Xi asked me to treat you to something nice, to cheer you up.”
Xie Tao was stunned when she heard him say this.
“Here,”
As Xie Tao was lost in thought, Xie Lan spoke again, “This is my gift to you.”
When she looked up, she saw Xie Lan holding a mobile phone box.
“Even though you found your phone, I saw it’s pretty old. Take this,” he handed it to her.
In that moment, Xie Tao stared at Xie Lan sitting across from her, speechless for a long while.
The young man in front of her, and the middle-aged man in that small tavern, both of them, were caring for her.
“Thank you, but I can’t accept it.”
It seemed like a long time before Xie Tao found her voice again.
But Xie Lan acted as if he hadn’t heard her, placing the box with the mobile phone in front of her, “I don’t care, this is bought in a color that you girls like. I can’t use it, if you don’t want it, I’ll have to throw it away.”
Over the boiling hotpot, white steam was shrouded, and Xie Tao bowed her head to eat the greens in her bowl, quiet beyond words.
In just a moment, Xie Lan had already devoured several plates of meat. Seeing Xie Tao eating as if her heart wasn’t in it, he found it puzzling. “Haven’t you gotten in touch with your friend yet?”
He remembered what she said last time.
Upon hearing his words, Xie Tao’s eyes might have been stung by the steamy smoke, as her eyes reddened and a tear suddenly fell.
She pursed her lips, clenched the chopsticks in her hand tightly, and said not a word.
In this vast sea of people, perhaps, she would never find him again.
—
Because the pond in the lotus pond was too muddy, the guards dredging it only managed to fish out a copper pendant from the pond by the time the sky darkened.
Wei Jing mounted a fast horse, draped in the night, rushing towards the direction of the Imperial Advisor’s residence.
Just two more streets to cross, and it would be the Imperial Advisor’s residence.
But as he passed a deep alley, his eyes were suddenly dazzled by a faint blue light.
In the blink of an eye, that faint blue light, like a rope, bound around his waist, forcing him to fall off his horse, and then bound him against the wall.
His horse, too, ran away amidst a burst of neighing.
Wei Jing, having been human for nineteen years, had never encountered such a mysterious scene.
He widened his eyes, utterly astonished.
At that moment, he vaguely heard a female voice saying, “That was close, almost didn’t make it…”
Then, he saw the faint blue light gradually condense into the figure of a woman.
She was a particularly lightly dressed woman, wearing only a thin, sleeveless long dress, revealing her fair and slender arms.
Her face was covered with a layer of black veil, obscuring her features, only the purplish-red earrings dangling from her earlobes shimmered with a moist luster.
“Who are you?”
The usually composed Wei Jing, at this moment, revealed a tension in his voice he had never experienced before.
The woman looked him up and down, casually saying, “Just a particularly beautiful woman.”
Wei Jing, not expecting such a response, was momentarily stunned.
The woman’s gaze lingered on him for a moment, and then, with a brightening of her eyes, she accurately pulled out the copper pendant hidden inside the folds of his clothing.
