CH 96

Chapter 96: Some sweetness (III)

Xue Xian and Tongdeng shot words back and forth, and Xuanmin simply stood there, exasperated. What a strange situation they found themselves in.

Each of them had previously been solitary, lone-wolf types, and although their personalities differed, there were some things they all had in common deep down –– one had instituted a secret courtyard where almost nobody had been allowed in; one was so aloof and cold that he could go three days without saying two sentences; and one had lived for hundreds of thousands of years without having all that much to do with the human realm.

So none of them had expected to become 'rowdy' as soon as they were united in the same room. And soon the mood heightened, for Xuanmin's pet bird arrived to join them.

Following two deep sighing noises, the bird flapped its wings and came hurtling into the hall, carrying a small bamboo basket in its beak. It flew violently around the hall and finally found its target, crashing straight into Xuanmin's arms. 

Xue Xian raised an eyebrow. "How come you're everywhere?" he complained.

The crow squawked at him insolently.

Tongdeng said, "This bird is still alive?"

"You know it?" Xue Xian asked, shocked. But then he remembered that the bird had brought him that old copper coin pendant, and could deduce the truth.

"This bird is older than he is," Tongdeng said, glancing at Xuanmin. "What a spoiled brat."

The crow should not have been able to hear Tongdeng, nor see him. Yet this godforsaken creature never seemed to obey the laws it was supposed to obey. It was basically some kind of bird god. After Tongdeng spoke, the bird suddenly looked intently in the spot where Tongdeng sat, with its head tilted, as though having heard something or having sensed that an old friend was present.

Xuanmin looked up at Tongdeng. "Around ten years ago, it landed in the secret courtyard with an injured wing. I rescued it. You've seen it before?"

Ever since he'd become the not-living-nor-dead being that he was now, and had met Tongdeng, Xuanmin had begun to gain memories from his previous life. Though it was mostly still too blurred to decipher, it was as though he were waking up from a dream –– some parts were clearer than others.

Now, he could remember that, at the age of six or seven, he'd had a pet crow. But he'd always assumed that the bird that had appeared in the secret courtyard had merely been a coincidence, and that he'd happened to have wanted to take care of the animal; that that was why the bird had accompanied him for the past ten years.

But now, Tongdeng seemed to imply that he and the bird's relationship went back much further than that.

Tongdeng said, "I've not only seen it."

When the crow had first arrived in the secret courtyard, Tongdeng had still been the Great Priest, and the first Xuanmin had only been around ten years old. At the time, Tongdeng had worried that his studious disciple was too antisocial –– the child had always been a little snowman, and did not seem to be about to melt anytime soon.

Although Tongdeng, too, was not exactly extroverted, he had now gone from being the one who iced others out to being the one being iced out –– he didn't like that. Besides, he'd also worried that little Xuanmin was too aloof, and would grow up unable to sympathise with others' pain.

In order to get Xuanmin to warm up a little, he'd thought of different ideas, and had ultimately decided to find him a companion.

When he'd first brought the crow to the secret courtyard, it had still been an egg. It had broken through its shell exactly at the moment that Tongdeng was presenting it to Xuanmin.

When it opened its eyes, the first thing it had seen had been Xuanmin. It had immediately taken to its master, throwing itself straight into Xuanmin's hands.

At the beginning, it had been like a chick, covered in soft fur and unable to fly. All it could do was hop about on its thin little claws behind Xuanmin, following him everywhere he went. When Xuanmin sat to read, it would pick a sunny spot on Xuanmin's robes and curl up there, snoozing or else rolling about. 

The chick... the bird chick grew slower than most birds, taking a very long time to learn how to fly. But once it did, it went from 'hopping manically after Xuanmin's heels' to 'flapping its wings manically around Xuanmin's face'.

Despite Xuanmin's irredeemably cold personality, he had ultimately accepted the crow as his pet. Every day, he would give it some food and water, but the rest of the time, he would allow it to roam wherever it wanted. Whether the bird disappeared for hours at a time or followed him around shedding its feathers anywhere, he didn't care.

At some point, the bird had picked up a strange habit –– every once in a while, it would steal one or two enormous magical pills to eat. But as long as it didn't make itself sick, Xuanmin didn't care either.

From Tongdeng's perspective, Xuanmin 'not caring about the bird' meant about the same as 'not hating the bird', which could be taken to mean 'indulging the bird'. After all, in the ten or so years he'd known the child, he had never seen Xuanmin 'like' anything or anyone.

Tongdeng had never in his life imagined that, several hundred years after his death, he would now be finding himself watching his disciple with a heart of ice treat another person so kindly. 

Having met Xue Xian, Tongdeng now understood what Xuanmin really was like when he indulged someone.

It was also because of having met Xue Xian that Tongdeng discovered –– his disciple had perhaps never been born to be an ascetic of the cease to struggle, cease to live kind.

He even suspected that Xuanmin couldn't not treat Xue Xian well.

Of course, if Tongdeng ever found out that Xuanmin really could tame Xue Xian –– if he ever saw Xuanmin half-seriously, half-affectionately say to Xue Xian, "Still messing around?" –– then Tongdeng would surely think his disciple had been poisoned or possessed. Although it was not obvious to strangers, Tongdeng had raised Xuanmin and knew that such a tone, to Xuanmin, was equivalent to 'teasing'...

Anyway, the bird really was terrifyingly intelligent.

Xuanmin reached into the bamboo basket it carried and retrieved a small flask of wine and a pouring pot. It was as though the crow had known that Xue Xian would find Xuanmin on this very night, and had somehow gotten its claws on this wine to help them celebrate.

Xuanmin never drank, so he first paused when seeing the flask of wine, then casually passed it to Xue Xian.

Xue Xian laughed as he accepted the wine. "What did you feed this bird while it was growing up?" he asked.

"Magic pills," Tongdeng said, matter-of-fact.

Xue Xian gaped.

He brought the wine flask closer and shook it lightly, so that a soft scent came wafting out of it.

"Qiulubai?" Tongdeng asked mildly.

Xue Xian nodded. "Seems like it, from the scent. You seem to know your wines."

"Only this one," Tongdeng said in a faraway voice, as though recalling a memory. "An old friend really loved Qiulubai. Each year on New Year's Eve, he would make me drink with him."

He made it sound neutral with a word like with, but in truth, that old friend had gone to lengths to get him to accept the wine, sometimes pranking him, other times begging him, constantly contriving situations in which they ended up together on New Year's...

"Wait, no, hold up..." Xue Xian raised an eyebrow at Tongdeng. "Drink? Qiulubai? You?"

Tongdeng hummed in agreement.

Xuanmin did not appear surprised by this. Although he still could not remember what his master had been like in his past life, when he'd heard Tongdeng utter the name of the famous Qiulubai wine, he'd felt an anonymous sense of familiarity, as though this was something that Tongdeng used to bring up frequently.

Xue Xian was shocked. "Monks can drink?"

Tongdeng moved his hand to his chest and gave a Buddhist greeting, then mildly replied, "Back then, before I could be fully initiated, Daze Temple was destroyed."

He hadn't been initiated, so technically he hadn't had to obey all the rules of Buddhist priesthood. Although Xue Xian wasn't clear on all the details of religious rites, he did know some of the basics. Hearing this, he scowled and stared at both Xuanmin and Tongdeng for a long time before finally saying, "I get it now. Not only do you deeply hate your disciple, but your disciple deeply hates himself, too."

Neither master nor disciple is actually a real monk at all! There are no consequences to breaking monk taboos. It's all based on self-discipline!*

Xue Xian wanted to sigh in admiration. The Great Priest really was the Great Priest –– crazy, to an unfathomable extent.

He turned and pointed an accusing finger at Xuanmin. "Liar."

Xuanmin looked back at Xue Xian silently, then glared at Tongdeng. 

"Uh-oh, you don't look very happy with your Shifu," Tongdeng said. He jutted his chin out and pointed at the door, saying, "There's the door. Off you go."

At the end of the day, he wanted Xuanmin and Xue Xian to go away and leave him alone.

"You're hurting my old eyes. Go." Tongdeng had no desire to spend New Year's Eve with this disrespectful brat of a disciple and his pet dragon. "Leave the Qiulubai."

Xue Xian scoffed. "How depressing. I'm older than you by some eight hundred generations."

Tongdeng said nothing.

Seeing that his shifu was about to be driven mad, Xuanmin finally behaved like a real disciple –– he nodded at Tongdeng, then tapped Xue Xian on the back of his head and said, "Let's go."

Although he looked serious and polite, he gave off the impression of saying, I'm taking this troublesome one home now. Please excuse me.

Xue Xian did not protest. He turned back around and asked Xuanmin, "So you're not loitering around here anymore. You're coming back with me?"

What does he mean, loitering...

"Yes," Xuanmin said, gazing back at him.

Tongdeng scowled and chased the two –– and their bird –– out of his temple.

By the time Xue Xian and Xuanmin got back to the bamboo building, the sky was fully dark. And maybe it was thanks to all the magical energy that was flowing from Xue Xian to Xuanmin through the red string, or maybe it was because they were physically closer to each other now, but as he lit a lantern inside the room, Xue Xian suddenly found that the 'neither living nor dead' Xuanmin finally seemed to be growing a mole on his neck.

As though the mark from the Spider of the Same Age, prompted by the day's events, was finally beginning to take effect.

And as the mole on Xuanmin's spirit began to appear, something was also happening to his fleshly body on the bed –– when before, the mole on that body's neck had been dark and dull, it seemed now finally to have completed its final stage and began to shimmer, as though the dried blood stain was now fresh blood.

Before Xuanmin could speak, he suddenly felt himself be wrapped up within a cyclone. The world spun around and around as some great force drew him towards it.

He felt a sense of dizziness, and a darkness fell before his eyes. In the next instant, as he opened his eyes again, he found that he was now somehow in a horizontal, laying position.

"It's finally succeeded..." Xue Xian breathed. It seemed that only now was he truly reassurred.

Xuanmin lay there, stunned, for a moment, then suddenly sat up. He found that his limbs were extraordinarily heavy, and felt completely different from the floating that he'd gotten used to. He sat on the bamboo bed and looked down at his own hands, then looked up at Xue Xian. "I––"

"From now on, your lifespan is tied to that of a real dragon." Xue Xian announced, slapping the bed. He came closer and looked deeply into Xuanmin's eyes, and slowly said, "No regrets. You have to hang out with me for hundreds or thousands of years, probably longer. Even if you get tired of me, you can't undo it."

Xuanmin looked back at him with those endlessly deep black eyes. He seemed to want to say something, but ultimately simply gazed at Xue Xian intently. Finally, he said, "It's all I could ever wish for."

Xue Xian had never heard Xuanmin express himself so directly before. He gaped at him in shock, then suddenly grinned. His grin seemed determined, and slightly evil, as he asked, "So technically, I've just saved your life. How do you plan to repay me, huh?"

---

* Mmk so basically the text talks about this thing that is supposed to happen when a Buddhist monk is officially initiated, 戒体, 'initiating the body', which is apparently when your body physically develops an inability to do bad things like drink alcohol because you're officially a monk now?? It's like magic?? But I didn't really know how to / was too lazy to figure out how to explain that smoothly in the text and also can't find anything about it online to see how it's been translated before so I'm just not putting it in. Baidu article in Chinese here - https://baike.google.com/item/%E6%88%92%E4%BD%93