Chapter 93 – Oaths of Eternal Love
As the words “My heart admires you” left Chou Bodeng’s lips, Shi Wuluo’s right hand, holding the reins, unconsciously tightened. The two horses reared their heads and snorted, and the carriage, traveling through the rugged mountains, swayed. He reacted quickly, and before the jolt could reach Chou Bodeng, the carriage had stabilized.
Chou Bodeng didn’t notice the carriage’s strange movement, but he felt the arm around him suddenly tighten.
He paused, staring at the man’s face.
The tips of Shi Wuluo’s ears were turning red.
“Honestly,” Chou Bodeng suddenly smiled, complaining with a mix of truth and jest, “you’ve taken all the advantages.”
Under Chou Bodeng’s gaze, the rims of Shi Wuluo’s ears turned completely red. Despite this, he kept his head slightly bowed, unwilling to look away. He was flustered, wanting to apologize, wanting to properly make up for the words he owed Chou Bodeng, but for a moment he didn’t know which sentence to say first.
“Stop.”
Chou Bodeng stopped him.
“It doesn’t count if you say it now.”
He said it didn’t count, but he didn’t say why. He didn’t look at Shi Wuluo, instead gazing ahead, lost in thought. The malachite beads by his ear swayed, a flickering touch of brilliant green. He was like a spoiled young lady, his moods ever-changing and unspoken, demanding only that others bend to his will.
“Alright.”
Faced with his sudden change, Shi Wuluo, who was accompanying him, showed not a trace of impatience, only offering gentle reassurance.
“It doesn’t count.”
Not far away, the storyteller’s tale had reached its end.
The wilderness-trekking team entered a lush green valley. The valley was narrow and rugged, forcing the team to stretch into a long line, moving slowly forward. Because the road was so poor, the carriages were spaced far apart. People stopped talking, focusing all their attention on driving. Once the human voices ceased, the calls of birds and beasts became particularly prominent.
For a time, the valley was both silent and clamorous.
Chou Bodeng was quiet for a while, then his left hand let go of the black shirt and reached out to touch Shi Wuluo’s right hand. The moment they touched, Shi Wuluo immediately grasped it, spreading his fingers to interlace with his, one by one, then curling his knuckles to hold on tightly, the bases of their fingers pressed together.
The deep shade of ancient trees passed over their heads. Vines and shrubs were pushed aside by the people and horses, rustling softly.
Amidst the rustling, Chou Bodeng finally spoke softly.
“Tell me when I don’t expect it. Tell me when I do expect it.”
“Tell me when I don’t know. Tell me when I do know.”
Oaths of eternal love, tender and intimate.
All the pure love and happiness he possessed was just this little bit, like a child under a tree playing with beads in a broken bowl. No matter how many times he counted, there were only a few… so he had to break one thing into many, many pieces, so he could have many, many moments of joy.
Tell me you love me in the morning, tell me you love me in the afternoon, tell me you love me in the evening.
Tell me you love me when spring arrives with the waking of insects, tell me you love me at the height of summer, tell me you love me when autumn comes with the falling frost, tell me you love me at the depth of winter’s snowy cold.
…
He had transformed from a profligate who threw money around like dirt into the most calculating of merchants, carefully weighing and planning how to evenly distribute the warmth from a single sentence throughout the long cycle of the four seasons, unwilling to waste even a single drop.
He needed a great, great deal of love to fill the emptiness in his heart.
“Alright.”
The only person who could give him these things agreed to each one, earnestly.
“That’s all for now,” Chou Bodeng became happy again, a radiant joy flowing from the corners of his eyes and brows. “I’ll add more later if I think of anything else.”
“Alright.”
Shi Wuluo promised solemnly.
He truly didn’t understand. He didn’t understand romance, didn’t understand the tender and graceful sentiments in the storyteller’s tales, couldn’t even grasp the feelings and emotions of autumn waters and white stones in travelogues. But he knew how to be good to Chou Bodeng. Whatever Chou Bodeng liked, he would do. Whatever he disliked, he would restrain.
All his passions and desires were written for one person alone.
Chou Bodeng looked up at him for a moment, then suddenly straightened up and leaned over, touching his cool lips with his own. Before Shi Wuluo could react, Chou Bodeng had nestled back into his arms.
“I’m sleepy.”
Chou Bodeng pulled the black shirt up a little higher.
“I’ll sleep for a bit.”
With that, he closed his eyes and truly fell asleep again.
His periods of wakefulness were growing shorter and shorter.
At first, in the Pure Lotus Lake, the chirping of insects and birds could easily startle him awake. But now, with the constant rumbling of the wilderness-trekking team’s wheels and the incessant clang of Old Man Luo’s gong, he could fall into a deep sleep amidst the clamor.
Previously, when he stayed in the carriage, Shi Wuluo would light a candle with a Bewilderment Wood wick in a bronze cup.
In the treasure markets of Zhunan, the wick of a thousand-year-old Bewilderment Wood was sold by the millimeter, one millimeter for one gold coin. Its preciousness lay in its ability to keep one “unconfused.” Cultivators in the Twelve Continents generally did their best to avoid injury to their souls, because once the soul was damaged, in the resulting delirium, a person would hear voices they normally couldn’t—the voices of countless dead souls from the miasma.
There was once a cultivator from Medicine Valley who discovered that after a person’s soul was injured, even if they could regain consciousness, they were prone to madness. To study the reason, that cultivator went so far as to experience it himself. After waking up, he recorded the feeling of an unstable soul and restless spiritual sense:
“…The soul is faint and adrift, with nowhere to go. The yin wind howls, and the wails of a hundred ghosts are unending. The body floats for ten thousand miles. I look around, and in a flash see thousands of beasts, then thousands of cities, then another grim place. In a daze, black sand rolls up from the ground, the cities empty. My family and enemies suddenly appear, all covered in dripping blood… I am terrified, believing I am guilty.”
Not long after recording this experience, this medical cultivator from Medicine Valley went mad.
From then on, the cultivators of the Twelve Continents became exceptionally fearful of the soul leaving the body. Herbs and treasures that could stabilize the mind and calm the soul when one’s spiritual sense was damaged were priceless. Among them, Bewilderment Wood was a supreme treasure for calming the soul. Furthermore, if Bewilderment Wood was made into a thin cord and used as a candlewick, the light from the burning candle could even carve out a space of brightness within the miasma. As long as the light did not go out, demons and goblins could not approach.
“Its brilliance shines in all four directions; when burned, one does not get lost [1],” referred to this use.
Back in Fu City, the paper lantern Shi Wuluo had given Chou Bodeng was lit with this very Bewilderment Wood. It was just that Bewilderment Wood was too precious; almost no one was extravagant enough to use it for candles, which was why even Zuo Yuesheng and Lou Jiang from the Mountain Sea Pavilion failed to recognize it. But even such a precious divine object had a very limited effect on Chou Bodeng.
It could barely keep him from startling awake from time to time.
…It couldn’t even grant him peaceful sleep.
Shi Wuluo quietly watched Chou Bodeng for a while, then reached out and covered his ears.
The wilderness-trekking team had stopped at some point.
The men at the front were moving the half-exposed, half-buried corpses in the wilderness one by one—this was the previous team that had passed this way. But they had not been as fortunate as Old Man Luo’s team. Halfway through their journey, they encountered an unusually thick miasma. Hundreds, even thousands of people had died here, silently.
The bodies, gnawed by the dead souls and wild ghosts in the miasma, were in various states of decay; some had not yet rotted, while others were just white bones.
The wilderness trekkers, who had seen this sight more than once in recent days, expertly moved the bodies to the sides to clear a path. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to help bury them, but time was limited. If they delayed too long and the wind suddenly changed, they could very well become the new white bones.
Old Man Luo took out paper money from his tattered sack and scattered it into the sky, handful by handful.
In his hoarse voice, he began to sing the ballad familiar to everyone:
“Sorrow of the trek, sorrow of the trek.
Sorrow that when darkness falls, there’s no turning back—”
The round, white paper money fluttered up, some catching on tree branches, some on shrubs, some landing in piles of rubble, and some covering the rotting white bones.
“East we go, west we go.
East or west, we go to our graves.”
Only Old Man Luo was singing; the rest continued forward in silence. To save time, some of the remains that were buried in the earth with only an arm, a leg bone, or a skull showing were not dug out. People, horses, and carriages rolled right over them… No one knew if it would be their turn to lie in the wilderness one day.
Old Man Luo tossed the last handful of paper money to the sky.
“East we go—and west we go!”
“What year, what month, will it ever end—”
The carriage rolled over a small, white bone half-buried in the mud.
The bone shattered with a sharp, cracking sound.
In his slumber, Chou Bodeng’s brow furrowed at the desolate song.
Neither deep sleep nor covered ears could block out the sounds that pained him.
Shi Wuluo pulled Chou Bodeng closer into his embrace, letting him hear only his voice, telling him over and over again:
“I love you.”
Not a sinner.
The one he loved.