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Qi Boming was dead.
His death was so sudden that before anyone could accept the reality, still dazed and bewildered as if in a dream, white lanterns and paper flowers were already hanging on the commander-in-chief’s tent, declaring that it was all real.
Who could have imagined that a renowned general who had once shaken the world, the foremost military commander of his time and the backbone of the current dynasty, did not die a heroic death on the battlefield nor did he have the chance to lay down his armor, return home and live out his days in peace?
He quietly died of illness in the northwest, on an ordinary night when light snow was falling.
Such an ending was truly unworthy of the glorious and brilliant first half of his life.
The atmosphere in the camp grew unbearably heavy. The attack on Tianshan was temporarily put on hold, and everyone milled around the now-empty commander-in-chief’s tent. The blow came too suddenly, and the hearts of the people had become somewhat unsettled.
Qi Boming was the backbone of the Qi family army. The generals in the army were all brothers who had risked their lives together with him. Now that Qi Boming had closed his eyes for the last time, even those uncles broke down in tears and fell ill one after another.
The camp was filled with dejection and lifelessness. The only person with enough spirit to step forward and arrange the funeral and manage everything was, unexpectedly, Qi Changying.
That night, after Qi Boming passed away, Qi Changying quietly knelt beside his father’s bed for most of the night. No matter who tried to persuade him, he would not be moved. No matter who tried to help him up, he would not leave.
Everyone privately said that this was bad. Qi Boming’s sudden departure had dealt the young general a heavy blow, and that the child would probably be unable to recover for quite some time.
To everyone’s surprise, the next morning, Qi Changying acted as though nothing had happened, calmly and steadily arranging everything. Only the faint dark circles beneath his eyes and the bloodshot whites revealed his exhaustion.
The more critical the situation, the more important it was not to lose one’s composure.
First, he ordered the army to retreat three hundred miles and temporarily settle in Tasu City in the rear. The attack on Tianshan would be discussed again later.
Then he informed everyone in the army that Qi Boming’s death must not be made public, especially not to the people of Chaosu, lest the enemy seize the opportunity to take advantage of their misfortune and disrupt their plans.
He then sent a letter to the imperial court reporting the truth, prepared a coffin, and planned to personally escort Qi Boming’s body back to the capital as soon as possible.
Qi Changying, who swiftly and properly arranged everything, appeared so calm and rational that it was almost bizarre, as if the person who had just passed away and was lying in the coffin were not his father.
But in reality, only those who had experienced such a thing knew that this was the most dangerous and unstable state of all.
Shen Huarong was deeply worried about this, but he did not know how to offer comfort or advice.
In such circumstances, any casual remark could become another blow to him.
With a belly full of things he had no one to tell, he could only go to Su Li.
But Su Li would not indulge him.
When Shen Huarong went to find him, Su Li was sitting on a low hill near the camp, staring blankly at the sheet of paper bearing Qi Boming’s birth characters, which had not burned completely.
The birth characters only have power while a person is alive. Now that the person was dead, even if Su Li burned the entire sheet to ashes and ground it into powder, he would obtain nothing more than smoke and ashes.
Now, apart from a few dried, darkened blood characters, there was only a charred black hole in the paper left by the flames.
It looked like a gaping mouth, mockingly taunting Su Li’s incompetence.
After staring at the paper for a while, Su Li irritably folded it haphazardly and stuffed it into his sleeve.
When he happened to look up and saw Shen Huarong, Su Li narrowed his eyes slightly, grabbed a stone beside him, and hurled it at his face.
“You have the nerve to show your face?! Get lost! If I were you, I’d dig a hole and bury myself alive. How could I have the face to keep living?!”
“What did I do?!”
Fortunately, Shen Huarong dodged quickly. Otherwise, the large stone in Su Li’s hand would have smashed his nose.
He was completely bewildered by Su Li’s scolding.
“I think Qi Changying’s good temper has spoiled you rotten, you little brat! It’s only been a few months since we last met, and you’ve become even more fierce!”
“Meow…” Shoumo also poked its head out from Shen Huarong’s robes, struggled free, and jumped down, affectionately rubbing against its little master whom it had not seen in a long time.
Before, Su Li entered the Vanguard Battalion with Qi Changying as a squad leader, so it was inconvenient to bring Shoumo along and he left it with Shen Huarong.
Looking at it now, the cat at least had some conscience. Even after such a long separation, it had not forgotten who it should be close to.
Only then did Su Li’s mood and expression improve a tiny bit.
But clearly, he did not have the slightest intention of sharing this improvement with Shen Huarong.
“Qi Boming was dying in the rear, why did you hide it from Qi Changying?!”
Su Li threw another stone at Shen Huarong. This time, Shen Huarong did not dodge, so the stone struck him squarely in the shoulder.
“Why did you hide it from me?! This matter is extremely suspicious. If you had let me know earlier, I could have saved that old man. Instead, you waited until he was almost dead before sending word. Now he’s dead, and it’s all because of you people who refuse to open your mouths!”
“Suspicious…?” Shen Huarong did not quite understand what Su Li meant.
“Uncle’s body was worn down by his new and old injuries. We also suspected that the northern barbarians had smeared poison on the arrows, but they hadn’t. All the military doctors in the army examined him and can confirm this.”
“What can you possibly ssee? Injuries and illnesses follow fate, but Qi Boming’s allotted lifespan hadn’t run out. His fate didn’t even include this calamity. How could he have died from injuries and illness?”
“I don’t understand any of this…”
“Idiot! I’m saying he shouldn’t have died, at least not now! Do you understand human speech or not?!”
Su Li has been seeing Qi Changying’s calm, unruffled face everyday for the past few days. Each time he saw it, he felt a knot of anger in his chest, and the more he saw it, the greater that anger grew.
Although his anger had arisen because of Qi Changying, he could not vent any of it on Qi Changying himself. It was not until Shen Huarong delivered himself today that he finally erupted like a volcano.
“Qi Boming’s allotted lifespan was twenty years from now, yet he died today for no clear reason. And even now, we don’t even know who did it! You people let Qi Boming die, stayed in the dark like a bunch of fools, and still insisted on keeping everything secret until the very end, leaving me not even the slightest bit of time to turn things around! Shen Huarong, you…”
“Zhuge Suli!”
Shen Huarong sharply interrupted him.
He wore a stern expression, his brows furrowed. It was rare for him to be so serious.
“I’m not Qi Changying. I won’t tolerate your temper without limits. Yes, you have many abilities that set you apart from ordinary people. You can see things we can’t, and with a flick of your finger, you can kill tens of thousands of people. You’re incredibly powerful, but when will you finally understand that we’re not you? We ordinary mortals can’t understand what you call allotted lifespans and the Mandate of Heaven. In our eyes, an injury is an injury and an illness is an illness. We don’t think about whether someone should or shouldn’t suffer them, much less imagine that there might be some hidden hand or chief culprit behind such a thing.”
“Before things truly reached this point, no one imagined the situation would become this serious. Uncle himself thought these injuries and illnesses would get better with rest and treatment. He didn’t need to alarm too many people, much less send word to the front lines and make Qi Changying worry.”
“We don’t have the ability to predict the future. We thought, felt, and acted according to ordinary human nature. Who could have imagined things would end up like this? If I had known everything you just told me, if I had known that this would be the outcome, then even if Uncle had tied me up with hemp rope and iron chains, even if he had stuffed socks and boots into my mouth, I would have found a way to get the news to Qi Changying.”
“But I couldn’t. Lord Qiyueban, for us mortals, no amount of money can buy the knowledge of what we would have known beforehand.”
How could Shen Huarong not blame himself?
How could he not feel heartache seeing Qi Changying like that?
But even the deepest self-reproach could not change what had already happened. The assumption that “if Su Li had been told earlier, Qi Boming might not have died” was simply too cruel to contemplate in detail.
“Actually, I’ve been wondering…”
After finishing this long speech, Shen Huarong paused for a moment, then suddenly raised his eyes to look at Su Li, asking hesitantly:
“If you think this wasn’t fate but something done by a person, then the person who did this… could there be someone on the Chaosu side who’s like you?”
Su Li was still seething over Shen Huarong’s earlier words. He had not yet had the chance to retort or insult him when Shen Huarong suddenly came out with this.
Su Li frowned.
“What do you mean?”
“You previously slaughtered an entire Chaosu military camp, a garrison, and a night-raiding force. This action intimidated them, but it also let them know that such extraordinary powers really exist in this world. Could they have started looking into this themselves and found someone like you, perhaps a spirit master or a shaman? The other person might not be as powerful as you, capable of killing people from a distance, but could they have secretly taken the commander-in-chief’s life without anyone noticing?”
Shen Huarong cautiously put forward his speculation.
Su Li frowned upon hearing this.
“What, are you saying that I’m the one who killed Qi Boming?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Because I frightened the people of Chaosu, they decided to find some way to use strange and uncanny arts against you people. Isn’t that what you mean?”
Su Li’s expression and tone were both cold.
Then he frowned slightly.
“…That’s almost impossible. In this world, apart from me and my master, no other spirit master has the ability to interfere with someone else’s fate without anyone noticing. That’s far more troublesome and difficult than the long-distance killing you mentioned. Unless a genius like that has truly appeared in this world and has been hiding in the shadows without revealing themselves, the situation you’re describing simply cannot happen.”
Although he said this, Shen Huarong did not continue to question or argue with him. But after Shen Huarong left and Su Li was alone again, he still fell into a slight state of self-doubt.
His master always said that where there was a cause, there was an effect.
So Su Li wondered whether the bone-deep, heart-burning pain that had tormented him like ten thousand ants gnawing at him for three days and three nights after he had taken tens of thousands of lives in a single night had still not fully settled the evil consequences.
Thinking further, back then, he had opened the gates of slaughter and won victory to help the Qi family army hold Chifeng Pass. If those evil consequences could not find him, would they change their target and turn their attention to Qi Boming instead?
And after that?
Would other people have to pay the price for this as well?
How long would it take, and how great would the price have to be, before the debt was considered repaid?
Su Li did not know.
He really wanted to ask his master whether things were truly as he imagined. If they were, what could he do to draw the evil consequences back onto himself?
One person did the deed, one person took responsibility. What he, Qiyueban, had done should not be borne by anyone else.
Nor did anyone else have the right to bear it for him.
But Su Li also thought that even if he went back to find his master now, that old man would probably only scold him, then sigh and tell him that the secrets of Heaven could not be revealed and that Heaven had its own arrangements.
Heaven this, fate that. Just listening to it was irritating.
Su Li lowered his eyes.
He sat on a rock on the hillside, holding the cat in his arms and staring blankly at the boundless grassland.
Spring had already arrived in the northwest. The snowfall on the night Qi Boming died was probably the last snow of this winter. Now the snow had melted completely, and even the withered grass showed signs of coming back to life. It would not be long before spring arrived and flowers bloomed.
As this thought passed through his mind, Su Li seemed to suddenly notice something, and his gaze paused slightly.
He spotted a person hiding at the foot of a distant, yellow-brown low hill, in a quiet corner where people rarely went and which was difficult to notice.
The person was dressed in plain white and sat alone on a rock, looking very lonely.
Su Li had spent a long time with this person. They spent day and night together and were already very familiar with each other. Thus, he recognized the figure at a glance.
Who else could it be but Qi Changying?
What was he doing there?
With this question in mind, Su Li remained where he was and continued watching, wanting to see why Qi Changying was staying there alone.
Who would have thought that he would end up watching for half a day?
Qi Changying stayed in that little corner of the world, never making another move.
He seemed to have turned into a statue, intending to remain there alone and motionless until the end of time.
From afternoon to dusk, and then until the sky had grown completely dark, he did not even change his posture. Only the occasional passing breeze lifted his long hair and the edges of his robes, making them flutter in the wind.
It was clear that Qi Changying was exhausted.
The commander-in-chief was gone, and the Qi family army needed a new leader to direct and arrange everything.
So Qi Changying hid his emotions and took on that responsibility of his own accord.
In the past few days, he didn’t show any unusual behavior in front of others. He just seemed unusually quiet and his expression unusually cold.
But that exceptionally reassuring steadiness, the kind that made others feel they could trust and rely on him, seemed to have been bought at the cost of his smiles and vitality.
He could not show his negative emotions or appear vulnerable, so he built a hard shell around himself, locking all those negative feelings inside with him and saving them to slowly take off his armor and process them when he was alone.
Like he was now.
Su Li sat far away from him.
He drew up his legs, rested his forearms across his knees, and sat quietly in a place where Qi Changying could not discover him, silently keeping the small figure in the distance company.
After a long while, Su Li sighed.
As though he had made some kind of decision, he raised his hand and formed a hand seal. The next moment, the entire set of chime bells silently appeared in front of him.
He raised his hand and gently stroked the cold surface of the bells.
His fingertips slowly brushed over the largest bronze bell in the corner. The patterns on its surface rose and fell beneath his fingers, outlining a few characters…
“Fusang.”
This set of bells was called the Fusang Divine Bells.
Gather the flowing light; bind it to Fusang, yet when sorrow comes, one day becomes long.
The meaning of this poem was: to seize the passing time, one ties the sun to the Fusang tree. But when sorrow strikes, even the passage of a single day becomes incomparably long.
There were so many underworld spirits in this world. The hatred and resentment they carried at the end of their lives bound them to the mortal world, preventing them from finding release.
This set of bells carried Su Li’s abilities. It could control ghosts, but it could also guide them to peace. It accepted and contained all the resentment within the underworld spirits, just like the Fusang Divine Tree that bound the sun. It bound their obsessions and brought them the final peace of their lives.
Su Li had followed his master to many places, walked through many hells on earth, and helped countless spirits who could not find release. Those who received his help did not know his name, so they called him by the name of his divine bells, addressing him as the Divine Lord Fusang.
Divine Lord…
How could he possibly be that capable?
Su Li slowly closed his eyes.
The Fusang Divine Bells were his natal magical artifact. Now, the bronze bells moved according to his wishes, and their ethereal ringing rang out, playing a song that others could not hear.
In the boundless darkness of the night, tiny points of starlight appeared in the sky. They resembled beautiful fireflies, yet also seemed like the Milky Way had fallen into the mortal world.
When Qi Boming died, he had harbored neither resentment nor hatred, so he could not become a ghost. Once the seventh day after his death passed, the remnant shadow of his soul would completely dissipate. He would then end this life, let go of everything, and walk toward the starting point of his next life.
From then on, there would be no more Qi Boming in this world.
Would Qi Changying blame himself? He was not able to spend much time with his father and had only managed to see him one last time in a hurried meeting.
And what could Su Li do?
He could not let Qi Changying see Qi Boming’s dead soul, nor could he give the dead soul intelligence and a voice so that it could talk and chat with Qi Changying.
All he could do was gather together the remaining traces of Qi Boming’s soul in the mortal world, make them tangible, and send them to Qi Changying so that he could feel his father’s presence one last time.
Actually, this was the first time Su Li had used the divine bells’ ability to condense a soul.
He always thought that when people died, they were simply dead. What was so difficult to accept? What was there to be reluctant to part with? And what was there to miss?
After all, the thing people experienced most in their lives was separation. Wouldn’t they get used to it if they simply accepted it?
Saying goodbye was completely unnecessary.
He thought that he would never waste his time doing something so useless for anyone in his entire life.
Until this rare clear night at the end of winter and beginning of spring, when the ringing of the bells, audible to only one person, sang a calm and sorrowful song that echoed throughout the mortal world.
No one knew that in this desolate wilderness, a god who would never soften his heart had made an exception for the first time.
And so, countless rays of starlight poured down…
Gently and secretly, carrying tiny, shimmering points of light, they flowed before the eyes of the young man.
