Chapter 279: A Long Time Ago

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    The shattering of jade rings in Liu Jin’s ears and reverberates in his hands. A familiar weightless feeling takes hold of his body as his surroundings fade to white and a new scenery takes their place.

    However, something is different.

    Whenever he shatters one of Old Jiang’s memory jades, Liu Jin sees the memory stored inside from the perspective of his master. It is as if the two were sharing a body. As a result, Liu Jin has become somewhat familiar with the feel of Old Jiang’s old bones.

    This is not it.

    His height is wrong. His eyesight is wrong. His limbs are too small and feeble. There is no power in his muscles. He is... He is...

    He is young.

    “It stinks here,” Liu Jin hears himself say. Sure enough, his voice is that of a young boy.

    “What did you expect?” Someone next to him, an older boy, asks him. He’s at least half a head taller, and his round belly protrudes from the dirty rags he calls clothes. “Can’t exactly smell like a field of flowers, can it?”

    Old Jiang, a young Old Jiang, snorts.

    “Got that right.”

    The two boys are in a field of corpses.

    Hundreds of bodies are scattered over the land. Some of them soldiers. Some of them not. A few hundred yards away, Liu Jin can make out the smoldering remains of what was formerly a city. Its great walls have been smashed open, and its insides lie ransacked. Crows and vultures fly in great numbers above their heads, and hundreds more have already landed to feast on the dead.

    “They really made a mess of things,” his master says while patting down one of the bodies. As he does, Liu Jin notices how small and thin his arms are. Nothing more than skin and bones. His master rummages through the corpse’s clothes before moving to the next one. He clicks his tongue when one of the crows picks the same corpse as him and shoos it away. “You’d think they’d at least leave the city standing so they could use it.”

    “Ah, that just shows how little you know, Brother Jiang,” the other kid says while rummaging through a different corpse.

    They are looting them for valuables.

    “Ah?” Jiang raises an eyebrow. “You’re suddenly an expert on war, Brother Wang?”

    “At the very least, this Wang has lived five more years than you, so he knows five years worth of things more,” the now-named Wang replies. “Once a siege has gone long enough, the soldiers get so angry they’ll smash the city and everyone inside out of principle.”

    “Seems wasteful,” Jiang says, kicking away another crow. This one caws and pecks at him, resulting in a brief scuffle between the two in which Jiang ultimately proves superior. “Dumb bird.”

    “Try telling the angry soldiers that it’s wasteful,” Wang says. He suddenly grins and stands up, something shiny held between his fingers. “Look! Look! It’s a gold pendant! Gold! This is going to pay for at least five meals!”

    Jiang snorts.

    “Yeah, right. The old man is just going to say it’s tin and not worth more than a bag of rice that’s already gone bad and that we should thank him for being so nice, the greedy buzzard.” He spits to the side. A vulture hisses at him. “I’m not talking about you!”

    “He would do that, wouldn’t he?” Wang deflates and sits on top of one of the soldiers. “It doesn’t make sense. We’re surrounded by so much stuff! We should be living like kings from selling all this metal to the blacksmiths!”

    “We only got four arms between the two of us,” Jiang says, turning over another corpse. “That’s nowhere near enough to carry all the weapons and armors here. We can only take as much as we can. By the time we return, there’ll be bigger and stronger scavengers filling their pockets.”

    “Oh, cruel fate,” Wang laments.

    Jiang frowns deeply. “Things were better during the war.”

    “Brother Jiang!” Wang stands up and almost trips over a corpse as he backs away. “You can’t say that!”

    “Why not?” Jiang shrugs, trying to appear unconcerned, but Liu Jin can feel the beating of his heart. “I’m right, aren’t I? At least we were all fighting on the same side back then! Once the war stopped, we all turned on ourselves.”

    Wang looks away. “Things have been bad lately.”

    Jiang lets out a harsh laugh. “Just bad?! Five months ago, the White Boars took over the area. The Eleven Rings turned on them, and then the Azure Skies crushed them both. Now the Red Tribe are going around sacking every city! Everyone’s gone crazy!”

    “It’s not all bleak, brother,” Wong says, trying to cheer both himself and Jiang. “I hear the Heavenly Sword are giving protection to all who ask!”

    “Isn’t everything the Heavenly Sword’s fault anyway?”

    “Brother!” Wang hisses at him, looking around in a panic. “You can’t say stuff like that! What if someone hears you!”

    “Who is going to hear me? The crows?” Jiang laughs. “I don’t think they’re the type to tell on anyone.”

    “Oh, you’d be surprised.”

    Jiang and Wang immediately position themselves back to back, looking at their surroundings with wary eyes. Their cultivation, Liu Jin realizes, is at least in the Nascent Realm despite their seeming youth.

    Alas, it does not matter here.

    A tree of bones and flesh rises from the ground, scaring away the birds. Its branches wrap around the children, disabling them in the blink of an eye and leaving the two hanging upside down.

    “A ghost! It’s a hungry ghost!” Wang cries. His face is red, and tears stream from his eyes. “Please have mercy on me, ghost! I always pay respect to my ancestors, and I have always been nice to old people!”

    Wang gapes at the masked woman, but Jiang falls into deep thought.

    “Teach me,” he says suddenly.

    Wang’s head whips in his direction. “Brother Jiang, what are you saying!”

    “Teach me,” Jiang repeats, looking straight at the masked woman and nothing else. “Teach how to do what you just did.”

    The masked woman laughs. “Do you really think an uneducated child like you can learn?”

    “Test me,” Jiang says.

    “Why should I do that?”

    “Because you just gave me life,” Jiang says. “That means this life of mine is your responsibility now.”

    “Ho? Well-spoken for a carrion feeder, aren’t you? However, I don’t think you understand what you are asking.” She turns around and walks away.

    “Hey, wait!” Jiang rushes to follow her, but Wang holds him back. “Let go!”

    “Brother! That’s not the sort of person you should be following if you want a long life!”

    “Mirror Fields,” the woman suddenly says as she walks away. “I’ll be there in three months. If you really want to learn, I expect to find you there.”

    Having said that, the masked woman vanishes from sight.

    ~~~

    Liu Jin releases the breath he’d been holding.

    The Death Fashioning Scripture.

    He already suspected. After a while, it became impossible not to. If Old Jiang was involved with the Death Fashioning Scripture in the past, many things suddenly made a lot of sense. However, there is a difference between being nearly certain and having actual confirmation from Old Jiang’s memories.

    “My abilities and knowledge earned me quite a bit of fame...Many sought to steal my secrets...Many sought to kill me....”

    Liu Jin’s nails dig into his palms. Droplets of blood fall to the floor before he forces his muscles to relax and his skin to mend. His master did not leave him the memory so he might learn more about his death. That is not the sort of person he was. The lesson here is something else.

    He felt it.

    Old Jiang might have been too young, scared, and ignorant to appreciate it, but Liu Jin felt the process with complete clarity. The way that woman used the dead to mend his master’s body. It is everything he imagined. His theory was not wrong. The arts of the Death Fashioning Scripture can be used for medical purposes.

    He can do it now.

    Reacting to his thoughts, his dog leaps on his desk while Liu Jin hurriedly takes out the jar with the black lump from his spatial pouch. He needs to do this while the memory is still fresh. His hands are a blur as the talismans come off one by one, and the lid rolls to the floor.

    For the first time in years, the black lump is exposed to the air of the outside world. It is oddly warm and lumpy. Some would probably consider it gross, but it’s nothing compared to sticking his hand into the Fleshcrafter’s monsters.

    Really, it’s no different from holding a liver.

    Taking a deep breath, Liu Jin lets his Qi rise and reach out to the dog. Its flesh ripples like water, and the lump sinks into it like a stone cast in a pond. Its skeleton and organs easily make space for the lump, and Liu Jin quickly connects it to its nervous system.

    That is the easy part.

    This is not just a matter of flesh. It is a matter of energy. Liu Jin’s Qi slithers around the dog and the lump. Sweat drips from his brow as he does his best to attune them to each other. The dog does not have dantian like a human would. Instead, its interior is more akin to a spirit beast. It has a central core. The key to make this work is to make it so the lump and the core become the same thing.

    Hours pass as Liu Jin carefully weaves their energies together, his Qi becoming like surgical threads.

    Finally, it ends.

    Liu Jin looks at the dog.

    The dog looks back at him.

    “We’re not going to tell anyone about this just yet,” Liu Jin tells him.

    The dog licks his face.

    Liu Jin smiles, but it doesn’t last long. He senses Lu Mei’s Qi approaching and barely manages to hide away the evidence of his experiment before the door opens.

    “My mother is threatening to reveal my identity,” Lu Mei says. There is a letter in her hand, and she looks as serious as he has ever seen her.

    Liu Jin and the dog blink.

    “What?”

    ~~~