Chapter 10: Borrowing Longevity from Heaven
"Oh? That quickly?"
"The cloth is a common item, but it is government-issued and each year's batch carries a different pattern. The full distribution records are all logged in the ledgers. This subordinate had men cross-reference them one by one..." Wu Kuang lowered his voice. "We confirmed in the end that the owner of this cloth is none other than one of the Great Xiang remnants already taken away by the Black-Clad Envoy, Sun Bo."
"Sun Bo? Are you certain?" Fang Xun raised an eyebrow, his expression an unreadable half-smile.
"Absolutely certain. This subordinate stakes his life on it, there is no mistake."
"Very well. I understand. You may go." Fang Xun waved a casual hand.
The study fell back into silence.
Fang Xun stood alone before the window, hands clasped behind his back, watching the bamboo shadows sway gently in the courtyard, his expression impossible to read.
"Frame a dead man, no witness left to contradict it. Interesting."
He did not believe for a single moment that Yu Niang, that large-hearted, shallow-minded woman without a strategic bone in her body possessed the ability to erase his seal, steal the Lengshan Vessel, and vanish without leaving the faintest trace. Nor did he believe that Sun Bo, that rebel he had personally wrung dry under torture until every last secret was spent, could somehow pull off a theft of this nature from the most absolute of dead ends.
"Most likely, that foolish woman discovered the Lengshan Vessel had been stolen by some unknown party, and knowing full well the methods I'm capable of, feared retribution and fled rather than face me.
"As for the true thief, clearly not one of the Great Xiang remnants either. Rather, some mantis lurking in the shadows, waiting to snatch the prize while the crane and the clam fought each other. Someone hidden in the dark, perhaps right under my very nose.
"And for that matter, the leak about the Lengshan Vessel's existence in the first place was suspicious from the beginning. Everyone who knew of it has either been silenced by me personally, or is among my innermost circle..."
Fang Xun's fingers tapped absently against the window frame. Face after face cycled through his mind, every person in Lengshan County who might conceivably be connected and he did not skip even Li Shun and Feng Guan, the two labor informants. But no matter how many times he turned it over, every conclusion felt absurd.
"Fascinating." A cold smile pulled at the corner of Fang Xun's mouth. "Someone actually managed to pluck a chestnut from the fire amid yesterday's chaos, stole the Lengshan Vessel and walked away clean.
"Whatever their cultivation level may be, their methods of theft and concealment are truly in a class of their own.
"Heh..."
Surprisingly, Fang Xun's face showed very little of the rage one might expect from a man who had lost a priceless treasure.
"It is only one Lengshan Vessel, after all. Lost is lost. In the beginning, I was simply seized by a passing greed, I wanted to use that once-in-a-century rarity to leverage something favorable when I maneuvered back in the Holy Capital.
"But now, I hold in my hands the staggering, heaven-sent merit of having captured a living legitimate heir of the Great Xiang royal line. Barring some unforeseen catastrophe, by next spring at the earliest I will be recalled to the central court, promoted and ennobled. The Lengshan Vessel has become something I can take or leave.
"As for Yu Niang..."
Fang Xun let out a quiet, amused breath. "Good riddance! I was honestly worried she'd cling to me and refuse to let go."
...
At that very moment,
The "peerless master thief" who had been lingering in this calculating magistrate's thoughts was, in truth, at something of a loss.
In the physical world, Li Shun lay in bed looking thoroughly wretched, feigning recovery from the tortures of the underground prison. But within the Fangcun space, his true consciousness sat before a long, narrow brocade case, brow tightly knit.
He could sense it with perfect clarity, that [Lengshan Vessel] capable of overturning the heavens and rewriting a person's fate, lay quietly within this case that was almost within reach. And yet—
Li Shun had exhausted every method available to him, and simply could not open this deceptively small wooden box that Fang Xun had sealed.
"This is the sorrow of having no power and no extraordinary means." Li Shun let out a helpless sigh. "A peerless treasure sitting right before my eyes, and yet it might as well be on the other side of an uncrossable abyss. All I can do is stare.
"If that complete stone statue were under my command, even borrowing just a thread of the killing intent it radiates, it would likely split this seal open without difficulty."
The thought sparked something. Li Shun acted on it immediately, dropping the brocade case right at the base of the stone statue.
Sure enough, under the statue's overwhelming presence, the faint cold frost that had been perpetually swirling across the case's surface began, almost imperceptibly, to dissolve.
Slowly, though. Agonizingly slowly. Like water wearing away stone.
Li Shun settled his patience and stared at it fixedly for an entire afternoon, running quiet calculations in the back of his mind. "At this rate, stripping the seal away without damaging the Lengshan Vessel inside, it will take at least a month...
"I waited twenty-six years. I'm not in a hurry for a few more weeks."
The efficiency of the Great Qian court was nothing short of extraordinary.
Only ten days later, the thirteenth day of the second month, the imperial decree of commendation came galloping into Lengshan County by fast courier from the Holy Capital.
Exactly how the Magistrate office's officials divided and quietly distributed that windfall of merit among themselves in private, Li Shun neither knew nor cared.
What he did find remarkable was this: even he and Feng Guan, two of the most utterly lowly and insignificant corvée laborers at the very bottom of Lengshan County had genuinely received concrete, tangible rewards.
Both were informants, but the merit had been ranked and apportioned.
Li Shun had merely been the "suggester" who raised the initial suspicion. Feng Guan was the "primary meritorious party" the one who had personally ventured into danger to confirm the evidence and run to report it to the authorities.
Accordingly, what Li Shun received was: three hundred thousand yuan, a modestly spacious ordinary residence within Lengshan County's city walls and an exemption from Lengshan corvée labor for the next ten years.
Feng Guan's reward, on the other hand, was the kind that would drive every hard-labor conscript in the empire wild with envy—
He was granted a Great Qian First-Rank Peerage title: Gongshi, Common Gentleman.
Along with permanent exemption from Lengshan corvée labor, removal from the degraded commoner registry, and the right to return home in honor.
When word spread of the gulf between the two men's rewards, as different as clouds and mud, Feng Guan dragged his still-unhealed body to Li Shun's bedside, his aged face flushed red, racked with guilt, several times on the verge of saying something and stopping himself.
Li Shun, for his part, appeared entirely unbothered. He even turned around and said a few words of reassurance to the man.
Sending Feng Guan out front as the face of the informant report had been a carefully considered scheme of misdirection from the start. What Li Shun needed was to remain concealed in the background and emerge unscathed.
As for Feng Guan turning misfortune into fortune, blundering into an enormous piece of merit through sheer luck, even receiving a noble title, that had been entirely outside Li Shun's calculations.
But it was neither undeserved nor objectionable.
And Li Shun found he didn't particularly mind.
He had, after all, successfully stolen the Lengshan Vessel. With that treasure in hand, he could shed the identity of a conscript laborer whenever he wished.
But still, having witnessed with his own eyes, in that county-wide storm of blood and fire, both the demon-god might with which Xiong Jin had dominated the battlefield single-handedly, and the golden light that had descended from the Holy Capital to pierce heaven and earth and suppress all beneath it, Li Shun found that different thoughts had begun to stir within him.
"A noble title is a precious thing, but real power is the only true foundation for survival. The Lengshan Vessel, something even Xiong Jin was willing to risk everything to seize..."
Within the Fangcun space, Li Shun gazed quietly at the brocade case where ice and frost continued its slow, steady retreat, his mind churning.
Though the reward decree had been read aloud publicly, the actual processing and handover of documents, land deeds, and silver still required several days to clear through the Magistrate’s office's bureaucratic procedures.
The fifteenth day of the second month.
Li Shun still lay sprawled on his decrepit wooden bed, doors shut against visitors, maintaining the pretense of injuries not yet healed. In reality, he had long since quietly released his tireless substitute puppet, which labored ceaselessly deep underground, day and night, filling in and compacting the hidden tunnel that had once saved his life, burying it beyond all discovery.
Once the promised residence was formally granted and he moved out, there must not remain a single thread left behind that could expose the secrets of either the Fangcun Realm or the puppet. Every last loose end had to be severed cleanly.
It was, without question, a laborious undertaking. Fortunately, the puppet never tired, Li Shun only needed to give the orders.
He had just closed his eyes and settled into focused stillness when- bang!
That already half-ruined wooden door was shoved open with no warning and no ceremony whatsoever.
Li Shun's heart lurched. His eyes snapped open.
Backlit in the doorway stood a young man of striking, almost remarkable good looks, with an upright bearing and a handsome face, striding into the room with confident, unhurried steps.
He looked to be around seventeen or eighteen. There was a vigorous, spirited quality to the set of his brows, and his entire bearing radiated the kind of bursting vitality and youthful energy unique to someone at the height of their youth.
He entered without a word, and simply stood there, staring at Li Shun in the bed with a peculiar, unreadable expression that made the hairs rise.
'Has something been exposed?'
Alarm flooded Li Shun's mind in an instant, a chill shooting straight up to the crown of his skull. He forced the upheaval in his chest back down, struggled half upright in the bed, pressed a hand to his chest, and put on the best performance of frail confusion he could muster as he cupped his hands in greeting. "This lowly one's injuries have not yet healed, I'm afraid I cannot rise to give proper salutation, and beg this young lord's pardon. To what do I owe the honor of your visit?"
The young man still did not answer. He only narrowed his eyes slightly, staring at Li Shun with cold stillness and at the corner of his mouth, there hovered something that might have been a faint, cryptic smile.
Li Shun frowned inwardly.
The silence inside the room was suffocating, as though the air itself had congealed.
The unease growing in Li Shun's chest sharpened. A killing intent began to quietly take shape.
And then, at this most fraught and suspended of moments—
The handsome young man suddenly tilted his head back and burst out laughing, a completely unguarded, gleeful laugh that shattered his composed facade entirely.
"Cripple, it's me! You didn't recognize me, did you!"
"Hm?!"
The killing intent Li Shun had been gathering collapsed in an instant. He sat there as though struck by lightning, completely frozen.
He stared fixedly at the young man's face, overlaying it again and again against the memory of a stooped, withered, ancient form. An inference so absurd it bordered on the ridiculous and yet, somehow perfectly logical, exploded into being in his mind.
"You... you're... Old Feng?!" Li Shun's face was a portrait of disbelief, his voice trembling slightly from the sheer force of his shock.
"Ha! In all of Lengshan County, who else would bother coming to see you, you Cripple!" The young man planted both hands on his hips and confirmed it with swaggering, unabashed satisfaction.
"How did you... what is this..."
The storm breaking inside Li Shun's chest was monumental. He stared at the almost overflowing vitality and life force radiating off this person at close range, his mind a total blank, language very nearly failing him.
The man who just days ago had been hunched, white-haired, a guttering candle in the wind, a man who looked every one of his forty-odd years had, in the space of barely a few days, reversed the course of time itself and become a seventeen-year-old young man brimming with fierce, vigorous life.
Feng Guan, clearly reveling in Li Shun's stupefaction, dropped casually onto the edge of the bed and leaned in, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial murmur. "Don't bother guessing, Cripple. After I received the First-Rank Gongshi title, the Magistrate personally summoned me yesterday and passed on a profound and mysterious technique. I cultivated it through the night, and when I opened my eyes this morning... heh, this is what I found."
Li Shun's entire being shook at the words.
He had long heard that the Great Qian government possessed a technique capable of reversing age and restoring youth and it had been among his most coveted goals from the beginning of his scheming.
He had not expected to see it manifest first, right before his eyes, in Feng Guan.
Sensing Li Shun's gaze, burning with an intensity that could almost scorch through a person, Feng Guan was just about to continue his crowing when something seemed to strike him, as though he had suddenly remembered some terrifying and absolute prohibition.
He pulled his grin back at once. A trace of apprehension and awkward guilt crossed his face. He lowered his voice: "Cripple, truly, I'm not trying to be a bad friend about this. This technique, it was personally created by the reigning emperor of Great Qian himself. The laws around it are strict, and not a syllable of it may be passed on lightly. Without official authorization from the government, if I taught it to you privately, both of us would face the most severe punishment possible."
He paused, looking at the slight drop in Li Shun's expression, and ultimately seemed to steel himself. He leaned in close and breathed eight barely audible words into Li Shun's ear:
"I can only tell you its name, Borrow Longevity from Heaven - the Twelve Perpetual Lives."