"This old body thanks the divine physician."
The old woman, her skin loose as a hen's and her hair white as a crane's, knelt trembling at Li Fei's feet, ready to knock her forehead against the floor.
"You mustn't, you mustn't."
Li Fei hurried to lift her up, her voice warm with feeling. "To save the dying and heal the wounded is the sworn duty of those in my calling."
"Thank you, Big Sister Divine Physician."
A plump little girl joined in the excitement, apparently intending to throw her arms around Li Fei's leg.
Li Fei glanced at the snot hanging from her nose, pressed a hand smoothly onto the girl's shoulder, and said with a kindly smile, "Little sister has only just recovered from a serious illness. Rest well these next few days, and don't make your elders worry…"
"The immortal maiden's medical skill truly has no equal," the eunuch beside her marveled, entirely convinced.
Ailments that had left both the imperial physicians and the Perfected Masters of the Mountain-Moving Sect helpless had been cured in a single morning with the help of this immortal maiden and her golden-haired assistant — the medicine touched them and the sickness fled. In all the world there was surely not a second person with such lofty skill.
"Ah, you flatter me, Eunuch."
Li Fei made a show of being modest for a while.
The eunuch had delivered two patients to Li Fei first thing in the morning: an old woman with a swollen abdomen, and a girl covered head to toe in suppurating sores.
The former Lilith had cured; for the latter she could do nothing herself, but she had offered a few suggestions.
Following Miss Stepdaughter's medical instructions, Li Fei had gritted her teeth and spent 19,999 Wealth Points on a miracle elixir, and the effect had been immediate. The two attending imperial physicians examined the pair from head to foot, and when they confirmed the illnesses were gone they looked as though they had witnessed a divinity walk the earth.
"Ah yes, Eunuch — here is the bill for the medicine."
After they had chatted a while, Li Fei produced a written list, thoughtfully annotated with prices.
She had promised not to charge additional fees, but the medicinal ingredients still had to be reimbursed. Nowhere in this world does a doctor pay out of her own purse to treat a patient.
On the Continent of Enlos, one standard gold coin weighed eleven grams, so twenty thousand Wealth Points came to two hundred and twenty thousand grams of gold — four thousand four hundred taels.
The gold in the Great Song's treasury was slightly less pure, but Li Fei was not a woman to haggle over trifles, so she honestly wrote 4,400 as the sum. She simply failed to stop her brush in time and accidentally added an extra zero.
The eunuch glanced at the list, and the smile froze on his face.
Forty-four thousand taels of gold… how many human lives would that buy?
But he soon made his peace with it. To cure terminal illnesses that had left the palace physicians staring helplessly at the ocean, the ingredients used must have been treasures of surpassing rarity. The price was reasonable.
In any case, it wasn't his money.
"The medicine fee will be delivered to your residence by tomorrow at the latest," the eunuch promised with a bow, the smile piling back onto his face.
"You've gone to much trouble, Eunuch."
Li Fei nodded happily and asked with considerable enthusiasm, "Then… where is the next patient?"
"That noble personage awaits the immortal maiden's arrival. If the immortal maiden would come this way."
The eunuch led Li Fei to the gate of the Chancellor's residence, where a carriage had long since drawn up and waited.
"Wait for me."
Li Fei mouthed the words to Miss Stepdaughter, sprang lightly onto the carriage, and rolled away into the distance to the brisk beat of hooves.
In a cold, quiet palace hall, the Empress — a woman of matchless grace — sat before her mirror, studying the face reflected there.
"Nnh…"
A savage pain lanced through her skull, as if invisible hands had reached inside it to tear her very soul apart.
Su Wen was used to this agony. She only let out a muffled sound, clenched her fists, and endured it in silence. A long while passed before the pain faded of its own accord, though her head still felt heavy and dull.
She stared blankly out the window at the sparrows wheeling and playing, and her thoughts drifted back to childhood — as if she had returned to that quiet little Daoist temple and stood again before that Perfected Master with the bearing of an immortal.
"Reverend, I beg you, save her."
The young Su Wen was cradled in her mother's arms while her father pleaded with the recluse master who lived hidden away in their small city to lift the calamity from his daughter.
The Perfected Master's robe had faded from repeated washing. He looked at Su Wen and shook his head slightly.
"Lord Su's daughter has been harmed by a ghostly thing. This poor Daoist will not stand idly by."
"But her three hun and seven po are already incomplete. I fear even an immortal could not save her."
Su Wen's mother wept and begged, "My daughter is only three years old… Reverend, please, show us a way."
The Daoist sighed. "To mend an injury to the soul requires the pity of Heaven itself — some heavenly treasure one might meet once in a thousand years. Without it, this poor Daoist cannot help her…"
Seeing despair break across the parents' faces, he added, "But she can save herself."
Su Wen's mother, still holding her, shuffled forward on her knees, her voice breaking with tears. "Then I beg the Reverend to instruct us."
The memory blurred and sharpened again; the scene shifted, and it was that night of bright moon and sparse stars.
Hands clasped behind his back, the Daoist gazed up at the sky and sighed placidly.
"Both the Buddhist and Daoist traditions possess Meditation Methods — supreme arts for cultivating the spirit and moral nature, which allow us seekers of the Way to calm the heart and cast out stray thoughts."
"You are not my disciple; I cannot pass to you the fundamental Way or the arts of my sect. But the Meditation Method may be practiced even by outer-door disciples, and since you have been harmed by a ghostly thing, I will make an exception and teach you my sect's Meditation Method."
"From this day on you must practice diligently. If you can grasp the Way of unity between Heaven and man, your soul will refine itself, and what is missing will heal without treatment."
"Thank you, Reverend."
Whether because the price of her rebellion had been too heavy, or because she had watched her parents beg on their knees, Su Wen seemed to grow up overnight into someone far steadier than her years.
She listened in earnest as the Daoist recited the secrets of the art, fixing every word in her memory.
…
On the day they left the little city, the Daoist — normally as carefree as an idle cloud or a wild crane — wore a rare gravity as he cautioned Su Wen.
"Remember this. The object of your meditation may be any of the ten thousand things of Heaven and Earth — the sun, moon and stars above, a blade of grass or a single tree below — and through it you commune with Heaven and Earth. Or it may be a Heavenly Worthy or Bodhisattva who receives incense and worship, whose immortal and Buddhic light you draw down to shine upon yourself, gathering the pious goodwill of the faithful."
"But never meditate upon skulking ghosts or evil gods, or demonic thoughts will enter your mind — you may even be assimilated by the fiend itself, and the consequences would be beyond imagining!"
"This disciple will keep it firmly in mind," Su Wen said, bowing her head to the ground.
"I am not your master," the Daoist said, waving his hands again and again.
"Though we have not performed the rite of discipleship, the kindness of a teaching passed down weighs as much as a mountain. From today this disciple will never cease her meditation."
Su Wen knocked her forehead against the ground three times before taking her leave of the somewhat flustered Daoist.
He seemed on the verge of saying something more, but only watched the Su Clan's carriages dwindle into the distance.
…
The memory dissolved. Su Wen lowered her eyes and stroked the white cat asleep on her lap, sighing without a sound.
Since the Reverend had passed the method to her she had not dared to slacken for a single day. Every night she meditated upon that luminous moon, trying to commune through it with the stars and all creation, to nourish her soul.
But the Great Way is hard to join. Though Su Wen kept the bright moon's company night after night and read the Daoist canon from end to end, its true meanings always eluded her.
Later, she was locked away behind the palace gates, watching the flowers bloom and fall beyond her window.
And the nameless fire of desire in her breast grew hotter by the day — from something faint and hidden to a churning, unresting blaze, its tongues licking inch by inch at the heart of a woman alone in an empty chamber. It was hard to bear, and it made the days crawl for an Empress who had the misfortune of being a gay man's wife.
The books held ten thousand principles of the Way, but they passed like a breeze and left no sound behind, no help against fire or flood.
To keep from taking a wrong step, from doing something no code of human conduct could forgive and bringing shame upon the imperial house, Su Wen took a desperate gamble: she meditated upon herself, and so subdued her restless heart.
This time, Su Wen succeeded.
The Great Song's foremost beauty, the woman in the mirror, took her throne at the center of Su Wen's sea of consciousness and looked down upon all other blossoms — one flower blooming alone slays a hundred flowers.
Let Consort Xiang be all coquettish charm and Consort Hui gentle as water, let the palace maids lower their eyes in demure obedience and offer up their secret hearts: none of it could stir her.
But that Meditation Method had been created by a Celestial Master whose attainment rivaled creation itself, and perfected through the heart's blood of generation after generation of the Daoist Order's prodigies. Was it something a mortal who had read a few volumes of the canon could alter as she pleased?
Indeed, the Reverend had warned her: even the great virtuous ones of the Buddhist school dared meditate only upon the solemn image of the Buddha, and the Celestial Masters of the Daoist Order entrusted their spirits to nature. To meditate upon oneself was a thing only immortals and Buddhas could do.
Yet Su Wen, staking everything on one throw, had committed an immense Forbidden act and set foot on a crooked path.
A mere mortal woman — however matchless her beauty — how could she stand comparison with immortals and Buddhas, with Heaven and Earth?
For all the recklessness of it, Su Wen was lucky enough not to fall into derangement on the spot; she even achieved striking results, subduing her restless heart and sharpening all six of her senses. But the price was cruel.
As her meditation deepened level by level, the wound to her soul — which had never improved but had at least stopped worsening — began to deteriorate in earnest. These past two years her headaches had come more and more often, and she was frequently drowsy and drained.
Some dim intuition already told her that if she insisted on meditating upon the woman in the mirror, it would not be long before her fragrance faded and her jade shattered.
Yet Su Wen did not stop. She pressed stubbornly onward down the road of self-destruction, longing for release — if she could leave this world with her chastity intact, then she would not have betrayed the imperial house, nor disgraced the position of Empress.
"Your Ladyship — the physician has arrived."
A palace maid's announcement cut through Su Wen's thoughts.
"Let her come in."
Su Wen waved a hand as though weary, her eyes still as an ancient well.
Breath remained in her, but she had long since tired of days like these. Setting aside the likelihood that this so-called immortal maiden was another swindler trading on a flashy name — even if she truly commanded the arts of the immortals, how could she save someone whose heart was already set on death?
Su Wen wished only to do a few more good deeds in this last stretch of time: to shelter the consorts in the deep palace who suffered as she did, to arrange a way out for Qiao'er, and to meet once the noble personage Qiao'er thought so highly of. Then she would have no regrets, and the Reverend's cultivation of her would not have been wasted.
"This commoner pays her respects to Her Ladyship the Empress."
A voice reached her ears, clear and lovely as an oriole leaving the valley.
Then a slender figure in white stepped into the bedchamber, and into Su Wen's eyes — and in that instant time itself froze.
Ten thousand stars were not as brilliant as her eyes; the newly risen sun was not as bright as her smile. The line of her lips was a poison in full bloom, her breast the rise and fall of forbidden fruit, her waist a willow-switch that hooked the soul away, her legs white pythons that could lock about a throat.
The dying light of the room collapsed in that moment. All things lost their color, and her whole field of vision was seized by the woman in white with the black hair. Then lines and colors in every shade of the rainbow spread outward from that white-robed woman as from a singularity, unfurling in crooked waves like a rising tide, and everything was more vivid and more beautiful than it had ever been.
"How can there be a creature so beautiful…"
Light rippled across Su Wen's eyes, and the sound of a silver vase bursting rang in her ears.
With a single glance, the mirror she had meditated upon shattered into fragments — and shattered along with it was her Daoist heart.
Su Wen was the most beautiful person alive. This was not arrogance but plain fact; even counting other kingdoms, the most one could add was "one of."
It was on that foundation that she had dared take her dangerous shortcut, using the woman in the mirror to subdue her restless heart.
But now Aristotle's disciples had watched iron balls dropped together from the Leaning Tower of Pisa strike the ground at the very same moment; Sir Newton sat beneath the tree and the apple flew upward into the sky. Everything was dreamlike, unreal — everything except the vivid, three-dimensional red at the front of that white-robed woman's chest, which was real beyond question.
In the vast silence, a rich fragrance of tea crept outward like the flicking tongue of a serpent, devouring and absorbing the faint elegance of plum blossom bit by bit.
"Mrow!"
The white cat cried out, leapt down from the Empress's lap, and vanished in an instant.
Su Wen drew a breath like someone waking from a dream and tried to steady the heart hammering against her ribs — but the tea scent stealing into her nostrils only made the leaping flame burn brighter.
Thanks to a breeding drilled into her very bones, Su Wen could just maintain her poised and proper bearing even with her thoughts in chaos. She wrestled her emotions down and said in a low voice, "So you are the immortal maiden His Majesty found for me?"
"I am." Li Fei stood there, fresh and bright, light shifting in her eyes. "Hearing that Her Ladyship was troubled by a stubborn ailment, this commoner volunteered to come and make an attempt."
Su Wen met her gaze for a moment and found her thoughts swimming. She turned her face aside without letting it show and sighed.
"I never believed there were immortals in the heavens. Seeing you, I find I believe it three parts."
All her life it had been others struck dumb by her; now it was reversed, and it was her turn to marvel helplessly at another's beauty.
"I find the green mountains full of charm; I fancy the green mountains find me the same."
Li Fei came gracefully forward, the woman before her reflected in her own eyes as well.
The Empress wore her black hair coiled up, her pupils like autumn water, the ridge of her lips smaller and finer than willow leaves. Yet the way those lips pressed lightly together washed a face that ought to have been dazzling with a cold reserve — a world-weary air, like a rare bloom that admires only itself.
She wore a jade-colored skirt whose shades were balanced just so, and her figure was in fact a touch taller than Li Fei's; as for the bosom fit to mother the realm, it yielded nothing to Lady Gnaea's.
The jade hand resting on the table was porcelain-white and lustrous, the nails faintly gleaming. Li Fei wanted very much to trim those nails for her, one by one, and then measure the length of each finger against her own skin.
She was merely sitting there, and yet she looked elegant and solemn — a bearing at once cultivated from within and entirely natural, which Li Fei had seen in only one other person: Lady Zhihua.
Seeing Li Fei draw closer, the Empress shifted her body with a movement almost too small to notice and steered the conversation back to business, as if that alone could rescue her Daoist heart from the wreck it had become.
"May I ask whether the lady is confident?"
Her voice was soft and pleasant, and a thin veil of maternal warmth lay over that cold, striking face — the aura of a young married woman, aloof and self-possessed, mature and gentle.
But Miss Top Courtesan's eyes could see straight through a person, and she felt the sorrow and loneliness inside this gay man's wife.
"Set your mind at ease, Your Ladyship." Li Fei spoke with complete assurance. "Even if the ingredients aren't all on hand and I can't cure the affliction outright, I can certainly ease it a good deal."
This was no empty boast, and the source of her confidence was Qin Zhihua.
Lady Zhihua had witnessed with her own eyes the moment her beloved burned her soul away; and every time the aftereffects of the young madam's soul injury flared up, that haggard, sickly look on her face wrung Lady Zhihua's heart.
So the recuperation regimen Lady Zhihua had tailored to the young madam, and the various essential oils she blended with her own hands, all had a considerable effect in soothing the spirit.
True, the Empress's chief symptom was headaches, whereas Li Fei was forever thirsty — clinically speaking, worlds apart… but running the whole regimen on Her Ladyship ought to do some good regardless, no?
Thank you, Lady Zhihua!
"In that case, I will trouble the lady."
Su Wen nodded and lightly drew back her sleeve, her fair wrist like congealed snow. Forcing down the stray thoughts in her mind, she lowered her eyes and waited for Li Fei to take her pulse.
"Ah… that. We don't go in for pulse-reading in our immortal realm."
Li Fei clamped a hand over her tailbone, lest Miss Tail come wriggling out and startle the Empress.
"Then what—" Su Wen said, puzzled.
"You'll need to remove your clothing, have essential oils applied, have the acupoints all over your body kneaded, plus a full-body massage…"
Li Fei described the recuperation procedure exactly as it was, then added with impeccable courtesy, "So if Her Ladyship the Empress would kindly disrobe."
____
________________________________________
💖 Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 50 Powerstones, I'll release +1 bonus chapter to warm your hearts.
🚀 Community Reward: If we reach 20 supporting members, we'll have a +5 chapter marathon across all stories! The romance won't stop.
👻 Come to our secret corner: Search for GirlsLove on (P). You know that's where the magic happens... 😉