Old Songs in the Cell
Beneath the earth there was no spring or autumn, no winter or summer. Outside, flowers bloomed and withered, snow piled high and melted away, but none of it counted inside this death cell. Here, the days still passed one drop at a time from the stone walls, one bowl of cold water at a time shoved inward, one chunk of coarse flatbread at a time flung onto the floor. After a while, Fang Yingjie could no longer say how many days, how many months, how many years had gone by.
Only a few things still marked the passage of time: the water-stains on the wall had crawled an inch lower; the straw mat had rotted through another layer; the man who brought their food had been changed once; even the accents in the guards' curses had grown faintly unfamiliar.
And then there was Fang Yingjie himself.
Ever since he had realized he had already endured his first year beneath the earth, he had more or less stopped counting the days.
At first he had still tried to reckon what day it was, how long it had been since the night he fell into the water, how far away Mount Hua must be by now. Later, after too much thinking, he found only a cold emptiness in his mind, and little by little he stopped trying.
Thinking was useless.
The darkness below would not grow brighter because he missed someone. It would not open and let him out because he remembered a certain date. The only thing he could hold on to was the meager business of staying alive in front of him.
When food came, he ate.
When a bowl of water was pushed within reach, he drank.
When his chest tightened, he settled his breathing little by little.
When the old wound in his right leg ached in the damp, he endured it little by little.
When the cold bit hardest at night, he drew that breath down into his energy center.
If it would not sink, he did not hurry. He simply sank it again.
At first, Fang Yingjie practiced the method Old Daoist Xuan had taught him for one reason only: not to die.
Later he went on practicing, but no longer only because he feared death.
If he did not, the cold would rise again, and with it the stray thoughts. The sound of dripping water, the scrape of chains, the guards' footsteps receding into the distance—bit by bit, they would grind a man hollow from the inside.
More important still, the man across from him was almost impossible to speak to.
Say ten words, and one might not be answered.
And if an answer did come, it was usually cold, hard, and barbed.
In the beginning those barbs used to leave Fang Yingjie tight-chested and stifled. Later he grew used to them. The man suspected him, blocked him, guarded against him as if he were a knife hidden in a sleeve. But the longer Fang Yingjie remained in this place, the more he came to understand that this was not the temper of an ordinary ill-natured man.
If a man could still trust others freely and wholeheartedly, he would not have become what this one had become.
The chains on the man opposite did not bind only his sinews and bones.
They held fast as well to many things the Crimson Flame Palace had already shattered inch by inch, then frozen hard again inch by inch.
So Fang Yingjie spoke less.
Asked less.
Explained less.
He ate the coarse bread, drank a little cold water, settled himself against the wall, and gathered his breath inward bit by bit.
He never thought of it as practicing any marvelous art.
When the disciples of Mount Hua practiced swordsmanship, sword-light flashed across the stone terrace. When they practiced palm techniques, wind came whispering from beneath their sleeves. Even the most ordinary fist-and-foot work had rise and fall, advance and retreat, opening and closing—one glance was enough to tell that they were training in martial arts.
What he did now was not even pleasing to watch.
He only sat.
Breathed.
Endured pain.
Guarded a single breath.
Sometimes the breath sank more smoothly, and he could sit a little longer. Sometimes the old injury in his chest surged up again, and one fit of coughing scattered the tiny bit of gathered breath he had just managed to collect. He did not grow angry. He merely waited until the coughing passed, then gathered it again from the beginning.
As time wore on, that small thing truly did become a habit.
Just as he would feel the emptiness in his belly if the food came late, so too if he went a day without regulating his breath, he would feel as if some part of him had been hollowed out.
He was still thin.
His face was still pale with the pallor of one who had not seen the sun in too long.
But the look he had worn in that first year—the look of a flame that might be blown out at any moment by the damp—had, in the end, receded a little. His right leg still hurt, especially when the underground moisture returned and cold seemed to drive into the seams of the bone like needles, inch by inch. But pain was only pain now. He was no longer as he had been when he first awoke here, when the slightest movement made blackness rush before his eyes.
Once, the man delivering their food flung half a piece of coarse bread too far, and it rolled all the way to the foot of the wall.
Fang Yingjie braced himself against the stone and slowly made his way over to pick it up.
It was only a few steps.
When he had first come here, those few steps would have taken him a long time.
That day, he stopped only twice.
Across from him, the chains gave a light scrape.
Fang Yingjie lifted his head. The man still leaned in the darkness, his tangled hair hanging down, those dim gray eyes staring blankly in his direction—as if he had heard Fang Yingjie's steps, or perhaps as if the chains had merely been tugged by chance.
Fang Yingjie picked up the bread, wiped it against the corner of his robe, and sat back down.
Suddenly the man said coldly, "So your leg's not ruined after all."
Fang Yingjie froze.
For all these days, this seemed to be the first time the man had spoken of his body of his own accord.
After thinking a moment, Fang Yingjie answered softly, "It still hurts."
The man gave a low, contemptuous snort.
"It hurts that badly, and you still crawled over there for the bread."
For a moment Fang Yingjie had no reply.
The man said again, still coldly, "If the Crimson Flame Palace truly means to use you in some scheme, they're willing to pay dearly for it."
The cell fell silent once more.
Fang Yingjie lowered his head and slowly bit into the piece of bread.
It was cold and hard. There was still a little dust clinging to the edge that could not be wiped clean, and it rasped against his throat on the way down.
He did not explain.
He did not mention the pain in his leg again.
Whatever he said, the man opposite would most likely never believe him.
And yet, for some reason, after being mocked so coldly, he found himself more settled than before.
At least the man had heard him walking.
At least he could tell that Fang Yingjie was a little better than he had been at the beginning.
It was only that the man would first think of even this in terms of a plot laid by the Crimson Flame Palace.
After that, a very long time passed in which the two of them still had little to say to each other.
Each had his own corner of the cell.
Day after day, Fang Yingjie sat by the slightly drier patch of wall and regulated his breath. The man opposite remained in the deeper shadows, chains weighing down his body, old wounds waxing and waning with the damp. If a bowl of water sat in the middle, neither of them said whose it was. If the bread had been broken into two halves, no word like give or take was ever spoken.
Sometimes Fang Yingjie would place the cleaner half a little farther to one side, a little closer to the other man.
The man did not always touch it.
And even when he did, he would not touch it at once.
Only after a long while—so long that the thing almost seemed ownerless—would he slowly reach out and take it.
Fang Yingjie learned not to look.
At least, not to keep looking.
Because he knew the man loathed being watched over.
The more it resembled kindness, the more he suspected it.
The more concern it carried, the colder he became.
The rules Fang Yingjie had groped out in that first year were gradually worn finer by time.
Water could not be passed into another's hand. It had to be left in the middle.
Bread could not be said to be given. It could only be said that one could not finish it.
If the chains on the other side suddenly rattled hard, do not ask at once.
If the man's breathing sank low, then more often than not the old wounds in his shoulders and back were flaring up; if the chains went taut all at once, then it was likely the guards were coming.
When the men in dark red robes entered the cell, lower your head first, back against the wall, and say nothing.
After they left, wait a little longer.
Only when the footsteps outside the iron door had truly gone far away could the bowl of water be pushed over, slowly.
No one had taught him these rules.
The first time, he learned them from fear. The second time, from memory. After enough repetitions, they simply became the terms of life.
Sometimes Fang Yingjie thought that if he ever did get out, he would never be able to forget anything about this place beneath the earth.
He would never forget the clammy cold of the stone walls.
Never forget the dying lamp that always seemed one breath away from going out.
Never forget the taste of coarse bread grinding his throat raw.
And never forget that, buried very deep within the man's cold words, hard as iron, there was once in a while the faintest hint of not wanting him to die.
But more often he did not dare think too much about getting out.
If he thought too much, his heart would go empty.
So he thought only of what lay before him.
Today, he was still alive.
Today, he still practiced.
Today, he still waited.
As for what he was waiting for, even he could not have said.
Perhaps for someone from outside to come.
Perhaps to grow older, a little stronger.
Perhaps only to wake again next time and find that he still had not died.
After living like this for so long, Fang Yingjie began to fear something else.
It was not that the death cell was too bitter.
It was that one day he might forget the sounds of his former life.
The wind on Mount Hua.
The sharp cries of his senior martial brothers as they practiced swordsmanship on the stone terrace.
That note in Zhen E's voice when she called his name—stern, painful, and sharp all at once.
And the tunes sung by men carrying firewood along the mountain paths.
At first those sounds had remained clear in his dreams. Later, after too much time had come between them and him, they seemed as though they had been soaked in the underground damp—swollen, blurred, almost touchable, yet no longer truly audible.
One night, the man who brought food left early, and the cell was quieter than usual.
The water dripped, one drop at a time.
The dying lamp far away had been pressed low by the damp, its yellow light like the eye of a sick man.
Fang Yingjie sat beneath the wall regulating his breath, and as he did, the breath in his chest suddenly went awry.
It was not pain.
It was not cold.
It was only that all at once something inside him became terribly hollow.
For one moment, he found that he could no longer remember what dawn on Mount Hua looked like.
He remembered only cold.
Only darkness.
Only the iron-rust smell that never left the dungeon.
Fang Yingjie opened his eyes and sat there in a daze for a long time.
Then, at last, he hummed a line under his breath.
The sound was very light.
So light it barely seemed to leave his throat.
It was a tune an older senior martial brother on Mount Hua had once taught him. It had never been any proper song, only a short mountain air that men might sing while carrying firewood or hurrying along the road. Even the words were incomplete—one line here, another there, and by the end whoever sang it usually made up whatever came next.
Back then Fang Yingjie had been too sickly to run over the mountain with the others. He would sit on the stone steps and listen. His senior martial brothers thought him too quiet, and sang on purpose for him.
At the time, he had found them noisy.
Now, when he hummed the tune again, he realized that that old noise was enough to make his chest ache with longing.
He hummed very softly.
Only two lines, and suddenly the chains across from him gave a harsh scrape.
The man said coldly, "Shut up."
Fang Yingjie stopped at once.
Silence fell over the cell again.
The drip of water continued, one drop after another.
After a while, the man asked, "Who taught you that?"
Fang Yingjie hesitated, but answered all the same. "A senior martial brother on Mount Hua."
A low, cold laugh came from the other side.
"So they even prepared a Mount Hua mountain tune for this. Thorough of them."
Something tightened in Fang Yingjie's chest.
He wanted to say no.
Wanted to say no one had prepared it.
Wanted to say he had truly heard this before, that the brothers on Mount Hua had truly sung it.
But what use would it be to say any of that?
The man before him would not believe him.
So he said nothing.
He only lowered his head and resumed regulating his breath.
After that night, Fang Yingjie did not hum again for many days.
But the less he hummed, the deader the cell seemed.
Dead, in the sense that even he himself seemed to be little by little claimed by the earth below.
Long afterward, one night, listening to the drip of water, he softly hummed half a line again.
This time he hummed even more quietly.
Again the man opposite spoke.
"Shut up."
Fang Yingjie stopped for a moment.
Then, after a pause, he hummed on.
It was not defiance.
It was not that his courage had suddenly grown.
It was only that on that night he truly felt that if there was not even this one small sound left, then a part of him would die along with the silence.
If he sang, then at least he would still know he had once lived on Mount Hua.
The chains on the other side gave a heavy scrape.
Fang Yingjie thought the man was about to curse him.
But after a long wait, the only thing he heard was a cold voice saying, "You sing badly."
Fang Yingjie started.
His lowered lashes trembled faintly.
After a moment he said in a small voice, "I never sang well to begin with."
The man said nothing more.
So Fang Yingjie continued.
He did not finish the song that night. Halfway through, a fit of coughing rose from his chest and broke the tune apart. He pressed a hand to his heart and spent a good while steadying himself before sinking his breath down once more.
The man opposite remained in the darkness.
Motionless.
Without asking.
Only that night, the sound of his chains seemed a little less frequent than usual.
After that, the old Mount Hua tune began to sound now and then inside the dungeon.
Not every day.
Sometimes Fang Yingjie was still too sick and languid to hum.
Sometimes the men in dark red robes had only just come and gone, and the stench of blood in the cell was too heavy for either of them to have any heart left for speech.
Sometimes the weather was simply too damp, and every breath felt like swallowing wet iron.
But whenever the emptiness inside him grew too fierce, or whenever he suddenly feared he was forgetting the sounds of the world above, he would hum a few lines under his breath.
At first, every time, the man tried to stop him.
"Shut up."
"Noisy."
"Who said you could sing?"
"So the Crimson Flame Palace has enough leisure for this now?"
At the beginning, Fang Yingjie would stop.
Later, he stopped less and less.
Because little by little he came to understand that when the man was truly angry, his voice was not like this.
The other man's anger was like chains jerking taut all at once, like an old blade scraping stone—cold, but with a murderous edge that could cut a person down to the root.
These rebukes, most of the time, were only habit.
Like a man who had been locked too long in darkness: when he suddenly heard the sound of another living human being, his first instinct was not joy, but to drive it away.
So Fang Yingjie let him curse.
Once he was done, if the breath in Fang Yingjie's chest was still steady, he would go on humming.
Sometimes, in the middle of a tune, he would notice that the chains opposite had fallen still.
Not the ordinary kind of stillness.
Even when that man did not move, the chains would usually give the faintest sound with his breathing, his old wounds, the damp cold. But several times, as Fang Yingjie hummed, he suddenly realized that even that faint sound had vanished.
He would lift his head.
Across from him there would still be only a shape in darkness.
Hair hanging loose.
Shoulders slightly bent.
Those dim gray eyes staring blankly in his direction, as though asleep, or as though he had heard nothing at all.
But when Fang Yingjie stopped, the breathing deep within that man's bent back always seemed to settle a shade lower than before.
Fang Yingjie did not know whether he was imagining it.
He did not dare ask.
So he did not.
If he asked, the man would most likely only sneer again and accuse him of fishing for answers with a few broken scraps of song.
He merely lowered his head and softly picked up the half-line where he had left it.
And so the days passed over them like a stone soaked in icy water, slowly grinding beneath their feet.
By then, Fang Yingjie himself could no longer say how many seasons—if seasons there could be in that place—he had endured underground.
He only knew that the man delivering their food had been changed again.
The guard who used to bang his wooden bucket against the bars had stopped coming, replaced by one with a heavier nasal accent. The new one was even worse-tempered, often kicking the bread straight into the wet. Fang Yingjie would wait until he had gone, then pick it up, wipe what could be wiped, tear away what could not, and eat the rest as usual.
He had to eat.
He meant to live.
Once, when the man opposite heard him lowering his head and biting into that hard bread, he gave a low snort.
"You're not bothered by filth, I see."
Fang Yingjie swallowed with pain scraping at his throat and answered only, "If I eat, I'll still have strength."
The man said coldly, "Strength for what?"
Fang Yingjie paused.
"To stay alive."
For a moment the darkness was silent.
Then the man said, "Being alive is not always a good thing."
Fang Yingjie did not answer at once. He slowly swallowed the mouthful of bread before saying softly, "But if you die, then there's nothing left at all."
This time the man did not needle him again.
As the days accumulated, the rules between them grew finer still.
Fang Yingjie knew that on nights after the men in dark red robes had come, he could not sing. At those times the smell of blood still hung in the cell, the sound of chains sank so heavily it frightened even the drip of water. He would only sit with lowered head in his corner and wait for those men's footsteps to go far away before pushing the bowl of water over.
And if the other man failed to move for a long time, Fang Yingjie would not ask at once.
To ask would resemble concern.
And concern was what the man hated most.
But some things did not need to be asked. If one lived long enough beside another, one would know.
Fang Yingjie knew that when the old wounds flared, the man's breathing sank lower than usual. He knew that when he was truly enraged, the chains went taut first. He also knew that however venomous the man's words might sound, he did not necessarily want Fang Yingjie dead.
Though blind, the man opposite had also gradually come to know a few of Fang Yingjie's habits from the sound of his footsteps, his coughing, the cadence of his breathing exercises, the faint brush of his robe-hem against the stone floor.
He knew that if the boy coughed hard in the night, then the next day his breath-regulation would be slower.
He knew the right leg ached in wet weather, though the boy always pretended otherwise.
He knew that if Fang Yingjie passed an entire day without speaking, then more often than not he was remembering the people he had left outside.
He even knew that when Fang Yingjie hummed the old Mount Hua tune, the first line was always the lightest, because even he himself did not know whether this time too he would be told to stop.
But none of this was ever spoken aloud.
To speak it aloud would be to admit something.
And beneath the earth, admitting a thing was sometimes harder than taking a beating.
One night, Fang Yingjie slept lightly.
The underground chill was worse than usual. Dampness climbed through the cracks in the stone and burrowed into the bones. He had coughed several times during the day, and by night his breathing was unsteady. Half dreaming, half waking, he saw Mount Hua again.
In the dream Mount Hua was far away.
White mist lay along the mountain path.
Someone ahead was singing that old tune.
The voice was very low, as though beyond the mist, or beyond water.
At first Fang Yingjie thought it was himself humming in the dream. But as he listened, something felt wrong.
The voice was too low.
Too hoarse.
Too cold.
It did not sound like the throat of a young man. It sounded like old iron, lightly, lightly grinding in damp air.
Only half a line.
Less than half.
As though the singer himself had forgotten the rest, or perhaps simply did not permit himself to continue.
Fang Yingjie woke with a start.
The cell was still dim.
The dying lamp hung far away. Water dripped from the wall, one drop at a time. The man opposite still leaned in darkness, the chains weighing down his body, his tangled hair hanging loose, as though he had never moved and never made a sound.
Fang Yingjie listened in a daze for a long while.
There was nothing.
At last he thought he must have misheard in the dream.
How could the man opposite possibly hum an old Mount Hua tune?
The next day, after the food had been brought and the guard had gone, Fang Yingjie ate half his coarse bread as usual, drank two mouthfuls of cold water, leaned back against the wall, and slowly settled his breathing.
When at last it steadied, he softly began humming the old Mount Hua tune again.
This time, the man opposite did not tell him to shut up.
He did not say it sounded bad, either.
The only sound in the cell was Fang Yingjie's voice, light as the thinnest thread of wind, drifting slowly through the damp cold, the rust, the old blood, and the failing light.
Fang Yingjie did not sing well.
Some of the words had long since been forgotten, and he could only blur his way past them. In other places the melody wandered out of tune. Had he sung it on Mount Hua's stone terrace, his senior martial brothers would have laughed at him long before the end.
But here beneath the earth, no one laughed.
The man opposite leaned in the dark. His chains did not move.
Halfway through the tune, Fang Yingjie suddenly felt that the cell no longer seemed quite so dead as before.
Only seemed.
The stone walls were still damp.
The dying lamp was still dim.
The iron door was still locked as heavily as ever.
The man opposite still suspected him, still guarded against him. When he spoke, his words were still, more often than not, cold as the back of a blade.
They still could not exchange more than a few proper sentences.
But some sounds were no longer as strange as they had once been.
The drip of water.
The scrape of chains.
The thud of coarse bread landing on stone.
Even that broken old Mount Hua tune, wandering in and out of pitch, had gradually become part of this death cell.
The dungeon was still a dungeon.
The chains were still chains.
And yet, in this darkness that had never seen daylight, two people who refused to draw near had, after years and years of days so slow, so cold, so fine they were almost invisible, grown used to the simple fact that the other was still alive.
A Word That Wounds
So a few more years passed.
And in those years, Fang Yingjie changed, little by little.
What Old Daoist Xuan had taught him had originally been nothing more than a method for clinging to life. Yet as time went on, that inner formula slowly took root within him. His old ailments gradually eased. The coughing came less often. His right leg still ached whenever the damp crept in, but he could now sit for long stretches, endure for long stretches, and hold himself upright without his vision blackening the moment he moved.
He was still thin, still pale, still looked like a boy who had not seen daylight in years. But his shoulders and back were no longer as frail as before, and something in his eyes had settled into a deeper quiet. In his energy center there was now the faint stir of inner force—not fierce, not abundant, but steady, quietly bearing up his body from within.
He still knew no fistwork, no kicking arts, no true techniques worth speaking of.
All he had gained was the ability to endure the cold more than before, endure pain more than before, and fall a little less easily.
The men in dark red robes still came.
Every so often, one of them would enter the cell with two or three guards at his side. The moment the iron door opened, the guards would drive Fang Yingjie into a corner and order him to lower his head and not look.
So he could only listen.
He listened to chains being lifted. He listened to the man in the dark red robe ask, in that unhurried voice of his,
"Still unwilling to speak?"
The man opposite never answered.
And the less he answered, the more those people delighted in humiliating him—jerking the chains, kicking over his food and water, sneering that the old thing still refused to talk, and always striking at those few places beneath his shoulders and across his back where old wounds had long ago been ruined by iron, piercing, and restraint.
One time, the dark-robed man came earlier than usual.
He stood just inside the cell door, looking down at the prisoner opposite him. His voice remained leisurely, as though he had not come to conduct an interrogation at all, but merely to ask after some trivial household matter.
"Old thing. Still not willing to talk?"
The man opposite leaned against the stone wall. Tangled hair hung beside his face. Those gray-filmed eyes stared open and empty, as though even this question was beneath the effort of hearing.
The dark-robed man smiled.
"So many years, and your bones are still hard."
He lifted a hand.
At once a guard stepped forward, seized one of the heavy chains, and gave it a vicious wrench backward.
The chain snapped taut.
The man's shoulders and back jolted. His whole body was dragged half an inch forward. Beneath the rags of his clothing, the old wounds seemed to be bitten open all over again, and even his breathing sank at once.
But he made no sound.
Only a single breath forced its way out of his throat, so low it was almost nothing at all.
Fang Yingjie had been keeping his head down against the wall, but at that instant his fingers clenched.
The dark-robed man bent over to study the prisoner's face.
"Speak, and you'll suffer less."
The man opposite let out a low laugh.
It was hoarse, like rust scraping over stone.
"Get lost."
The guard's face darkened. He drove a kick hard into the man's ribs.
It was a brutal blow.
The man's body slammed back against the wall. Chains clattered wildly. His hair fell aside, and at last a thread of blood seeped from the corner of his mouth. Yet he still did not beg, nor did he offer another word.
The dark-robed man did not seem in any hurry. He merely said,
"Again."
The guard caught the chain once more.
This time he moved like a man who knew exactly where the pain lay. He twisted his wrist on purpose, dragging the chain across at an angle so that it tore directly at the old wound across the man's shoulder and back.
Fang Yingjie had been pressed into the corner with his head lowered.
The guards had forbidden him to look, and so he could only listen.
But as he heard the chain pulled taut again and again, heard the prisoner driven against the stone wall again and again, and then heard the dark-robed man drawl, "The old thing truly does have hard bones," something in Fang Yingjie's chest suddenly surged upward.
He knew he should not speak.
He knew, too, that speaking would do no good.
But in that moment, if he still kept silent, he felt that this dungeon itself would one day force his own head down as well.
He heard his own hoarse voice break the silence.
"He's already like this. What more do you want?"
The cell went still.
The dark-robed man turned slowly.
Even the guards froze for an instant, as though they had never expected the boy who had spent all these years bowed and silent in the corner to speak at such a moment.
Fang Yingjie's face was pale, but he did not take the words back.
He looked at them and repeated himself.
"You've already chained him into this."
"What more do you want?"
One of the guards gave a cold laugh.
"Since when was it your turn to speak, brat?"
Before the last word had fully fallen, a palm had already lashed across Fang Yingjie's face.
A sharp crack rang through the cell.
Half his face went numb at once, and the blow sent him crashing into the wall. Before he could regain his footing, another fist drove into his abdomen.
That punch scattered the little breath he had just managed to steady inside his chest.
He doubled over. A metallic taste surged into his throat, black motes bursting across his vision. The impact dragged hard at the old injury in his right leg as well, and he nearly collapsed to his knees.
The guard drew back to kick him again, but Fang Yingjie suddenly raised an arm, almost by instinct, trying to stop the blow before it landed.
It could hardly be called a technique.
It was neither quick nor precise.
It was only the desperate movement of a man driven too far, trying to intercept a rain of fists and boots with whatever he had.
The guard's kick crashed into his forearm. Then the man seized him by the shoulder and hurled him viciously back into the wall.
A dull thud echoed through the cell.
Fang Yingjie's back struck stone. His blood and breath churned violently, and the color drained from his face.
But he did not cry out.
He did not beg for mercy either.
He only braced a hand against the ground, and after a long moment, forced that chaotic breath back down bit by bit.
The dark-robed man watched him with interest.
"So. You've grown some courage."
He lowered his gaze to Fang Yingjie, then looked across at the other prisoner.
"Old thing, the boy is speaking for you."
The man opposite had been sitting with his head lowered.
Only when he heard those words did he slowly turn his face.
Those gray-filmed eyes could not see. Yet Fang Yingjie still felt a chill settle on him, dull and cold as the back edge of a blade.
The man's voice was low and hoarse, cold enough to strip every trace of warmth from the air.
"Who told you to interfere?"
Fang Yingjie froze.
The man said again,
"Get back."
Those two words were colder than the slap had been.
Fang Yingjie's throat moved, but for a moment no sound came out.
The dark-robed man laughed.
"And you still won't accept the favor."
The prisoner ignored him and said only, in that same cold voice,
"You think taking one beating for me makes you clean?"
Fang Yingjie was still half sprawled on the ground. One side of his face burned, and his stomach kept clenching in waves.
He took two rough breaths before answering quietly,
"I wasn't trying to be clean."
For a moment, the cell fell silent.
Fang Yingjie lifted his head. His voice was soft, but he did not evade the man's words.
"I just couldn't bear to watch."
The man opposite did not speak.
The smile on the dark-robed man's face faded a little.
He studied Fang Yingjie for a while, then said,
"Couldn't bear to watch?"
His voice was slow and even.
"There are many things in this place that are hard to watch. If you mean to open your mouth over every one of them, you won't stay alive for long."
Fang Yingjie did not answer.
He knew that.
Of course he knew.
He could stop nothing. He could save no one. That little attempt just now had not even managed to hold back a guard for half a step.
But if he said nothing—not one word, not one move—then he feared that one day he truly would become just another stone in this dungeon.
The dark-robed man seemed to have lost interest in continuing. He merely gave a flick of his hand toward the guards.
"That's enough."
The guards released the chains.
The man opposite sagged slightly and settled back against the wall once more. The blood at his lip slowly threaded downward through his beard.
Before leaving, the dark-robed man cast one last glance at Fang Yingjie.
"Come."
The guards murmured their assent.
The iron door shut again.
After the footsteps had gone, darkness settled back over the cell.
Fang Yingjie still leaned against the wall, the breath in his chest and belly in complete disorder. He tried several times before he could barely force the upheaval back down. The numbness in his face slowly turned to pain, and the ache in his back spread in waves from where it had struck stone.
He closed his eyes and began, little by little, to regulate his breathing.
After a long while, the man opposite finally spoke.
"Are you satisfied now?"
Fang Yingjie opened his eyes.
The other man's voice was as cold as before.
"One beating, and now you feel like a man?"
Fang Yingjie was silent for a moment, then gave a faint shake of his head.
"No."
"Then why interfere?"
Fang Yingjie leaned against the wall, white-faced and unsteady.
"I don't know either."
It was a foolish answer.
But it was the truth.
He had not weighed the consequences. He had not thought through what would happen once the words left his mouth.
He had only heard that chain pulled tight again and again, seen a man tormented to that point and still forced to endure them trampling the last of his pride into the dirt.
So he spoke.
And so he was beaten.
He said,
"I know it was useless.
"I know I couldn't stop them.
"But if I keep saying nothing..."
He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was even lower.
"I'm afraid one day I truly won't be able to say anything at all."
For a very long time, the darkness opposite gave no answer.
So long that Fang Yingjie thought the man would once again drive everything back with a single cold sentence, just as he always had before.
But in the dark, the man said only, very low,
"Being able to speak is not always a blessing."
Fang Yingjie answered just as softly,
"And being unable to speak is not always the same as living."
This time, the man opposite did not curse him again.
Fang Yingjie closed his eyes once more and drew his scattered breath down, one mouthful at a time.
He hurt badly.
But in the end, that breath had not wholly come apart.
The man opposite sat in the darkness for a long time without moving.
He listened to the boy steadying his breath through pain. He listened to that current of breath, broken apart by the beating, slow and clumsy and stubborn, sinking down bit by bit once more.
If the boy was part of a trap, then he truly was willing to suffer for it.
But when had the Crimson Flame Palace ever lacked the nerve to pay a price?
Blood could be real.
Pain could be real.
Humiliation could be real.
Even that one sentence—I just couldn't bear to watch—could be real.
The deadliest traps had never feared truth mixed in among the lies.
The more truth they contained, the easier they were to believe.
He slowly pressed down the faint disturbance in his own heart.
He could not trust him.
Still could not trust him.
Only that night, he did not tell Fang Yingjie to get back.
Throwing Himself into the Fire
A few more years passed.
The child who had been eleven back then had slowly grown into a youth.
He was still pale. It was the pallor bred by long years without sunlight, like a thin frost laid over cold stone deep underground. But beneath that whiteness, he was no longer as frail as he had once been, no longer something that would shatter at a touch. His shoulders had broadened, his frame had lengthened, and the narrow little skeleton he had once worn had been drawn out bit by bit by time. There was sinew now in his wrists, his arms, his back. He still could not be called strong, but he no longer looked like that sickly child from years ago, the sort who seemed as though a passing gust might blow him over.
His face had changed as well.
When he lowered his head in the past, he had looked like a child whose fright had not yet left him. Now, when he lowered it, there was already the quiet outline of a young man there. It was not that he felt no fear, nor that he no longer hurt. It was only that fear and pain had been pressed down, layer by layer, into his bones, and no longer rose easily to his face.
The old injury in his right leg had changed too.
At first, whenever the damp deepened underground, it had felt as though cold needles were wedged into the seams of the bone. Even the slightest movement had been enough to make his vision blacken with pain. Later he had been able to sit, to brace himself, to move a step at a time. By now, ordinary walking no longer posed much trouble. Even if he sprang up suddenly or lunged forward several paces, the leg would not necessarily drag him down at once. Yet when the moisture rose again from the depths, the old wound still ached faintly, as though a splinter remained buried in the bone, reminding him from time to time that the storm on the lake had never truly left his body behind.
Sometimes, he himself found the change strange.
In all these years, he had not once looked into a mirror. He had no idea what he had grown into. Only from sleeves that fell shorter year by year, and trouser hems that drew tighter year by year, did he know that his body had gone on growing in this place that never saw the sky. Now and then he would lower his head and catch sight of the tendons standing out on the backs of his hands, or hear his footsteps land more heavily on the stone than they once had, and only then would it come to him in a daze—
That even buried underground, a person could still grow up.
Only this kind of growing brought no joy.
Boys outside grew up through passing seasons. They put on new clothes. Someone would look at them and say, "You've grown taller again."
He had grown up in cold water, coarse buns, a guttering lamp, and the sound of chains, enduring it inch by inch.
He had grown taller, and was still in the cell.
He had grown sturdier, and was still in the cell.
His right leg could walk again, and still it could not carry him out through that iron door.
At times, that thought was colder than pain.
The men in the dark red robes still came.
Sometimes they left longer gaps between visits. Sometimes they came again sooner. Only later did Fang Yingjie gradually understand that they did not come on a whim. It was more like some fixed rule long ago laid down. After a certain stretch of time, they would come and ask their questions again; failing to get answers, they would torment him again. Like a length of old iron that refused to burn through or break under the hammer, cast back into mud and water, then tested again the next time to see whether it might at last ring differently.
This time, the footsteps outside the cell were heavier than usual.
Before the iron door opened, Fang Yingjie was already awake.
He had been sitting against the wall, regulating his breathing. The moment those footsteps drew near, the breath in his chest paused of its own accord, then slowly sank again. The man opposite him had heard them as well. The chains gave a faint clink, then fell silent once more.
The iron door opened.
The light was brighter than usual. When it spilled inside, the damp water on the floor caught a dim gleam. Two guards entered first, one carrying a short cudgel, the other a hooked iron rod. Behind them came the same man in the dark red robe. The hem of his robe was spotless. His boots made almost no sound on the wet stone.
"Head down."
One of the guards barked the order as always.
Fang Yingjie slowly lowered his head and retreated into the corner.
Over the years, he had learned the rules of this ritual well. When the man in red entered, he could not raise his eyes, could not speak, could not even look too much. If the guards told him to step back, he stepped back. If they told him to lower his head, he lowered it. He knew that if he moved recklessly at such a time, the one who suffered would not be only himself.
The dark-robed man walked over to the prisoner opposite and looked down at him for a while.
"You're still alive."
His voice was as slow as ever, as though it held the hint of a smile—or perhaps no smile at all.
The man opposite sat against the stone wall, half his face hidden by disordered hair, his clouded eyes staring emptily ahead. He did not answer.
"So many years," the man in red said. "That truly is remarkable."
He lifted a hand.
The guards stepped forward and, with practiced ease, seized the chains.
Fang Yingjie kept his head lowered, but his fingers had already curled tighter and tighter.
He could not see clearly. He could only listen.
He heard the chains jerk violently upward, heard the iron scrape across the stone floor, heard the injuries in the man's shoulders and back being wrenched open again until a low sound was forced up from his throat.
It was a very soft sound.
Had Fang Yingjie not listened to it in this cell for so many years, he might not even have recognized it.
"I only want to ask you a few questions," the man in red said mildly. "Why must you make it so ugly every time?"
The man opposite still did not answer.
One of the guards gave a cold laugh and twisted his wrist deliberately to one side.
The chains drew taut at an angle.
The man's whole body was pulled forward before another chain stopped him short. Beneath the torn cloth at his shoulder and back, an old wound immediately began to seep darkly once more.
The dark-robed man bent and said something in a lowered voice.
He spoke too quietly for Fang Yingjie to make out the words. Now and then he caught fragments only—old matters, old names, some particular palm art. The same topics returned every so often, yet he never heard them whole, never understood exactly what these people were trying to force out of the man opposite.
At last the prisoner spoke.
Still only a single word.
"Get out."
The guard's face darkened, and the cudgel came crashing down.
A heavy thud.
The blow landed across the shoulders and back with the sodden weight of a strike against wet timber. The man's body jolted. His brow slammed into the stone wall. His hair fell loose, and a ribbon of blood began to creep down from his temple.
"Ask again," said the man in red.
Then the questions, the blows, and the clatter of chains began to fill the cell over and over.
Fang Yingjie kept his head lowered, but the breath inside him was becoming harder and harder to hold down.
Don't move, he told himself.
He had seen this too many times over the years.
He could not stop it. He could not intervene.
The last time, he had spoken only a single sentence, and they had beaten him so badly his breathing had fallen into chaos. He had had to lean against the wall for a long time before he recovered. The man opposite had not thanked him for it. He had even scolded him for meddling.
He knew all of that.
But knowing was one thing. Hearing it with his own ears was another.
The man was old now.
Fang Yingjie did not know when, exactly, he had begun to realize it.
When he had first woken in this dungeon, he had only felt that the man opposite was like a bar of old iron locked away by chains and darkness—cold, hard, terrifying, as though no number of years could ever bend him.
But the years had passed, and little by little Fang Yingjie had begun to hear the change. The man's breathing grew thinner with each passing year. Even the breath that pressed against his throat whenever the chains were yanked had grown heavier year by year. Even the outline of him leaning against the wall seemed somehow lower than before.
He was still hard.
But hard did not mean unaging.
The dark-robed man asked another question.
The prisoner did not answer.
One of the guards drove a boot into the space between his chest and belly.
The man was kicked back against the wall. Every chain shuddered. Blood ran faster from his brow, down through the tangled hair and onto the rags of his clothing. But still he did not beg for mercy.
The man in red gave a faint laugh.
"Old thing."
The guard lifted the cudgel again.
Before it could fall, Fang Yingjie moved.
He did not know himself when he had gotten to his feet.
By the time he realized what he was doing, he had already thrown himself forward.
He knew no techniques.
He did not know how to generate force.
He did not know how to break or counter a move.
He only rushed in, flung both arms around the guard's arm as it reached for the chains, and rammed against him with gritted teeth like a cornered little beast.
The impact was neither well placed nor strong.
But the guard had plainly not expected him to launch himself forward so suddenly. His grip slackened. The cudgel's swing went half an inch wide.
Every sound in the cell stopped for an instant.
The man in red slowly turned his head.
The guard looked down at Fang Yingjie clinging to his arm, and his face sank at once.
"You little bastard. Looking to die?"
His elbow slammed backward into Fang Yingjie's shoulder.
Half his body went numb. Fang Yingjie was hurled away at once. Before he could even struggle up, another kick crashed into his back. It was heavier than the elbow had been. His chest clenched. A hot, metallic sweetness surged straight up into his throat.
Instinctively, he tried to brace himself against the ground. But the moment his hand touched the wet stone, another vicious kick landed in his side.
He rolled all the way to the wall.
The guard had plainly lost his temper. He strode forward and brought the cudgel down on him again and again.
Fang Yingjie could not dodge.
All he could do was curl up, protect his head and face, protect his chest.
The cudgel crashed across his back, his shoulders, his arms. The pain came in black waves across his vision. It was a solid kind of pain, as though lumps of iron were being hammered straight into flesh and bone. The old wound in his right leg was dragged awake as well. Old pain and new pain rose together, layer by layer, flooding into his skull.
A few years earlier, a beating like this might truly have killed him.
But this time, for some reason, he did not immediately come apart.
The pain was still pain.
It was enough to make his whole body go cold, enough to make his teeth ache from clenching, enough to turn the little dying lamp before his eyes into a wavering blur, as though it might go out at any moment. Yet after the breath in his chest was thrown into disorder, it did not scatter all at once the way it once would have done.
Curled on the ground, he followed Old Daoist Xuan's method by instinct, drawing that battered breath downward little by little.
One blow fell. Half the breath scattered.
Gather it again.
A kick landed. His chest tightened.
Sink it again.
Do not rush.
Do not let it scatter.
Do not let that tiny flame go out.
When the guard saw that Fang Yingjie neither cried out nor wept, his anger only deepened, and he raised his foot again. But the dark-robed man suddenly said,
"That's enough."
The guard stopped, panting, and spat resentfully. "These years have at least given him some bones."
The man in red looked down at Fang Yingjie on the floor, and even he seemed a little surprised.
"The bones are harder now," he said.
Then he turned to the prisoner opposite.
"You're fortunate. Even shut in here, you've got someone throwing himself in front of you."
The man opposite leaned against the wall, blood still running from his brow.
He said nothing.
From the moment Fang Yingjie hurled himself forward, to the moment he was beaten down, to the moment he lay curled beneath cudgel and boot, the man had not spoken once.
He had not cursed.
He had not shouted for him to stop.
He had not told him to get back.
Those grey, unfocused eyes only faced this direction emptily the whole time. To anyone who knew nothing, it would have looked as though he were watching with cold detachment. But Fang Yingjie, sprawled on the floor through pain and dimness, had the strange sense that the man was too still.
Still in a way that felt as though something inside him was being crushed down beneath his chest, held there by force and not allowed to make a sound.
The dark-robed man seemed satisfied for the day—he had asked enough, and beaten enough. At last he flicked a hand.
"Go."
The guards released the chains.
The man opposite sagged and settled back against the wall. Blood at his lips, blood at his brow, blood seeping once more from the old wounds in his shoulders and back—all of it made him look more than ever like a lamp on the verge of burning itself out.
The iron door shut.
The footsteps receded.
Darkness flowed back into the cell.
Fang Yingjie lay facedown on the floor for a long time without moving.
It was not that he did not want to move.
He could not.
His back hurt, every inch of it. His arms hurt. His shoulder hurt. His side hurt. His right leg hurt too. The metallic taste in his throat rose again and again. He swallowed several times before he could barely force it down.
Slowly, he rolled over and pushed himself upright against the wall.
The moment he moved, every injury in his body flared at once, and a sheet of white pain passed over his vision.
But in the end, he managed to sit.
He closed his eyes and began to regulate his breathing.
One breath.
Then another.
The chaotic currents slowly sank.
Halfway down, pain tore them apart again.
So he gathered them again.
No one spoke in the cell for a very long time.
The man opposite did not speak either.
That silence was heavier than a curse.
In the past, he would most likely have sneered at him again. So you've played the hero to your heart's content? Think that makes you clean? Take a few blows for someone else and you feel like a man again?
But this time, there was nothing.
Fang Yingjie spent a long while regulating his breath before he finally managed to gather the disorder in his body back under control. He still hurt, but not with that first terrible force that threatened to drag him down into blackness. Slowly he opened his eyes and saw the man opposite still sitting in the dark, tangled hair hanging over his face, chains pressing across his shoulders and back.
The man did not ask whether he was hurting.
Fang Yingjie did not speak of it either.
That night, the cell was quiet beyond measure.
Even the sound of chains was rarer than usual.
For a long time afterward, Fang Yingjie was left to heal.
His body was bruised blue and purple all over. Several places were swollen so badly that even turning over at night woke him with pain. When the guards brought food and caught sight of him, they would sometimes sneer and say he had asked for it, that a little thing like him had tried to play the champion, and next time he would probably throw away his life for it.
Fang Yingjie would hear them, lower his head, and keep eating his bun.
He truly did hurt.
Yet inside that pain there was also something that had not been there before.
He knew now that he had taken such a beating—and had not died.
A few years ago, he would likely not even have been able to sit up afterward. Now they had beaten him that hard, and after several days of regulating his breath, he had slowly begun to recover. The bruises on his back faded slowly, and the pain in his shoulder lingered, but the breath deep within his energy center had never scattered.
Only then did he fully realize, belatedly, that he truly was no longer the same as before.
It was not that he had learned how to fight.
It was that he had become harder to beat to death.
The thought was not exactly comforting. If anything, it was absurd.
But in this dungeon, becoming harder to die was already no small thing.
The man opposite still spoke very little.
Only, during the days when Fang Yingjie was recovering, the bowl of water would often come to rest within reach of his hand precisely when his thirst was at its worst.
Fang Yingjie did not know whether a guard had set it there carelessly, or whether the man opposite had somehow nudged it across.
He did not ask.
If he asked, the man would most likely refuse to admit it.
The Lure of Escape
A few more months passed, and no one from the Crimson Flame Palace came to torture them again.
At least, not in the old way—not bursting into the cell, yanking on chains, demanding answers, and beating flesh for the sake of it.
That day, the ones who came were two guards Fang Yingjie did not know well.
They opened the iron door, glanced first at the man across from him, then turned to Fang Yingjie.
"Out."
Fang Yingjie stared.
In this underground cell, he had almost never heard those two words.
The words he heard most often were "Keep your head down." "Back away." "Face the wall." "Don't look." That iron door had always opened for others to come in, or for food and water to be flung inside. Never like this. Never for someone to call him out.
For a moment, he did not even react.
One of the guards frowned. "Did you not hear him?"
Fang Yingjie rose slowly to his feet.
Across from him, the other man's chains gave a faint, almost weightless clink.
By instinct, Fang Yingjie turned his head.
The man was still sunk in darkness, his face slightly angled, those dim gray eyes unfocused—yet somehow it still felt as though he were listening to every stir on this side of the cell.
He said nothing.
Neither did Fang Yingjie.
The guards shoved him forward and marched him through the iron door.
It was the first time since he had sunk beneath the lake and awakened underground that he had truly passed beyond that threshold.
There was no sky outside. No wind. Only another cold, damp passageway.
Yet to Fang Yingjie, even this felt like another world.
The air in the corridor still carried the chill of the earth below, but it lacked the cellar stench of old blood and mold that had steeped for years inside the prison. Lamps burned along the walls every few paces, their flames wavering, and the light was bright enough to make his eyes ache.
So lamps could shine like this.
They led him around two bends and up a short flight of stone steps.
The steps were shallow.
But after years without walking such a path, he found the motion strangely unfamiliar. His right leg had recovered greatly, yet when he set his foot on each step he still lagged half a beat, as if his body had forgotten how.
One of the guards shoved him from behind. "Move."
He stumbled, caught himself, and kept climbing.
Higher up, the dampness thinned.
Then came a wooden door.
The moment it swung open, a wash of warmth spilled out.
Fang Yingjie went rigid.
There was lamplight inside.
Not the sickly, guttering remnant of a flame crushed down by the wet air of the dungeon, but clean lamplight. The shade was thin and bright, and the glow pooled warmly across the table. There was tea there, steam rising slowly from the cup. Beside it stood a bowl of hot rice, a dish of vegetables, and a neatly folded set of dry clothes.
The room was not large.
But it held no smell of mold.
No smell of rust.
No smell of dried blood.
The floor was paved with clean brick, and against the wall stood even a copper basin filled with clear water.
Fang Yingjie stopped in the doorway and suddenly forgot how to breathe.
So such air still existed in this world.
So this was what hot food smelled like.
He lowered his eyes to the bowl on the table and looked at it for a long time. Then, all at once, his throat tightened.
All these years, he had eaten nothing but cold, hard coarse buns. On good days they were merely dry; on bad days they came smeared with mud, water, or dust. If he could swallow them, that counted as one more day survived. As for hot rice, hot tea, dry clothes—he had almost forgotten what any of them really were.
Now, with that faint warmth brushing his fingertips, a ridiculous sense of grievance rose in him.
As though a man who had lived too long in darkness, upon seeing light again, would first feel only the pain in his eyes.
There was someone seated inside the room.
Not Li Ying.
Not the man in dark red robes who usually came.
This one wore a dark robe of plain cut. His face was utterly ordinary, and his voice was mild, as though he had known from the beginning exactly how Fang Yingjie would react.
"Sit."
Fang Yingjie did not move.
The man did not take offense. He only said, "It has been many years since you were last brought out, has it not?"
Fang Yingjie remained silent.
The man smiled a little.
"Do you want to leave?"
The moment those words fell, Fang Yingjie's heart lurched hard in his chest.
He knew it was bait.
But bait is bait precisely because the fish is truly hungry.
The man spoke slowly. "There is sky outside. Wind. Hot food. Dry clothes. You are still young. Why waste your life rotting below with an old prisoner?"
Inside his sleeve, Fang Yingjie's hand slowly clenched.
The man went on, "Do you want to see your mother?"
Fang Yingjie's breathing broke at once.
Watching him, the man's voice softened further.
"Zhen E, the Flying Heroine. She has not spent these years searching for you in vain."
Fang Yingjie's head snapped up.
The man seemed pleased by that reaction.
"You see? You still want to get out."
Fang Yingjie's throat had gone dry.
Of course he wanted to.
How could he not?
He wanted to see his mother.
He wanted one look at the sky.
He wanted to know what had become of Mount Hua.
He wanted to know whether, in this world, he still counted as one of the living.
The man lifted his teacup and brushed the foam aside with the lid.
"And that little girl as well."
Fang Yingjie jolted.
"Wang Yan?"
The words came out in a rasp.
The man looked up at him. "So you do still remember her."
Fang Yingjie took a step forward. "She's alive?"
The man smiled, but did not answer at once.
That one smile was enough to leave Fang Yingjie's whole heart hanging.
It was not as though he had never thought of Wang Yan during these years. But the dungeon was too long, and if a man let himself think every day of someone who never answered, the heart would slowly wear through. So he could think of her only sometimes, never always. He wondered whether she had escaped, whether she too had been imprisoned somewhere, whether she had died long ago beneath that lake on the night their boat overturned.
But now someone was telling him she might still be alive.
This was no false temptation.
At least, not to Fang Yingjie.
The breath in his chest was in wild disorder now, almost beyond his control.
At last the man said, "Alive."
Something flared in Fang Yingjie's eyes for an instant.
The man saw it, and his voice grew gentler still.
"Do you want to know where she is?"
Fang Yingjie did not answer.
But his silence was already an answer.
The man set down his teacup and gestured toward the food on the table.
"Eat something. Change into dry clothes. All you need do is ask a few questions for us."
Fang Yingjie's shoulders stiffened almost imperceptibly.
"There is no need to harm him," the man said.
His tone was so light, as though he were speaking of something utterly simple.
"Just ask him a few old questions."
Fang Yingjie slowly raised his eyes.
The man continued, "The two of you have shared a cell for years. He does not trust us, but he may not fail to trust you. You need do nothing more than follow the thread of conversation—ask him about the old matters from those days, ask him what he has hidden away, ask him about those few things he has refused to speak of all this time."
He smiled again.
"If you get the answers, we let you go."
Fang Yingjie said nothing.
The man added, "Your mother, Wang Yan—you can see them both."
The room fell silent.
So silent that the slow dispersing breath of steam from the teacup could almost be heard.
Fang Yingjie stood there, staring at the bowl of rice, at the folded dry clothes, at the lamplight trembling in the basin of clear water, his fingers curling tighter and tighter.
He truly wavered.
He was no saint.
Nor was he a man without longing.
For years he had eaten cold buns, drunk cold water, slept on wet stone, listened to chains, smelled blood, and grown up a little at a time in that sunless dungeon. And now someone had laid before him hot food, lamplight, dry clothes, his mother, Wang Yan, and the sky beyond all of it. All he had to do was reach out. All he had to do was ask a few questions.
Not kill anyone.
Not poison anyone.
Not lay hands on another man himself.
Only ask a few questions.
He could even tell himself that the man in the cell had never trusted him anyway; perhaps he would get nothing out of him. And if he got nothing, that would not be Fang Yingjie's fault.
He could tell himself, too, that he only wanted to get out—only wanted to see his mother, only wanted to know where Wang Yan was.
He had been trapped too long.
He truly wanted to leave.
Slowly, Fang Yingjie lifted a hand.
His fingertips touched the edge of the table.
The warmth rising from the bowl drifted against them, gentle and soft. That small breath of heat felt like a hand brushing the coldest place in his chest.
All at once, he wanted to weep.
So he truly had almost forgotten what warmth felt like.
The man did not urge him on.
He only watched in silence.
A long time passed before Fang Yingjie slowly drew his hand back.
In a low voice, he said, "I want to get out."
The man's smile deepened.
Fang Yingjie lifted his head and looked straight at him.
"But not like this."
The smile in the room faded at once.
The man looked at him without speaking.
Fang Yingjie's voice remained low, but he spoke each word with perfect clarity.
"You've already ruined him like this."
He stopped for a moment. His chest was rising and falling hard.
"I can't help you ruin him further."
At last the man's expression darkened.
"You think if you do not ask, he lives?"
"I don't know."
"You think this makes you clean?"
Fang Yingjie slowly shook his head.
"I never asked to be clean."
He paused, then said, "I just can't go out that way."
For a moment the room was utterly still.
Then the man let out a short laugh.
This time there was no warmth in it at all.
"You've spent so long down there you've begun to fancy yourself iron-boned."
Fang Yingjie did not answer.
The man lifted one hand.
At once the guards came in from outside.
The food on the table was still steaming.
The tea was still hot.
The dry clothes were still folded in a neat stack.
Fang Yingjie gave them one last look, and then hands seized him by the shoulder and dragged him out.
He did not struggle.
But when he stepped out of that room and the cold struck his face again, he suddenly felt a terrible hollowness in his chest.
He had not taken a single bite of the rice.
He had not drunk a single mouthful of the tea.
And yet that trace of warmth seemed already to have burrowed into his bones, so that returning to the cold, he understood more clearly than ever what he had lost over all these years.
The iron door opened once more.
He was shoved back into the cell.
He staggered and caught himself against the wall before he fell.
Behind him the door clanged shut, and the lock dropped with a heavy sound.
The cell was still dark.
Still damp.
Still full of dripping water, rust, old blood, and that half-dying lamp that never quite went out.
The man opposite him still leaned back in the darkness.
From the moment Fang Yingjie had been taken away to the moment he was brought back, he had not spoken once.
He did not speak now.
Fang Yingjie walked slowly back to his corner and sat down.
He bore no new wounds.
Yet his face was paler than it had been even on the night he was beaten.
Across from him, the other man's face was slightly turned, as though he were listening to Fang Yingjie's footsteps, listening to his breathing, listening for the smell of blood on him, the scent of medicine, or any other trace that did not belong.
He asked nothing.
Fang Yingjie said nothing.
That night, the cell was very quiet.
Quiet for a very, very long time.
So long that Fang Yingjie thought the man opposite him had fallen asleep. Then at last he heard himself speak, very softly:
"I really wanted to get out."
The words were so faint they were nearly drowned by the drip of water.
After that he sat in silence for a long time.
Long enough for the wick of the dying lamp to twitch.
Then he said, "But I couldn't go out that way."
Still no sound came from the other side.
The chains did not move.
But in the darkness, the man had not been sleeping.
He had known from the moment Fang Yingjie was taken away that it could be nothing good. The Crimson Flame Palace would never, without reason, bring out a boy they had kept imprisoned underground for so many years.
When Fang Yingjie returned, there was no smell of blood on him, no smell of medicine.
Only the wild disorder in that one breath, as though he had just torn himself back by force from somewhere else.
The man never asked.
Yet that night, as Fang Yingjie sat against the wall with his head bowed, sinking his breath little by little, the man opposite him kept those dim, long-lightless eyes turned in his direction for a very long time.
It was not that he was looking.
He had long since lost the power of sight.
And yet that face, those eyes, that gaunt, rigid body weighed down by iron chains all seemed, in the darkness, to incline soundlessly toward the boy.
He remained like that for so long that suddenly it was as if something had seared him.
Then, little by little, he turned his face away again—
like a man who had reached out in the dark and brushed against fire,
only to wrench his hand back by force.
Poetic Coda
A dying ember cast its faint glow on the iron door;
Long years in the frozen cell laid bare the truth of a soul.
An old song broke and drifted, cold as the tide's low murmur;
One quiet answer fell back, and even the chains hung heavy.
Alone he flung himself at fire and learned the weight of pain;
At the threshold of escape, even lamplight seemed warm.
He came back asking nothing of the dusty world beyond,
But bound both purity and stain to this one body.
(End of Chapter Thirty-Two)