The crown prince seemed to understand but also seemed not to.
“The reasoning now is the same. You must understand that the moment a sword is unsheathed, someone will be hurt. When force is released, something must receive it.
Thus, it is wrong to say I dissolved the force of two swords. Nothing was dissolved; I absorbed their attacks. To stop an attack by hurting oneself is a foolish technique and only to be used when there are no other alternatives.
As a noble crown prince, you’ve no use for something like that.”
The crown prince continued to copy his scriptures, but he still looked contemplative a while later.
He asked, “Do you have any other questions?”
After a moment of hesitation, the crown prince said, “One thing. Shifu, if the third person didn’t have enough food, what then?”
“…”
The crown prince continued, “If both of the hungry had gotten food, but wanted more, and fought harder because of greed and sought more food from the third person, what should be done?”
“What do you think?” he asked.
The crown prince pondered and said, “I don’t know… Maybe he shouldn’t have intervened from the start.”
***
The great hall was gold. Everything was gold. Right now, however, it was awash with red.
At every golden banquet table, a person was sprawled. Their throats were slit, all tragic deaths.
The hand that gripped the sword wouldn’t stop shaking. The stately king was covered in blood, and his eyes were red, filled with pain and hate. By his feet was the dead body of the queen. With sword in hand, he took one step after another and made his way over. When the king looked up and saw him, he was supremely dumbfounded.
“State Preceptor? You…”
The sword struck with cold, cruel force.
Just then, he sensed something and whipped his head around. The young crown prince stood outside the door amidst the corpses of guards strewn across the entrance floor. The boy’s eyes were blank, as if doubting what he saw was real. He took a step forward and almost tripped on the threshold, dazed and disoriented.
He withdrew the sword, and blood splattered his black robes.
The crown prince hadn’t tripped on the threshold but on the dead bodies sprawled on the ground. He threw himself on the king’s body, his voice finally returning.
“Father?! Mother?!”
But the king would never speak again. The crown prince couldn’t shake his father awake. He whipped his head around toward him, his eyes wide.
“Shifu! What are you doing? What did you do?! State Preceptor!!”
It was a long while before he heard his own voice, devoid of emotion—
“You all deserved it.”
***
Xie Lian slept fitfully and rolled awake with a start.
He blearily rubbed his eyes and discovered he hadn’t actually slept for that long, and moreover, he didn’t even dream of anything nice. To the latter point, it was a good thing that something had jabbed him in the chest and woken him. He sat in silence for a while, then felt around in his clothes and found something. He opened his palm and revealed two dice, the same ones from Paradise Manor.
A sea of red floated in his mind’s eye. The scene was blurry, but that crimson figure was supremely distinct, gazing intently at him, unmoving. Xie Lian sighed.
I wonder how much is left of San Lang’s Paradise Manor. If I get banished again, who knows how much junk I’ll have to sell or how long it’ll take to pay him back…decades, centuries; if anything, I’ll pay him the rest of my life.
Xie Lian stared at the dice for a bit before clapping his hands closed in a prayer; he shook the dice in his palms and rolled them to the ground. The dice rattled and rolled before coming to a stop.
As expected, all the luck he had borrowed from Hua Cheng was used up. He was hoping for another roll of two sixes, but it came up snake eyes.
Xie Lian couldn’t help but puff out a rueful breath and shake his head.
Suddenly, he heard footsteps coming from behind. He stiffened and packed away both his smile and the dice.
The footsteps didn’t sound like those of Jun Wu. Jun Wu’s footfalls were steady and composed, quite unhurried. Similarly, although Hua Cheng walked with nonchalance and lacked decorum, often lazy and languid, his air of confidence and surety was identical to Jun Wu’s. These footsteps, in contrast, could be called a little floaty.
Xie Lian turned his head and was taken aback. “It’s you.”
The person who had arrived was clad in black, his face fair and his lips thin. His expression was indifferent, appearing incomparably aloof. Although a martial god, he looked more like a civil god. Who else could it be but Mu Qing?