Transmigrating as the Heart Demon of the Ruthless Sword Venerable – Chapter 56
by Little PandaShattered Sound (Part 6)
The Mysterious Person
“…Spare everyone.” Nüluo said it with tears brimming in her eyes.
Yunzhongjun smiled. Her face was pale, her lips trembled once — and still she did not move.
Nüluo’s hand turned, and the dagger turned with it, one slow circle. Her tears finally fell. “You’re not her. She would never do such a thing. Who are you? Give my shimei back to me.”
Yunzhongjun paused. “I am your shimei.” Word by deliberate word: “I am Yunzhongjun.”
“No! You’re not her! She would never drag the Sound Sect into a strait like this! She would never trample over others against my will!” Nüluo’s voice climbed higher and higher. “The music my shimei played was always measured and serene — music of elegance and rectitude, one with the Great Harmony1 she sought for all the world. Nothing like you. Who are you?!”
Yunzhongjun murmured, “Music…”
“Every sound that rises is born from the human heart.”
In distant memory, an old man drew the words out long. But the memory was far away — from before she herself was born. A memory belonging to that one host.
She had lost. She had given everything to her — body, talent, memories, the long years of remembering her shijie and the hidden spring-longing of a girl’s first affection. The only things left behind were the pursuit of the Great Dao and the care for all beneath heaven.
To cast off your own desires and still crave some Great Dao, some world-for-all — nothing but a hypocrite. And she was the true Yunzhongjun: the one who could look straight at what her heart wanted most, and go take it.
“I am Yunzhongjun.” She said it again. She drew a slow breath, her palm pressing gradually over her wound. The artifact she had once given Nüluo was exceedingly sharp; even now, at Mahayana, with that dagger driven in, the bleeding would not stop.
A wound like this could not kill a Mahayana cultivator. But inside, the ache was unbearable.
Yunzhongjun’s voice dropped low. “Shijie, it hurts so much.”
Nüluo’s hand trembled. Her shimei had been carried over into the sect as a child, adopted into her Shizun’s arms because her talent was extraordinary. But someone several hundred years old had no idea how to raise a human cub that, like some little animal, knew nothing but eating, drinking, pissing, shitting, and sleeping. After two nights of that torment, he had bundled her up in a hurry and tossed her to his eldest disciple, Nüluo — graciously dubbing it, “Your cultivation crawls along anyway; your master might as well find you something to do.”
And so a girl still in her adolescence began, flustered and fumbling, to raise a child.
Children grow fast, like crops in a field — one wind passes over, and they seem to change their shape by the day. She watched her grow. As a little thing she would still weep in silence when practice wore her down or hurt her, whimpering softly, half wheedling: “Shijie, it hurts so much.”
Nüluo could never stand it when the child wheedled like that. She would secretly help her slack off, and blow on her fingertips — worn scarlet, the skin broken open from her drills.
But later, after the Shizun once caught Nüluo covering for her and Nüluo took the punishment, the child never whimpered like that again. She seemed to grow up in a single instant, walking farther and farther, to places Nüluo could never reach.
But Nüluo bore no resentment. She was even glad.
Nüluo knew her own gifts were limited — the great road beneath her feet narrowed with every step. And still she yearned toward that road. Her little girl seemed to know her yearning, and walked it steadily, surely — and Nüluo felt, faintly, that she herself was being carried on.
Only, now and then, a small loneliness would come. Remembering the little girl who had once leaned on her for everything.
Only a little.
Now she heard those words from memory again. She lifted her head and found Yunzhongjun watching her, fixed and unblinking. Those eyes held love and desire — but none of the brightness and flight she remembered when her little girl spoke of the future.
It was as if, one day and without warning, her little girl had simply stopped walking. Turned around. Looked back at her. Waited for her. That broad, bright road — sought after by countless thousands, the road that leads to eternity — she had dropped it just so.
And so her little junior sister was left stranded at her side.
At first Nüluo had clung to hope. She stubbornly told herself her little girl had only grown tired, had only stopped to rest a while. Until the elders came to her and, in heavy voices, spoke the one truth she least wanted to hear.
“Since her breakthrough to Mahayana, Yunzhongjun has not advanced a hair in all this time.”
“Every day she hovers around you — fetching you delicacies, pills, treasures.”
“Nüluo… perhaps it is time to honor your betrothal.”
The elders had watched her, warm with expectation. Nüluo’s heart was sore with grief and shame. These were her elders. She was her Shizun’s first disciple, yet her talent was not even the match of an outer sect disciple’s — and the elders had never once dealt harshly with her; they had treated her as fondly as their own junior.
It was only that the Sound Sect’s future weighed more.
“No… I know. You’re not her. Give her back to me!”
Nüluo’s tears came faster and faster. She had never been strong-natured; what she was doing now was already the very limit of what she could do.
Yunzhongjun thought: she knows. She knows this person has always been exactly this. But she herself had woken out of darkness, nourished on the deepest obsession and darkest shadow in Yunzhongjun’s heart — and what she wanted was everything the original Yunzhongjun had wanted and could never do.
And if that was so — what difference was there between her and that Yunzhongjun?
Yunzhongjun bent down and wiped the corners of Nüluo’s eyes, bit by bit. She looked at her own fingers, smeared with her blood and Nüluo’s tears — then laughed, low, and licked the tears and blood from her fingertips. “Everything I’ve done is everything she wanted to do. Do you know how she thought of you? How she longed for you? I know it all. She couldn’t do it — but I can. Shijie.”
Yunzhongjun’s hand passed over Nüluo’s cheek. She looked at that pale face and painted it a blood-tinted flush, as if rouging her in brilliant crimson.
Her voice was infinitely gentle. “Stay with me. That is my wish — and hers. Don’t you understand? I was born of her obsession; she died of her obsession. And our obsession has only ever been you. Shijie — won’t you take pity on us, just a little?”
“No, no…” Nüluo’s eyes went wide. She slowly loosened her hands and began to shrink back.
But Yunzhongjun stepped forward, an arm circling her waist. She seized the hilt of the dagger still buried in her own side and drew it out, slowly. “So deep. Shijie, how very cruel you are.”
The words fell, and the dagger came free. Yunzhongjun glanced at it and tossed it aside; it rang out against the floor.
“My dagger!” Nüluo cried, lunging toward it.
Yunzhongjun’s face darkened. Her arm tightened, trapping Nüluo in her embrace. “That thing? Thrown away is thrown away.”
“No — no, that was — that was my shimei’s gift to me!” Nüluo cried. Yunzhongjun had not imagined Nüluo could tell — that the Yunzhongjun of those days had not yet been her. One blank instant of astonishment, and Nüluo tore free of her, scrambled for the dagger, and scrubbed the blood from it with all her strength.
As if the blood were something filthy.
“Shijie. Look at me.”
“No. You’re not my shimei.” Nüluo’s voice shook, thick with tears.
Yunzhongjun pressed a hand to her chest. Her heart hurt. She had never once been able to bear making Nüluo sad — but now she could not rein in her temper. Her eyes reddened further; as her heart wrenched, black-red flame dripped from the wound, fell to the floor, and crumbled into ash.
Tang Wenchun found that sight a little familiar. She whispered, “Her body… it’s demonizing too…”
Yu Zhaoming gathered Tang Wenchun in, pulling her closer into her arms, and covered her mouth. “Don’t speak.”
Tang Wenchun tilted her head up and met only Yu Zhaoming’s silent gaze. Blood still seeped at the corner of her lips, but the embrace was warm — warm enough to scald. Tang Wenchun closed her mouth and burrowed deeper into it of her own accord.
She suddenly felt a little drowsy, and felt that the embrace behind her was very safe.
Yu Zhaoming surveyed the hall. She saw that Xuanjiu had recovered. Her Shizun’s gaze traveled over her and Tang Wenchun, then knitted into a frown as it turned toward Yunzhongjun and Nüluo, her voice very low: “It seems this place won’t end well.”
Most of those seated had surely already sent quiet word back to their sects. But relief from a sect would take time — she knew those sects’ ways too well. Even seeing the message, they would burn long hours in council debating whether the matter was real, and then who ought to be sent.
And whoever came to the Shenfeng Sect would not be of especially high cultivation — otherwise they would not have failed to muster even a single Mahayana among them. Even if a sect took the message seriously — the small sects sometimes had no Mahayana cultivator at all and so would never show themselves; the great sects had deep foundations, yes, but whether they could react swiftly was another matter altogether.
“Shizun, is there really no way?” Tang Wenchun asked in a small voice.
Xuanjiu shook her head, then produced a bitter smile. “Rest easy. Nothing will happen to you two.” Even if she had to burn her own life to ash, Xuanjiu would not stand by and watch two children of such blinding brilliance be snuffed out here.
Tang Wenchun was silent a long while. Then, quietly: “I have a way.”
She silently brought something out, glanced up at Yu Zhaoming, her voice very small: “Cover for me.”
Yu Zhaoming recognized what Tang Wenchun had produced. The Myriad Realms Mirror. She means to beg help from the Treasure Gathering Pavilion? Yu Zhaoming’s heart clenched, a thin thread of sourness running through it.
“…Is what I’m doing right?” Tang Wenchun asked softly, raising the mirror and aiming it at Yunzhongjun.
“This world never really had a right and a wrong to begin with. You’re only looking for the road that lets you live… Wenchun.” Yu Zhaoming’s breath fell suddenly at her ear, carrying a thread of heat. “You need to think of yourself more.”
As she spoke, her arm drew in slightly, screening Tang Wenchun from every other gaze in the hall.
“I am Yunzhongjun! How am I not her? I know everything she knew! I know what she wanted most in her heart — it’s precisely that for which I was born. How could I not be her!” Yunzhongjun seized Nüluo’s arm. Her eyes were fully crimson now; her white robes had soaked red with it, and with the black rising steadily around her, she looked like a demon fallen into the abyss.
Not a trace remained of that old bearing — graceful and lingering, radiant without end2.
That had been the Yunzhongjun in Nüluo’s memory. That had been her shimei.
“No…” Nüluo shook her head slowly, wrenching herself free of Yunzhongjun’s grip. “However like her you are, you are not her in the end. You’re not her.”
Yunzhongjun fell silent. After a long moment she burst into deranged laughter — and the laughter cut off as abruptly as it began. “So what if I’m not? She’s dead. I killed her myself. It was I who took her body, there in her sea of consciousness. That you could climb to Golden Core, that you could enjoy everything you have now — that was me, all of it, mine!”
She reached for Nüluo — but Nüluo stepped back, evading her. “None of it is what I wanted.”
She looked at Yunzhongjun. Yunzhongjun looked at the shijie in her memory — always so soft, so weak, like her namesake, like a frail dodder flower3 — and saw in those eyes a resolve she had never seen before.
“You killed my shimei…”
Yunzhongjun laughed low. “So you mean to avenge her?”
Vengeance would do as well, really — then she would carry her in mind for a lifetime. “By all means. But wait a moment, Shijie — I still owe a lesson to certain people who don’t know what’s good for them. This has already cost too much time…”
“No. I know I can’t beat you. The only thing I can…”
Spiritual qi began to whirl, squeezing itself desperately toward Nüluo. Somewhere in the hall a voice shouted: “She’s going to detonate her Golden Core!!”
Yunzhongjun’s eyes went utterly crimson. She flung out a hand and clamped it over Nüluo’s body. “Stop — stop now!!”
Her spiritual energy strained to check the rest — and was swallowed into Nüluo along with all of it. She remembered: to raise Nüluo to Golden Core she had fed her pill after pill, had guided and dredged her meridians with her own energy, again and again. Their two energies knew each other far too intimately; not the least resistance could rise.
She did not care whether she lived or died, nor whether the others did. She feared only that Nüluo would die of it.
For the first time, despair crept into Yunzhongjun’s eyes. “Shijie!!”
“Aiya, aiya.”
At that very moment, a seam was slit, light as a fingertip, through the void — and a figure sauntered out. A long black conical hat shrouded him from head to foot; his face could not be seen, and even his voice sounded neither male nor female.
He waved a hand, and Nüluo was sealed away in an instant. Within it, Nüluo’s face flushed dark crimson — but no matter what she did, she could draw in no more spiritual qi.
“Did I not say so from the start? Cast off this useless body, and saving your shijie becomes ever so much simpler.” The person draped himself familiarly over Yunzhongjun’s shoulder. “I’ve saved your shijie for you. What will you give me in return?”
Yunzhongjun cradled Nüluo like a treasure won at last, her gaze never wavering from her. “What is it you want?”
The person laughed. “These people have watched a free show, and now they all know our secret. As I see it — why not simply kill them all?”
At that, Yunzhongjun’s gaze swept across the others in the hall — and came to rest on Tang Wenchun. Tang Wenchun shuddered without meaning to as those cold crimson double pupils passed over her. But Yu Zhaoming shielded her at once, and let her breathe.
Yunzhongjun laughed softly. Across the distance, she gently traced the outline of Nüluo’s face. Nüluo’s body, flooded vein and artery with spiritual energy, had already swollen past bearing — and still Yunzhongjun’s eyes brimmed with fascination.
“Good,” she answered, very softly.
The author has something to say:
That line about “every sound” comes from 《Record of Music: Music’s Roots》.
“Graceful and lingering” comes from 《Nine Songs: Lord Within the Clouds》.
The Mysterious Person first appeared when Yu Zhaoming broke through to Nascent Soul — and was discovered by Yunzhongjun.
No update tomorrow, temporarily — moving house is exhausting. So exhausting.
Footnotes
- 天下大同 | Tianxia Datong | The Great Harmony — a Confucian utopian ideal set out in the 'Li Yun' chapter of the Book of Rites, describing an age of public spirit in which the old are tended to the end, the young are raised, and every widow and orphan is provided for.
- 灵连蜷兮既留，烂昭昭兮未央 | Ling lian quan xi ji liu, lan zhaozhao xi weiyang | Lines from 'Lord Within the Clouds' in the Nine Songs, a cycle of Warring States shamanic hymns by the poet Qu Yuan, preserved in the Songs of Chu; the poem invokes the cloud deity Yunzhongjun, and these lines describe the god lingering gracefully, his radiance blazing without end.
- 菟丝花 | tusihua | The blossom of Cuscuta, the dodder — a leafless, rootless parasitic vine that cannot stand upright and must twine around a host plant to live; in classical Chinese poetry it is a stock image of a frail, clinging woman wholly dependent on another.
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