finishing the mission (2)

"Are you alright, Fei'er?" Long Ming asked with concern as he looked at Lin Fei's face. She seemed pale, which was not surprising, given the long cut on her neck and chest that, after running for so long, had worsened even further.

"Don't worry about me..." she weakly replied, her eyes closed as she tried to resist the immense pain she was feeling.

"Tsk, of course I'm going to worry," he said, thinking of something he could do to help her. He hastily took a rune from his bag and threw it to the ground nearby, and in the next instant, a small flame appeared, dimly illuminating the area.

Thanks to this new lighting, he could look more closely at her condition and noticed several small wounds around her body. But the most serious ones remained the cut on her neck and the one on her chest. Long Ming closed his eyes and began reciting a mantra.

He decided to use the resonance with heaven and earth to heal her. After a minute and a half, he opened his eyes, which were golden, and looked at her.

"This..." he noticed a strange mist around the wound on her neck, it seemed like poison. Long Ming began to grow desperate with this revelation and tried to use all his knowledge to extract the poison and close the two wounds.

It was obviously a time-consuming process, and after trying for a minute, his eyes lost their golden color. The purple mist seemed to have noticeably weakened, but to his dismay, the wounds had not healed. This was not enough, so he took some herbs and a crucible from his spatial ring (which he had put in the ring during the journey there).

He crushed the herbs in the crucible until they turned into a kind of liquid and made her drink it. According to one of the books he had taken from that vault, this combination of herbs should have medicinal effects. Lin Fei's complexion improved slightly, relieving Long Ming a little.

Nevertheless, he continued to act, taking a rune from his bag and breaking it near the cut on her chest. As he broke the rune, a small stream of water suddenly appeared and fell into her wound, then he tore a piece of his clothing (which was apparently clean) and used it to stop the bleeding.

Long Ming continued to do several things that he remembered to be useful in this situation, stopping the bleeding, giving her medicine, keeping her entertained so she wouldn't lose consciousness, warming her with his clothes, and so on. He did everything he could for several hours.

"Long Ming... you don't need to exert yourself so much... I'm fine..." shortly after, Lin Fei regained consciousness and spoke to him, holding his cheek with one hand. Contrary to her words, her eyes were dull and lacked their usual liveliness.

"Yes... I know..." Long Ming spoke, also holding Lin Fei's face and looking deeply into her eyes.

"Hug me," she said. And Long Ming obeyed.

The two remained embraced, watching the darkness of the cave being expelled by the light coming from the entrance gaps.

"Do you remember when we first met?" she suddenly asked.

"Yes... it was when I was looking for a cheap shop to buy a weapon. I entered the old man's shop and started looking for a good weapon for myself. After grabbing the weapon, we went to the forest to test it together... then we went monster hunting and..." Long Ming passed out before he realized it and woke up an unknown period of time later. Upon waking with a start, he noticed three arrows stuck in his body, one was in his shoulder, another in his thigh, and one more near his belly button. He broke them, but he dared not remove the arrowheads, as they currently served the purpose of stopping the bleeding.

Long Ming decided to ignore his condition for now, noticing that, thanks to the resonance with heaven and earth that he had done repeatedly, the poison had already been suppressed, and his condition was more or less stable.

"Fei'er, are you awake?"

"Yes."

"Sing for me."

"Okay..." she began to sing her favorite song. Then Long Ming slowly moved away from her and started to explore the cave; he was looking for an alternate exit. It was very dark, so he searched for a rune in his bag and found his last lighting rune; he broke it, and a small light appeared in the air, faintly illuminating his surroundings. Long Ming began to observe the walls, occasionally tapping with his fingers on the stones, looking for some hollow wall that could serve as an alternate exit.

'Hm?' he soon noticed some seemingly hollow rocks, so he closed his eyes and began to meditate. Almost two minutes later, he opened his eyes again and could perceive the Qi circulating on the other side, so he performed a series of movements, guiding the Qi from his surroundings and redirecting it to the wall.

The wall seemed to tremble with the impact, so Long Ming tried two more times before managing to open a considerably large opening. At least enough for them to pass through.

Of course, he would not pass through this hole lightly, so he threw a stone towards it. Listening carefully, he noticed an echo from the other side of this hole and, furthermore, it seemed he heard the sound of the stone hitting water; perhaps a lake!

"Fei'er!" he called out to Lin Fei excitedly at this moment, but she didn't respond.

"Fei'er?" he repeated, approaching where she was, then, through the faint light obtained from his rune, he noticed she was motionless.

He ran towards her, his mind completely blank. He began to shake her while calling her name, but she didn't respond; Long Ming couldn't even hear her breathing or heartbeat.

He laid her on the ground and started performing chest compressions, trying to revive her. Time passed. And Long Ming, oblivious to the time, continued in this attempt, finally understanding that she was no longer alive.

His willpower evaporated instantly, and he felt a part of him, his soul, shatter into a thousand fragments. Time continued to pass as he looked at her.

"...when we get out of this cave, and I heal my wounds, I promise I will come back here to give you a proper funeral," after an unknown period of time, Long Ming finally spoke these few words before turning his gaze to the hole he had made and, without much thought, passed through it.

It was dark, but his other senses seemed sufficient at that moment. He walked carelessly until he felt his foot touch water, furthermore, it seemed quite deep. With this discovery, he closed his eyes and opened them again; after two minutes, he noticed the flow of Qi in the environment, including its colors and specific flows.

Long Ming noticed the flow of water element Qi, which predominated in that lake, but also seemed to travel through an entrance to another place.

"An exit... " he thought inwardly before plunging into the lake and swimming towards the exit. Soon he passed through a narrow passage until he noticed the daylight shining directly on his face.

He realized he had emerged in a lake familiar to him, so he got out of the water and walked towards a tree, where he began to reflect on what he should do. The first thing he thought of was to ask for help from Gao Ting, but it seemed too dangerous to enter the city, the territory of the Li clan, especially with his clothes dirty and torn from blood.

"There's a village nearby..." after a few minutes, he remembered there was a village close to the city. Being a village, the Li clan shouldn't have their eyes on it, though it was possible that someone might be watching nearby villages waiting for him; however, that seemed highly unlikely, as there was little sense in caring so much about his life and death. After all, Long Ming was just a common mercenary.

Therefore, he decided to go to this village and ask someone to send a letter to Gao Ting.

With this plan in mind, he walked towards the village, relying on his memory. Fatigue had taken over every part of his body, and occasionally he seemed to lose consciousness for a second or two; moreover, the cuts around his body, as well as the arrows embedded in him, continued to bleed continuously, causing him to lose more and more blood.

Then nearly an hour passed before he noticed a small wall in the distance, 'must be the village,' he thought excitedly. As he approached, he noticed someone tending to the gate of the wall who jumped in surprise at the sight of him.

"Someone injured! Get help!" the gatekeeper shouted to the people on the wall before rushing towards Long Ming and supporting him to take him inside the village.

Long Ming lost consciousness at this moment and, in his next moment of awareness, realized he was lying on a bed with a woman beside him.

Several days later, in the city of Cui Shi.

"What?!" Gao Ting exclaimed in surprise upon hearing the revelation from the man in front of him.

"You're telling me that Long Ming and Lin Fei tried to steal a precious treasure from the Li clan?" he exclaimed again, obviously astonished by this.

"That's right, Lord Gao. We had the mission to retrieve a treasure from the Li clan that was stolen by a traitorous member of the clan. Everyone was excited about it, as helping the Li clan was practically everyone's dream... who would have imagined that, in fact, they had such deceitful thoughts... during the pursuit, we managed to injure them, but they remain missing. If you could help us... it would be of great assistance, and the Li clan would be very generous in gratitude," the man in front of Gao Ting, a middle-aged man with several scars on his face and graying hair, was Hu Tao.

After his failure to kill Long Ming and Lin Fei, he had promised his new master, the young master of the Li clan, Li Wei, that he would bring back the heads of the two, but after all these days, he still hadn't been able to find them.

"Of course, I promise I will notify you as soon as I find out anything," Gao Ting assured, while trying to shoo Hu Tao away from his workshop, under the pretext that he wanted to digest this information alone.

After Hu Tao disappeared from his sight, Gao Ting sighed in relief and looked at the cash desk where a letter lay. Gao Ting opened it again and reread its contents. Even after reading it several times, Gao Ting still seemed incredulous.

"Ming'er... what have you done?" he murmured softly.