The Past Calls (4)

Ronghe couldn't shake his thoughts from the earlier interrogation which took place in front of him. Given a choice, he would not choose to be around Yinyue.

The way her fingers held and plunged the needle reminded him of a seasoned physician. Not that of a common person with some superficial medical knowledge. She knew exactly where to aim, and where to inflict the most pain.

"Magistrate, you should be no stranger to torture," 02 said as he stopped to let an unsteady Ronghe bend over and take deep breaths. "And that wasn't even bloody."

Ronghe turned and glared at him with reddened eyes. Not bloody? Was 02 blind to the pools of blood in the study? Wait, was he questioning his courage?

He opened his lips to retort, only to feel a sudden sharp pain in his abdomen. His hand moved to clutch at the abdomen. It felt as though someone stabbed him in the stomach, twisting the dagger around.

"I-I've…," Ronghe muttered with difficulty. His mind, overwhelmed by pain and panic, struggled to hold on to fleeting shreds of clarity.

He tried to mouth the word 'poison' at 02, who stared at him in bewilderment, stunned by the sudden change.

The sudden gut-wrenching pain caused Ronghe to retch. He gave up trying to speak. His chest constricted, squeezing his lungs, almost suffocating him. His eyelids fluttered at the world moving around him in a dizzying spin, causing him to stagger.

Ronghe could taste the bitterness of the bile rising from his heaving chest. He could taste and smell the metallic tang of blood. A surge of pain from his stomach caused his chest to heave heavier. His body was trying to force out something. He tried to open his mouth again to speak, but started gagging.

02's forehead tightened with his eyes fixed on Ronghe, took a step forward. The magistrate looked fine earlier.

Before Ronghe knew, his mouth spewed a slew of crimson across the grey ground in the courtyard. His body convulsed, he could feel his arms thrashing against the air and the gravel on the ground.

"SOMEONE GET A PHYSICIAN!" 02 yelled at the sight.

He grabbed Ronghe by the waist to lower his writhing body onto the ground while keeping away from his flailing arms.

"GET YINYUE HERE!"

Hushiyi was the only person who could and dared address the Grand Prince by name. Without hesitation, 02 swung around and sprinted past Hushiyi towards the study.

Ronghe could hear the cacophony of muffled sounds — echoing footsteps, voices of those around. Someone poked hard at three of his meridian points on the chest.

"Should slow the spread of the poison."

Ronghe recognised Hushiyi's voice. Those pokes didn't seal his meridian points fully. Only experienced physicians and highly skilled martial artists could use their finger like an acupuncture needle to seal those points. The poison was still spreading through his body like a million daggers slashing his veins from within.

Ronghe wanted to tell him to press harder, but each breath he took burned through the passages from his mouth to the lungs. His vision slowly faded into a foggy strange twilight with shadows moving around. The increasing intensity of pain kept his mind from sleeping.

"Hang on, my sister can handle this," Hushiyi said. "Don't sleep. You must not sleep."

Ronghe struggled to listen to the noise and the voices around. He understood what Hushiyi meant. If he slept, his sleep might be permanent. He wasn't ready to die a second time. Not after all his efforts to live.

The noises faded into a deafening silence. Ronghe screamed at himself, "DO NOT LET GO!"

In the pitch black darkness of his mind, he wandered around blind towards a small dot of white light. A sickly sweet fragrance wafted around him. With each step he took, the fragrance grew stronger.

"I can't be dead." Ronghe tried to convince himself. But this was the exact place he had entered when he died. Hope fell, leaving despair to rise within his person. "No, I can't be dead so easy. I have to live. I must live."

If he died, his second chance at life was wasted. All that planning to change his fate, only accumulated to an earlier death than his first life.

Young at 20 and only a lowly concubine's son, Ronghe forged his way out of his family in this second lifetime, rather than sit and wait for tragedy to replay itself.

He is one of his father's seven sons — a threat to the first wife and her sons, and his life meant nothing to his father. He had no protection from his half brothers - they beat and battered him every chance they could when he was young. His mother died giving birth to him and the servants raised him.

Without his first life's memories, he wouldn't even have come to this forsaken place of Bian. Ronghe still felt a chill in his bones when he entered the central palace in this second lifetime. It was the place he died, framed by others.

"You smell quite dead," another unfamiliar voice of a man spoke in a strange accent, interrupting his flashback. The accent sounded like those of the Xirong people who traded in the Capital.

Ronghe swung around but he couldn't see anything in the pitch black.

He couldn't confirm if the voice belonged to a Xirong person. At the shared borders of the Dayan and Xirong empires, there would still be people who spoke the Dayan language with a Xirong accent.

"WHO IS THERE?" He yelled out.

"Does it matter?" asked the disembodied voice. "I'm only passing by. A stranger to you."

"Why do you speak to me, then?"

"Just curious. There's two of you here. How odd…," the voice replied in a pondering tone.

"Two of us? Wait, are you a soul collector?" Dread crept into Ronghe's mind. Soul collectors were spirits of Hell. Death came when they collected the soul. In his first death, he didn't see any soul collector.

"With that corpse flower scent…both of you stink of it," the voice answered with disdain. "And no, I don't collect souls. I don't belong to the realm of the dead."

Ronghe didn't like the condescending tone the disembodied voice took with him, but he felt a sense of relief knowing that whoever the voice belonged to was alive. Maybe it was one of the infamous wandering Xirong shamans.

"What's a corpse flower?" Ronghe asked.

"Red spider lilies…that's what you Dayan people call that flower. They grow in both the living and dead realms, forming a bridge."

'You Dayan people' confirmed only part of his suspicions. Whoever this was didn't belong in Dayan.

"And you must be a shaman? From Xirong?" Ronghe asked, only to hear a cold snort in reply.

"Just a passerby…that's all you need to know. The other is coming…," the voice sounded fainter, refusing to reveal more.

"What other?"

"The one who shares your scent…," the voice replied, growing softer.

"WAIT, ARE YOU LEAVING?" Ronghe yelled in a panic. He wanted to ask how he could regain his consciousness.

Alas, no reply. Just deafening silence in the dark.