Chapter 43: CH 42

Xuanmin was extremely picky, and he couldn't stand anything dirty or messy, so all of the rooms he'd rented were of the highest quality. Although he clearly had a lot of silver pieces, he couldn't keep spending like this. Xue Xian wondered how long the rest of Xuanmin’s money would last. And if they really did spend it all, how did Xuanmin plan to get more? Although the bald donkey was highly skilled, he didn't seem to be the type to start charging for his services.

The best room in this inn wasn’t anywhere near as luxurious as the one at Guiyun Hall, but it was adequately clean and tiny. The inn boy [a] who'd brought them upstairs had quickly rearranged some furniture and then returned with fresh tea and a bowl of water for the guests to clean their hands.

"This humble one is always upstairs, so if you need anything, please let me know," the boy said before retreating.

Although they'd checked into the inn to rest, really only Lu Nianqi and Stone Zhang needed it. Jiang Shining was a ghost, and Xue Xian didn't really need sleep. And as for Xuanmin...

Xue Xian had already stopped considering Xuanmin as a human. He didn't eat and he didn't sleep -- how could he be?

The half-paralysed black dragon had spent all day being bumped up and down in the carriage, and because he had no feeling in his legs, he had been resting all his weight on his stiff hips. At the end of the day, he had begun to feel sore. To help the zuzong rest his muscles and regain some energy, Xuanmin put Xue Xian down on the bed as soon as they entered the room.

Forget the mediocre quality of the rest of the rooms at this inn: the bed was definitely worth the money. The mattress was thick, fluffy, and comfortable, a welcome respite after all day spent on the wooden bench in the carriage. Satisfied, Xue Xian stretched his back and flexed his shoulders, then made himself a nest using the blanket. Leaning back in the bed, he breathed a happy sigh.

Xuanmin sat down by the carved wooden table. He did not seem intent on resting at all.

Xuanmin fiddled with the lantern on the table, and when the flame was stable, he took the poster back out of his chest pocket and smoothed it out again, falling back into deep thought. The warm yellow flame cast dark shadows onto his face, making his eye sockets look deeper, the bridge of his nose look taller, and the lines by his mouth look more severe.

Xue Xian rested his head on one hand and squinted at Xuanmin. Then he suddenly broke the silence. "Bald donkey?"

Xuanmin hadn't seemed to immediately register that Xue Xian was speaking. Finally, without taking his eyes off the poster, he said, "Mn?"

Xue Xian raised an eyebrow, but did not look at Xuanmin. "Is that you on the poster or not?"

“...”

That was quite a blunt way of putting it, but it wasn't inconsistent with Xue Xian’s straightforward, honest personality.

Xue Xian watched as Xuanmin put the poster back down onto a table, keeping a corner lightly pinched between his fingers. Xuanmin turned to him, as though calculating how to respond without revealing too much.

From when the bald donkey had first shovelled Xue Xian up from the Jiang compound floor to now, not that much time had actually passed. Maybe it was because they'd already experienced so much together that it had stretched out time, but sometimes Xue Xian would suddenly feel as though they had known each other for a long time, or even that they were deeply familiar with one another.

Xue Xian could tell that Xuanmin was a cautious person –– in all this time, he'd divulged nothing at all about himself. It could've simply been his natural reticence, but part of it might also have been the amnesia. Xue Xian wasn't completely heartless; he understood.

To be honest, [b] if Xue Xian one day lost his memories too, he would not trust anyone or talk to anyone either. He’d immediately kick up a fuss and focus on getting his memories back before doing anything else. If anyone tried to stop him, he’d surely make them regret it. 

But right now their situation was rather unique. They were travelling together, and thus stuck together, like two locusts tied on a string. If Xuanmin wasn't the man on the poster, that was one thing, and if Xuanmin was the man on the poster, that was another thing. They had to be prepared for any event. They couldn't very well sit around and wait for someone to come knocking on the door before having figured out a plan.

"Bald donkey, how about this," Xue Xian said soberly. "Let's make a deal. Are you okay with that?"

Xuanmin was not. This niezhang clearly did not know how to play fair. 

Xuanmin continued to stare at the poster and did not say anything to decline Xue Xian’s proposal. After all, if Xue Xian had his mind set on something, you agreeing to it was only a formality. It didn't actually affect the outcome.

Xue Xian saw from Xuanmin's manner that he'd wordlessly said: Go ahead and I'll try to tolerate whatever it is you're up to now. So Xue Xian said, "The two of us don't know each other well enough. If we get into trouble, it'll be hard to handle––"

Xuanmin finally glanced at him, as though surprised that Xue Xian was being serious for once.

Xue Xian continued: "Let's ask each other some important questions. If I ask you a question and you can give me an answer, then I'll let you ask me a question. But if you can't answer or don't want to answer, then you have to give me a silver piece. What do you think?" Xue Xian's eyes glinted as if to say, Look how nice I'm being!

Xuanmin was speechless. 

You really know how to make a deal with an amnesiac. 'If you can't answer you have to pay me'? You're clearly just after the money.

“…Why don't you just take it," Xuanmin said. He reached into his pouch and took out all of the silver pieces, then lightly, carefully tossed them toward the bed.

Xue Xian gritted his teeth, but caught the silver pieces and weighed them in his palm anyway. Finally, he said, "I'm not keeping this. Let's try it a different way."

Xuanmin really was a high priest, with no concern for earthly things like money. Having given away all of his silver, Xuanmin was immediately drawn back to the poster again, and refused to engage Xue Xian any further.

Xue Xian tapped the headboard and snapped, "Look at me. I'm being serious."

Xuanmin seemed to find Xue Xian’s lazy, reclining position to be an eyesore –– more so than usual. Without lifting his eyes, he finally said, "Speak."

"How about this, I'll be the generous one. I ask you questions, and if you can answer, I'll give you a golden pearl. If you can't answer, then we'll just leave it be until you do remember. Of course, if there's a question you don't want to answer, you can just say you don't remember." 

As he spoke, Xue Xian moved the silver pieces around on the mattress, as though placing a big bet. "See?" he said. "What's yours is yours. I won't take anything. You don't stand to make a loss, and you could even win some. What do you think?"

In truth, Xuanmin had been the one paying for everything so far, and it was beginning to add up. Xue Xian hated owing others, whether this was in terms of kindness or coin, and he always tried to pay back more than he owed. But his issue was that he hated to do so directly and insisted on devising all sorts of strange ways of repaying his debt. It was a little eccentric.

Hearing Xue Xian's proposition, Xuanmin finally lifted his head, intrigued that the zuzong would willingly do something to his own detriment. Had the sun risen in the west today?

"If you don't say no, I'll take that as a yes," Xue Xian said, his mind already drifting away. Where should I start...

Of course, Xue Xian knew that Xuanmin didn't care for money: naturally, Xuanmin would never say anything he didn't want to say just to gain a bit of gold. Before Xue Xian had even begun to ask, he suspected that the bald donkey wouldn't answer most of them.

But... any answers were still answers.

"How come you'll sometimes wake up and not recognise anyone? Where does that come from?" Xue Xian asked.

Xuanmin only frowned and stared at the flame in the lantern, saying nothing.

“...” Great, Xue Xian thought. Immediate failure.

Just as Xue Xian was about to give up on the first question, Xuanmin suddenly said in a deep tone, "I do not remember. It has been like this for a number of months. It suddenly happens, and then it takes me one or two days to recover. These days I seem to be recovering faster."

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Xue Xian was stunned. Huh? He really answered?

As Xuanmin spoke, his hand moved to his neck. He frowned and asked, "Last time, you told me to touch my neck. Why?"

"You haven't seen it?" Xue Xian asked, but then remembered that, whenever Xuanmin woke up from his daze, the mole would have already gone back to normal. He really would never have seen that strange spider shape. "Whenever you're in that state, thin blood vessels will creep out of that mole on your neck. It looks like a spider. But as soon as you touch it, the spider legs go away, and you stop being stupid."

Xuanmin: “...”

From the look on Xuanmin's face, Xue Xian guessed that Xuanmin really didn't know anything about the mole. So he said, "Okay, so that was one answer."

Xue Xian reached a hand into his sleeve and rummaged around in there for what seemed to be an absurd amount of time. Finally, he took out a handful of small golden pearls the size of peanuts and threw one into Xuanmin's pile of silver.

"…Where do you keep all those pearls?" Xuanmin asked.

Xue Xian cocked an eyebrow. "I'm a divine being, you know. There are plenty of places for me to hide things. It's just inconvenient to take it out in public, so I've been spending yours." 

Then Xue Xian asked, "You said this has been happening for a few months. What do you mean?"

This time Xuanmin didn't think for too long. He candidly said, "It means what you think it means. When I woke up, I was alone at a funeral station [c] in a mountain in Langzhou."

"Funeral station?" Xue Xian was stunned.

Funeral stations were a local feature of the regions in the western Xiang. [d] They were places for people transporting dead bodies [e] to rest and shelter from rain. Because of the aura of death, living people avoided such places at all costs.

"Why were you there?" Xue Xian asked.

Xuanmin shook his head and said, "I do not remember anything anymore. When I opened my eyes, all I had on me were the copper coin pendant, a book on geomancy and spells, a random sheet of paper covered in notes, and some yellow talismanic papers."

"So you don't remember who you were, where you came from, where you were going, what you were going there for?" Xue Xian suddenly felt a wave of sympathy for the bald donkey. Anyone waking to find themselves alone at a funeral station in the middle of nowhere, with no memories about what they were doing, was likely to go insane.

Xuanmin shook his head again. "At the time, I remembered nothing. In the time since, I will sometimes remember some fragments, but forget them by the next day."

"So what did you do?" Xue Xian couldn't help but ask.

"I decided to start noting down the things I could remember on the piece of paper. I keep it on me, and whenever I feel confused, I look at it again," Xuanmin replied.

"Oh," Xue Xian said. "And that's the piece of paper you asked Lu Shijiu to check at Gravestone Island? You can't recognise your own handwriting?"

"When I woke up, there was already text on the paper. The handwriting could have been forged,” Xuanmin replied.

Xue Xian understood. "You thought someone might forge your own handwriting and use that to mislead you."

"Mn."

"So what do you remember?" Xue Xian asked, dropping two more golden pearls into Xuanmin's money pile.

"Too messy to make sense of," Xuanmin replied. "Something about the copper coin pendant, some place names, and... one thing."

"What thing?"

"Find this person," Xuanmin said. "I remember that I am looking for someone. I owe them something. I cannot rest until I have repaid my debt."

Xuanmin’s low, soft voice gently filled the room, and although there was still that certain coldness to his tone, somehow it all felt... very melancholy, so that even a stranger would be able to detect a sense of tragedy in his speech.

This was the first time Xue Xian had seen Xuanmin in such a state. It suddenly made Xuanmin seem more human.

And suddenly, for some reason, Xue Xian felt as though something had lodged itself inside his heart, refusing to budge no matter how he tried to make it move. It felt so weird! 

Xue Xian stared at Xuanmin for a while, then kept his tone neutral as he said, "Okay, I have no more questions. You can take the money."

He returned the remaining golden pearls into his sleeve, to wherever it was that he kept them. Who knew what kind of mechanism he used for it.

In truth, Xue Xian hadn't learned all that much. He still didn't know if Xuanmin was the criminal on the poster. But he wasn't in the mood to ask more questions, and couldn't be bothered to. He saw Xuanmin falter, as though he, too, found Xue Xian’s sudden coldness inexplicable. 

Just as Xuanmin stood up to make his way to the bed, Xue Xian suddenly thought he could hear the faintest noise behind the wall, light and subtle. Something that sounded a bit like the clinking together of weapons.

The city was under curfew already, so the only people allowed to carry weapons were… those who worked in the yamen? 

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The author has something to say: 

About to enter into the month of exams QAQ

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[a] 小二 (xiao3 er4) is also used here. (See Chapter 40 footnote.) 

[b] Musuli uses the chengyu 扪心自问 (men2 xin1 zi4 wen4), literally “touch heart, ask self”, which means to examine one’s conscience or to search deep within oneself for answers to a question.

[c] The Chinese term here is 尸店 (shi1 dian4), literally “corpse shop”. In my original TL, I translated this as “funeral stop”, but I feel that “station” fits better. 

[d] 湘 (xiang1) denotes modern-day Hunan Province (of which Langzhou was historically part); this region name comes from the Xiang River. Specifically, 湘西 (xiang1 xi1), literally “western Xiang”, is also the name of a modern-day prefecture within Hunan that has an ethnically diverse population; its official name is Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture. 

[e] Musuli uses 赶尸人 (gan3 shi1 ren2) here, literally “people who shutter/ferry/transport corpses”.

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