Chapter 62: Chapter 60: Bastard with a Dozen Lives

His face felt tight and dry. He sat in front of her with his hands fiddling with the dingy fan and his eyes refusing to focus on her own. The room was dark and dingy by his standards with a pervasive scent of dust. Rui Yifu counted in his head as silence stretched between them. Lady Gu was as unmoving as a statue, her thin hands held in her lap.

“Why do you avoid looking at me?”

Rui Yifu did not meet her eyes, “it would be disrespectful.”

“Is that so?”

“It’s also rather dark in here,” Rui Yifu gestured with his fan, opening and closing it with a quick flourish to make some sort of noise in the horrible stillness around them.

“I have a lantern in that chest,” she pointed at one lone chest wrapped in leather that sat atop a large sack of what looked for all intents and purposes to be fossilized barley. Rui Yifu frowned in displeasure of doing more manual labor but got up anyway to fetch the chest. “You do not need to bring the chest with you, just the lantern inside of it.”

Rui Yifu bit his lip, already having lifted up the heavy chest, but set it back down and fiddled with its carnelian clasp, then he lifted the top off and stared blankly down at the lantern inside.

It was a little smaller than his head, an elaborate entwining of red and yellow coral that held a shallow pearl dish at its bottom with all-too familiar runes on it. His throat dried and his hands hovered just above the lantern. It was like the one in the shop, and yet somehow it felt worse and more real sitting there collecting dust and moldering in the chest. He could imagine the texture of the coral against his hand, the smoothness of the pearl plate the coral held. Lanterns that would decorate the hidden cities of the Fish People during their few festivals. To see one now in such a dark place so far from water felt like something emerging from his memories like a horrible ghost.

“Well? You said it was dark, do you not want any light after all?”

“This… this is a lantern…”

“Yes, it is a lantern.”

He turned his head to glare at her, not used to being on the receiving end of sarcasm. “How did you acquire it?”

“It was a gift, a marquise of a city hidden in a lake came to me for help and brought me a myriad of treasures, but I told him I would only take the lantern,” Lady Gu answered. Her pale face seemed like the moon at night. “He said it required no oil, no wick. No spark. I could never figure out how to get it to light. But maybe you would know?”

Rui Yifu’s hands carefully slipped around the coral and he lifted it upwards. He blew gently on the rune inscribed on the plate and a clear light formed, illuminating the sparse dusty room in a strong light.

Everything was covered by a thick layer of dust. Even Lady Gu had dust streaking her hair and settled on her clothing. “I thought immortals were supposed to be clean.” Rui Yifu sneezed hard enough he thought his face split open.

“We are supposed to be many things,” she answered with wry amusement. “You act as though I consciously roll around in dust. It is more that sometimes I close my eyes, and when I open them I find all has been covered by dust. I am older than the Four Kingdoms, I have slept through storied dynasties, cities have risen, fallen, disappeared, destroyed themselves, been abandoned, all in my time. The years become like grains of sand.” Her shoulders sagged a little. “I think you would know this well.”

Rui Yifu reached a hand to the side of his neck, where deep scarring sat. He turned his head to the lantern but his eyes remained on the lady who sat so still he doubted she even breathed. He wondered if he smashed the lantern into her face if she would even bleed. “I have no idea why you would say such a thing, Lady Gu.”

“Do you not? It is curious that you knew how to ignite the lantern.”

“I travel much, I’ve been through all Four Kingdoms multiple times in my travels so I have had plenty of time to pick up all sorts of odd pieces of knowledge.”

“Those scars are strangely placed,” she pointed to his neck.

“Not everyone I meet is as pleasant as Liu Xie.”

“He’s not very pleasant to begin with,” she tipped her head to the side. “Whose face are you wearing?”

Rui Yifu set the lantern down where its light was thrown into strange shapes and the shadows took almost malevolent forms around him. “That is a very strange question, it is my own.”

“Then why is it peeling?”

He stared at her while his lips formed a tight line. He moved his fingers to his face and was suddenly aware of how cold they were. Like they had been encased in ice. The skin on his face felt rough and dry and as his cold fingertips moved from his jaw up to his cheeks he felt where the dry flesh curled over on itself. He carefully pinched it, pulled, and the rest of the stolen face fell away like the skin of a snake. Instinctively he pushed his hands against his face, his real face, hiding it from the still immortal and himself as an awful keening sound came out from his mouth.

It was laughter, he realized as his chest seized. He was laughing as the last vestige of his illusion dried out and crumbled on the ground. So much time running, stealing, doing terrible acts to sustain the disguise of a human and it had all come to naught.

“I am not going to judge you,” Lady Gu said, her voice an even tone he barely heard over his own laughter and hammering heart. “Whatever reason you have is your own, the guilt you have is your own, your decisions your own. I will not tell anyone your truth. That is for you to do.”

He wheezed, staring out at Lady Gu through his fingers. “You think I can just go to them with this face?”

“Yes.”

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He laughed coldly, “how can you say that with a straight face? I’ve been running for three hundred years and your stupid trick has ruined it all. Do you know what is done to my kind? Are you really that sheltered on your mountain, Gu? Do you think I can go back to them or anyone else?”

“You said you traveled, did you really mean to say you were running?” She asked flatly. “What are you running from, Child of the Ancient Ocean?”

He barked like a wounded laughing dog, wet tears running down his hands he could not stop, he felt like his ribs were squeezing around his organs.He fell to his knees as he tried to breathe deeply. “I… I can’t return home, not empty handed. I… I can’t stay anywhere, so long as he is out there.” Rui placed a tear stained hand down on the dusty ground. “A pariah of my people, despised by the gods, to die is terrifying. I can’t move on. I would be stuck, forever, conscious and helpless until some twisted little spirit devours me or the heavens themselves fall to formlessness.”

Warm hands slid around his face and forced him to look up. Lady Gu’s eyes were tired dark things, as though she was weary of all. “Whatever sins you carry I do not know, but I can tell you are tired of living, aren’t you? But something is keeping you moving, despite what you might say otherwise it’s more than just the terror of being stuck in your own corpse isn’t it? I can see it,” she leaned her face close to his. “You cannot expect to reach what you truly seek by hiding behind other faces.”

He shoved her away with a snarl, watching her tumble backwards as he tried to get up only to stumble over the lantern and smash his face into the ground. Rui Yifu heaved himself back onto his knees and then sat down, wiping thick clotty blood that oozed out from his nose. Lady Gu was already sitting up in her original position, much less dusty than before. “I… I made some mistakes. I played with the White Flame and watched it burn away my family,” he said softly while staring up at a patch of light on the high ceiling. “I ran, I tried to cut my own throat to escape but unfortunately it turned out to be harder than I thought.” The dim memories were like shadows in his eyes. “Then he found me, he said he was researching the White Flame to try and make it safe to use… I was so desperate to find a way to absolve myself. Or to make their deaths not meaningless mistakes. We adopted a war orphan. I had so many ideas, but… in the end…” He tried to breathe through his nose and felt a glob of snotty blood roll back and winced in pain in time with the memory. “By the time I realized what had happened, it was too late for that child, and he had already fled.”

“So you have been searching for him.”

“Off and on,” Rui Yifu looked at the blood and tears smearing his hand. “Sometimes I try to be someone else. Like now, I am ‘Rui Yifu’. Before then I was ‘Shi Dazhe’, and ‘Chen Zihua’, and others I’ve forgotten.”

“When you leave, will you still be Rui Yifu?”

“Maybe, I like him. He’s confident and cares little for others opinions, and he’s beautiful. Always beautiful.” He frowned. "But I'm just a bastard with a dozen lives, each more wasted than the last. Rui Yifu can at least make himself seem important, and people question less when you have a pretty face." He placed a hand on his neck, feeling the ridges of scars.

“If it is looks you are so concerned about, I believe you have nothing to fear,” Lady Gu said.

“What you and others see is not what I see,” he sighed, “it’s not what I know.”

Silence lingered between them except for him occasionally snorting up blood on accident and then grimacing in pain. He felt hollowed out, as though years of burden had been reduced to nothing and had left no sense of absolution in its place. Just emptiness.

“Do you remember your original name, I wonder?”

“Our bodies age and die like real humans, but our souls are placed in new ones. We are reborn fully aware of our prior lives. New souls are so precious to us. But I have been in this body for a very long time.” He spoke softly, blood trickling over his lips as he spoke. “...No, I don’t remember it. I don’t remember him, or her. Whomever it was, so long ago.”

Lady Gu gave him a weary yet warm smile, “then you and I are alike. Living so long we have forgotten ourselves. You create new personages, and I simply try to close my eyes and let it all pass me as it did before, to exist in loneliness as no one.”

“What a sad bitch you are.”

She cackled, “I haven’t heard that one before!” She slapped her knee. “Yes, I suppose it does sound rather pathetic when I say it like that. In truth, I had never asked to become immortal. It just happened, the one in white out there came to me and informed me of my status. I felt no different from how I did before though.”

“Did he look like a bald fat old man?” He asked with a grin.

“Despite what rumors say, no. He looked just as you see him now, and presumably acts just the same.” Her face then turned serious, “so when I tell you now that you can go to him with your real face, I tell you so in complete truth. He will not turn on you, it is not in his nature to do so.”

“So you say.”

“So I know,” Lady Gu insisted. “Besides, I feel he will need every bit of help he can get for what awaits. You all have a child to rescue, to my understanding.”

He frowned as he thought about Zhu Er, Idony, ‘the wild animal’, the child who was picking up as many names as he seemed to. She was still somewhere out there, and he felt some weight return to his chest. He had been so busy wallowing in his own self pity she had nearly slipped out of his mind entirely.

“You can go now, if you wish. Send the farmer boy in.”

He got up and began looking for his fan, finding it laying on the ground near the chest he had pulled the lantern from. “Do you know where she is, the child?”

“I know a description of the area, roughly, yes.”

“What is the description then?”

“Ask Liu Xie.”

He nearly snapped his fan in half before he sucked in a deep breath and walked as swiftly out of the room as he could, trying to keep himself from scowling. “Never trust an ascetic for a straight answer,” he muttered acidly.

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