Chapter 357 - The Immortal Tokugawa Ieyasu (1/2)
Chapter 357 The Immortal Tokugawa Ieyasu
Tokugawa Makita wakes up and realizes he is swinging. The world is different from what he knows.
The cold wind mixed with snow dashes into his neck. Tokugawa Makita finds all he could see is the root of the tree. It turns out that his legs have been tied up and he is hung upside down in the dense forest.
The wind brings voices from the distance. He tries his best to raise his neck and sees that people who caught him have set a low table and are now making tea on the hillside in the snow.
Snowflakes fall on black branches and a wild plum adds a little red. In such a fascinating scenery, a beauty is pouring water. This is usually a very elegant thing to do even in the upper circle of Edo—on the condition that he sits next to the beauty instead of being hung upside down here in the cold wind.
As a samurai, Tokugawa Makita’s dignity does not allow him to beg for mercy. He just stubbornly struggles to free himself. However, the rope tied to his body is like a spider’s thread. The more he struggles, the tighter it is. He almost runs out of energy in the end.
He finally gives up, swaying there like a hanging sausage.
He can hear the whisper on the hillside since now he is quiet. Their conversation is scattered by the wind so he can’t hear it very clearly.
Now Tokugawa Makita hasn’t noticed that these people are not speaking Nihonese.
…
Lin Qingxue now wakes up and tears up the typical Edo oiran (courtesans) clothes. As a Huaxia female soldier, she will never wear Nihon Kimono.
Lin Luoran finds a dress in s.p.a.ce for her. Lin Qingxue only wears a thin dress on such a snowy day but she seemingly doesn’t feel cold at all.
“Don’t you feel cold?” Lin Luoran makes an egg pie with vegetables for Mr. Lin and hands it to him.
Lin Qingxue shakes her head, “No. It’s not really snowing here.”
Lin Luoran nods. This Special Forces woman is much powerful than she thought.
“When did you know everything here is not real?” Even her cleared eyes can’t see through the illusion here. The sophisticated Edo era looks so real.
Lin Qingxue holds the cup and drinks two sips of tea. The tea is warm and makes her calm down.
“I met cultivator Cui Hejian soon after I came here… He actually said he was the medical officer of Tokugawa shogunate. I followed him to Edo and walked for more than a day. After drinking the water in the stream, I felt so dizzy and couldn’t even remember why I am here for a moment. Therefore, I was alert and refused to eat food here. Then I ran into cultivator Ye Xiaobei who said he was the second son of the Tokugawa family. I realized this might be a place where people forget the past and live in a dream ignorantly. To remind myself, I engraved my own name on my arm. But even so… ”
Lin Qingxue smiles bitterly, “Even so, I still forgot who I am without noticing it. Sometimes I thought I was really a geisha who learned singing and dancing since childhood.”
Lin Luoran smiles gently, “Do you know how long have you been here?”
Lin Qingxue is stunned, “Maybe half a month, otherwise how can I learn those strange performances?”
Lin Luoran shakes her head and suddenly asks the eavesdropping man who is swinging under a tree branch, “You tell me how long has she been in Edo?”
Upside down, Tokugawa Makita’s face turns red with hypoxia. He screams angrily, “What did you guys do to Miss Yukiko? She is the best tayu in Edo and has been performing on the stage for a year! ”
“Tayu” is the t.i.tle of the highest-cla.s.s courtesan even better than Oiran in the Edo era. It means a performer or a senior courtesan.
Lin Luoran shrugs, “You said you have been here for more than a month. He said you have been performing on the stage for a year… Actually, you just came into the Mount Fuji crater shortly before us. Altogether I think you are here only for about two hours.”
Two hours… Lin Qingxue is so surprised. What kind of dream is this? She only comes here for two hours but she feels like living a totally different life. She is “Yukiko” here, a geisha who has studied singing and dancing from a young age.
“What’s more, you can still vaguely remember who you are because you haven’t been to the Komaba Park in s.h.i.+buya.”
“The Komaba Park?”
Lin Luoran nods but she doesn’t say anything.
Lin Qingxue came here and became a geisha. Ye Xiaobei thinks he is the second son of the Tokugawa family. Fatty Cui’s cousin, Cui Hejian, thinks he is a medical officer… What about Luodong and Huang Weijian?
She hasn’t found the key to this “Dream” but can still hold on with the power of faith to back her up. But maybe Mr. Lin and Yuan Ye can’t escape from the fate of losing themselves as time pa.s.ses by.
“Everything starts with Tokugawa Ieyasu’s expansion of the Hongu Sengen Taisha Shrine in Mount Fuji.” Lin Luoran knocks on the table and looks at Ye Xiaobei, a swaying sausage in the wind.
Yuan Ye knows his grandmaster very well and helps her finish her sentence, “We can just go to ask General Tokugawa for a ransom… It is so funny. This boy suddenly has one more father. If his grandma knows it, he will be killed when he returns.”
Yuan Ye says it in a very easy way but Tokugawa Makita flinches. He really doesn’t know what these outsiders are thinking about.
…
“My second son was caught? That’s nonsense!” A middle-aged general with white face and black clothes angrily shatters the valuable porcelain from the other side of the ocean, the Ming.
“General, we are so useless and we deserve to die. Now we still can’t find out where he is…”
Tokugawa Ieyasu wears wooden clogs and the traditional samurai hairstyle with shaved pate and topknot. It’s really not a heroic outfit. He is also not very tall but he has a n.o.ble and powerful momentum.
Seeing how angry he is, these samurais are all trembling.
“I guess maybe it’s the Toyotomi family?”
Tokugawa Ieyasu doesn’t response. Now he has just established the Shogunate system in Edo and the Toyotomi family still occupies Osaka. He can’t underestimate the power of this family. If it is the Toyotomi family, why did they kidnap Tokugawa Makita?