Chapter 17 - Bonus Story 1: We Part Though We Love (2/2)

Moxi paid him no further attention, lowering himself into his chaise that soon blended into the hustle and bustle of the capital.

The market square.

Moxi sat on the sentencing bench looking to the execution grounds. There had once been a tall scaffold here that burned his Sansheng to death.

His life’s only Sansheng.

A chest pain abruptly pricked him. Moxi lowered his head to conceal his expression.

Noon was nearing. He waved. The first batch of prisoners came onto the scaffold. The general had bitten his tongue and killed himself in prison. This group only consisted of his wives, his three sons, and his only daughter – Shi Qianqian.

Moxi covered his mouth coughing for a while. The guard standing next to him looked to the sun and asked whether they should begin the execution. He nodded. The guard raised his hand and had yet to give command when the disheveled woman suddenly shrieked and said, “Moxi! Next life! Next life I will make sure to never like you! I also curse you to an eternal separation from the person you love! You shall never be able to be with her.”

Answering her was only a burst of whooping coughs.

The executioner behind Shi Qianqian went over to muffle her mouth. Shi Qianqian desperately struggled as she shouted: “In this life, you punish my clan. If there is a next life, I shall have you kill the person you love with your own hands! You and she will never be together!”

Moxi was incensed by her words. The fury in his eyes terrified the guards by his side.

Moxi suppressed the trembling in his chest. He removed the tablet on the table and threw it onto the ground: “Stirring up a ruckus on the execution grounds is adding another crime to your crimes. Cut across her back!”

Everyone was aghast upon hearing his order.

Shi Qianqian seemed to have gone mad as she laughed to the sky. “You two will never get a good ending! Do you think she will come back? She’s dead! She’s dead!”

Moxi fisted his hands in a death grip, his normally gentle and courteous voice at this time was pricklier than ice: “Cut across her back. I want her to watch how her entire clan is exterminated.”

That day, blood spilled over the ground at the market square. The woman’s crying and screaming still echoed in the air after the execution ended, gratingly like the bemoaning of phantoms. In the end, her corpse was hastily wrapped up like everyone else’s, discarded in some parts unknown.

Thereafter, the prime minister’s reputation as the “nice gentleman” ceased to exist.

Moxi fell sick that night, bedridden. The emperor ordered the imperial doctor to check on him. When the diagnoses came out, it was said to be tuberculosis. The entire court was gripped with astonishment.

But the sick one seemed indifferent to it all. He relied on medicines to get through those days of ill health then came right back to court and took care of business as usual. He spoke nothing of it and no one knew to what extent he was sick. He seemed to everyone no different from an ordinary person. None saw him coughing too badly either.

Over time, everyone forgot he had tuberculosis.

It was another long winter.

Plum blossoms flowered splendidly in the yard. Draped in a coat, Moxi stood in front of his log cabin watching the plum forest for a long time. He stood there until it got so dark that one couldn’t see anything before slowly returning to the house and lighting the candle. The awful paleness on his face was illuminated under the candlelight, accompanied by hollow cheeks and dark shadows under his eyes.

Seated in front of a desk, he unrolled a rice paper parchment and slowly sketched a plum tree. After he placed the brush down, he quietly contemplated it and, for whatever reason, picked up the brush and painted again. Soon, a silhouette of a girl with her back turned appeared behind the frosty plum tree. She seemed to be sniffing the plums, immersed in their fragrance.

Moxi admired the person in the painting while, at the same time, looking as though he wasn’t seeing anything at all. Reaching out, his fingertips touched the ink that had yet to dry on the rice paper.

Chill traveled from his fingertips to his heart. He squeezed his eyes closed but couldn’t suppress his cough. He abruptly bowed over, spewing a red blot onto the rice paper, its color as brilliant as the plum blossoms growing on the branches.

“Moxi!”

He fast opened his eyes at the sound of his name. A woman was sitting on the divan and carefully mending his clothes. “Moxi, why have your clothes torn so? Were you bullied? Did you fight back?”

Moxi stared dazedly, afraid to blink.

“Sansheng…”

Between the clanging of the watchman’s gong outside the yard, the image flickered and dissolved in the wind.

Moxi got up to run after it, but his body did not listen to him. He fell forward, his sleeves knocking down the candle on the table.

Moxi paid no attention to the rolling candlelight. He couldn’t contain the grief in his heart any second longer. Staring at the place where Sansheng disappeared, he whispered: “Who will stay up to mend my clothes from now on… Sansheng, who will stay up to mend my clothes?”

The flames caught onto the curtains. Watching the fire burn, Moxi did nothing but lightly smile.

…

The watchman went past the prime minister’s courtyard. He went for two blocks, clanging his gong: “Be careful of fire.” When he rounded the corner, he caught a glimpse of blazing light.

Above the prime minister’s estate, a patch of sky was burning red.