By the time the story was over, the steam wafting from everyone’s teacups had cooled.
The group was gathered in the emperor’s assigned room in Cloud Ladder Gardens. After heading indoors, the court ladies had gone out of their way to serve tea, but no one had taken a single sip throughout Genyou’s matter-of-fact account of his past. They couldn’t bring themselves to.
Reirin, Keigetsu, and Gyoumei were all sitting at the table, gloomy expressions on their faces. Keishou, Akim, and the court ladies were hanging back by the wall, looking no less glum. Only the coals in the brazier were inanely bright.
“After that, it took me a year to eliminate everyone involved in my brother’s assassination.”
His eyes on the floor, Genyou quietly told the rest of the tale.
The three princes responsible for spreading the lies were the first to go. Genyou had initially planned to kill his father right away as well, but that would have left him no choice but to succeed the man as emperor. Hesitant to claim a throne once meant for Gomei so soon after his death, he opted to put that murder off for a year.
Although he despised his mother for allowing things to come to this, his promise to Gomei meant he couldn’t kill her. As soon as the mourning period for Gomei was over, he forced the empress to assassinate the emperor as atonement, then stripped her of political authority and placed her under house arrest in an imperial villa. In light of his mother’s all-consuming love of power, this was probably a fate worse than death.
He had now passed judgment on everyone involved in dispatching the sorcerer, but this failed to lift his spirits. Genyou’s revenge would not be complete until he caught the killer himself—the sorcerer who had absconded with Gomei’s stolen body.
“I promised that I would bury my brother’s body on Sunlit Bliss Hill, so I must retrieve it at all costs. To that end, I’ve spent years gathering information from cultivators and tracking down the whereabouts of said sorcerer.”
The reason he had eased the oppression of Daoist cultivators was to make it easier to round them up and collect information. He visited disaster sites and war zones because he knew the sorcerer was more likely to frequent those areas. Given the high death toll, it would be less conspicuous to drain people’s life force and leave desiccated corpses lying around. That, and a wounded blind man would have an easier time blending in.
“This year, we’ll have the first Day of Ultimate Yin in twenty-five years. The balance of yin and yang will be disrupted, and souls will more readily detach from the body—thus presenting the perfect opportunity to use the body-swapping spell, even trapped within the vessel of another. I have no doubt that he will visit the land with the densest yin energy. No doubt whatsoever,” Genyou repeated for emphasis, his voice dark. “However, I could not find the sorcerer among the blind and injured I lured out on the pretext of verbal alms.”
The man clenched his fists hard enough to turn his knuckles white, his usual composure nowhere to be found. He was getting restless.
Silence settled over the room. Everyone knew Genyou’s side of the story now, but they had no idea what to do about it.
“So?” Genyou smiled thinly, an implicit rebuff. “Can you turn this situation around?”
Reirin sat straight at attention. Now that she’d talked a big game to the emperor, she had to find a breakthrough solution. But how?
“Excuse me,” Keigetsu nervously interjected from beside Reirin, still wearing her friend’s face. “M-may I have permission to speak?”
No one would have expected her to present her opinion to the emperor before she was asked.
Despite her lack of confidence in the proper etiquette, Keigetsu did her best to string together a coherent sentence. “Um, you say you’re looking for a blind sorcerer with an injured leg, Your Majesty, but are you, erm…absolutely certain that is the case?”
Unsure what she was getting at, Genyou furrowed his brow. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
The moment everyone else turned to look at Keigetsu, she felt her mouth dry up. All her life, her magic had been a taboo to be hidden, so explaining it to the highest authority in the kingdom was too terrifying a prospect to consider. A simple request for clarification was all it took to make her feel like she should have kept her mouth shut.
Reirin, meanwhile, shot Keigetsu the look of a student eager to learn. “Goodness, Lady Keigetsu! Did you pick up on a discrepancy?!”
Keigetsu took a few slow, deep breaths. The way this woman never doubted her for a moment always gave her the courage to hold her head high. Right. I’m a practitioner of the Daoist arts. She knew more about magic than anyone in the room.
“I-I was a bit confused by Your Majesty’s claims that the sorcerer has been draining people’s life force to keep himself alive. Qi is something one recovers naturally. Moreover, while the body-swapping spell is indeed an advanced one, it does not require much qi to maintain.” She’d stuttered at the very start, but the longer she talked, the more easily the words flowed from her lips. “As you can see, the two of us have swapped bodies, and I needn’t drain anyone’s life force to keep us this way.”
“Duly noted,” said Genyou, eyes narrowing as they settled back on Keigetsu. “What is your point?”
“I wonder if the sorcerer might require a large amount of qi for another reason. For example…” The next part would be complete speculation. Keigetsu steeled herself before concluding, “Perhaps to offset his blindness and physical disability.”
The group gasped. Reirin snapped her head up and leaned into Keigetsu’s personal space. “Is that truly possible?!”
“Yes. By channeling qi to his eyes, he could constantly perceive the flow of qi around him. He would see things differently than most people, but it would give him an approximation of vision. By channeling qi to his leg, I believe he could move it in much the same way he might levitate objects.”
“Interesting. Rather than repair the body itself, he assists its functions with qi,” said Gyoumei. Everyone nodded along, impressed. “How much would he be able to see with this so-called approximation of vision?”
“Let me think… Keeping in mind that this is entirely my own conjecture…all living things have qi, even plants. He could probably make out a path by the grass growing alongside it. Qi tends to cluster around the eyes and mouth, as they possess the power of invocation, so he might be able to tell faces apart by the relative position of their features. I imagine he could also distinguish between family units by the color of their qi.”
Reirin summarized the key points. “So from an outside perspective, the sorcerer might appear no different from an able-bodied person?”