Tou awoke to the sound of his own pained moans.
“Urgh…”
Impure qi was still circulating through his body, so he felt dreadfully ill. Most of the swelling and discoloration of his skin had subsided, but his innards were churning. Clawing at the walls of the cave he’d chosen as his hideout, he scowled with regret and once again berated himself for ever bothering with that “snack.”
The very next moment, he once again made excuses to himself for doing so. I had no choice. I had to stock up on qi if I hoped to get away.
His choice to go after those brigands was a sign of how desperate he had been. Three nights ago, he had heard that deafening, foreboding roar shake the settlement. Springing from his shabby woven mat, he’d hastily checked the surrounding qi to see if the approaching Day of Ultimate Yin had induced a natural disaster, but he hadn’t sensed the kind of ominous forces that would bring about calamity. Relieved, he had lain back down on his bed.
A few hours later, he was plagued by a new worry. If a natural disaster hadn’t caused the noise, then what had been responsible? He could have sworn it had sounded like cannon fire.
As soon as the thought occurred to him, Tou had flown from his mat, too anxious to stay put. What if a member of the imperial family had discovered his whereabouts and brought in the troops to take revenge? Perhaps the Maidens had been sent into the region as the vanguard, he realized.
Tou had spent the past twenty-five years catastrophizing about how he was being hunted, convinced that he would face death upon capture. When he attacked Ei Gomei all those years ago, Ei Genyou, the youngest prince at the time, had glowered at him with enough bloodlust to warrant the suspicion. If looks could kill, Tou’s head would have long since flown from his shoulders. Just recalling the sight of that ghastly countenance was enough to send a chill down his spine.
A year after Tou left the imperial capital, that very same man had been crowned emperor. Word had it that he had been proactively paying visits to disaster areas and war zones ever since. It was possible that the man simply enjoyed travel, but the mere thought of him following Tou’s trail, hell-bent on revenge, made the doctor’s hair stand on end. The rumors that the emperor focused his charity efforts on the blind were reason enough to suspect he was searching for Prince Gomei’s body. As a consequence, Tou had no choice but to pump his body with an excessive amount of qi and struggle to pass himself off as an able-bodied man.
In hindsight, my luck ran out the moment I fell for the former emperor’s nonsense and made an enemy of that vindictive man. Oh, woe! My life has been nothing but a series of misfortunes.
Clawing at his breast, Tou fell into his usual habit of looking back on his past and feeling sorry for himself.
He was originally born the son of a town doctor. That might sound respectable enough, but his good-for-nothing father was always running himself so ragged for strangers that he could never afford to buy his own son a fancy outfit or two. Tou was thus left to spend his younger years living in envy of the sons of wealthy merchants. His only happy childhood memories were the times his misery had reached its peak and driven him to steal their valuables.
To add insult to injury, despite Tou’s status as the eldest son, his father had cited some baffling reason to pass him over and appoint the wily second son his successor. Although his father had offered to find Tou a bride as a consolation, all of his prospective matches turned out to be imbeciles who couldn’t comprehend his appeal and weren’t appreciative of the opportunity to marry him. One woman had even gone so far as to claim, “I’d rather bite my tongue and die than become this man’s wife.” Considering women were only good for taking care of men, he was mystified as to how she planned to get through life without a husband.
The bottom line was that Tou had been forced to live a life of hardship, all because he was surrounded by parents and women who couldn’t see what he was worth. And his misfortunes had persisted. While he was wandering aimlessly, struggling to pin down a steady job, he had gotten addicted to gambling and become a target of debt collectors.
Soon after, however, he was given cause for celebration for the first and only time in his life: He had been taken in by a Daoist cultivator and developed a gift for the mystic arts. At the time, cultivators were generally treated as con artists, but a handful of them were actually capable of wielding magic. Tou turned out to be the genuine article.
As he picked up a knack for magic, he had devoted himself to his mentor, mastered spells for everything from swapping bodies to controlling fire, and learned the right things to say to make a good impression on others. At long last, the golden days he deserved were upon him.
But they didn’t last long. When he gave a speech in a city square, hoping to make the most of his talents, a local official had shown up to arrest him. The emperor at the time was a coward who feared cultivators staging a coup d’etat, so he had a policy of rooting out talented young individuals like Tou and torturing them. Tou himself was blameless in the matter, of course. All he had done was spread the truth that magic could grant one more exalted status than the emperor himself, yet he had found himself tossed into a dingy cell and beaten. He had only made that attempt on Prince Gomei’s life because the emperor had agreed to spare him if he did, yet the man’s son Genyou had almost cut him down for it. And now, he was stuck living life on the run in a cumbersome vessel.
Oh, what a wretched life I’ve led.
Tou gave no thought to the fact that he was infringing upon the innocent Prince Gomei’s body or that he had gotten by at the cost of countless people’s lives. The only person he pitied was himself, oppressed and pushed to his limits by people who never tried to understand him.
From Tou’s perspective, his subsequent life as a fugitive had been almost too depressing to recount. Circumstances had compelled him to steal a body that couldn’t see or walk if he didn’t actively do something about it. His natural spring of qi wasn’t nearly sufficient to emulate those bodily functions, so Tou’s body often went into a state of starvation. With no recourse, he was forced to attack nearby people and drain their life force.
During the early days following his escape, he had been able to make do with one person per year. Alas, as his body grew accustomed to having its qi supplemented by outside sources, it began to cut back on its efforts to replenish its own supply, forcing him to siphon more and more. Twenty-five years later, going after twenty people per year was barely enough to cover the cost. The intervals between bouts of starvation were getting shorter and more irregular as well. The situation was inconvenient, to say the least.
Patience. The Day of Ultimate Yin is almost here.
Tou squeezed his eyes shut, fighting to get his ragged breaths under control. This would be the first Day of Ultimate Yin in twenty-five years, an opportunity Tou had been anxiously awaiting.
His current body was Ei Gomei’s, not his own, and he couldn’t cast large-scale spells like the one to steal another’s body while swapped. If he tried to push it, his qi was liable to run out of control and leave him in even direr straits. Thus, Tou had been forced to content himself with his burdensome vessel, going through life like a bug hungrily sucking the juice from fruits still tethered to their trees.
On the day when yin and yang fell out of balance, however, souls were prone to detaching from their bodies. To continue the metaphor, the fruit would drop off the branch and right into his hands. On the last Day of Ultimate Yin, this had enabled him to seize Prince Gomei’s body without even coming into direct contact with the man. Now that his second chance was rolling around, he had resolved to steal himself a younger, more robust vessel.
And then nobles from the capital arrived with perfect timing… Initially, I considered myself lucky.
As the nobility had kept the bloodlines of the five clans pure, their qi was of a far better quality than that of the average commoner. Unfortunately, Tou’s fugitive status kept him from going anywhere near the imperial capital, so he had given up on ever crossing paths with a noble; he certainly hadn’t expected the opportunity to fall right into his lap. What’s more, the Maiden who’d visited Treacherous Tan Peak had possessed a mysterious mix of fire and earth qi—Tou assumed she was born to parents from two different clans—and the military officer who appeared to be her immediate family had boasted an ideal body with pure earth qi.
Elated, Tou had leapt at his chance and sent them the mark of his sacrificial offering. By smearing his own blood on it, he’d given himself a way to sense their presence even if the Day of Ultimate Yin threw his magic off.
And yet, three days ago, that thunderous boom had dropped Tou from the top of the world straight to the pits of despair. He wondered if his best move was to run, but he was reluctant to leave the region with the greatest concentration of yin ahead of the long-awaited day. Unfortunately, as he struggled to make up his mind and grew more and more panicked, he was hit with another bout of starvation. With yin and yang falling out of balance in the lead-up to the big day, he was already struggling to focus his qi efficiently. Not to mention that the Maiden’s visit had forced him to use up quite a lot of qi in his desperate efforts to feign sight.
His heart was palpitating at an alarming rate, and his whole body was racked with excruciating pain. Eventually, Tou cracked. Taking the bare minimum of precautions to make sure no one saw him, he had gone to the hut where he’d locked up the brigands and sucked their life force dry without even bothering to inspect it. As Tou descended upon the ruffians, his hair a disheveled mess and drool spilling from his mouth, he had failed to notice what was happening to his body until his hunger was sated. Only when he was glancing over their lifeless bodies did he realize that their yin energies were abnormally strong and that the qi flowing through his own body was oddly stagnant.