CALID Chapter 29

The Past

Duan Xu chuckled and shook his head, finally finding a comfortable position leaning against the bed curtains. He said, “Revenge? What revenge would I seek? My master was actually quite good to me, treating me like a cherished weapon. Although I didn’t want to be a weapon, I didn’t harbour any hatred towards him.”

“My master was a high-ranking Huqi noble, intolerant of even the slightest bit of stupidity. In his eyes, the foolish Huqi people were garbage, and other foolish tribes were simply not worthy of living. So, he would only select those with good aptitude for training, regardless of ethnicity. However, after entering the Temple of the Azure, we all had to become followers of the Azure God, pledging a lifetime of dedication to the Azure God. When I was wandering the streets, his entourage passed by me but he turned back, picking me out from the beggars and bringing me back to the palace. Perhaps he saw great potential in me.”

“Living in the Temple of the Azure was much more comfortable than wandering the streets. At least we didn’t have to worry about food and clothing, and priests would come to recite the Azure Scriptures for us. We were required to remember everything about the Azure God. I had a photographic memory from a young age, so even though I couldn’t understand most of the Four Books and Five Classics before arriving in Danzhi, I could recite most of them. Naturally, I could recite the Azure Scriptures backwards.”

“So my master had a slight favouritism towards me. With hundreds of disciples in each cohort, he didn’t have time to personally teach each one, only appearing during assessments. He probably couldn’t even recognize everyone over the seven years. However, he occasionally tested me on my studies individually and even gave me his military books to study, imparting military strategy to me. I heard that my master didn’t have any sons, so he treated me as if I were half a son.”

The morning sunlight shone on Duan Xu’s face, giving him a somewhat lazy look as he described his experiences in the Temple of the Azure in a relaxed tone, as if it were just an interesting story, with a hint of nostalgia.

He Simu leisurely sipped her tea and said, “Such filial piety, and yet you could still blind his eyes and escape.”

“I had fundamental differences with him, of course, I never said it, and he didn’t know either.” Duan Xu fell silent for a moment but just shook his head with a smile. “No one should ever think they can change another person.”

“So what do you want by involving yourself in this war?” He Simu asked.

Duan Xu looked up at He Simu, blinking innocently and confusedly. “I’ve said it many times, I want to reclaim the seventeen states north of the Guan river.”

He Simu’s eyebrows dangerously furrowed, and the dimly lit room suddenly had an atmosphere of impending storm.

Duan Xu, with keen eyesight, immediately raised his finger to his forehead and said seriously, “I just said I would tell the truth. I swear everything I say is sincere.”

He Simu chuckled dismissively, not buying it. “When you entered the Temple of the Azure, I’m afraid you also swore to serve the Azure God for life, didn’t you?”

“I have seen the Azure God, so swearing to something whose existence I cannot confirm naturally holds no weight for me. But I have seen Your Highness, and my oath to Your Highness is absolutely genuine.”

Duan Xu’s tone was quite confident.

However, he also knew that such an answer would be difficult to convince He Simu. Duan Xu paused for a moment before continuing, “The first few months in the Temple of the Azure were pleasant, except for pretending to believe in a god we didn’t believe in, everything else was fine. A few months later, we began our real training.”

“Or rather, we began killing.”

The smile in Duan Xu’s eyes faded away, and he tapped his knee with his fingers, his gaze drifting into the distance.

“Children of seven or eight years old holding swords, some lower-class commoners who had committed offenses were tied up and kneeling in front of us, row by row. We went down the line and killed them one by one. At first, we were all afraid, crying and making a fuss, unable to start. Later, the children who cried the most were killed in front of us, and those who remained crying were punished. Those who killed slowly were also punished. After that, everyone stopped making a fuss.”

“Later on, everyone got used to it.” Duan Xu’s fingers withdrew, and he pointed to his chest, where there were still bruises, slowly saying, “I did too.”

“At first, I would feel afraid too, but gradually, I came to see it all as a matter of course. Later, when I killed, I felt nothing in my heart. Killing became so routine that sometimes I even thought, ‘I’m so tired, my arms ache, why haven’t they all died yet?’ It would have been better if they had all died at once.”

The description of the Temple of the Azure finally shed its light-hearted facade here, revealing its true and brutal nature.

The morning light slanted down, partially blocked by the bed curtains, creating a division of light and shadow from Duan Xu’s nose to his chin, his eyes in the darkness, while the skin of his upper body, exposed to the sunlight, looked pale and stark.

Just like the impression he gave people, a mixture of light and shadow, ambiguous and unclear.

“Soon, we, the disciples of the same cohort, began drawing lots to duel. The results of various assessments determined the superiority and inferiority of our weapons during the duels. In each duel, one of the two participants would die. At that time, we didn’t think there was anything wrong with it, as if doing our best to put others to death was the most normal thing in the world. Winning a duel meant advancing closer to the Azure God. This kind of duel continued round after round until the Ming Shi exam seven years later.”

“After about two years like this, one day during training, I went to kill another lower-class citizen who had committed an offense, as usual. Usually, their hands and feet would be bound, their mouths gagged, unable to make a sound. But that day, one person’s gag fell off when I approached.”

“He looked at me anxiously. The sunlight that day was brilliant, shining down from the sky into the courtyard where the execution was taking place, with many dust particles floating in the sunlight. He seemed resigned, trembling as he said to me—’Sir… the weather is really nice today… please go easy.’”

In the morning light, Duan Xu’s lips curled slightly, as if reminiscing about the scene of that person’s incoherent words, and he said slowly, “At that moment, I looked up at the sky. The sunlight was strong, the leaves rustled in the wind, it was indeed a beautiful day. It was as if I had suddenly awakened from a long and terrible nightmare, trembling with fear. I wondered what I was doing. Why did I have to kill this person? Why did this person have to be killed by me? Have all those we killed truly committed crimes? Why… why had I never realized these questions before?”

“He was a person, just like me, living in this world. He also enjoyed good weather, yet I only complained about the tiredness in my arms when killing him.”

Duan Xu took a gentle breath and smiled faintly, “In that instant, I suddenly realized that I was becoming a monster. Even if I didn’t die at the hands of my peers in the end, what was the point of living on as a monster?”

Where he was, malice and filth filled the air. He was being tamed, losing his brain and heart, losing his thoughts and conscience—becoming a monster, becoming a weapon, one step away from irreversible damnation.

He woke up suddenly at the edge of the cliff.

He Simu was silent for a moment before asking, “So what happened to the person you were conversing with?”

There was no storm on Duan Xu’s face, not even a smile. He chuckled lightly.

“I still killed him. The instructors were standing behind me, and if I didn’t kill him, I would be the one to die. After him, there were eighty-three more people who died at my hands like that. Later, I started carrying out missions, helping the court of Danzhi, and the more I learned, the more blood debts I accumulated.”

In moments of clarity, fear clung to him like maggots to bone.

He realized he was living in hell, surrounded by a group of people who thought they were living in paradise, unable to escape.

The absurdity was that only he thought it was hell.

For a while, he felt like he was going mad. If the beliefs and principles instilled in him by the Temple of the Azure were all false, how could he be sure that the Four Books and Five Classics he read in his childhood were true? What kind of world was he living in? What was true and what was false, and what were the principles he should follow?

At just over ten years old, he didn’t know what he would become. He knew he was undergoing a transformation, starting to enjoy killing, craving violence, and despising life. But he didn’t know how to turn back into a human.

The poems and articles he had memorized, the words and phrases he didn’t understand at the time, now emerged from the depths of his memory, conflicting with the brutality instilled in him by the Temple of the Azure.

In this struggle, he painstakingly pieced together what he believed this world should be like.

Breaking his twisted bones, cutting away the rotten flesh, and still pretending to be hunched and deformed. Pretending to be more indifferent, more fanatical, more devout than anyone else, just to deceive his master and fellow disciples.

He bound the beast within him, telling himself over and over again, stay awake, stay awake, you cannot become a monster.

One day you will return to the sunlight, reclaim your name, and live as a dignified person.

For seven years, two thousand five hundred and fifty-six days and nights.

“When I left the Temple of the Azure, I swore that one day I would reclaim the Seventeen Provinces and end all this madness on the northern shore.”

He Simu put down the teacup in her hand, sitting at the edge of Duan Xu’s bed, her hand stroking the various scars on his body, then looking up at him.

In the eyes of this young man, there was a calm and tranquillity, like a deep abyss suddenly illuminated, revealing a glimpse of the profound depths.

He Simu thought, perhaps he wanted to untie the ropes binding the hands of those Han people, remove the cloth from their mouths, and let them stand up and live in the sunlight. Perhaps he wanted to ensure that no one would ever again be treated like livestock and killed.

Perhaps he also wished that there would be no one like him, like Fifteen, who almost or truly lost himself in lies and killings.

He was saving those lost Seventeen Provinces, just as he wanted to save the Seventeen from the Temple of the Azure years ago.

Time flew by like a galloping horse, but it was also like struggling in the water, sinking and resurfacing repeatedly.

There was little pity in He Simu’s eyes, only calmness. “So, have you succeeded? Are you no longer a weapon? Are you human now?”

Duan Xu’s eyelashes trembled slightly, a rare hint of uncertainty appearing in his usually firm narrative. He smiled, “I should be human. But, it’s not quite normal.”

He Simu stared into his eyes, then suddenly smiled, lightly patting his cheek. Duan Xu made a sound as her touch grazed his injured face, then heard He Simu say, “You’ve been hammering and patching yourself up like an object, growing up in all these years of mud and mire, yet you haven’t gone crooked.”

Duan Xu paused for a moment, then chuckled softly, “Is that so?”

“What is normal, what is abnormal? Little General, Little Fox, my cursed one, live well, go through life in this world, fulfil your wishes, and then die without regrets. That’s the most normal life.”

Duan Xu fell silent for a moment. He leaned closer to He Simu, letting the sunlight fall into his eyes from the shadows of the bed curtain.

Perhaps the sunlight was too glaring, as his eyes narrowed slightly, shrouded in a thin layer of moisture.

He spoke softly, “Are you trying to comfort me?”

“No, I’m not trying to comfort you, not even pity you. Little General, I’ve seen many tragic lives in the Ghost Records, so yours isn’t much. So you can trust that what I say is the truth.” He Simu’s expression was calm and firm.

Duan Xu looked at He Simu for a moment, and for a brief moment, he seemed to see the long years behind her, like a river drowning his hardships. He suddenly smiled, his eyes sparkling like the starry sea.

He reached out and took hold of her sleeve, shaking it as if pleading, and said, “Thank you, Si Mu.”

He Simu momentarily ignored his cheesy gesture, raised an eyebrow, and repeated, “Si Mu?”

“Your Highness, can I call you Si Mu?”

“I’m nearly four hundred years older than you. I advise you to think twice before you speak.”

“I really like…” Duan Xu’s words trailed off.

“What do you like?” He Simu asked.

He smiled, looking handsome, with the appearance of a bright-eyed young man.

“I like your name. I make a wish to you, to exchange my five senses for once. Please allow me to call you Si Mu.”