Young Master Ling took only two personal bodyguards and flew to Baoji overnight.
Ling He did not even waste time checking into a hotel. He traveled continuously without resting or sleeping, because what he needed to accomplish mattered far more than sleep. Leaving the airport, he went directly to the home of the important person he had come to visit, carrying gift boxes of dried Luancheng abalone and sea cucumber in both hands. It was an extraordinarily rare sight, Mr. Ling looking almost like someone arriving with a chicken in one hand and a duck in the other after traveling a thousand miles to present gifts.
It was not that Ling He did not understand social conventions. Ordinarily, he simply believed he had no use for such courtesies. There were too many people and matters he either did not care about or handled through strategy, seizure, and manipulation. He had no interest in flattering anyone. But some things in this world simply could not be taken through cleverness, and some people could not be forced to hand over whatever he wanted. Today, he genuinely needed someone’s help, so he had no choice but to strip away his pride and lower himself.
He entered and nodded politely. “May I ask whether Dr. Zhang Wenxi is here?”
A lean, capable-looking man stood beside the window with his back toward Ling He, tending dozens of strange plants arranged across the sill. He wore a loose traditional silk jacket and black cloth shoes with layered soles. His Republican-era scholarly taste carried something of Qi Baoshan’s old-fashioned pretension, except this man was much younger.
The fellow was sharp too, almost as though a heavenly eye had opened in the back of his skull. Without turning, he immediately shot Ling He down in his distinctive, irreverent accent. “Why is it you again? I already told you last time not to come. I’m not treating him!”
Ling He asked softly, “Why can’t you treat him, Dr. Zhang?… Is the injury too serious? Can’t it be healed?”
The man slowly turned around, revealing a long, wheat-colored face and narrow, shrewd eyes. “No. It can be healed. It’s just reconnecting a tendon. A tiny injury like that is easy for me! But I’ve been in a bad mood lately, so I’m not treating anybody. You can all stay lame!”
Elio’s Notes: Zhang Wenxi’s dialogue is written with a strong regional flavor, most visibly by spelling his “I/me” with a Shaanxi-style pronunciation. Rather than turning that into a caricatured English accent, I’m carrying it through his blunt, colorful speech.
Ling He froze. He had never encountered such an unceremonious refusal, delivered without even bothering to invent a respectable excuse.
The young man Ling He had come to visit was not old. Within certain circles, however, he was rumored to be a miracle doctor whose gifted hands and surgical blade could treat almost any traumatic injury.
After the founding of the People’s Republic, stories circulated about a certain “Divine Blade Zhang” from Baoji who lived in seclusion in the western Qinling Mountains and was periodically summoned to Yandu to treat the country’s highest leaders. Supposedly, he performed surgery without blood or scarring, cured whatever he touched, and left neither marks nor aftereffects. Unfortunately, even the most miraculous half-immortal had a mortal lifespan and a fate he could not evade. He could heal everyone except himself. Eventually that “Divine Blade Zhang” died, leaving behind a successor whose hands were said to be just as skillful. That successor was the young miracle doctor Ling He had come all this way to find, Zhang Wenxi.
Unfortunately, the man before him was notoriously difficult. Zhang Wenxi was famous for being eccentric, unreasonable, and generally incompatible with the rest of humanity. Perhaps extraordinary skill simply made him arrogant. Whether he treated a patient depended entirely on his mood.
Zhang Wenxi settled into an antique pearwood chair carved with elaborate patterns, holding a covered teacup. With lowered eyes, he leisurely brushed aside the layer of tea leaves floating across the hot water, taking his time purely to aggravate his visitor. With that roguish face, the kid hardly resembled a doctor who saved lives. He looked more like some counterfeit mountain-bandit physician.
Ling He stood there alone. Usually he was the one who schemed and sprayed venom at other people until their faces twitched and their skin practically broke out in sores. That was his specialty. Asking someone for help was not. He now tried to imagine how ordinary people handled situations like this. Was he supposed to throw himself at the miracle doctor’s legs and roll around sobbing until pity moved him? Throw money at him? Seduce him? Pull a gun? None of those would probably work.
Holding back his irritation, Ling He stepped closer. “When does Dr. Zhang expect his mood to improve enough to treat someone?”
Zhang Wenxi snorted. “No idea. Maybe six months or a year. Maybe eight or ten years. Depends on my mood.”
Ling He frowned, resentment simmering inside him as he studied the man in return. “Divine Doctor Zhang, the space between your brows looks congested, your tongue coating is yellow, there are sores at the corners of your mouth, and your temper is irritable. Looks like excessive liver fire and yin deficiency from internal heat. Did you get dumped and end up in a bad mood?”
Zhang Wenxi’s brows shot upward. “Are you the doctor or am I the doctor? Who’s diagnosing whom? You brat, you dare mock me?!”
Ling He placed the boxed seafood on the floor. “Since you’ve been dumped and you’re upset, I suppose I came at a bad time. My apologies, Divine Doctor Zhang. I’ll visit another day. Please take care of yourself and stay alive until your mood improves!”
The words were so venomous that Zhang Wenxi stared after him in astonishment. Never had he seen a patient asking for treatment speak with such arrogance and disrespect. He shouted at Ling He’s back, “You… You stop right there!”
The young miracle doctor really had been in a poor mood lately. He had indeed suffered heartbreak, and it was hardly fresh.
The childhood sweetheart Zhang Wenxi had loved since they were young had returned to his hometown in Shandong and married another man. Zhang not only failed to get the person he wanted, he had even gone running off to heal the lame leg of his successful romantic rival. After performing such broad-minded, compassionate, merit-accumulating foolishness, Divine Doctor Zhang felt he had exhausted his lifetime supply of kindness. He had no desire to meddle in other people’s worldly affairs only to watch them flaunt their happiness in front of him. Whoever was lame could stay lame. What the hell did that have to do with him?
With a bellyful of idle melancholy, wounded pride, and self-pity, Zhang Wenxi pointed at the chair beside him. “Mr. Ling, sit. I want to ask you something.”
Once Ling He sat, Zhang Wenxi gave him a sidelong look. “That man with the severed tendon. How did he get injured? Borrowed from loan sharks and couldn’t repay them, so somebody chopped his foot? Or did something evil and got revenge taken on him?”
Ling He shook his head. Whenever Yan Xiaodao came up, all the poison and resentment inside him seemed to evaporate. He answered seriously, “He’s a very good person. He never does evil. Why would anyone take revenge on him?”
Zhang Wenxi immediately became curious and leaned slightly closer. “A good man with bad luck, then? How did the tendon break?”
Ling He’s expression did not ripple. His gaze was perfectly innocent, as though discussing an ordinary household matter. “I’m the bad person. I cut the tendon in his foot with a knife.”
Zhang Wenxi sucked air through his teeth and dramatically lifted his leg to rub his own ankle, as though suddenly experiencing the same piercing agony. “Does this man have a grudge against you or something? You hit him that hard!”
Ling He shook his head again. “No. He’s my wife.”
Zhang Wenxi clutched his chest and nearly folded backward over the pearwood chair. He could already tell that Young Master Ling’s state of mind and reasoning operated on some plane completely separate from normal humanity. The man was describing an act vicious enough to make anyone’s hair stand on end, yet his young and beautiful face remained clear and transparent, almost as innocent as a newborn baby, as though he had nothing to do with the filthy mortal world at all. He talked about stabbing through another person’s foot with all the casualness of scaling a fish in his own kitchen. What kind of brain was this? Either his blood vessels had grown sideways or there was a tumor dangling from his brain stem.
Zhang Wenxi rubbed his chest until he recovered enough to complain. “You already chopped his foot, and now you want to spend money hiring me to fix it? Lunatic. Are you screwing with me?”
The lunatic Mr. Ling shivered faintly as though cold and found himself speechless.
He had already cut it. What if he simply left it untreated?
If the injury remained permanent, would Yan Xiaodao still forgive him and stay beside him, at least giving him the appearance of doing so willingly?
Yan Xiaodao certainly would. He would limp over, embrace him, forgive him, and continue indulging Ling He’s willfulness, cruelty, and terrible reputation. As long as they remained together, what did it matter whether outsiders considered them companions enduring hardship together or two villains wallowing in the same mud?… Ling He believed this with extraordinary certainty. After sinking alone in a black swamp for so many years, using wickedness as armor and poison as a weapon, he had met only one person who could make him look upward as though encountering a god. Xiaodao was the guardian angel who had come to save his life, someone who repeatedly made him ashamed of himself yet also left him helplessly obsessed, forever tormented by the depth of his devotion.
Yesterday, when Xiaodao watched Zhixiu climb the wall and onto the roof with her bare hands, a wasteland of loss had appeared in his eyes. Ling He had been hiding behind the door and had seen it. It hurt him.
At the village inn, Xiaodao had tumbled all the way down that staircase. Ling He had not even managed to catch him in time. A hero reduced to a tiger fallen onto level ground, his perfect Xiaodao defeated by a rotten staircase. The memory gnawed at Ling He relentlessly.
Ling He felt that he urgently needed another confession before Pastor Qiu Wenlan, and certain parts of the confession he had made months earlier would now have to be changed. His state of mind was completely different. Whether or not he and Xiaodao could spend the rest of their lives together, the layers of change this man had carved into him, deep and shallow, had already been branded into his skin and bones. There was no denying them.
So falling in love with someone could make a person less vicious and a little softer and kinder… though Ling He had no intention of admitting such a realization to Yan Xiaodao for as long as he lived.
Ling He said quietly to Zhang Wenxi, “I want to heal him. I want him back the way he was before. I want him to be happier.”
“So that’s it. Fine…” Light flashed through Zhang Wenxi’s narrow, elegant eyes. He replied briskly, “I’ll charge you fifteen million. If you can afford it, I guarantee I’ll repair your sweetheart’s foot so completely he won’t even feel that it was ever injured.”
Ling He stared. “You charge that much?”
Zhang Wenxi looked perfectly reasonable. “Normally I charge only one and a half million for one little foot. Fifteen million is what I charge for replacing a head. But you just told me you were the one who stabbed your wife’s foot. If you can be that poisonous and ruthless even toward someone you love, how could I possibly let you get away without bleeding a little yourself? Fifteen million. Not one cent less. Otherwise I’m not treating him.”
Ling He stared blankly at Zhang Wenxi and, unusually, humbled himself enough to plead poverty in front of an outsider. “I don’t have that much money. I can’t produce fifteen million in cash right now.”
“Well, when you were cutting his foot and making him hurt that badly, why didn’t you think about whether you could afford to fix it?” Zhang Wenxi spread both hands and sneered. “If I charge too little, then the next time Mr. Ling gets upset and decides to abuse his wife, what happens? You stab the other foot? Best I bankrupt you this time. Then there won’t be a next time!”
Every word out of Zhang Wenxi’s mouth was sharp and vicious, deliberately mocking him without mercy and whipping him bloody with ridicule. Ling He stared in speechless disbelief and finally realized that today he had encountered a living opponent.
Ling He lowered his thick lashes. Two ink-wash shadows fell beneath his eyes. Softly, he said, “Divine Doctor Zhang, I really can’t produce that much. Can’t you make an exception?”
Zhang Wenxi countered, “You still own property, don’t you?”
Ling He: “…”
Ling He’s vision darkened. He shook his head until the shower of gold stars dancing across the black curtain disappeared, then ground out, “I can sell property. Heal his foot first.”
Zhang Wenxi casually pulled a sheet of rice paper from the desk, his narrow eyes gleaming with equally matched calculation. “Mr. Ling, write me a formal IOU. Fifteen million, and not one cent less.”
Ling He did not haggle or hesitate. He took out a pen and signed his name on the debt note.
With that single signature, he acquired an enormous debt.
The turning wheel of heaven was almost comical. A self-mocking smile appeared at Ling He’s lips. The only solution was to let that bastard Chen Jiu live another lifetime so Ling He could rush over, cut in ahead of everyone else, and steal that fifteen million for himself.
……
With the master away, the Ling residence suddenly lost the pillar that suppressed evil and kept order in the house. All the usual rules and restrictions of Hanhai House seemed to collapse overnight. Before the stern-on-the-outside but extraordinarily indulgent second master, Yan Xiaodao, there were practically no rules at all. Men and women, old and young alike entered full rebellion mode, eating whatever they wanted and sleeping wherever they pleased.
With the high-end chef away, Immortal Mao bought takeout boxes three meals a day to feed the entire household.
Yan Xiaodao could barely imagine how he had once shared a home with a crowd of bachelors for years, surviving every day on assorted cheap boxed meals Kuanzi brought home and living such a rough existence. It was not only Ling He who could no longer return to the life he had once lived…
The white house had chilly walls and minimalist decor. The kitchen contained cold stainless-steel pots and appliances without the slightest hint of human warmth. Mr. Ling normally stood in the kitchen like a wooden stake anyway, hardly behaving flirtatiously, his expression always cool and blank, yet Ling He himself was breathtaking scenery. Even his expressionlessness was beautiful. He could wear shabby old clothes and flip-flops and still look good.
Mao Zhixiu and several companions planned to go play at the beach and invited Mr. Yan along to ride jet skis. Yan Xiaodao hesitated, then politely declined. His mind was occupied by the beautiful and skillful Xiao He. With Ling He gone, who was he supposed to embrace on a two-person jet ski? Bored, he decided he would rather stay in his bedroom and read 1587, A Year of No Significance.
Yan Xiaodao had stayed in Luancheng twice now without visiting many of its tourist attractions, so Mao Zhixiu drove him around the city’s rising and falling mountain roads to enjoy the flowers.
With Master Ling away, Mao remained cautious. She chose a battered, nondescript van that looked utterly unremarkable from outside, while seven or eight strong men were packed inside. The lone female warrior took responsibility for driving.
Mao Zhixiu’s handsome shoulder tattoo showed beneath her clothes. She wore sunglasses with a slender women’s cigarette at the corner of her mouth. The way she sent all four wheels bouncing across the mountain roads looked exactly like a female bandit charging down from her stronghold.
Yan Xiaodao instinctively seized the overhead handle. Unable to control the shaking of his entire skeleton, his backside actually lifted from the seat as he shouted, “Young lady, take it easy!”
The brothers clutched their stomachs and groaned. “Brother Xiu, you’re shaking those pork-rib boxed meals right back out of us!”
Mao Zhixiu laughed around her cigarette. “Look at this whole bunch of delicate little ladies!”
The van erupted into mutual insults, teasing, and waves of laughter as everyone enjoyed the trip immensely.
When they passed Luancheng’s most famous Christian church, Yan Xiaodao said he wanted to buy a small relief pendant of Christ to send to his mother, a modest gesture of filial affection. Mao Zhixiu told him there was no need for Mr. Yan to trouble his injured foot by getting out. She would run in and buy it for him.
Their van stopped beneath the trees not far from the church. Yan Xiaodao rested an elbow against the window and watched the scenery. Along the road, translucent green plane-tree leaves shaped like broad palms rustled in the wind.
Several steps away stood a public telephone booth.
The telephone suddenly rang.
From the first ring, the perpetually vigilant Yan Xiaodao noticed it. He turned and stared at the phone booth beneath the tree. It was a public payphone for pedestrians. Who called into a payphone?
Amid the noisy traffic around them, the telephone continued ringing by itself with strange clarity. Yan Xiaodao’s hearing was exceptionally sharp. The call plainly disconnected and turned into a busy signal, yet the person dialed again and the phone resumed ringing in his ear, almost as though it had been made to ring specifically for him. The other men in the van began noticing too.
One of the younger men gave Yan Xiaodao a meaningful look. Yan’s face remained cold and composed. He did not move.
“Mr. Yan, if you won’t answer it, I’ll answer it for you!” The young man suddenly pulled open the van door and jumped outside. The instant he picked up the receiver, the irritating ringing stopped abruptly and became another busy signal…
Yan Xiaodao remained silent, understanding everything. He judged that the call had indeed been meant for him. If so, the caller could probably see him sitting inside the van. With other people and watchers surrounding him, Yan could not possibly answer.
Perhaps the call had never needed to be answered at all. Each piercing ring was both a warning and an urgent summons. Through the rest of that afternoon and evening, the sound seemed to take root inside Yan Xiaodao’s mind, becoming something solid and alive that repeatedly ground across the taut strings of his nerves…
Early the next morning, Yan Xiaodao stood with a cane at the busy entrance to the morning market, watching Zhixiu and A’Zhe go inside to buy breakfast. He wore a rainproof hoodie with the hood concealing half his face and knee-length shorts below. It was the most ordinary way local men dressed for wet weather by the sea, simple and casual enough to blend in.
He had seen Ling He dress that way before and had unconsciously copied him. Ling He occasionally exposed a pair of long, slender calves, and somehow even the sloppiest casual clothes took on the texture of menswear modeling when worn by him.
During the minute or two Mao Zhixiu was inside the market, a black sedan suddenly charged into view without warning and forced itself into the chaotic formation of bicycles and electric scooters piled around the entrance. A window rolled down and someone inside called in a familiar lowered voice, “Big Brother, hurry! Get in and come with us!”
Yan Xiaodao looked over in shock. One of the people inside was a bodyguard from Master Qi’s side, a familiar face he recognized. The other was none other than his brother Kuanzi.
His foot was already recovering well, and he had spent quite some time leisurely vacationing around Luancheng. To outsiders, he must look so content that he had forgotten home entirely. How could Master Qi possibly not know where he was? While Yan’s group was away investigating in the Three Rivers region, his own men had already been circling Hanhai House for several days, waiting for him to return.
Kuanzi looked equally shocked and confused as he grabbed Yan Xiaodao’s arm. “Big Brother, stop standing there. Get in!”
Yan Xiaodao said, “Kuanzi… who told you to come?”
It was a completely pointless question.
By reason, Yan Xiaodao had originally been injured and abducted. If he simply climbed into the car now and left without saying goodbye, no one could accuse him of being disloyal or unjust.
By feeling, he did not want to leave at all.
Yan Xiaodao pressed one hand against the car door. “Kuanzi, please take a message back to Master Qi for me. My foot is ruined. I won’t be much use to my godfather anymore. I’ve failed him. Tell the old man to take good care of himself.”
He had promised Ling He that he would never slip away while Ling He was absent, and he intended to keep his word. They had spent nearly two months in a cold war, almost severing everything between them, and Yan Xiaodao still had not properly confessed his feelings again. Yet deep inside, he had already begun configuring the rest of their future. He wanted to spend the latter half of his life with Mr. Ling, regardless of the hardships and burdens he could already foresee. He was willing to carry them.
The two men inside froze, bewildered and unwilling to accept it. “Big Brother, Master Qi told us to bring you a few words. The boss said…”
Qi Baoshan’s bodyguard deliberately imitated his employer’s tone, even reproducing the pauses, punctuation, and hoarseness of his voice with remarkable accuracy. “Xiaodao, you went south. By now, I assume you understand those unbearable events from more than ten years ago. They were sins your godfather committed when he was young, and I carry guilt for them. Heaven turns in cycles. Those who forcibly alter their fortunes eventually suffer retribution. The older I become, the more I regret it.
“Xiaodao, you are the only son your godfather has. Without you, I have no child at my knees. If one day the calamity written into my fate arrives and I die in the street, there will not even be anyone to collect my body or see me to my grave. Xiaodao, your godfather believes that from beginning to end I have never wronged you in a single matter. Your heart is too cruel.”
Yan Xiaodao’s expression did not change.
Yet the solid, weathered skin of that face seemed to crack with a rustle audible only to himself. Countless complicated emotions escaped through those fissures and surged outward, striking painfully against his eyes. Perhaps age really did make a man less useful than he had been in youth. The one becoming softhearted now was Qi Baoshan. The cruel one truly was Yan Xiaodao.
He nodded with difficulty. “Once I finish dealing with what’s in front of me, I’ll go back immediately to see my godfather. Kuanzi, take one sentence back to Master Qi. The situation is already dangerous and the water can’t be put back into the basin. If he can leave, tell him to leave quickly.”
……
The scale inside Yan Xiaodao’s heart had swayed violently back and forth for months, the crushing weights on either side strangling one another. At last there was a winner. Yan Xiaodao himself had never expected to be this firm or this free of hesitation. It was almost as though he only understood what he truly wanted when the moment arrived. Everything had changed, and he could no longer return to what he had been.
Yan Xiaodao released his hand and limped several large steps away on his right foot, flatly refusing to climb into the car. He would wait for Ling He to return.
Su Zhe emerged from the morning-market stalls with his comically permed hair resembling a chicken nest. He carried large boxes of takeout in both hands. His thin legs moved with such dramatic hip-swaying that he almost rivaled a competitive race walker on television, interpreting the concept of narcissism with magnificent excess.
Kuanzi sighed in anger and sorrow, unable to understand whether his big brother had been bewitched by a little demon or possessed by something unclean. All they could do was frantically turn the vehicle around. The car spat out a trail of dejected exhaust before its roof vanished among the shifting crowd.
That evening, white plastic takeout trash filled the kitchen and coffee table at Hanhai House. Nobody had even cleaned away the empty containers when the great master returned, bringing with him Dr. Zhang Wenxi, whom he had traveled a thousand miles to fetch.
All the household retainers under Immortal Mao stood with arms crossed, surrounding and inspecting the famous miracle doctor of jianghu legend. Zhang Wenxi looked around Ling He’s enormous house, sat down, and offered only one observation. “I like the color of this house. Perfect for an operating room!”
Su Zhe kept blinking at Immortal Mao. “I thought he’d be some decrepit old man. This little miracle doctor is young and handsome!”
Mao Zhixiu snapped, “You like another one? As long as you see a living man, you can extrapolate one hundred and eight positions from the way he sits in a chair.”
“I do not! I’m picky too!” Su Zhe widened a pair of pure and innocent black eyes and whispered conspiratorially to Immortal Mao. “Believe me or not, but this little miracle doctor is gay. Look at the way he’s looking at me~~~”
Mao Zhixiu rolled her eyes toward heaven, completely unable to endure this hopeless narcissistic lunatic.
At the turn of the staircase, Mao pulled Ling He aside and reported quietly in his ear, “Yesterday, when we passed the church, a public phone on the street rang twice in succession. It was probably meant for Mr. Yan. This morning at the market, a black car followed us and tried to take Mr. Yan away, but he actually refused to leave while he had the chance.”
Ling He seemed fully aware of every movement occurring in light and shadow, regardless of whether he himself was in Luancheng or another province. His black lashes glittered beneath the chandelier. The corner of his mouth tightened slightly. “Call the property agent in America. Put my apartment in Brooklyn up for sale.”
“What?!” Mao Zhixiu’s willow brows nearly flew off her brow bones. “Sell it? Where are you supposed to live when you go back?”
Then another thought struck her. Good lord, Mr. Ling, don’t tell me you’ve already settled things with Mr. Yan and plan to marry him? Now you’re selling off the property on your own side of the family? At least leave yourself some road back!
“You can live anywhere. Plenty of people sleep in the underground passages of the New York subway… I could sleep there too.” Ling He had always regarded money and property lightly. Xiaodao was the only thing weighing on his mind. Even so, the corner of his mouth unconsciously leaked a smile carrying the warm yellow glow of the lamp.