# Chapter 106: Who Would Lightly Betray a Youthful Heart
Miaoyu left with a coquettish smile curving her lips, swaying as she walked away.
The White-Bone-Masked Envoy was a complicated man. For all the years they had spent together, she had never been able to see through him. Today's show of ease could have been a test—a probe to see whether she had uncovered the Daozi. Or it could have been a warning, a nudge to keep her composure, lest she betray the secret she had found.
Everyone had gathered beneath the banner of the White Bone Path for a single shared ideal. But before that final goal was reached, each of them kept a private arithmetic of their own.
As for the Second Elder, his behavior was far plainer to read. He cared nothing for whatever she might wring out of an interrogation. Perhaps he had no hand in the Ji Xuan affair; or perhaps he simply knew that she could draw nothing out at all. An old fox as wily as that—she did not even try to guess his thoughts. To parse them would only lead her astray; they were simply beyond her.
Few hands had been assigned to the trail of the abducted water-clan. Miaoyu herself had told no one that she would appear on the banks of the Clear River. Whoever in the shadows had anticipated her and passed the message along must know her far too well. She could not name that hidden informer, and questioning everyone one by one was pointless—they might truly know nothing at all.
She was afraid that the matter of the Daozi would break the surface. After escaping death by a hair's breadth, that fear had spilled over beyond all holding.
And now the White-Bone-Masked Envoy had his suspicions, and the Second Elder was no fool either.
When the Daozi was born into the world, he did not awaken at once. The bonds of everything that had shaped him since his birth held him fast, and only then began the long, grinding process of breaking free and awakening. Before that awakening came, the Daozi was not strong. What decided his fighting power was only the cultivation he had done since his birth.
And that meant the Daozi might well be shattered before he ever woke... or be supplanted.
That was why Miaoyu moved in secret—especially now that the Great Elder had shown so little zeal for searching out the Daozi at all. As the Holy Maiden, as the destined worldly consort bound to the Daozi, what she wanted was to hurry his awakening along.
And so, once she had settled that Jiang Wang was the Daozi incarnate, she had arranged three things.
Three things. Three choices.
She meant to shake and even shatter the moral code Jiang Wang already held, and in doing so help him find his way back to himself. The first thing set him thinking of the state, of the court; the second set him thinking of the relation between the human clan and the water-clan, and of the human clan itself.
As for the third... it could wait.
Something had happened to the Great Elder in the Yun Kingdom; he was out of contact for now. Both the Second Elder and the White-Bone-Masked Envoy had yet to show their hands. Perhaps this was not a good time.
It was too dangerous now, she thought.
She walked back to her room, her mind unsettled.
So unsettled that she quite forgot she had never been someone who weighed the danger.
...
When Jiang Wang was very young, his father told him that the water-clan were simply people who lived within the water. Like the human clan, they had their own thoughts and feelings, their own family and friends, their own loves, hatreds, and entanglements.
In fact, this was the common understanding of everyone.
That consensus had not fallen from the sky. It had been earned over ten thousand years of peace and friction between human and water, through the pains of uncounted men of talent and wisdom on both sides.
And now, someone was skulking about abducting water-clan, drawing out their Dao meridians to refine Opening-Vessel pills. As though, to obtain a perfected Opening-Vessel pill, a human might not hesitate to drain a cultivator's meridians dry.
It made Jiang Wang feel the wrongness of the world, its absurdity.
"You think such things don't happen?" Zhao Rucheng drank until his handsome face burned red, and his tongue was loosened. "There are plenty of people who eat men—Xiong Wen is only one of them! You think so, eh? It's just that most of them don't eat outright; they find another way to do it, and so you all fancy that man-eaters are few. Third Brother, you're too naive!"
"Your Third Brother isn't naive." Ling He had drunk a great deal too, but even drunk, that man would not let himself run wild. He sprawled half against a chair, caught his breath a moment, and said, "He just... has things he believes in."
"And you, my eldest brother, what do you believe?" Zhao Rucheng patted his knee, grinning wide. "So young, yet every day you sit around like a kindly old man. What for?"
"I believe that human nature is good at root. I believe that no one truly wants to eat people, that most are driven to it by necessity, that given a choice they would not do such a thing. I believe every person wants to stand clean in the sunlight."
"Third Brother is a little naive... but you, you're a fool!" Zhao Rucheng could barely keep his seat now, and leaned whole against the armrest. "Don't give such people a single chance!"
Jiang Wang slumped over the table, downed another cup, the fumes rising to his face, and squinted as he said, "Our eldest is the kind of man who bears no harm to others. There are so many things he could never bring himself to do that he thinks others can't either."
"Every heart is made of flesh, after all." Perhaps it was the drink, but tonight Ling He was oddly stubborn. Or perhaps he had always been a man of stubborn inner convictions, who simply chose not to argue while sober.
"Some flesh has gone to rot and fester!"
"It was good before the rot started."
"No, no—there are people whose hearts are not made of flesh at all, but grown straight from rot and scurvy!"
"Nonsense, Number Five. Rot can't grow a human heart."
Ling He was truly drunk. It had been so long since any of them had called him by that name.
Zhao Rucheng giggled. "Not all people are people, my silly brother."
"Then neither are all people not-people." Jiang Wang, watching from the sidelines, seized the flaw exactly and said with great confidence, "The reason men are men is precisely that most men are men. Otherwise why wouldn't we be called ghosts?"
He raised his right hand high, half-drunk. "And so, I declare! The eldest is right!"
Ling He broke into a grin, smiling with a childlike, satisfied delight.
"To hell with it!" With one flip Zhao Rucheng sprawled back in his chair. "This rotten place—I don't care who lives or dies here. Except you lot... and Tiger..."
Abruptly he began to cry. "Wah, wah — and Fang Pengju. That damned Fang Pengju!"
On ordinary days, no one lorded over Fang Pengju more scornfully than he did. Only when he had thrown all restraint to the wind, drunk herself blind like this, would such words ever come out of his mouth.
Jiang Wang swayed as he poured himself another cup, and lifted it. "To that damned Fang Pengju."
And drained it in one.
Zhao Rucheng sobbed a few times, then stopped, and turned peevish instead. "Tiger's been in Jiujiang this long, and not a word to us. He's a damned one too!"
"Right, another damned one!"
Ling He, half in his cups, corrected them out of nowhere, "It's tiger-fatherly, not damned."
...
At some point Uncle Deng had come to lean against the door outside, hands tucked into his sleeves. He listened to the voices rising within the room, and let out a long sigh, his voice full of grief. "They're all still children..."
The night wind stirred his sleeve, and a single blood-red bead fell silently.
But before it could reach the ground, some power caught up with it and dissolved it into nothing.