"Ahem! As it happens, I too am a victim of all this."
No sooner had Yu Zitong spoken than he sought to win Han Li's pity, and to set himself as far apart as might be from Doctor Mo; but seeing Han Li utterly unmoved, he had no choice but to go on.
"I was originally a cultivator..."
And so, plainly and at length, Yu Zitong recounted his own history and the whole course of the matter. In the telling, of course, he painted himself as a poor wretch who, only after being coerced by Doctor Mo, had been driven into the conspiracy — laying all the blame upon the dead Doctor Mo unto the last.
Han Li was far too wary to believe every word the man let fall; yet, weighing the tale against what Doctor Mo himself had once confided, he could still sift out seven or eight parts of the truth from the whole.
With whatever of falsity the other's speech might hide stripped away, Han Li came to a fair understanding of how all had come about.
That part of Doctor Mo's old story which told of how he had been set upon unawares, and had gone forth seeking some means to restore his lost power, must have been true; there had been no need to deceive him in that.
But the talk of a wondrous book found in some hidden place, and of a method recovered from it to restore his strength — that was a fiction invented from whole cloth. In truth it was wholly on Yu Zitong's account that Doctor Mo had recovered his power; and yet it was on Yu Zitong's account, too, that the curse had laid hold of him.
It came to this. Yu Zitong had been born into one of those families men call cultivator clans, and had cultivated the Art of Eternal Youth as far as the seventh layer, attaining thereby no mean degree of mastery; but beyond that point his innate aptitude had bound him fast. The Art of Eternal Youth would advance no further, and he could never reach the full establishment of Foundation Establishment.
Now, a cultivator who has not established his foundation may not be counted a true adept, nor may he openly enter the immortal world; and so, in his helplessness, Yu Zitong had quit his hiding place and gone down into the mortal realm to try his temper there, to see whether he might yet break the bottleneck that beset his heart.
There was also, if fortune smiled on him, the hope of chancing upon some precious herbs and carrying them home to refine into spirit pills; though he knew such a hope was faint indeed. Still, in all things it came down to luck; and who could say but that heaven might not crown him with a great windfall besides?
It was with such alluring designs that Yu Zitong, then a young man but little more than twenty, stepped into what the adepts call the mortal world.
The gaudy, dazzling pleasures of that world outside wore down his eyes in short order. His heart had never been firmly anchored; within a handful of years he had gone utterly to ruin, become a hanger-on at the table of some great man, and begun to loll in luxury and splendour; and his heart for cultivation by degrees grew cold.
Such disciples as Yu Zitong, who gave up halfway, would after a century have their names struck from the family register, and their whole branch be accounted mortal kind, forbidden all commerce with the main house — unless, perchance, one of their descendants should again show aptitude and talent for cultivation, in which case they might once more be acknowledged as of the blood.
Had matters gone no further, Yu Zitong's way to the Great Way might indeed have been shut, and immortal arts denied him; yet a long and fortunate life to a hundred years was not beyond his reach. Among cultivators who had not yet established their foundation, such a state was common enough, and no great disgrace.
But whether it was heaven's eye at work or simply his hour of reversal, one day a few years later, as he idled along the streets and, as was his habit, turned in at an apothecary's shop, he chanced upon a most rare Blood Spirit Herb. This spirit herb bore so strong a likeness to the common red oil flower that the shopkeeper, who had not the wit to know it, had set it among his ordinary wares.
At the glimpse of it Yu Zitong was overjoyed; with this herb to hand, his hope of breaking the bottleneck waxed strong, and the heart for cultivation stirred in him anew. He would have paid on the spot and carried it away.
But then a fresh hindrance arose. Another cultivator stepped into the shop, spied the herb also, and would by no means let it go; and the two fell to disputing over it on the very ground.
The shopkeeper, seeing his chance, set the two against each other and declared the herb should go to him who offered the most silver. Yu Zitong's purse proved the deeper by a little, and so the spirit herb passed into his keeping.
Yet he was no fool, and knew the other would not let the matter rest. That very night he fled his lodgings and made what haste he could toward his family's lands; but he had not covered half the road ere the man caught up with him, and there was a great battle.
The other's power outmatched his by more than half a span; Yu Zitong was beaten till he spat blood. Yet he could not bear to lose the herb that was already his. Gritting his teeth, he invoked a life-preserving talisman he had carried out of the clan, and by a secret art of mutual destruction so terrified the other into flight that he at last escaped.
But by then he was sorely wounded; and it was in this strait that he fell in with Doctor Mo, who was himself abroad seeking a remedy.
It was the doom laid upon Yu Zitong. He had walked the world for years, yet of dealing with such jianghu rogues as Doctor Mo he had not the least experience. Marking the doctor's failing health, he had the folly to speak of it outright, and, all unwitting, let slip that he carried a valuable cure upon his person.
At that, he had called down a killing calamity upon his own head. For Doctor Mo was at that very hour burning with impatience, seeking a remedy high and low and finding none; and when he heard that this man had a medicine that could save him, was it not certain that he would use every art and every entreaty upon the man's body?
But the medicine Yu Zitong spoke of, though not so rare a marvel as the Blood Spirit Herb, was still compounded of more than a dozen precious herbs, distilled by the methods of cultivators at the cost of much of his vital essence; and of it he had but a little left. Wounded as he was, he prized it all the more, and how should he ever part with it as a gift to some mortal he accounted no more than an ant?
Doctor Mo, seeing that even his grovelling could not wring the medicine free, was cut to the quick by shame and anger, and his murderous heart was roused. Secretly he followed Yu Zitong to a lonely spot, and, coming upon him from behind, administered to him a poison of his own secret making.
In the natural way of things, an ordinary poison should have been of no avail against Yu Zitong. But this secret drug of Doctor Mo's — whose own potency the doctor did not fully understand — worked upon him all at once, and Doctor Mo had his triumph.
Yu Zitong, already gravely wounded, was now sunk near to death by the venom striking at his heart; and then Doctor Mo showed himself, and fell to ransacking his body at his ease, with great arrogance.
Seeing all this, Yu Zitong needed no further telling of how matters stood. Blazing with wrath, without a thought he called up the "Blood Arrow Soul-Oath Curse," turned all the vital essence of his body into a single breath of curse, and spat it full upon Doctor Mo's head; then his primordial spirit abandoned his flesh and drifted, all unseen, out of his body.
Only after his spirit had left his body did Yu Zitong realize how ill he had considered the matter: he had not prepared a vessel to receive him. With no other refuge, he could but bore his way into Doctor Mo's body, and so for a while stave off the danger of his spirit perishing.
Doctor Mo, startled at first to be drenched in that spray of blood, found presently that nothing untoward befell him, and thought no more of it.
Trusting in his knowledge of drugs, he picked out from the corpse those few pills, and swallowed them with great rejoicing; and, true to the medicine's promise, his power was restored entire.
Wild with delight, Doctor Mo gathered up all he had stripped from the man, together with a copy of the Art of Eternal Youth formula that he could not himself decipher, and resolved to return straightway to Lanzhou, to wreak his vengeance and once more make his name.