Repaying A Kindness

“…”
“…”

Silence stretched between me and Doctor Yu. He stared at me; I only sipped my tea.

— Drip. Drip. Drip.

Tea from the overturned cup ran across the table and spilled off the edge onto the floor.

“Hooo—”

Doctor Yu let out a long sigh and slumped back in his chair, then dug his fingers into his temples.

Must be giving him a headache.

He had come here on a rumor that someone knew how to cure the Severed Meridians, and the man who supposedly knew was talking like a quack peddling cures. And on top of that, the cure had turned up by chance, in a cave in a cliff. Was I supposed to believe that myself? If he had put a fist in my face, I would have had nothing to say about it. Anger is the normal response. I would have been the same. Short of being a fool, no one could take a story that preposterous at face value.

But.

Doctor Yu has to be willing to play the fool.

If he wants to save his daughter, there is no other way. And for that, I first had to make him believe in me. As things stood, anyone would take me for a swindler.

A madman spouting nonsense.

That was surely the man Doctor Yu saw. There are any number of ways to change what a man thinks of you, and I had the easiest and fastest of them ready.

— Thunk.

I set a fat pouch on the table.

“Fifty taels of gold.”

Time to show him what money can do. Fifty taels is no mere coin or two; it would be enough to change his mind.

“Use it to buy what you need to make the medicine. And move to better lodgings. It would suit me if you came to my family’s manor, but I imagine that would be uncomfortable for you, Brother Yu¹.”
“…”

Doctor Yu looked from the pouch to me and back again, eyes wide, plainly taken aback.

Fair enough. Fifty taels of gold is no small sum, and it had taken some resolve on my part to lay it down.

After a silence, Doctor Yu asked.

“…You’re not handing all this over for nothing. What is it you want from me?”

His manner and his tone had gone calm in an instant. Nothing buys a man’s trust like money.

I took a mouthful of tea and answered.

“I’ll tell you later.”
“I’ll hear it now. You and I have never so much as laid eyes on each other. Why are you doing this?”

Doctor Yu asked it with his face set hard. I looked back at him without a word.

I’m giving back what I was given.

In my past life I received a great deal from Doctor Yu. Wound care was the least of it; more than half the reason I survived was him. A man who takes a kindness ought to know how to give it back. That is the way of things.

A drop of water’s kindness; a welling spring in return.

It means to repay even the kindness of a single drop of water as though it were a gushing spring.

In my past life I never repaid you. This life will be different.

This time I meant to repay that kindness until it overflowed. That was why I had handed him fifty taels of gold I had bled for. I would have liked to give more, but the rest could be paid off little by little from here on.

I smiled and answered his question.

“Does that matter?”
“What?”
“Whether we have met before or not, what does it matter? There is only one thing for you to do right now, Brother Yu. Save your daughter.”
“…”

Doctor Yu fell silent, and I went on.

“Treat your daughter first. Hear my request afterward, and if it doesn’t sit well with you, you needn’t carry it out.”
“…”

The silence held a while, and then he spoke.

“Very well. I’ll believe you. Tell me how to make the cure.”
“Why are you asking me that?”
“You said just now that the ingredients and the herbs had to be processed and compounded!”

Doctor Yu snapped at me, his brow creasing.

“That’s right.”
“Enough word games… Tell me, and be quick about it.”

Doctor Yu’s lips trembled faintly as he spoke. It was plain he was burning inside and forcing it down.

It is the very picture of a true father, bearing anything to save his daughter.

But I cut his hopes down in a single stroke.

“I’m sorry to say it, but I don’t know the compounding or the ratios either.”
“What?”
“I’m no physician. How would I know the processing and the compounding? Working that out is the physician’s work — which is to say yours, Brother Yu.”
“You mad little…”

Doctor Yu lost hold of himself, spat the curse out, and seized me by the collar.

Quite the temper on him.

At Blood Sand Plain he had been a man of few words; who would have guessed he swore this readily, and grabbed men by the collar besides. There was nothing anywhere in him of the Doctor Yu I had known in my past life. Well, there was something to be said for this version too.

He was breathing hard through his nose. I met his eyes and spoke evenly.

“Is there another way to cure your daughter?”
“…”
“Then take it as being taken in, and study how to do the processing and the compounding as I’ve told you. Even if what I say turns out to be a lie, the money I’ve given you will buy good medicinal stock, so you stand to lose nothing, Brother Yu.”
“…”

The hand at my collar went slack. Hearing it out, he could not say I was wrong.

“When your daughter’s treatment is done, come to the Yang manor.”

I rose from my seat. I was on my way out of the teahouse when Doctor Yu’s voice came from behind me.

“What is your name.”
“Yang Mujin. Eldest son of the Yang manor, and its Young Master.”

Yu Baegun stared blankly after Yang Mujin’s back as he left the teahouse.

He felt like a man under a spell.

He didn’t look as though he’d even turned twenty.

Yet his speech and his bearing were those of a seasoned gangho man well past thirty. That tongue had played him like a puppet, and the boy had laid down fifty taels of gold without so much as a blink. There was no seeing him as a boy of that age.

The lightning-struck jujube wood, the Soul-Returning Grass, the heavy pouch of gold on the table: his eyes moved over them in turn, and just the sight of them set a storm of tangled feeling whirling through his chest.

Picking up the Soul-Returning Grass, he turned it over, studying it.

An herb I’ve never seen before.

At a glance the dark red herb looked much like He Shou Wu; had he not known better, he might have taken it for a badly kept batch of it. And then there was the lightning-struck jujube wood, to be used as a medicinal ingredient. In all his learning he had never heard of such a preparation.

Yet Yang Mujin had said that compounded with the right herbs in exact proportions, these would make a cure. And that he had them from a cave in a cliff, no less.

Do I believe him, or not?

The doubt would not leave him. The whole thing was too preposterous for him to sort the true from the false. As he wavered, the things Yang Mujin had said a short while ago came back to him.

You must trust me completely.
There is no way to cure your daughter’s Soul-Returning Severed Meridians but this one.
Whether we have met before or not, what does it matter? There is only one thing for you to do right now, Brother Yu. Save your daughter.

Believe him. Take it as being taken in, and believe him.

These past few years there was nothing he had not tried to cure his girl. If a medicine was said to be good for the body, if an ingredient was rare, he had gotten hold of it though it cost a thousand in gold. He had brought every method there was to bear, and his daughter had only grown worse. Everything he could do, he had done, and by now he could not even find his bearings on what more to try, or how.

Sit with his hands empty and attempt nothing, or study the processing and the compounding as Yang Mujin had told him? The answer was already decided.

Yu Baegun gathered the things on the table carefully into his robes and went back to his daughter.

From that day, his ordeal began.

The first thing he did was work out the properties of the Soul-Returning Grass and the lightning-struck jujube wood. He dried them, ground them, pounded them, boiled them down over a fire, pressed them for their juice. Every method there was, he threw at them, and he buried himself in the study.

After hundreds, after thousands of attempts, he at last found the way to process the ingredients and the ratio to compound them in. What he made in the end was a small ‘elixir pill’, dark red like the Soul-Returning Grass at its heart.

“Haah— Haah—”

Yu Baegun carefully parted the lips of his daughter, unconscious and breathing in ragged gasps, and slipped the little pill inside. He poured lukewarm water in with a spoon, and the girl swallowed it with an audible gulp.

All that was left now was to wait. As he watched over her with his heart in his throat, his eyelids slowly grew heavy. Now that the cure was finished, the relief let the exhaustion of several sleepless nights fall on him all at once. He could not fight the falling eyelids, and in the little while he dozed the sun must have risen, because his eyes stung.

He opened them slowly, and his heart sank. The bed where his daughter should have been lying was empty. It felt as though his heart had dropped clean out of him with a thud.

“Yeohui!”

Yu Baegun started and sprang up from where he sat. He looked around for his daughter, and his eyes stopped at the window.

A girl stood there, her body thin from never being able to eat properly. Seen from behind she was familiar and strange at once, but he knew her in an instant.

“Ah…”

It was his daughter. Yeohui.

Tears welled in Yu Baegun’s eyes. The daughter who had lain like a doll for three full years was standing on her own feet, looking out at the world beyond the window.

At his call she turned slowly around. A faint flush had come into the face that had been nothing but bloodless and pale, and the eyes that had been unfocused and clouded had won back their light, clear and sharp. She looked at him and beamed.

“Papa!”

A clear, bright voice rang in his ears. The scene he had seen for three years only in dreams was happening in front of him. She came pattering over and buried herself in his arms, and a small warmth spread through every part of him.

“Aah…”

Holding his girl to him, Yu Baegun broke into sobs he could not hold back.

— Thump. Thump. Thump.

Against his chest his daughter’s heart beat out strong as a drum. This was not the cold body that had stiffened like a block of wood as the life guttered out of it. Life was moving through her again.

O gods of Heaven and Earth, I thank you…

Inwardly he gave his thanks to Heaven, over and over. Then, all at once, he thought better of it.

No.

It was not Heaven. All of this was a miracle one man had made.

Yang Mujin.

The name of the benefactor who had saved his daughter.

At that same hour.

Yang Mujin was swinging his spear, the same as any other day.

— Swish! Whirl! Swish!

As always, he drilled the fundamentals: Lan, Na, Zha.

A few laborers who had come to work at the house passed by with fed-up looks on their faces.

They must have thought I could not hear them²; they were muttering about why I did nothing but the same movements over and over, every single day.

But I paid it no mind. You see only as much as you know.

The Nine Great Sects and One Gang, who closed their gates because of the Orthodox-Demonic War, and the renowned Eight Great Clans of the Central Plains today: every one of them stresses the fundamentals. They are not fools; there is a reason they weigh such things so heavily.

Cutting, swinging, thrusting.

Only when you can bring these out as naturally as breathing can a form show its proper power. Neglect the basics and you may not notice it day to day, but in the moment when everything hangs, it decides whether you live or die. It is a lesson I learned the hard way, crossing back and forth over the line between life and death more times than I could count.

“Hooo—”

I lowered my spear and let out a rough breath. The gap between one voice and the next had stretched out again.

It was three days when I met Doctor Yu.

This time four days had passed before it came. That the voice was growing harder and harder to hear had to mean my fundamentals were entering the realm of full maturity, and in fact I had been feeling that change clearly of late, every time I handled the spear.

I went into my room, stripped off my clothes, and stood in front of the bronze mirror. Firm muscle came into view, standing out sharply even without my tensing. My body was in better condition than in my past life, and the muscles a spear calls for had developed noticeably.

The body is nearly finished.

Another three months or so and my external arts would reach a respectable level. Then my constitution would turn over, and internal and external arts would come into harmony. The gathering of qi and the movement of qi, both of them slow as a grub, would grow faster beyond any comparison. My meridians would strengthen and my acupoints widen, so that I could draw on qi as freely as I liked and take no internal injury from it under ordinary conditions. It amounted to being repaid for all that hardship at once.

My attainment in the Azure Dragon Art will rise too.

I would climb from third-rate to second-rate as a matter of course. It had been only a few months of proper training, and the progress was quick. But there was something a little unsatisfying in it, too, because there was a way to cut those three months shorter still.

Doctor Yu could turn three months into a few days.

The means was right there in front of me and I could not take hold of it, and that left me wanting. But I could hardly add a request of my own to a man with no room in his head for anything but making the cure for his girl. The Doctor Yu of my past life had regretted failing to cure her right up to the moment he died. I would wait, if it took three years instead of three months.

I was turning this and that over when I heard a knock at my door.

— Knock, knock.

“Young master, someone has come to see you. Says his name is Yu Baegun, and that he has come to repay a kindness.”

Doctor Yu. So you’re a tiger, are you?³

Speak of him and here he comes.