Xie Shuishan was stunned by the scene as well.
Fortunately, although Zhu Huan had been twisted into a bizarre shape, he was wearing his nightclothes. The two men manipulating his limbs on the bed were both blindfolded.
Xie Shuishan stood beside the bed and watched for a while before discerning what was going on. This was probably something akin to modern massage therapy and rehabilitation.
Though the range of motion was far too extreme.
Every so often, under the two men’s handling, Xie Shuishan could hear the bones in Zhu Huan’s body crack.
Zhu Huan kept his eyes tightly shut from beginning to end, his lips pressed into a straight line without letting out a single sound. His face and neck were flushed crimson.
Xie Shuishan watched with some trepidation. Surely Zhu Huan’s body wouldn’t actually be broken by all this?
For once, Xie Shuishan had encountered something outside her area of expertise. She truly knew nothing about massage. She had tried many different kinds herself, but she had never seen anything like this—something that looked as though the bones were being snapped apart and reshaped.
Just as she leaned forward, intending to get a closer look, Jiang Yi—who had recovered despite his bleeding head—grabbed her and hauled her out from behind the bed curtains.
When Xie Shuishan asked him about it, Jiang Yi was afraid she might charge in again and make His Majesty lose face, so he had no choice but to tell her the truth.
“This is bone-setting by the blind.”
“His Majesty has been bedridden for a long time and is unable to move his limbs on his own. To prevent his bones from deforming, he summons blind practitioners skilled in bone-setting to the palace every ten days to stretch his joints and correct the alignment of his bones.”
“What kind of bone-setters?” Xie Shuishan pressed.
Jiang Yi was reluctant to explain, but he was genuinely afraid of her now.
After a moment, he continued, “The blind are those who cannot see, or whose vision is extremely poor. From childhood, they are specially trained to become intimately familiar with the human bones and meridians.”
Only then did Xie Shuishan understand.
Oh. Blind-person massage.
She stopped giving Jiang Yi a hard time and no longer tried to return to the bedside to watch Zhu Huan being twisted into strange shapes.
Xie Shuishan leaned back in a high-backed chair, idly turning her teacup in her hand. The water inside formed tiny whirlpools as her nimble wrist moved.
Through the gauzy curtains, she could see that the two blind men were practically about to hoist Zhu Huan up by the legs and shake him upside down.
Was this really supposed to help with his recovery?
But Zhu Huan could never recover in the first place.
In every version of the story Xie Shuishan knew—whether it was the original plot in which the male and female leads emerged victorious, or the twenty-five times Zhu Huan destroyed the world—the system’s descriptions of Zhu Huan’s death had all been rather undignified.
It was as though his misery were Heaven’s fair judgment and retribution for his brutality and bloodlust.
By the time Xie Shuishan set down her teacup, the tea had gone completely cold. At last, the bone-setting session came to an end.
The two blind men were helped down from the bed. Both were drenched in sweat, and palace maids attended to them as they were taken to the eastern side hall to rest for the time being.
The bed curtains were drawn back, but the ordeal for Zhu Huan was not over.
The palace maids helped him wash himself once more. Afterward, he was not dressed in his nightclothes; only a light, soft quilt covered his body.
Zhu Huan lay facing the inside of the bed. Xie Shuishan could see only the back of his head, his long hair somewhat disheveled. Beneath the quilt, the rise and fall of his breathing was almost imperceptible. For a while, Xie Shuishan even suspected that he was already dead.
Before long, two female physicians arrived and began massaging him.
One started at his shoulders and back, while the other began with his feet.
Before laying hands on him, they took porcelain bottles from the medicine chests they had brought with them. They poured an unknown liquid into their palms and rubbed their hands together to warm it before beginning the massage.
The rich scent of cloves, mingled with a faint sandalwood fragrance, soon spread into Xie Shuishan’s nose.
Clearly, whatever the female physicians were using on Zhu Huan served much the same purpose as massage oil.
Like the two blind men before them, the female physicians worked with great vigor. At least they were not blindfolded, but most of their movements were performed through the quilt.
They reached beneath it with their hands, never daring to look at Zhu Huan’s body beneath the covers.
When the massage was over, the female physicians washed their hands and withdrew. More palace maids arrived with their sleeves rolled up and basins of water. They shifted Zhu Huan’s head to the edge of the bed and began washing and combing his long hair.
Once wet, his hair was black and thick. It was repeatedly soaked and scrubbed with medicinal water, then wrung dry. A little oil was carefully rubbed into the ends before the hair was dried with warm air.
At last, everything was finished. The palace maids helped Zhu Huan into a fresh set of nightclothes. He finally opened his eyes, drank a bowl of herbal medicine, and then another bowl of ginseng broth.
Yet he did not even sleep for a while. Instead, he opened his mouth and called, “Jiang Yi, read the memorials.”
Jiang Yi went to fetch the memorials. Xie Shuishan rose from the table and walked toward the bed.
The closer she came to Zhu Huan, the more pronounced the scent of cloves became.
He was lying on the bed, his luxuriant black hair spread across the pillow. His complexion was rosy, and he smelled fragrant, like a little cake fresh from the oven after being baked to perfection.
But when Xie Shuishan looked down at him and met his eyes, she saw none of the ease or relaxation one might expect after being so thoroughly attended to.
His eyes were filled with an unmistakable numbness and gloom, along with silent “cracks.”
Even in the modern world, with its advanced medical care, there were still many people who, despite having the means to recover some of their bodily functions through rehabilitation after an injury, ultimately gave up and allowed their limbs to gradually deteriorate.
The reason was simply that they could not endure the pain of watching faint hopes shatter again and again, nor the helplessness of being handled like a piece of living flesh.
It was the loss of control that came from placing one’s dignity entirely in the hands of others.
What was more, Zhu Huan was a true emperor, and certainly not a gentle or easygoing man. To him, being subjected to such treatment was probably comparable to being slowly flayed alive.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Xie Shuishan looked at Zhu Huan. She raised a hand and held it suspended above him, without even knowing what she intended to do.
She had never been disabled, nor had she ever experienced that kind of despair after hope had been crushed.
She could not empathize with Zhu Huan. She only failed to understand.
Her illness was a dissociation from reality, from the many emotions and sensations of authenticity within it, compounded by emotional apathy. She had none of the shame that ordinary people possessed, nor the reverence for other people’s lives—or for her own—that a normal person ought to have.
But she had undeniably been moved.
The way Zhu Huan had just endured everything with his face flushed and his eyes shut, and the ashes filling his eyes now, as though a great fire had burned through him, while he still refused to accept fate or death—that had indeed struck something within Xie Shuishan, something sealed away for many years.
It was a distant past separated from her by two worlds, a wound hidden deep within the long passage of time, still refusing to heal and continuing to send out an itch of pain.
Zhu Huan also reminded Xie Shuishan of the Irish wolfhound she had once owned.
She still remembered that its name was Aier.
At the time, after Xie Shuishan and the dog had been attacked, the dog had been gravely injured but had not died immediately.
The doctor had advised Xie Shuishan to have it euthanized. Its internal organs had suffered multiple injuries, and one of its lungs had been punctured. Every breath it took while alive was an agony without end.
At first, Xie Shuishan had also thought it would be best to let it leave this world peacefully. It had been a good dog.
They decided to put it to sleep the following day. That night, when Xie Shuishan went to say goodbye, the dog saw her and still stubbornly tried to get up.
Xie Shuishan watched coldly as it crawled, dragging a long smear of blood across the floor, through its bed and onto the ground.
Watching it crawl over, she saw it lick the wound on Xie Shuishan’s hand, which was wrapped in gauze.
It also ate a great deal of softened dog food and drank milk. Later, because the pain was too severe, it vomited twice.
But each time it threw up, it would return to eat again as soon as fresh food was added to its bowl.
That night, Xie Shuishan sat beside the doghouse until dawn, watching the servants tend to Aier as it vomited and ate, over and over.
At first, they still felt sorry for Aier. They thought that since it was going to die anyway, they might as well let it eat something.
Later, they all said that the dog was beyond saving and shouldn’t be fed anymore. Feeding it would only make it suffer.
They all said it wouldn’t survive.
It might die in the middle of the night.
Aier knew that it was injured—seriously injured. It was in so much pain, yet it stubbornly kept eating. Perhaps it believed that as long as it ate, its wounds would heal.
When dawn came, Xie Shuishan asked it, “Do you still want to live?”
“If you do, drink the milk one more time. I’ll keep you alive.”
Aier had always been remarkably perceptive. It drank once more.
Xie Shuishan abandoned the idea of euthanasia and ordered the doctors to do everything they could to save it.
Over the course of its treatment, it endured countless brushes with death, infections, deteriorations, and amputations.
But each time—every single time—it showed even the slightest improvement, whenever Xie Shuishan looked at it, it would lick the place on her hand where the wound had once been, though the scar had long since healed and no longer existed.
It clung stubbornly, almost astonishingly, to life for several months. In the end, every limb that could be removed had been removed. Only half a dog remained.
When it died, Xie Shuishan was at the negotiating table with her grandfather.
Her grandfather was negotiating the acquisition of a multinational corporation.
That night, unable to shoulder his enormous debts, the other company’s chairman jumped from the office building where they were holding negotiations.
Their rival company seized the opportunity and slandered the Xie family, claiming that they had killed him in order to complete the acquisition. Public outrage erupted, while reporters surrounded the building and the police became involved. As a result, it was three days before Xie Shuishan was able to return home under the protection of her bodyguards.
By then, her dog was dead.
It had died on the same night as the chairman who had been unable to bear the company’s bankruptcy and leaped to his death.
But Xie Shuishan’s dog had died only because it truly could not be saved anymore, after holding on until nothing remained but a skeleton. Until the very end, it had waited for Xie Shuishan to come home.
Those who could live did not cherish the prime of their lives and insisted on dying, while those who wanted to live could not hold on for a mere three more days.
By then, Xie Shuishan had already developed dissociative symptoms after losing both her parents. And now she had lost the final gift her mother had left her.
She had wanted to cry her heart out. But to the very end, she still shed not a single tear.
She no longer knew how to express her grief in a healthy way.
Those events and emotions had long since been buried by her growing up, by the passage of time, and even by her death.
Yet at this very moment, in another world and under circumstances utterly unrelated to those of the past, she remembered them all over again.
Her hand, suspended in midair, finally descended slowly onto Zhu Huan’s brow and sank into his long hair.
Her thoughts were somewhat hazy as she asked the question she had never gotten the chance to ask Aier:
“Does it… not hurt?”
“Go on.” Don’t cling to it anymore.
Why insist on living when it was so painful?
Lying there, Zhu Huan naturally took in the tidal surge of pity and tenderness flooding Xie Shuishan’s eyes as he gazed up at her.
But when Xie Shuishan’s fingers slipped into the hair at his temples and covered his eyes, manually closing his eyelids, Zhu Huan said nothing.
He opened his mouth in shock and uncertainty.
He was just about to speak when Jiang Yi returned, carrying a memorial.
He called softly, “His Majesty.”
Xie Shuishan seemed like someone abruptly awakened from a dream. Her hand, still pressed over Zhu Huan’s eyelids, felt the eyeballs rolling beneath her palm and trembled slightly.
Then the “tide” in her eyes receded like clouds dispersing after rain, vanishing without a trace.
She rose slowly, withdrew her hand, and left the bedside with calm composure, without looking at Zhu Huan again.
I’ve been refining the outline these past few days, coming up with a new idea every day. Save the good articles and recognize them by the cover. If you see me change the title, just ignore it, hahaha.
