Chapter 4: A Plaster That Won’t Come Off

“You are not going to die.”

The words landed in his ears and Xie Hansheng’s head snapped up, the chains striking a dull clang with the motion.

His face held none of the relief one might expect from someone learning they were to be saved, only a deeper wariness and suspicion.

“What are you talking about?” he asked, biting each word off clearly.

Shan Yiqiu did not answer immediately.

He looked steadily at Xie Hansheng’s face, then let his gaze drift downward in an unhurried sweep, taking careful measure of the savage penetrating wound at Xie Hansheng’s shoulder and the transformed scales surrounding it.

After a moment, he finally stood, unhurried in his movements, walked to where Xie Hansheng was, and drew from inside his coat an unsealed official document, which he held out.

Xie Hansheng hesitated for just an instant before taking the stiff sheet of paper.

By the thin thread of light from above, he scanned quickly through the text.

When he saw his own name listed under the jurisdiction of the enforcement corps, with “Chief Enforcement Officer Shan Yiqiu” written clearly after the transfer of custody, his heart gave one hard, fast beat.

“You had me transferred to you?”

He raised his head, his voice flat and cold.

Shan Yiqiu nodded. “You have bled for the Holy Court and for this land. I cannot sit by and let a man of conscience and goodwill die in silence.”

“A man of goodwill?”

Xie Hansheng let out a short, cold laugh, cutting and contemptuous.

“Your Excellency, which eye of yours saw that in me?”

“I don’t concern myself with how others see things or how they define them,” Shan Yiqiu said, lowering his gaze.

“I only look at the facts. The fact is that until the moment your transformation occurred, your record was beyond reproach and you had never deliberately harmed any innocent person. I am willing to trust my own judgment and willing to give you a chance to start over.”

Had these words fallen on anyone else’s ears, Shan Yiqiu would likely have gained a slave weeping in gratitude. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] On Xie Hansheng, however, something shifted in his expression.

Using the motion of returning the document as cover, his fingers shot forward and clamped around Shan Yiqiu’s wrist, wrenching him forward with force.

Shan Yiqiu had not anticipated the sudden move and had no time to pull back. He stumbled half a step in the direction of the pull and inevitably collided with Xie Hansheng’s blood-streaked chest.

The document fluttered to the ground.

There was no third person in the cell at that moment. Xie Hansheng was entirely capable of snapping Shan Yiqiu’s wrist in the next instant, or using his remaining strength to close around the slender, fragile throat before him.

Death was near enough to touch, yet Shan Yiqiu did not so much as tremble an eyelash. He was pulled close like this, and he tilted his face up as though he had been expecting it all along, calmly meeting the churning, scrutinizing eyes above him.

Xie Hansheng met that gaze and ran his tongue over his cracked, bleeding lips, lowering his voice so that his breath stirred the curve of Shan Yiqiu’s ear.

“Your Excellency, if you think I’m going to be grateful to you, going to weep with relief for you, then you are wrong…”

He tightened his grip and watched the skin under his fingers flush red.

“Do you know that I could twist that pretty head of yours a full one hundred and eighty degrees right now? You would die here, without a sound, and no one would come to save you.”

That was what he said, and that was what he did, yet Shan Yiqiu did not struggle. Instead, in this thoroughly undignified posture, he let the better half of his weight settle against Xie Hansheng’s chest.

Then the enforcement officer raised the hand that had not been seized, and his fingertips came to rest once more on the edge of the cold scales at the wound below Xie Hansheng’s collarbone, tracing the hard texture with careful attention.

“Kill me, and then what?”

Shan Yiqiu asked, his tone warmer than Xie Hansheng’s by several degrees.

“Your former comrades, your friends, everyone still connected to you in any way would be implicated and investigated on charges of murdering the Chief Enforcement Officer and attempting a prison break.”

“Xie Hansheng,” he spoke his name, “have you been so thoroughly eroded that you no longer care about anything and only want to drag everyone down with you?”

The words were spoken with intimacy. The threat behind them was more real and more forceful than anything imagined.

At these words, Xie Hansheng’s body locked up as though he had taken a blow, and the force in the hand gripping Shan Yiqiu’s wrist loosened bit by bit. The sudden savage fury that had erupted through tensed muscles deflated quickly in the face of that cold, real question, like a punctured balloon, and only a deeper exhaustion and helplessness remained.

Xie Hansheng let go.

Shan Yiqiu did not pull back. His fingertips remained resting on the scales. The two of them stayed pressed together in the silence, their breathing close.

“Have I ever called you a hypocrite?” Xie Hansheng said abruptly.

“Is it too late to apologize now?”

“No need,” Shan Yiqiu said carelessly.

“I won’t be angry over that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you were telling the truth,” Shan Yiqiu said easily, “and besides, we’ve known each other so many years. Whatever you may think of me, I have always considered you a friend.”

Silence spread through the small, foul space and Xie Hansheng did not know whether he ought to feel fortunate for that. His wounds were hurting, and the newly grown scales were being felt over and over by someone else’s hand, and the combination of sensations left him muddled.

Then Shan Yiqiu seemed to remember something and looked up.

He asked with curiosity, “You think I’m pretty?”

Only then did Xie Hansheng realize what words had just left his own mouth without thought.

His throat moved. His dry, cracked lips parted, but no sound came immediately.

Before Xie Hansheng could gather himself to argue or retort, Shan Yiqiu went on of his own accord.

“You dislike me very much.”

He was still leaning against Xie Hansheng, neither concerned about whether his presence was worsening the pain of the other man’s injuries nor bothered about whether a prisoner’s blood might stain his clothes.

He wanted to be there, and so he did not move, wearing the skin of a kind and mild man, while underneath lay a nature that paid back every slight and answered greed with greed.

A hypocrite, indeed.

Xie Hansheng pulled at the corner of his mouth, his voice hoarse.

“The fact that I don’t grovel before you and smile in your face the way some people do doesn’t mean I dislike you.”

His mouth said he did not dislike him, but his expression said the opposite.

“Very hostile,” Shan Yiqiu remarked.

Only then did he finally straighten up and move out from where Xie Hansheng had been supporting him, restoring the ordinary distance between two people.

The front of his black uniform had caught a fair amount of half-dried dark red blood. Shan Yiqiu glanced down at it briefly.

“You got my clothes dirty,” he said.

“It will come out of your pay later.”

Without waiting for a reaction from Xie Hansheng, he bent his knuckles and knocked three times on the cold stone wall.

Almost at the same instant the knocking fell, the sound of a key turning came from outside the cell.

Two men in enforcement corps uniforms walked in without a word, gave Shan Yiqiu a slight nod, and silently began to work on the heavy shackles on Xie Hansheng’s body.

The chains came loose with a piercing scrape of metal and joints that had been bound for so long were freed, yet what came with freedom was not ease but stiffness and a more acute aching.

Xie Hansheng gritted his teeth and, using the wall for support, slowly straightened his body.

It was at this moment that Shan Yiqiu saw, truly and fully, what the protagonist looked like after two months in prison.

He was bare from the waist up, and the skin that had gone so long without daylight showed a sickly pallor in the dimness, covered all over in old and new wounds layered on top of each other, and in grime.

With the shackles removed, the wounds that had been forcibly compressed split open again, and warm fresh blood wound its way down through the firm lines of muscle, sliding over the dark-colored, irregularly scattered transformed scales, tracing patterns that were both cruel and strange.

Pure Eastern blood was not common in the Holy Court. Shan Yiqiu was, and so was Xie Hansheng.

Xie Hansheng’s build was not the excessively swelled bulk common among Westerners but a lean, fluid power forged through a thousand hardships, and every scar made his former rank as knight commander something he had fully earned. At this moment, however, it only looked harrowing.

Shan Yiqiu stood one step away and watched in silence.

His gaze was steady and calm, though it paused when it passed over Xie Hansheng’s back, and then his eyes narrowed slightly.

Xie Hansheng had not quite found his footing and his breathing was rough with pain and weakness. Shan Yiqiu’s gaze had come to rest on the spot above his shoulder blades, at the first vertebra of the spine.

There was no bleeding there, and no obvious wound. On the pale skin, a dark grey dot had appeared, something metallic embedded at its center, fused with the flesh and grown into it.

Those who underwent transformation would gain strength and a capacity for recovery beyond ordinary human limits in the course of their erosion. This was precisely the source of the Holy Court’s urgent desire to study them and its deep fear of them. The nail driven into the spine had not killed Xie Hansheng but it had made him weak, leaving him subject to the will of others.

And in that moment, Shan Yiqiu suddenly understood why the protagonist, who should by all rights have had the strength to break free, had lain so quietly in the cell, waiting to die, letting his life ebb away.

Someone had driven a nail into his back.

Shan Yiqiu’s fingertips turned against his side, his expression undisturbed, only a slight deepening in his eyes.

He withdrew his gaze and turned to the subordinate waiting quietly nearby, his tone unhurried.

“I brought clean clothes. Would you please take him to wash up, and bring him out once he’s dressed.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

One subordinate answered at once.

Shan Yiqiu gave a nod, looked at Xie Hansheng no further, and turned to walk out of the cell.

His boot soles struck the damp stone floor with a clear, crisp sound.

“Shan—”

He had barely taken two steps when a hoarse call came from behind him, only one syllable of a surname before it stopped.

Shan Yiqiu halted and turned.

“What is it?”

Xie Hansheng, supported by one of the enforcement officers, had just managed to stand upright, fine beads of cold sweat seeping from his temple.

He fixed his eyes on Shan Yiqiu and asked, word by word.

“Since I’ve been put under your command, that transfer document… should it be given to me, or kept with you for filing?”

Hearing the question, Shan Yiqiu lifted half an eyebrow.

As though he found it amusing, he drew his tone out slowly.

“Strictly speaking… you should be given a copy, as proof.”

Xie Hansheng said nothing and simply held out his hand toward him.

Shan Yiqiu looked at the outstretched hand and laughed suddenly.

He did indeed draw from inside his coat the document, now somewhat creased, and walked back toward Xie Hansheng without haste.

Two steps away, he stopped. The hand holding the document hovered between them without passing it over, and instead he leaned forward slightly and asked in a voice only the two of them could hear, carrying a trace of teasing.

“Are you going to pull me over again this time?”

Xie Hansheng’s expression darkened at once and he shot his hand up and snatched the document clean from between Shan Yiqiu’s fingers, the motion fast enough to stir the air.

Shan Yiqiu pretended not to notice his irritation and turned once more to the two subordinates with a mild word.

“Thank you for your trouble.”

With that, this time he did not linger and left the cell with a light step.

……

Outside, the sky had grown a shade darker and the enforcement corps carriage stood quietly on the open ground, waiting as always.

In the brief stillness that the open space brought, however, several figures who had no business being there had appeared beside the carriage.

A number of knights in silver-white lined armor with the Holy Knight short capes over them, and the deputy commander they had gathered around at the center.

Seeing them, Shan Yiqiu’s expression did not change. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] He only clicked his tongue inwardly.

What a plaster that wouldn’t come off.