Rising Phoenix

Gu Nanyi suddenly said, “Diarrhea.”

Ning Cheng paused in understanding. Feng Zhiwei had eaten all that raw seafood and drank so much the night before, ending in puking and diarrhea and unrestful sleep. Then she had headed to that battle wits with Zhou Xizhong before rushing anxiously her to the Ancestral Temple. She had pushed her body and mind to the limits, and her weakened body had not been able to resist the illness.

Ning Yi bit his lips, his face as pale as frosted autumn grass. Feng Zhiwei’s body was a feverish stove in his arms, and she had clearly been ill for a while now. When had it begun? She had refused to say a word, not allowing herself to collapse until everything had settled!

She must have known she was infected a long time ago, and so she had kept him distant, and he had thought…

Ning Yi knelt in the dust, paying no mind to his dirty robes. He hugged Feng Zhiwei close, his hands trembling.

He had never hated his own blindness so much!

Gu Nanyi stood numbly beside them, walnuts in his hand. He stared blankly at the dark green climbing over Feng Zhiwei’s face… She was sick? When? How? Why did he not know?

And that Ning Yi, why was his expression so dark? Was she going to die?

Would she die?

As soon as the question appeared in his mind, Gu Nanyi trembled.

He felt a dark, uncomfortable feeling rise up within him as if his chest was plugged. His breath came raggedly as he experienced a strange emotion for the first time.

His life had always been a lake of dead water, his heart always beating to the same rhythm. Sadness, pain, happiness, joy… everything that a normal person had as missing from his life, and he did not understand any of it.

When he had lost his father at age three, he had been very calm.

When his wet-nurse and nanny had died when he was eight, she had taken his hand, her eyes teary as she said: “Poor child, for a person like you to bear so much…”

As he stared indifferently at his wet-nurse that night, he had calmly taken back his hands and wiped off her tears.

Then he had turned and walked through a house filled with bowing attendants.

What was he? What? No one had ever told him, and everyone looked at him that way with those strange eyes, sighing as they walked by him.

He cared nothing for what had happened or those eyes or expressions. His own life seemed like the life of a stranger, distant as if coming to him from a wide expanse of mountain and sea, as if from a different world.

But in this moment he suddenly wished to know what kind of person he was.

Was it because he was different that though he was always by Feng Zhiwei’s side, he still could not understand what had happened to her?

And if she died… if she died…

Gu Nanyi stepped back, frowning and he touched his chest, shutting his eyes and taking deep breaths… He must have been infected as well, that was why he was in pain.

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Feng Zhiwei turned her head and began vomiting. She had not eaten much, so she could only spew out gastric juice and bile. Her vomit shot out violently like liquid arrows, covering Ning Yi and not sparing Ning Cheng or Gu Nanyi.

But none of them moved away, and even Gu Nanyi’s obsessive cleanliness did not make him step away.

Ning Yi clutched her even tighter, propping her up on his knee and gently patting her back, relieving the pressure from her internal organs and helping her breath after the violent vomiting, paying no mind to the filth or smell.

Suddenly, the distant sounds of marching filled the sky and a great sea appeared in view. Feng Zhou’s troops had finally arrived.

Ning Yi turned his head, his cold stare locked onto the ajar gates of the Yan Family’s Ancestral Temple, his deep calm eyes revealing an unquenchable fury.

“Tear down the temple!”

“Your Highness!”

“Kill anyone who stands in your way!”

…

A shroud of misery and darkness reigned over West Yard.

The Imperial Envoy had been infected by the plague and his life was in great peril. News of this matter was sealed, and everyone in the know had been forbidden from speaking even to their own men. Prince Chu’s fury was like a great storm, and people walked hurriedly here and there in silent trepidation. No one dared speak, and whenever people met in the hallways and streets, they exchanged terrified glanced before hurrying off on their missions to find physicians and medicine.

A series of physicians were ushered in one after the other as piles of rare, expensive medicine were gathered like worthless trash. The medicine stoves were cooking day and night, and Prince Chu’s face great more and more pale as the days passed.

After that day’s great fury, he had not spoken a single word to those around him. He could not stay by Feng Zhiwei’s sickbed, sending off a secret missive for the Imperial Court’s Grand Physicians before spending the days in meetings, interrogating the spies that they had captured.

Feng Zhiwei had fallen to the plague and struggled on the edge of life and death. The South Sea was plunged into upheaval as she lingered in a coma.

An enraged Ning Yi finally bared his cold and merciless fangs.

After Hua Qiong had helped Yan Huaishi and his invalid mother limp out of the gates, Ning Yi had sealed the gates once more, locking the Yan Family inside.

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While the rest of the extended family was off receiving their free rations and silver, Ning Yi had the three thousand Imperial Guards and three thousand Feng Zhou troops dig a tunnel underneath the Ancestral Temple before stashing a huge amount of dynamite right below the structure. With a muffled boom the storied walls of South Sea’s wealthiest family’s Ancestral Temple, said to be built by an ancient Emperor, collapsed. The magnificent building, the gorgeously carved beams and painted pillars, the site of worship for generations over the centuries, shattered into broken ruins, revealing the pillars to the golden sun.

Basically every single important male descendant of the family was inside the temple, and fortunately the foundations of the building were firm. Though the building had collapsed, the pillars within held firm. The devastating blow of extinction never came, but one man still died and many were injured. The current Family Head hit his head and fell into a coma; Yan Huaiyuan’s legs were broken by a falling wall. Grandfather Yan was not harmed in anyway, but when the younger generation tried to carry him away and flee, the old man pushed them away and fell into a fit of tears.

He knelt before the broken spirit tablet of the Yan Family’s founding Emperor and kowtowed until his forehead bled, exclaiming: “The heavens have forsaken our Yan Family! Dewei[1] has brought shame to the ancestors and cannot face the ancestors!”

That day, he committed suicide by smashing his head into a wall of the Ancestral Temple, his blood quietly pooling around him in the flying dragon patterns on the ground.

[1] Yan Dewei is Grandfather Yan’s name