He’d gone back to the infirmary to look for Yookyung, the day Gyuvin was taken.
“Sunbae,” he’d asked, “Why did the Coalition send Gyuvin home? What did he do?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you’re part of the upper panel. How could you not know?”
Yookyung glanced up from something he was mixing in a bowl and narrowed his eyes at him. “I’m not always present at every discussion they have. It’s not like I’m anybody that important.”
“But he was called in for an interrogation, wasn’t he?” Ricky persisted. “I saw Minwoo-sunbae come and get him. You must have been there. What did the other seniors say?”
“You ask too many questions, Ricky,” Yookyung sighed. “I told them to stop going after him. They were taking it too far, as usual. I don’t know why they sent him home, but if they ordered it through the Coalition they must have had a lawful reason. It’s probably for his good, and yours too. Look how badly you were hurt because you were close to him.”
“Sunbae, I didn’t get hurt because of him, I got hurt because of everyone else.”
“Whatever it is,” Yookyung answered. “It’ll be better for you to have a new partner. I’ll have them assign you someone without a holy weapon this time. Zhanghao needs a new partner too, but they won’t make you two a pair since they don’t pair people from the same sect together. Anyway, I don’t want you showing up in my infirmary again. I’m not here to be your personal nanny. You’re old enough to take care of yourself.”
“I know. I will.” He sat in his chair and said nothing more for a long few minutes. When Yookyung had finished bottling up whatever he was mixing, he looked up at Ricky and sighed again.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m worried about Gyuvin,” he said, biting his lip. “Hyunjae-sunbae, Seungho-sunbae, they’ve always been out to get him. Why did they blindfold him and restrain him like that if they were just going to bring him home? That was unnecessary. It wasn’t like he was going to fight back when there were six Lunar Valley cultivators and three seniors right there.”
“They blindfolded him?” Yookyung stood, searching for an empty place on the shelf to put his new bottle of concoction. “They said they were taking him home? Why would they send someone from Lunar Valley to take Gyuvin back to Sunshower City?”
Ricky nodded. “I don’t know. That’s what those cultivators said.”
Yookyung stayed quiet for a long moment, thinking. “I’ll talk to Hyunjae.”
“Thanks, sunbae. Will you tell me if something happened to him?”
“You care too much,” he returned. “It’s going to get you killed if you’re not careful.”
“Then I’ll be careful.”
“Get out of my infirmary.”
Training had resumed the next day, the seniors didn’t want to waste any more time than had already been wasted. There were only a few weeks left of the training camp anyway, before they would all go back home for the rest of the year. The Spirit Beast Hunting Festival would commence at the beginning of next summer, where they would all reunite to partake in the hunting competition and enjoy the festivities that would last more than a month.
He wondered if Gyuvin would still be allowed to participate in the Spirit Beast Hunting Festival when the time came. Whatever he’d done to get him sent home, it couldn’t have been so severe that his punishment would extend into the next year, right?
Ricky focused on training with Matthew, and put all his other thoughts out of his mind. Matthew was no Gyuvin, of course, but he had a similar disposition; he was bright and cheerful and spoke without much filter, but by this point Ricky had spent enough time away from Moonrise Palace that the culture shock he’d first felt when he arrived at the camp no longer really fazed him. Dewspring Estate had always been the most liberal out of the five great sects, anyway; the closeness of the sect’s relationship with nature and wildlife, combined with their primarily non-combative cultivation methods, had made them altogether a very easy-going group of people to be around. From his, albeit limited, interactions with the other cultivators from Dewspring Estate who were at the Peak, he could tell they were generally of a happy-go-lucky glass-half-full sort, quick witted and adaptable to most circumstances in a blink.
They’d gotten to talking, one of the days, when Matthew had asked Ricky if he’d wanted to eat lunch together. Ricky saw no reason to say no; his main reasons for not eating with the others when Gyuvin was around were firstly, because Gyuvin was around and his holy weapon aura was suffocating, and secondly because he just didn’t really like the cacophony of so many people talking over each other at once, whereas Matthew was just one person, and he had no holy weapon.
“What’s it like, living up in the snowy mountains?” he’d asked. “You know, the weather and all. I’ve never seen the Palace before, either.”
“Well, it’s…cold,” Ricky answered. “I don’t notice it much because I grew up there, but I suppose other people would find it cold. And the Palace is a beautiful place. I wish other people got to see it more, but the journey up the mountain is too arduous for most people to bother with.”
“Really?” Matthew returned, intrigued. “Describe it to me. Maybe I’ll get to see it someday.”
Ricky tried his best to describe it from memory. He spoke about the spires on the tops of the tallest towers in the Palace, and how they reached so high he used to wonder when he was younger whether he could climb them and reach the heavens. He spoke about the way the fresh snow would blanket the outdoor walkways during the night, and how the children used to race each other to see who could make the first footprints in the pillowy whiteness. He spoke about the Palace Forge, located at the peak of the highest mountain in the mountain range, where every child received the weapon that would become their lifeline in every battle they fought from then on. The senior cultivators watched them closely during training, in their formative years. They had a way of knowing just what kind of weapon would suit each disciple; in his seventeen years, Ricky had never seen anyone leave the Forge with anything that didn’t end up becoming their perfect weapon.
“The weaponsmiths in the Forge work tirelessly to give us that privilege,” he said. “The Forge gave Yujin a saber, but he’d wanted to attempt the Trial by Fire, so he got a holy weapon on top of it. Zhanghao-hyung got his jinghu from the Forge, too, and he prefers using it far more than he likes his holy weapon.”
Matthew nodded slowly, listening intently. Ricky supposed he could relate; it was, he presumed, somewhat similar to the process of selecting a spirit pet at Dewspring Estate, the process Matthew had to have gone through to get Kumi. The little fox hardly left Matthew’s side at all; she was sitting beside him on the bench now, stretching lazily on her back, moving only to take pieces of meat Matthew offered her.
“Hey, you’re smiling,” Matthew said, looking relieved. “I was hoping to cheer you up. I’ve hardly seen you smile this past week.”
Ricky smiled again, in acknowledgement, but all he could think about was the way Gyuvin used to do the same; he’d do funny little things here and there in the hopes that Ricky would laugh, not caring if he made a fool of himself in the process. Ricky never really understood why, but he always appreciated it nevertheless.
He thought about whether or not Gyuvin had made it back to Sunshower City already. It wasn’t like they’d made any promises, but if Gyuvin was home, maybe they could write to each other. It was silly, really, that he’d gotten so attached to him over the course of a few months, but without him here to entertain him with mindless banter and a hundred and one random facts he somehow had stored in his mind at any given time, Ricky felt a little lost. Like an explorer who’d lost his map, or a moth whose lamp had burnt out.
He’d heard word from Gunwook that he and Jiwoong had asked Jeon Minwoo if Gyuvin had made it back to the Court alright, and all Minwoo had said was that he’d yet to hear from either the Sect Leader or Gyuvin himself about his return to Sunshower City, which was weird to say the least. Already it had been two weeks since he was taken away, and if his memory didn’t fail him the distance between Raintree Town and Sunshower City was not far enough that it could possibly take any more than five or six days to arrive. In his eyes it was uncharacteristic for Gyuvin to disappear somewhere and leave others worrying, which meant the safest option was to assume he hadn’t arrived yet and had been waylaid somewhere along the way. But without any information or any way to procure more, there was nothing he could do except wait for news to come.
With some determination, he set the feeling aside and didn’t think of it anymore for the rest of the training camp. Gyuvin was old enough to look out for himself. Ricky had spent his whole life relying only on himself; why, now, should he yearn for the presence of someone else? He dealt with his own feelings, as he’d always done, by thinking his way out of them, and in this way the last four weeks of the camp passed by without much event.
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