In any case, his complicated history with his weapon aside, he’d never really had the strongest grasp on the special technique. It was odd that all of a sudden he had it in him to use it twice, and for so long, without collapsing immediately after.
He heard the sound of footsteps on the paved stones of the courtyard outside his room, and he peeked out of the slightly-ajar door to see who it was.
“Ricky!” he called, stepping out once he recognized him. “Is everything okay? I…” He recalled suddenly that Ricky had told him not to come near, the last time they’d seen each other, and on second thought he stopped in his tracks, wondering if the sentiment still stood.
Ricky gave him a gentle smile. The blood had been washed out of his hair and he was wearing a clean set of robes; he looked so perfectly composed that Gyuvin wouldn’t have known he’d just been in battle if he hadn’t been there to see it for himself. “Everything’s fine, please don’t worry. I’m sorry for scaring you earlier. You shouldn’t have seen that.”
“What do you mean shouldn’t have seen that?” Gyuvin asked, incredulous. “I thought you were going to die in front of me, you know. What did Yookyung-sunbae do for you to recover so fast?”
Ricky retreated to his spot under his willow tree and Gyuvin knew not to follow, choosing just to sit down in the doorway of his room. “He just gave me some medicine, and let me rest a while,” Ricky answered. “He’s familiar with my condition, so he knew what to do. Honestly, it wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last, either.”
“Won’t be the last?” Gyuvin asked. “What is your condition, actually? I’ve never seen anyone bleed from their eyes before. That was terrifying…”
Ricky smiled, that smile Gyuvin knew he gave when he was trying to politely sidestep something. “It’s rare, so I don’t think anyone else in the cultivation world would have it. Either way, I think knowing about it would burden you more, and I don’t want that.”
“Not knowing how to keep you safe burdens me even more…” Gyuvin answered, a little sulkily, but he didn’t intend push any further.
“I’m tough, you know?” Ricky said lightheartedly. “I don’t need other people to worry about me.”
“I know you are, Rank 2 Ricky Shen,” Gyuvin retorted, laughing. He hadn’t looked at the ranking board in a while since he didn’t care at all about it, but that was the last placing he remembered.
“You’re one to talk, Rank 1 Kim Gyuvin,” Ricky returned. “I wonder if they ever found out what was suppressing everyone’s spiritual power…”
Gyuvin recounted to Ricky the entire sequence of events, from Han Seungho pointing out to the Mushan Temple monks that he still had his spiritual power, to the destruction of the very last willow that had lifted the suppression array. Ricky listened intently without interrupting, his eyebrows furrowed with concern.
“So that willow that we found growing near our bamboo grove was part of the array?” he asked finally. “How long had it been growing there without anyone even paying attention to it?”
“On hindsight, it was weird that it grew so fast,” Gyuvin said. “It only took a few weeks for it to grow from a sapling to a giant tree. We should have noticed something was off about that.”
Ricky shook his head. “Why would we suspect anything? The Peak grounds are so heavily warded that we can’t even pass through the gates without the entry tassel. The only two options are that either someone managed to break or bypass the wards, or it was someone from the Peak who set up the array in the first place.”
“Speaking of broken wards,” Gyuvin interjected. “The demons. The wards protecting the Peak must have been broken at some point before the siege began, because the demons wouldn’t have been able to get in otherwise.”
Ricky sighed. “Something about all this seems very sinister. The willow array had been set up for months before any of this began. Whoever is pulling the strings behind this has planned this for a while now, and not only is his plan very, very thorough, it looks like he’s had constant access to the Peak the entire time.”
“That means whoever set this all up might still be hiding somewhere here,” Gyuvin said, frowning. “Or worse. What if it’s one of us?”
“I have a question to ask you, Gyuvin,” Ricky started, after letting the silence hang in the still air for a few minutes. “Please answer it honestly.”
“When have I not been honest with you?” Gyuvin returned, lightheartedly. “I’ll answer honestly. What is it?”
“The night of the murders,” Ricky continued. It felt like weeks had passed since that night; the memory of seeing the body at the front gates and getting taken away to their detention quarters felt like something from the far past, but in truth it had only been two nights ago. Everything since then had just happened so fast that it felt like there’d been an eternity between that night and the present. “You left your quarters in the middle of the night. I saw you. Where did you go?”
“I did?” Gyuvin frowned. “Oh, I took a walk around the Peak with Minwoo-hyung because he was supposed to leave soon and I just wanted to spend some time with him, that’s all.”
“No, after that.”
“What?”
“I know you went for a walk, and I heard you come back,” Ricky said. “But later that night you left again. Where did you go?”
“I left again?” Gyuvin tried to remember what else he’d done that night. “No I didn’t. After I came back with Minwoo-hyung I went to sleep. I didn’t go anywhere until the next morning.”
Ricky’s eyebrows furrowed again, and he stayed quiet for a long moment. “I saw someone coming out of your quarters that night.”
Gyuvin put two and two together just then, from Ricky’s line of questioning. “You think the murders had something to do with me?”
“That’s not what I said, Gyuvin,” Ricky answered evenly. “I’m not trying to accuse anyone of anything. I only wanted to clarify what I saw.”
“Well, I’m telling you I didn’t leave my room after I came back from my walk,” Gyuvin insisted, a little hurt that Ricky would even hint at something like that, even if he’d said that wasn’t what he was trying to do. “Disbelieve me, if you like. I’ll take any kind of truth elixir you want, but my answer isn’t going to change.”
“No, it’s okay,” Ricky answered. “I believe you.”
Gyuvin narrowed his eyes at him. “No, you don’t.”
“I do,” Ricky repeated. “I was meditating outdoors, so I only opened my eyes when I heard footsteps. I saw someone leave, but it was out of the corner of my eye and he disappeared quickly. I didn’t think to follow because I didn’t think anything was going to happen.”
“Could it have been Jiwoong-hyung?”
Ricky shook his head. “He was with Gunwook and Matthew drinking that night. He told me he’d be spending the night there if it got too late.”
A long minute of silence ensued. They’d been talking just fine before, but Ricky’s question, what Gyuvin took to be some sort of a veiled accusation, had caught him off guard, and he found all of a sudden that he didn’t really have much more to say to the other boy.
“Maybe I was seeing things,” Ricky said finally, interrupting the silence. “It was dark, after all.”
Gyuvin said nothing back. Twilight was beginning to fall, and after a while he got up from where he was sitting and went back into his room, shutting the door behind him.Â
He lay on his bed and thought about Hanbin. He was almost certain that Hanbin was dead; he remembered how it felt to pick Hanbin’s body up from the ground and hold him in his arms. Hanbin was cold, like a rag doll, and there’d been no more warmth in his hands, no more life in his face. The wound in his chest was almost black around the edges, like it had been burned, something Gyuvin hadn’t been able to see during the night when it was dark. He wondered if he should be feeling something more. To be honest, he didn’t know if he even could feel anything at that moment.
Why did he have that memory? Those two blurry, addled visions he’d had, first of him standing outside the grounds and Hanbin telling him to go back, and then of Hanbin’s body on the ground in the middle of the forest. He was sure, now, that some part of that memory had to have been real and not a dream, since he’d found Hanbin’s body in the spot it was supposed to be in, but whose memory was he reliving? The fact that he’d woken up in his old courtyard instead of his detention courtyard added even more questions into the mix. He doubted it was his own memory; he didn’t recall ever leaving his detention courtyard, even though he’d seriously considered it that night. Plus, even if he did, he had no reason to leave the Peak grounds. The only reason he’d thought about leaving was to get rid of the incriminating pot of water in his room.
The water.
Gyuvin sat up in his bed and looked towards the windowsill where he’d left it, and his heart stood still for the hundredth time since he’d woken up that day. The pot of water was gone. He leaned out the window to see if it had toppled over and fallen out, but it hadn’t. The piece of plain white cloth was still sitting abandoned on the windowsill, which meant it had clearly been moved by some sort of human intervention.
That meant someone had been in his room without him knowing, saw the bloodied pot of water, and taken it. The incriminating evidence that he’d wanted more than anything to get rid of was in someone else’s hands now, and not only did he have no idea who it was, he had no idea what they were going to do with it.
A knock sounded at the door just then, and he nearly jumped out of his own skin. Putting the piece of cloth back down onto the windowsill, Gyuvin straightened out imaginary creases in his robes and steeled himself, opening the door. It was Minwoo, changed into a clean set of clothes, his expression uncharacteristically grave.
“Come on, Gyuvin,” he said softly, beckoning to him. “The seniors need to talk to you. Let’s go.”
He followed Minwoo without any protest. Sunset painted the sky as two sets of footsteps echoed through the empty breezeway, the floorboards still stained a rusty brown with the dried blood from earlier in the day, and Gyuvin was overcome with the terrifying feeling that this was the beginning of the end.Â
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