COPPER COINS

Chapter 43: Plague County (I)

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The two waiters led the yamen clerks around the inn building and pointed up at a shut window on the second floor. In low voices, they said, "Daren, it's that one."
These two worked in customer service all day long, so obviously knew just the right things to say––
As ordinary townspeople, they did not know nor care about the wider context of that wanted poster, but they knew to be extremely careful when they reported the monk. They couldn't just barge in and say, "There's a monk in our shop who looks exactly like the Guoshi," as, if they turned out to have been mistaken, they would have offended all parties and gotten their eyeballs poked out for a good wash. They also couldn't say, "The monk looks exactly like that wanted poster all over town," because what if, somehow, the monk really was the Guoshi or connected to the Guoshi? The Guoshi would definitely not be happy that they had accused him of being a criminal, and they'd be in real trouble.
   
The two waiters had pondered this for a while, then had decided to tell the yamen, "There's a monk in our inn who seems very strange." If the yamen clerks wanted to know what precisely made the monk ‘strange’, that was not the waiters' problem.
Even so, as the waiters led the clerks back to the inn, they began to feel conflicted again. They didn't know why, but somehow they felt anxious about it all.
   
Although the men outside the inn had made their voices as low as they could, Xue Xian, curled up on the bed, heard every word.
They were surrounded again.
They were... surrounded... by the yamen... again!
That bald donkey must have been born under the wrong stars. Out of the three cities they'd visited, they'd gotten onto the radar of two yamen, and each time the clerks had come directly to break down the door!
   
The weird feeling that had settled into Xue Xian earlier had still not dissipated. Xue Xian turned over in the bed so that his back was to Xuanmin now. He re-entered that cycle known as ‘three days annoyed at Xuanmin, five days pissed off at Xuanmin’.
As always, Xuanmin's steps were completely silent, but Xue Xian could still feel their presence by their weight on the floorboards.
He could feel that Xuanmin had walked up to the bed and was standing there, looking at him.
   
Xue Xian assumed, based on Xuanmin's stuck-up and detached personality, that Xuanmin had come over to do one thing –– pick up the money that Xue Xian had snapped at him to take.
But Xuanmin did not move at all, not toward the mattress nor toward the pile of gold and silver. He simply stood there by the bed, saying not a word.

“...”
Why is he just standing there stiff as a pole, not saying anything?!
Still staring at the wall, Xue Xian frowned. He really didn't enjoy being stared at like this. With strangers, it was tolerable, since he saw them as mere dust on the ground anyway; he could ignore them, or reach out a claw and swat them away. But it was different with the bald donkey. When others stared at Xue Xian, it merely made him irritated, but under Xuanmin's gaze, his entire head from the top of his skull to the base of his neck felt completely frozen.
His whole dragon skin was going to peel off...
   
When will this end? If you have something to say, damn monk, just say it...
Xue Xian was so tense from self-consciousness that he was practically turning into a stick of dragon jerky right there on the bed. In his mind he muttered angrily to himself, but in reality he said nothing.
The silence in the room was unnerving.
For a brief moment, everything seemed to vanish from Xue Xian's sharp hearing –– from the noises next door to the movements outside the window and the hush of the street under curfew –– all of it was gone, hanging in the air, suffocated by that silence. Even Xue Xian didn't realise that it was because he was still waiting for Xuanmin to speak.
Since Xuanmin had been standing there for so long unmoving, the thing he wanted to say had to be... unusual. There was no reason to hold back otherwise. Was he about to give more detail on who it was that he was looking for? Or something else?
   
The yamen clerks Xue Xian had heard beneath the window were probably already entering the inn and creeping up the stairs by now. Still, Xuanmin said nothing.
“...” Xue Xian had already died multiple times in his mind. Why don't you just choke on your words and die already?
   
Gradually, the yamen clerks' voices wormed their way back into Xue Xian's ear: "Be careful where you step. We don't want to alert them. We'll go to the door, and you guys watch the window."
Xue Xian laughed coldly. If you keep holding it back, you can go hold it in the yamen jail.
   
“You ––" Xuanmin finally said, something indescribable in his tone making Xue Xian feel even tenser.
   
Xue Xian was a divine dragon, and he was getting all worked up over a single word from a mere mortal? What the hell?
Xue Xian wasn't even breathing anymore. He waited and waited for Xuanmin to finish his sentence. But having just said the word You, the fucking bald donkey had fallen silent again.
Xuanmin should be glad this zuzong wasn't in his dragon form at that moment. Xue Xian was feeling so nervous that he would've brought the whole inn down!
   
The yamen clerks had made their way into the inn from the back door, but had seemed to have attracted some attention from others in the building, causing a small commotion.
Xue Xian heard Xuanmin's robes suddenly move a little –– Xuanmin seemed to have noticed the noise below, and turned to look at the doorway. With that, the indescribable feeling in the atmosphere disappeared, leaving no trace at all.
   
When Xuanmin turned his head back, he saw that the zuzong was throwing some kind of tantrum again. Xue Xian had burrowed his head deep into the nest of blankets, as though he'd given up on life and was ready to suffocate right then and there.
Actually, Xue Xian was angrily thinking, Fine, it’s your life you’re throwing away. Get caught if you want. I can get away anytime.
With that thought, his body began to glow dimly with a white light.
   
Deng deng deng––   
Now that they were this close, the clerks had given up trying to be quiet. Their footsteps were alarmingly loud as they boomed rapidly up the stairs.
And beneath the window, where more guards stood, there was a slicing sound, like swords being slipped out of scabbards.
   
So the door and the window were both blocked.
The yamen clerks turned the corner and marched toward the door to Xuanmin and Xue Xian’s room, pushing away the inn boy stationed in the corridor.
   
And in that instant, the human form on the bed vanished and a long black shadow emerged from the blankets, growing larger and larger as it slithered out.
Hong––
The wall against which the bed had been leaning fell away, revealing a shocked Stone Zhang and Lu Nianqi sitting next door.
   
Xuanmin was briefly stunned, too –– he hadn't expected the zuzong to turn into a dragon so casually. When Xuanmin came back to his senses, he saw that he was holding a black robe, thrown to him by Xue Xian, who seemed to have relegated him to some kind of clothes-holding sidekick role.
Even more typical, as the zuzong tossed Xuanmin the robe, he didn't forget to take back the golden pearls he’d tucked inside his sleeve earlier. With a flick of his claw, Xue Xian sent the pearls spinning, and they swiftly disappeared into him, somehow slipping into his scales.
Xuanmin: “...”
   
Xue Xian had broken down the wall –– the yamen clerks had to know that something was happening inside.
There came a loud shout from beyond the door: "Don't bother! We have you surrounded on all sides, you have no way of escaping!"
   
As the clerk yelled, his companions began to ram against the door.
In the moment that the door was forced open, the leading clerk even sneered, "There's nothing you can do. Unless you broke down the roof and flew out––"
   
He stopped.
The crowd of clerks standing by the door wondered if they were all dreaming...
No, they were definitely dreaming.
   
The leading clerk's mouth was still hanging open mid-speech as he gaped at the black dragon curled up inside the room.
The dragon was inconceivably large –– just its tail part filled the entire room. The bed had been crushed, and the wall beside it had been reduced to rubble as easily as one might slice through tofu, leaving behind only a thin frame on all four sides.
   
But... what kind of knife could slice a wall like tofu?!
Then, the leading clerk noticed that the enormous black dragon had already broken down much of the roof, and that the top half of its body reached outside, sprawled across the sloping roof of the inn. The whole building seemed to be sagging in one direction under its weight.
   
The clerks' faces were still frozen in bewilderment and terror when the dragon lowered its heavy head and looked at them through the gap in the roof. Then, it reached out a claw and seized the equally stunned middle-aged man and skinny boy from the neighboring room. At the same time, it nudged its head and lifted a young monk wearing a white robe onto its back.
   
The black dragon glared at the clerks once more, then let out a bright roar as its head stretched out.
Instantly, the wind and clouds above responded, and lightning flashed in the distance, intermittently lighting up the dark night sky. Thunder rippled toward the inn from its epicenter somewhere far away, booming increasingly louder.
Then, an enormous, deafening gust of wind blasted into the room.
   
The black dragon mounted the wind and ascended to the clouds above. As it departed, its long black shadow flitted in and out of the clouds, pirouetting in the air before vanishing into the darkness.
   
Whether they'd been standing by the door or waiting beneath the window, all of the yamen clerks –– as well as those two waiters, and the handful of nearby townspeople who'd happened to look up in that moment –– had seen that dragon fly away into the sky, and could not believe their eyes.
The leading clerk had not even managed to see what Xuanmin looked like -- he only remembered that cloud-like robe.
   
Shortly after the dragon disappeared, the dark clouds he'd summoned began to pour with torrential rain.
The storm was overwhelming, and as the raindrops slapped onto the clerks' faces, they felt so cold that there were chills down their spines.
   
Finally, the clerks came back to their senses. One of them murmured, "They... they really did break down the roof... and fly out..."
The man's voice seemed squeezed out of the very bottom of his throat, and sounded strained, perhaps from the shock, or from the cold.
   
Hearing this, the leading clerk's lips began to tremble, and he turned pale. "We... we were here to arrest the monk, right?"
"Ah," his colleagues stuttered. "Right..."
   
"Just now in the sky... that was a dragon, right?" the leading clerk asked, still in a daze.
"Right..."
   
"That monk, did you see it ––" The leading clerk turned his face to the skies again. "That monk flew away with the dragon..."
"Right..."
   
The clerks stretched their necks out as far as they'd go and gawked into the night together like a group of meerkats. Apart from Right... they seemed to have forgotten how to speak. Only when their uniforms had become completely drenched in freezing rain did they suddenly truly realise what had just happened––
A monk! Riding a dragon!
   
Was it every day that you saw a mythical, divine creature like a dragon?
But that monk actually rode the dragon into the sky; was it every day that you saw a monk like that?
   
The same thought seemed to flash simultaneously across the clerks' minds. They slowly looked at each other as their faces shifted from terror to confusion to revelation. "Could it be... that he's... that person?"
In all the nation, they could only think of one monk who was powerful enough to tame a dragon––
That mysterious masked Guoshi, whose face no one had ever seen.
   
The speed at which rumors can sometimes spread across a town is terrifying. Within the night, all of Huazhi County began to speak of one thing –– the Guoshi was back!
The previously unremarkable inn immediately exploded with customers as crowds came to gawp at its roof and at the two waiters who had been witness to it all. After being interrogated by the authorities, the neighbors all swarmed in too, eager to hear the waiters’ tale.
   
As Huazhi Xian Cheng whipped itself into a frenzy, the black dragon and white-clad monk in question were swimming in a lake not far from Qingping County.
Stone Zhang and Lu Nianqi were still in shock from the flight and floated corpse-like on the surface of the water. Even as the group reached the shore and Xuanmin dragged them each out, they continued to gaze off into space in stunned silence.
Jiang Shining had long reverted to his paper man form. As he shivered on a patch of dry grass by the water, he glanced at the mess of pagodas and towers in the distance and asked Xue Xian, "Zuzong, could you not land in such a traumatic way next time?"
   
Irritated, Xue Xian pointed at those faraway city gates. "A landing is a landing," he snapped. "We didn't even have to spend money on a carriage. Look at the city gates. Can you read? Read it with me: Qing –– Ping –– County. I brought you to your sister's front door, and you're still complaining about this and that. You should be ashamed of yourself!"