Memories

The Nosy God

"Do you know the Crown Prince of the Nine Heavens; Ye Hua?" she found herself asking.

We continue where we left off.

A long long time ago, Zhe Yan, the revered Medicine God, had been considered as a seer by most immortals. In their minds, he had always been too well prepared, had never been fazed by anything surprising, and had seemed to grasp a little knowledge of the future by knowing just what to say in the exact opportune moment.

Little did they know, he was in fact not a seer, but was bestowed with the art of paying attention to the little details that others might have missed.

Bai Zhen had laughed, hitting the desk repeatedly in mirth, when he first heard it, and had wondered out loud how being nosy can be misconstrued as being omniscient. Zhe Yan had let him laugh in his expense. It was after all, a bit funny. But he never went out of his way to correct people's assumptions, because he kinda like letting them think that he knew something they do not.

And he did – in his own way – knew more than other people. He credited this to his nosiness, his penchant to see under the surface, and his ability to connect the dots.

The same dots appeared in his mind when Bai Qian – with tears streaming down her face – inquired about the Crown Prince Ye Hua, who he had just healed from the same inflicted wounds moments ago. Ye Hua, who had lost the will to live after the demise of his blind mortal wife – whom Zhe Yan had seen previously in the Nine Heavens – and thought that she looked very much like Little Five.

He sighed again. Fate, oh Fate.

"Yes, I do know the Crown Prince Ye Hua. But before we get to that, I will clean the blood off of you, while you sip on my peach tea – which I prepared with no magic, because you once told me it tasted better that way – whist you'll tell me the entirety of your trial."

Gently, Zhe Yan grasped back her hand one by one and continued to clean down the blood. Waiting patiently for her to start her story.

At first, Bai Qian was quiet. She knew Zhe Yan knew of something, but he wouldn't say anything to her until the moment was right, as was his custom. She arranged her thoughts and proceeded to give him the facts of events that had come to past. She left the emotion out of her story and only gave him the hard facts. She wanted him to see the picture clearly, not blinded by emotions like she did. He worked better that way, dissecting moments and words in his brilliant mind.

She didn't realise it, but the tears kept falling from her eyes, and Zhe Yan kept wiping them off her face, in between dabbing the blood away.

In the end, all the visible blood was no more and only the tears remained. Bai Qian story stopped once in a while, because Zhe Yan handed her a cup of tea from time to time when her voice had become hoarse, or when she had became too lost in a painful memory that she sobbed more than she was talking.

"And so, my mortal self jumped off Zhu Xian Terrace. And when I woke up, I was here, having regained my immortality and my memories back. All of them."

Having finished her story, Bai Qian turned her gaze back to the window, watching the petals falling from the trees.

If she didn't, she would have seen the complicated emotion on Zhe Yan's face; ranging from sadness to rage. The latter made more of an appearance.

The washcloth he was holding was disintegrated in the fire of his rage. He held himself firmly, praying his cultivation was strong enough to prevent him from cloud-jumping to the Nine Heavens and wreck havoc. Consequences be damned!

He sighed again. There was two ways to handle this. The easy way, that was to burn the people responsible into ashes. Or the hard way.

Gazing at her form, he knew without a doubt that she loved the Crown Prince. And remembering the condition of the man itself, Zhe Yan knew without a doubt that he also loved her. Why else would he have jumped to follow her if not out of love?

But it wasn't that memory that implored him to take the hard way. It was the memory of seeing her mortal self back in the Nine Heavens with the cloth covering her eyes. The Crown Prince had came to her side then, seemingly unfeeling and cold, but Zhe Yan saw the underlying love in the way he was so in-tune with her movements, ready to catch her in a moments notice should she fall. In the way his hands twitched from holding back from touching her to hold her close. That facade of his cold exterior might fool others, but not Zhe Yan. He saw right through the Crown Prince.

Having witnessed the way the Heavenly Lord dealt with his second son, Zhe Yan understood that the old asshat was set against any display of emotion, especially love. He wouldn't want to lose his beloved Crown Prince to a mere mortal. Especially one who might turned his grandson from an obedient unfeeling proper Celestial, to one that would choose love over everything else.

From the way she described the changes in his demeanor, Zhe Yan believed that Ye Hua had decided to trick others into believing he was not in love with her, and thus sparing her live, without telling her beforehand, which was stupidity beyond belief. Didn't he know that putting a blindfold on her eyes was the same as blinding her?

Zhe Yan felt his anger rose again. But once he made a comparison between the Crown Prince he met before Su Su and after Su Su, the decision was decided for him. The hard way it was then.

Too many things were left unsaid between the two. Zhe Yan would no longer have it so.

"You asked me whether I know the Crown Prince, Ye Hua. You knew the answer to this because you remembered that I've met your mortal self and him back in the Nine Heavens," Zhe Yan started. "But what you don't know is that before that, I've come to the Nine Heavens with your father to discuss your ruined engagement with the Second Prince, and went back home having made a new engagement between you and Ye Hua."

She whipped her head so fast, Zhe Yan was afraid it might topple from her neck. That would be a bit harder for him to mend. She gasped loudly and still he continued. "But after that, what you also do not know, is that before I found you bloodied in front of this hut, I had just came back from healing the same wounds from the Crown Prince, who also jumped to save you or to simply follow you into nothingness, or so he thought."

Bai Qian gasped again.

But Zhe Yan was not finished. Far from it. "He should have woken up after I healed him. But I believe the knowledge of your demise, the loss of his love, made him lose his will to live and the last time I saw him, he was still lying there, immobile and unresponsive."

Bai Qian stood up so suddenly and was ready to cloud-jump, but Zhe Yan was prepared for that. He held tight to her arm and completed a series of movements to seal her magic.

Confused at first and then outraged, she screamed at him. "Why did you seal my magic?! I have to go to him! Let me go this instance, Zhe Yan!"

"Little Five, calm down," Zhe Yan said in the calmest tone he possessed. "You have always put your trust in me. Have I ever let you down?"

She continued to stare at him, but the intensity of her rage has quieted down. Slowly, Bai Qian shook her head.

"The rules of a common trial do not apply here," he explained. "In a mortal trial, you would have lived your life with no interference from any immortal beings. But in this trial, you were exposed to more than just one immortal, and being married to the Celestial Crown Prince nonetheless. That being said, I don't know why it happened the way it happened. You were cursed by Qing Cang and then Fate intervened and transformed your curse into an unorthodox trial. Maybe the path to be a High Goddess is harder than the rest? Maybe it was your destiny? There are a lot of maybes and we might never know the whys behind them. But what I do know, is that the loss of your husband and your son are so unbearable for you, that you simply do not want to accept that it was a trial. And nor should you. Because in a common trial, we learn the lessons and we let go of our mortal lives and its attachments. This could be done quite easily because those attachments have a lifetime span of mortals. In your case, your mortal self has ceased to exist, but your loved ones remained immortals. And furthermore, you regained all of your memories. And am I right to assume that you would not like to forget them?"

The fight has left Bai Qian and so she sat back down. "I was thinking of asking you for the drink of oblivion. It hurts, Zhe Yan. But after having talked to you, I'm not so sure that was the case anymore. But I don't know how we moved on from this."

"That's because the two of you were fools!" He raised one finger to stop whatever rant ready to leave Bai Qian's mouth. "But luckily for you," he stopped until he has her full attention, "you have me now! Listen closely, this is what we are going to do..."