Shao’s eyes slowly fluttered open, and he was greeted by the opulent furnishings of the Patriarch’s home. He sat up with a start when he realized that he was laying in the bed of Patriarch Guanyu. The pain in Shao’s arm and face didn’t bother him nearly as much as the thought that he was getting blood on the Patriarch’s bed. Such a showing of disrespect would get him exiled from the village!
As Shao’s moment of half-awake confusion faded, the reality of his situation set in once more. The village? There wasn’t much of a village left. He wasn’t the same person he was a week ago. The events of the past few days struck Shao like a crashing wave, and he was just barely able to stop himself from bursting into tears.
“Lay back down, boy,” Granny Daiyu commanded from nearby. “I just finished wrapping your wounds. If you thrash about too much, I’ll have to start again.”
Shao looked around at his surroundings and saw that his broken arm had been lashed with bandages to a bamboo shoot in an arm splint. The splint did a surprisingly good job of reducing the pain in Shao’s arm when he tried to move it.
The vision to one of Shao’s eyes was blocked, and he lifted his uninjured arm to investigate the blockage. Bandages crossed his head and neck in a haphazard diagonal pattern, putting pressure on the cut Shao had taken to his face. Using all those bandages for a relatively minor wound seemed wasteful to him.
Granny Daiyu sat on a chair to one side of the Patriarch’s bed, and Yang Guanyu sat on a chair on the other side. Leaning against a wall on the far side of the room was Shen Jian. If all three of them were still present in the room, then Shao couldn’t have been unconscious for very long.
“How long was I asleep?” Shao asked.
“About an hour,” Lin Daiyu said briefly. She tried to push Shao back into bed, but he got out of the bed and rose to his feet. Shao frowned as he realized that splotches of blood stained the Patriarch’s bed.
“Please excuse me, Granny Daiyu, but I can’t afford to spend any more time in bed.”
With a disapproving look on her face, Lin Daiyu said, “Fine. If you’re too stubborn to listen to your poor old grandmother, at least put your arm in this sling.”
Lin Daiyu held out a large piece of linen that closely resembled the sleeve of a cheap robe. A long leather strap similar to a belt attached one end of the sling to the other, which was clearly meant to hold the arm in place. Shao knew that the village didn’t own anything like this. Those who broke their arms in Bluecrest Village typically just tied their arm up in a makeshift brace and tried to work through the pain.
“Where did you get this?” Shao asked as he painfully fitted his arm through the sling.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Shen Jian brought it here when he saw that you had collapsed,” Lin Daiyu said, gesturing over to the cultivator standing at the door.
“Do you have any more of those healing pills?” Shao asked Shen Jian. The fact that the older cultivator hadn’t yet offered made Shao think that none were left, but he had to confirm one way or another.
“I brought three with me,” Shen Jian said, kindling some small amount of hope in Shao that he wouldn’t have to spend the next few weeks in a sling. “I gave you one, and I gave the other two to villagers who had been mortally wounded by the dog yaoguai.”
Suddenly feeling foolish that he had asked for a healing pill at such a time, Shao meekly said, “I didn’t know. Thank you for that.”
To say that Shao was surprised by that statement would be an understatement. The healing pills were some of the only pieces of equipment Shen Jian had that he valued at all, and he used two of them to save the lives of mortals. Over and over again, Shen Jian told Shao that cultivators didn’t care about the lives of mortals, and they barely cared about the lives of other cultivators. Here, Shen Jian showed himself to be the exception to the rule. Why was he different from all the other cultivators in the world? Did Shen Jian really care about mortals, or was this just another example of manipulation?
Shaking his head and trying not to linger on that thought, Shao turned toward Patriarch Guanyu and bowed deeply. The idea of the Patriarch bowing to him still filled him with awkwardness.
“If I may ask, honorable Patriarch, what do you think will happen next? Is there still hope for the village?”
With a sad smile, Patriarch Guanyu said, “Thanks to you, there is. The docks and the fields are undamaged, and there are still enough of us alive to work them. There will be a period of mourning, and then we must all move on. The only lingering concern is that this might happen again. We have seen that not even our small village in a forgotten corner of Haishan is safe. We need a Divine Protector.”
Yang Guanyu looked over to Shao with a look of sorrow and humility in his eyes and said, “Please, Yang Lin Shao, stay here as our protector. I will give you everything I own on top of the customary tithe of ten percent to stop this from ever happening again. Please, I beg you.”
Several long seconds of silence passed as Shao’s commitment to becoming Shen Jian’s student began to crumble. What would he do if the people of Bluecrest were massacred once more when he was at Shigong Temple?
Just as Shao was about to relent and promise to become the Divine Protector of Bluecrest Village, Shen Jian cleared his voice loudly and said, “That won’t be necessary. I’ll supply you with a disciple from the Shigong Sect within two months. You’ll still need to give him ten percent of all your money and land, but you won’t be required to surrender everything. Does that work for you, Yang Guanyu?”
“Really? Do you swear it?”
Shen Jian sighed before saying, “I, Shen Jian, Disciple of the Path of the Divine Sword, swear upon the eternal Dao that a cultivator from Shigong Temple will arrive here in two months time and act as its Divine Protector.”
“Thank you, honorable cultivator. You have the eternal gratitude of the people of Bluecrest Village.”
“I appreciate it,” Shen Jian said, clearly trying to keep his expression neutral. “Now, come on, Yang Shao. We leave for Shigong Temple within the hour.”