Book 3. The Long Journey. Chapter 18. Agnes’s Choice.

“It’s already too late for her,” Yin said without emotion in his voice, but at the same time couldn’t hide his inner feelings from Laien. He sighed inwardly, thinking that Laien was too good and too soft of a person for his own sake. The world was a cruel place… not everyone, and in fact almost no one would be as lucky as him and receive the protection of one of the supreme experts of his country. No, the average person would have no one to ask when trouble came hitting on the door to his house; and even if he did ask, those who his family had considered friends would make excuses and refuse to help.

“Clementine, calm down!” Agnes grabbed his wife by the shoulders and said strongly, though in a low voice. As a result, Clementine looked him in the eye, bewildered as she was, but she did stop shouting and making a ruckus for the time being. Judging from the look in her eyes, she temporarily returned to her world of dreams and stopped paying attention to anything around her.

“What do you mean by saying it’s already too late for her?” Agnes asked Yin, some anger and impatience showing up in his voice. Was this boy implying that his wife was already as good as dead? Even though he had never truly loved her, he valued her as a companion and treasured her as a wife; he didn’t want her to die!

Yin frowned a little, then exchanged a brief look with Laien and sighed. “The tea she tried to give us was brewed from the Aethern Leaf of the Datura Flower. The flower and the rots have strong healing and detoxifying properties, but the sweet-smelling leaves are an addicting, slow-killing poison. Judging from how she is acting, she’s way beyond saving… and most likely, so is your daughter,” he explained without beating around the bush, caring little to sugar coat his words.

It took Agnes some time to understand the meaning of Yin’s words and a few more seconds to resist the urge of calling him a liar and asking how could he possibly know all of that. Yet, when he recalled how Yin had reacted during the breakfast to being served his wife’s tea… everything began making sense. It was so obvious that he couldn’t help getting angry with himself; how come he didn’t think of this sooner? Maybe… because he never considered the possibility of the tea his wife loved being something so dangerous.

“Mother… and big sis… they are going to die?” Tan asked in a trembling voice, his gaze alternating between the faces of his mother and father.

“Is there no way to cure them?” Agnes put his hand on his son’s back and directed the question to Yin. “None at all? No matter how rare the ingredients are or how much they cost, I can acquire them!”

Yin laughed helplessly, his face twisted with pain and deep sadness. “If there was a way, my family would have found it,” he said bleakly, his eyes glistening with tears and hatred as he recalled the long year during which his parents had been bearing with the maddening pain in wait for his uncles and aunts to find a way to save them, all for naught.

“There might still be a chance,” Agnes said stubbornly, refusing to abandon all hope without even trying. “Come back inside, tell me everything you know about this ‘Aethern Leaf’ and ‘Datura Flower’,” he said firmly and decisively, just one tone away from straight out ordering Yin to do so.

“No,” Yin responded after a somewhat long second of silence. He definitely wouldn’t relive this nightmare. Not now, nor never.

It took Agnes a good moment to realize that Yin refused him. He frowned, then argued. “I understand you must have had some traumatic experience with this flower, but I need information! I’m willing to reward you in any way in return for your help.”

“I already told you enough,” Yin said sternly, anger reverberating in his voice. “Or do you intend to stop me by force?” he asked provokingly, and judging from the look in his eyes he fully intended to fight his way out of here was he forced to do so.

Agnes’s expression went dark for a few seconds, but in the end, he forced himself to cool down. “Take your guards and go,” he said coldly, resigning himself to investigating the matter on his own.

“Dear, don’t make them go so soon!” Clementine said all of the sudden, glanced at Laien and Yin with an amiable smile and looked back at her husband. “They seem to know about my tea! Maybe they have some leaves or some new flowers? They stopped growing after I picked some up recently, I have nearly none left!” she explained with deep concern, remaining oblivious to the weight of the situation at hand. It was as if she didn’t remember what she did anymore, nor could comprehend the words she was hearing, or perhaps was forgetting them as soon as she heard them.

Agnes’s body and mind froze for a moment. “The symptoms… how soon…” he asked in a low voice, realizing that even if he wanted to investigate or look for a cure, he would have no time for that.

Yin pursed his lips, keeping himself in a relatively calm state of mind only through sheer willpower. Did this man not understand how hard it was for him to… yeah, he probably didn’t. He couldn’t know, and neither could Laien. After all, he hadn’t told anyone. “How… how long was this tea around?” he asked, then glanced to the side and smile a little when Laien put his hand on his shoulder.

“How long you ask, I don’t even…” Agnes said helplessly, feeling incredibly ashamed. Had he been so dissociated from his family that he didn’t know even something so simple?

“Five years ago,” Tan spoke up, his voice still breaking down a little. He coughed twice to clear his throat, looked at Yin and explained properly. “Big sis mentioned that mom started having this tea five years ago and started sharing it with her three years ago.”

Agnes was very surprised to see that his son happened to remember such a detail. He also turned to look at Yin, very much impatient to hear the answer… but he couldn’t help frowning when he saw the shock painting itself on the boy’s face.

“Five years?” Yin repeated, so shocked that for a second he forgot about his own nervousness. “Just how resistant is she to the Aethern Leaf? A normal person overdoses after a year at most, and that’s if there are enough leaves to brew from!”

“Is there a hope then?” Agnes asked eagerly. Maybe his wife and daughter would be exceptions, maybe they wouldn’t suffer the same fate as everyone else! At the very least, he wanted to hope it was true.

Yin felt his throat clench as all the emotions once again returned to him, along with the many unwanted memories. He swallowed heavily and forced himself to say. “I don’t know. I doubt it. No matter what, there had never been anyone who got out alive when the hallucinations had already begun.” Having said so, he turned around and quickly put a hand to his mouth and grit his teeth. Even if he was focusing and trying not to think about it, his body was reacting regardless of his will. He really was feeling very weak and ill; quite laughable, or so he thought. To be reduced to this state by just a trauma from his past… if he was so weak, how could he ever intend to achieve his goals?

Not knowing what to say, Laien stood by Yin while hugging him with one arm. He wanted to help the General and his family… but at the same time, he could tell that Yin was forcing himself to stay here. What was making it worse was the clear awareness that Yin was doing it because he wanted him to; were it not for him, Yin would have already left, be it earlier before Clementine found them or now when Agnes was asking him for help. He was glad Yin at least told Agnes what he knew… and yet, he also understood that this information wouldn’t change anything. All that would be different was that Agnes and his son would know why exactly were Clementine and Cecile dying.

“Dear, I’m…” Clementine tried to bring something up, the aware and intelligent look briefly returning to her eyes, but before she could finish the madness once again clouded her eyes and mind. “Huh? Dear, why won’t you kill them?” she asked, genuinely surprised, scared and even slightly angered at the same time. “You were so merciless with him, even though I loved him, even though I cried, apologized and begged you to stop…” she began saying, almost monologuing to herself and not speaking to Agnes, who in turn could only stand there and listen despite not wanting to hear it.

“You were good to me… but you never loved me. You were there for our daughter and son, but not for me. Oh, why then did you need to punish him, not me, for the little bit of frivolous dream of a little girl who had always dreamed of love and passion had? He didn’t know, he was innocent…; he laid with me, but he knew nothing! Yet, you beat him, you castrated him and in the end, you cut his head off and smashed it with your foot… why drear oh why, if you did what needed to be done, why won’t you kill those bad, bad boys?”

Agnes trembled a little, what caused his son to become that much more distressed by the situation. This strange tea, those flowers… were they somehow related to that minstrel from a little over five years ago? He had done the right thing as far as he was concerned, he had washed off the shame of his family by killing the man when he found him in bed with his wife in that tower… but had he been more understanding of Clementine’s pleas, would this all have never happened?

“After such a long time,” Yin wanted to speak loudly, but it was only Laien who stood right next to him and Agnes who managed to hear him. “The symptoms will appear almost immediately. Those with strong bodies and great willpower can live for many months after that… others will die after a few weeks, or a few days,” he finished saying, then shut his mouth tight to prevent himself from vomiting. That was it; he told Agnes all he could. He gave Laien a resigned, but for some reason he himself couldn’t quite understand, a bit happy look and wordlessly inquired if they could get going already.

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“Yeah, let’s go,” Laien smiled a little and nodded. From what Clementine just said he could make out that Agnes’s family indeed had its own problems, but they had done enough for them; or rather, there really wasn’t much else they could do for them. Personally, Laien might have wanted to stay longer and help Tan and his father get through those hard times, but when he considered how it would make Yin feel he immediately gave up on the idea of spending many days in the Iron Fort.

“Uu, for some reason I’m feeling pretty bad…” Clementine said casually, her face growing a bit pale. She straightened up, then looked around the courtyard, naturally failing to notice the loitered around corpses and the damage to the wall of the castle. “You know, I really want to drink some more of my tea… don’t you think those boys might have some?” she asked, apparently not remembering anything from the last fifteen minutes, or even from a longer period of time.

Agnes’s lips trembled and his face twitched. “I don’t think they have any. Come, I’m sure Cecile would like to speak with us,” he suggested instead of answering his wife’s question.

“She would?” Clementine asked with a blank smile. “Maybe she would,” she agreed after a second, though it was hard to say whether this thought lingered in her mind for longer than this very brief moment. However, the intent itself remained since she appeared to be waiting for Agnes to start walking.

Laien and Yin exchanged one last glance with Agnes and with Tan, after what the two of them headed to the gate while Agnes, Clementine and Tan returned to the castle.

They walked silently, both of them finding it hard to find any suitable worlds. Were it not for their spiritual bond this silence would have been very awkward, but thankfully they were able to come to a wordless agreement that in the end, they were okay with how things worked out.

“Whoa, so many people,” Laien said with a somewhat helpless smirk when the two of them saw the gate and the hundreds of people gathered behind it.

“They must want to know what happened.” Ruan’s voice startled Laien and Yin and caused them to tense up. They hurriedly looked over their shoulders and saw the former courier scratching the back of his head and smiling at them apologetically. “I’m good at hiding my presence, it’s an old habit,” Ruan explained briefly. He shouldn’t need to say that he rushed over to the courtyard the moment he had heard that explosion and came just around the time Agnes ordered everyone to leave; he trusted the boys would be able to deduce this much on their own.

“Who wouldn’t want to know,” Laien said resignedly. It was too bad that he couldn’t tell those guys anything positive; the whole story surrounding the General and his family was just too pitifully sad to talk about it.

“I don’t think they are waiting for the news,” Yin suggested the opposite, happy to have something else he could focus his thoughts on. “It’s not like the serious, dutiful people from here to do something strange like waiting for their General to tell them what happened in a group of hundreds at the gate to his home,” he explained his point, to which Laien and Ruan agreed. It really wasn’t like the Iron Knights to act like a mob of curious citizens from somewhere else.

“Oh, you are here!” Lieutenant Tares called out to Laien and Yin from afar. “I’m glad nothing happened to you. Come here, come!” he yelled rather merrily, by the looks of it not planning to ask them about the situation in the castle. Alas, it wasn’t that he wasn’t interested or didn’t want to know; he just knew it wouldn’t be proper to ask those two instead of waiting for the General himself to send the news.

“Were they waiting for us?” Laien asked with a smirk and a laugh. He quickly spotted Teira and Lucin and the two’s fathers, he even recognized some faces of the people from yesterday, including the so boys who had been labeled as ‘troods’… one of which was looking at him somewhat anxiously for some reason.

“I wonder what did they come up with,” Yin mused aloud, refusing to be down and depressed due to everything that had just happened this morning.

“I wonder too,” Laien said and smiled cheekily. “It’s not like they could give us anything we could possibly need. I’m pretty curious actually,” he said in a more quiet voice since they were already getting pretty close to the gate.

“Gifts first, chatting later,” Tares said loudly when Laien and Yin, and their guard to whom no one had been paying much attention to, approached. He glanced at the boy who had suggested for them to present this kind of thing to Laien and Yin, then seeing the youth was hesitating stepped closer and shoved him out with a hand he placed on the boy’s back.

“If they don’t like it, I’m so screwed…” the youth thought nervously. Being a trood wasn’t the end of the world, but his and his friends’ lives would be so much more pleasant if they managed to get rid of this label they received because of their cowardly fathers.

“You prepared a gift for us?” Laien asked with a laugh and a hint of amused disbelief in his voice. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate the gesture, but given what he had received from his friends in Neil City… what else could he possibly need? Sure more money would always be useful, but he couldn’t quite convince himself people like those would pick gold coins or some jewelry to present to them.

“I… kind of suggested we give you this thing,” the youth, despite not being that different in age compared to Laien and Yin found it really taxing to speak to them in front of all those people; especially given what kind of circumstances he was in. He produced two interspatial rings, by the looks of it both of them being high-grade, although just barely qualifying as such and handed one each to the two in front of him.

“Hm?” Laien raised his eyebrows and poured some spiritual energy into the ring, claiming the ownership of it. He peeked inside, and his expression changed instantly to one of a very pleasant surprise. “Mid-grade water elemental stones! Over a thousand of them!” he exclaimed with a bright smile. It had admittedly been troublesome for Rudford, Vatras and even Injar to so quickly come into possession of a large quantity of at least mid-grade elemental stones. They were, after all, a very precious military resource and their distribution was tightly controlled

He had once found some low-grade water elemental stones in the Blueside Lake in the forests of the Valius family, but their usefulness was pretty limited and after infusing them with spiritual energy, he never found a good chance to use them before he got strong enough for them to become irrelevant. Mid-grade stones, however… they might not be that useful against martial masters, but in hundreds, they were a perfect tool to deal with large masses of weaker opponents.

“Mid-grade lightning elemental stones,” Yin also said happily and swiftly put the new interspatial ring into one of his own. “They are pretty nice, but imagine what high-grade ones could do! They are incredibly precious though; not just any object is capable of easily killing experts of the Realm of Heroes after all,” he commented, then sighed a little. If his parents were still alive, he would have likely had some high-grade lightning elemental stones of himself right now along with many other precious items and secret pills.

“So, you like it?” Tares raised an eyebrow and asked, just to be sure. The boys look to be pretty satisfied and it was good, but he wanted them to confirm that they weren’t just pretending. In the end, he couldn’t be sure whether they hadn’t received a bunch of elemental stones from his own protectors beforehand; then their gift wouldn’t hold nearly as much meaning.

“Of course, the elemental stones will be really useful,” Laien replied contentedly and Yin nodded in agreement. “That being said, won’t you get in trouble for that?” he asked with a laugh. Wasn’t using elemental stones outside of war strictly prohibited, not to mention giving them away in form of gifts?

“We have our General’s permission, we’ve got nothing to fear,” Tares said with a laugh. “What, did you think we took them all without asking him?” he inquired and smiled at Laien meaningfully. They weren’t like him, a young protégé of the Red Dragon School. They needed to obey the rules; any mishaps wouldn’t be so easily forgotten and forgiven.

“Looks like we can consider you guys had more or less made up for your fathers,” Tares said and smiled at the youth standing at his side and at the two who were a bit further away. “Keep doing your best and make sure you don’t turn out like your fathers,” he reminded seriously, but without any scorn in his voice. Those lads proved they had good intentions; they deserved to be given a chance.

“Tan?” Lucin mentioned all of the sudden, looking just above Laien’s shoulder and at the road leading up to the gate.

Laien, Yin and everyone else turned to look and saw Agnes’s son sprinting towards them as if his life depended on it. Before they could begin guessing what reasons could the boy have for rushing over, Tan closed the distance with a surprising speed; he must have broken through to at least second mortal realm if he could run so fast, what was quite an achievement for a seven-year-old.

Tan hurried so much that he failed to stop in time and bumped into Laien quite heavily, nearly knocking him over. He didn’t pay mind to it for even a second though; he ignored his short breath and raised his head, then began speaking as fast as he could all the while huffing for air.

“Please help…! Father is going to… kill mother…!”

Those words were so unexpected and so unbelievable to the Iron Knights that immediately, a complete silence feel in the group. Their General was going to kill his wife? Yes, they had heard a bit about those boys and the General killing Clementine’s private guards, but this thing now… it was too hard to believe.

Yet, the next second a frighteningly clear and Qi-filled cry of incredible pain reached the gate from the inner section of the core district… from one of the castle’s watchtowers. The Iron Knights trembled; they were warriors and had seen death on more than one occasion, but they had never heard a cry filled with so much pain, agony and suffering. They couldn’t imagine what kind of pain would a person need to be in for their yell to sound like that.

“Mother,” Tan said in a weak, breaking voice, tears appearing in and soon flowing from his eyes and down his cheeks.

“Almost immediately…” Yin repeated his previous words in a very quiet voice and grabbed Laien’s shoulder, holding himself up as his legs threatened to give in.

“Please, someone… save my mother!” Tan pleaded, at the moment more concerned with his mother’s life than with any kind of logic or reason.

“No one can save her,” Yin spoke up in a low and quiet, very much pained tone. “Your father is right. By this point a quick death will be a mercy,” he said grimly, startling the listeners with the coldness of his words and throwing Tan even deeper into the abyss of terror and fear.

“Yin!” Laien looked at his friend a bit angrily, but couldn’t not groan inwardly; he wasn’t surprised by Yin reacting in this way and saying such things… he had his own suspicions about Yin’s own past and could very literally feel what he felt. However, he still couldn’t see what Yin said as a good way to help this kid, Tan, to come to terms with the harsh reality.

“What else are you going to do?” Yin asked in his frustration and unconsciously gripped Laien’s shoulder with more strength. “Tell him to hope, tell him everything is going to be all right? Ask him to stay by his mother and sister and encourage them to keep clinging to life for as long as they can?” he asked and as if in support to his words, another cry of Clementine’s rang out; even more pained, even more desperate than the previous one.

“I…” Laien opened his mouth slightly, then closed it. He wanted to do something, but what in the world was he supposed to do?