Chapter 82: The Tenth Day

~~~

Liu Jin finishes all the preparations early in the morning. He spends the rest of his time cleaning his instruments, pacing around the room, and writing a letter he should have written from the start.

Ren He and Yan Chao arrive at the usual time. Their eyes keep drifting to the elixir on the way to the throne room. They look at it with hope and apprehension in equal measures. It is not hard to understand why. Certainly, they wish for things to return to normal, but will healing Ruan Goutin truly accomplish that? It is a question no one knows the answer to.

It may be that healing Ruan Goutin will just make things worse. Fearing that is only natural. Liu Jin even worries that they will take the elixir and throw it away. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen. They take him to the throne room as usual.

“I truly must commend you,” Ruan Goutin says once he and Liu Jin are alone. The doors are closed, the barrier is up, and Liu Jin can speak again. “I did not believe you when you said you could heal me, yet with every day that passes, I feel myself improving.”

He laughs, happy and relieved.

“It truly is a wonderful thing to be rid of that maddening pain. I even feel my old strength returning. Truly, you are worthy of serving me.”

“My lord, I am honored by your praise.” Liu Jin bows his head as he lifts the tray and offers the final dose of elixir to Branch Master Ruan.

He takes it.

Liu Jin watches as the bottle is emptied. It happens quickly, yet to him, the events go by at a glacial pace. Such is his nervousness.

The bottle shatters in Ruan Goutin’s hands.

“At last!” He roars with a crazed smile, his fist raised into the air. “At last, I’m restored! That accursed Wandering Wind thought she had gotten rid of me, but she’ll one day learn the folly of her…”

Ruan Goutin trails off, his gaze firmly locked on his raised fist. He stares at it in complete incomprehension, unable and unwilling to accept what he is looking at. The shards of broken glass have dug into his skin. Red liquid trickles down his arm and stains his clothes.

He is wounded.

He is bleeding.

“What is…?” Ruan Goutin sways on his feet, dazed and confused. “This cannot…”

It cannot possibly be.

There is no way the skin of someone in the Heaven Realm can possibly be damaged by mere shards of glass. There is no way he can possibly be bleeding right now. It is impossible!

That is surely what Ruan Goutin is thinking.

It is why it takes him so long to reach the obvious conclusion.

“You!”

Vicious. Hateful. Venomous. The way Ruan Goutin looks at him is all that and more.

It doesn’t matter.

“What have you done!?” Ruan Goutin roars, stepping over the broken glass. “What have you done to me!”

It is already far too late.

Ruan Goutin’s hand lashes out to strike him.

Liu Jin stops it.

No large impact rings around the room. No furious Qi blows everything away. Liu Jin stands and catches Ruan Goutin’s arm by the wrist with all the ease in the world. It is not that Liu Jin has gotten any stronger. He is still just in the Nascent Realm.

Ruan Goutin’s strike just now was unbearably weak. That is all.

As Ruan Goutin is left to stare in frozen shock, Liu Jin takes the man’s ring and lets him go. The instant the ring is off his finger, the Emperor-class aura surrounding Ruan Goutin is dispelled.

It is not replaced by the aura of a cultivator in the Heaven Realm.

Liu Jin holds up the ring between his fingers. Even now, it still gives off the aura of an Emperor-class cultivator. “So this is how you were fooling everyone into thinking you were still an Emperor.”

“You insolent fool!” Red-faced, Ruan Goutin aims his hand at Liu Jin’s neck and makes a vicious cutting motion.

Nothing happens.

“Impossible!” Desperation creeps into Ruan Goutin’s voice. He keeps aiming his hand at Liu Jin, seeking to activate the symbols he placed on his neck without any success. “This is not possible!”

Liu Jin sighs and brings two fingers to his neck. Nine-Headed Snake God’s Veins pulse as his Qi resonates with the bindings. One by one, he removes them from his skin, flicking them to the floor where they splatter like ink. From the beginning, removing them hadn’t been beyond his ability. He just hadn’t dared to try, fearing Branch Master Ruan would sense his attempt and activate the bindings in response.

There is no need to worry about that now.

“Branch Master Ruan, you should already understand. The elixir was never meant to fix your soul.”

If there truly is an Elixir of Soulful Blessing out there, Liu Jin does not know it.

“What you have been drinking for the past nine days… Its true name is Elixir of Joyful Dreams. Perhaps, you might have heard of it.” Judging by Ruan Goutin’s rapidly paling face, he most certainly has. “It is not meant to heal wounds or cure illnesses. Instead, its primary use is recreational. It causes the one who drinks it to experience mild hallucinations. This one is a variant of it.”

Or rather, this is the original version of it, which is both stronger and subtler than what one might commonly find nowadays.

According to his master, its first recorded use was well over four thousand years ago. Faced with a city’s impenetrable defenses, a cunning general turned to his alchemists for a solution. The Elixir of Joyful Dreams was what they came up with. They produced it in large amounts and placed it in large cauldrons all around the city. The vapors generated by the boiling elixir flew over the mighty walls and caught the enemy in a pleasant dream, allowing the general to easily capture the city.

It had been an interesting story. His master had a lot of those. Back then, Liu Jin had not seen the value of this elixir, but his master had told him one never knew when one might need alternate means to occupy a patient’s mind.

Liu Jin doubted his master had foreseen he’d ever use the elixir this way.

No, perhaps he had.

“If I had made the dose too strong right away, you’d have noticed it and countered it.”

“That’s enough!”

“However,” Liu Jin continues, heedless of Ruan Goutin’s plea. “What if you were administered weaker doses over the course of several days? The effects would slowly stack up, making it much harder to detect.”

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

On Ruan Goutin, the first few doses had barely done anything. The effects had been slightly more potent on the disciples, but not one of them had ever drunk the elixir twice in a row, likely out of a sense of duty to each other. Due to that, Ruan Guotin had not noticed anything unusual. The most each disciple had felt had been a slight increase in energy.

Liu Jin had been counting on the disciples acting that way. It had been a gamble, but the concern Yan Chao had shown for Ren He seemed real enough to him.

“Once the elixir started affecting you, you grew careless because you thought your condition was improving. This allowed me to up the potency of the doses.”

“Enough! Stop talking!” Ruan Goutin shouts, wide-eyed, desperate and panicking.

Begging.

“You thought you stopped feeling pain because you were healing. That is not it. You stopped feeling pain because your senses dulled. Your mood. Your energy. Your apparent health. It is not real. It never was.”

Liu Jin does not stop. It is not that he wishes to boast. It is just…

It’d be too cruel not to explain everything.

“You have just been lost in a daze all this time.”