Duan Xu laughed out loud, shook his head, and finally found a comfortable position to lean against the bed curtain, saying: "Revenge? What should I take revenge for? My master is actually very good to me. He takes care of me like a good weapon. Although I don't want to be a weapon, I don't hate him to the point of hatred."
"Master is from a high-ranking Huqi noble family, and he cannot tolerate even the slightest bit of stupidity. In his eyes, stupid Huqi people are trash, and stupid people from other tribes simply don't deserve to live. So Tianzhixiao only selects people with good qualifications, and people of all ethnicities can be selected. But after entering Tianzhixiao, we all have to become the people of Cangshen and swear to dedicate our lives to Cangshen. When I was wandering on the street, he turned back even though his cloth sedan chair had passed by, picked me out from the pile of beggars on the street and brought me back to the palace. Maybe he thinks highly of my talent."
"Living in Tianzhixiao... is much more comfortable than when I was living on the streets. At least I don't have to worry about food and clothing, and there are priests to read the Cangyan Sutra to us. We need to remember everything about the Cang God. I have a photographic memory since I was a child. Before I came to Danzhi, I could recite most of the Four Books and Five Classics, although I couldn't read them at all. Naturally, I could recite the Cangyan Sutra by heart."
"So the master is a little partial to me. He doesn't have time to teach hundreds of disciples in a period. He only shows up for assessments. I'm afraid he can't even recognize all of them in seven years. But he occasionally comes to test my homework alone. He even gives me the military books he wrote and teaches me military tactics. I heard that the master has no son, so he probably treats me like half a son."
The bright light of the early morning fell on Duan Xu's face. He looked a little lazy and described Tian Zhixiao in a relaxed tone, as if it was just an interesting experience, and even a little emotional.
He Simu drank his tea leisurely and said, "What a loving father and filial son, you actually had the heart to blind his eyes and run away."
"He and I have fundamental differences. Of course, I never said it, and he didn't know it either." Duan Xu was silent for a while, but just shook his head and said with a smile: "No one should dream of changing another person."
"So, what do you want by getting involved in this battle?" He Simu asked.
Duan Xu looked up at He Simu and blinked innocently and confusedly: "I said it many times, I want to recover the seventeen states north of Guanhe."
He Simu's brows furrowed dangerously, and the dimly lit room suddenly felt like a storm was about to come.
Duan Xu had a keen eye and immediately raised his finger to his forehead and said seriously, "I just said I would tell the truth. I swear I said it from the heart."
He Simu sneered and didn't buy it: "When you entered the Heaven Knows, I'm afraid you also swore to be loyal to Cangshen for life, right?"
"I have never seen Cang Shen, have I? If you are not sure whether something exists, then your oath to him will not count. But I have seen His Highness, and my oath to His Highness is absolutely true."
Duan Xu's tone was quite righteous.
However, he also knew that such an answer would be difficult to convince He Simu. Duan Xu paused and continued, "The first few months of entering Tianzhi were very pleasant. Apart from pretending to believe in a god that no one believed in, there was nothing else. After a few months, we began to receive real training."
"Or rather, we start killing people."
The smile in Duan Xu's eyes faded, his fingers tapped on his knees occasionally, and his gaze drifted away.
"Children aged seven or eight held swords and knives. Some low-ranking Han people who had committed crimes were tied up in rows and made to kneel in front of us. We killed them one by one. At first we were all scared and couldn't bring ourselves to kill them because some were crying and making a fuss. Later, the children who cried the loudest were killed in front of us, and the rest who cried and made a fuss were punished. Those who killed slowly were also punished. Later, everyone stopped making a fuss."
"Later, everyone got used to it." Duan Xu retracted his finger, tapped his chest with the purple-scarred finger, and said slowly, "Me too."
"At first I was also scared, but gradually I took it all for granted. Later, when I killed people, I didn't feel anything at all. I even felt so tired and my arms were sore. Why haven't I finished killing yet? It would be great if they all died at once."
The narrative about what God knows finally sheds its lighthearted shell here, revealing its true and cruel outline.
The morning light slanted down, partially blocked by the bed curtains, with the light and darkness divided at the bridge of Duan Xu's nose. His eyes were in the darkness, and the exposed skin from his jaw to his upper body was pale and dazzling in the sun.
Just like the feeling he gives people, a mixture of light and dark, ambiguous and unclear.
"Soon, we, the disciples of the same period, began to draw lots for duels. The results of various tests would determine the quality of our weapons in the duel. In each duel, one of us would die. At that time, we didn't think there was anything wrong. It was as if doing our best to kill the people around us was the most normal thing in the world. Winning the duel meant we were one step closer to becoming a Cang Shen. This kind of duel would continue in rounds until the trial seven years later."
"About two years passed like this. One day during training, I went to kill the low-class people who had committed crimes as usual. Usually their hands and feet were tied up and their mouths were sealed so they couldn't make any sound. But that day, one of them had his mouth sealed, and the cloth covering his mouth fell off when I walked up to him."
"He looked at me anxiously. The sun was very bright that day, shining all the way from the sky into the execution yard. There was a lot of dust floating in the sun. He seemed to have accepted his fate, and said to me tremblingly: My Lord... Today's weather is really good... Please be gentle."
In the morning light, Duan Xu's lips curled up slightly, as if he recalled the incoherent scene of that man, and he said slowly: "I looked up at the sky at that time. The sun was strong, and the leaves were rustling in the wind. It was indeed a good day. I seemed to wake up from a long-lasting nightmare, trembling with fear. I thought, what am I doing? Why did I kill this person? Why did this person have to be killed by me? We killed so many people, did they really commit a crime? Why... Why did I never realize these questions?"
"This is a man who lives in this world like me. He also likes good weather, but I just find it too tiring to raise my arms when I kill him."
Duan Xu took a deep breath and said with a faint smile: "At that moment, I suddenly realized that I was turning into a monster. Even if I didn't die at the hands of my peers in the end, what's the point of living as a monster?"
The place where he is is full of malice and filth. He is being tamed to the point of losing his brain and heart, his thinking and conscience - turning into a monster, a weapon. If he takes one more step forward, he will be doomed.
He suddenly woke up just on the edge of the cliff.
He Simu was silent for a while, then said, "So what happened to the person who talked to you?"
There was no expression on Duan Xu's face, he even smiled without any smile.
"I still killed him. The coaches were standing behind me. If I didn't kill him, I would be the one to die. After him, another eighty-three people died in my hands. Later, I started to carry out missions and help the Danzhi Royal Court. The more I learned, the more blood debts I had on my hands."
When I am sober, fear is like a maggot attached to my bones.
He found himself living in hell, surrounded by a group of people who thought they were living in heaven, and unable to escape.
The ridiculous thing was that he was the only one who thought it was hell.
For a while, he felt like he was going crazy. If God knew that all the ideas and principles he had been instilled with were false, how could he be sure that the Four Books and Five Classics he had read as a child were true? What kind of world was he living in? What was true? What was false? What was the principle he should follow
He was only in his early teens, and he didn't know what he would become. He knew he was becoming alienated. He began to enjoy killing, to crave violence, and to despise life. But he didn't know how to become a human again.
Those poems and articles he had memorized before, those words and sentences whose meanings he had not understood at all when he memorized them, now popped out from the depths of his memory and tore at each other with the violence that had been cultivated by God.
In this tearing, he struggled to piece together what he thought the world should be like.
He broke his crooked bones, cut off his rotten flesh, and then pretended to be hunchbacked and deformed. He pretended to be more indifferent, more fanatical, and more faithful than anyone else, so that he could deceive his master and fellow disciples.
He tied up the beast in his heart and told himself over and over again, wake up, wake up, you can't become a monster.
One day you will return to the sun, take back your name, and live as an upright person.
This went on for seven years, two thousand five hundred and fifty-six days and nights.
"I swore when I left God Knows that one day I would take back the Seventeen States and put an end to this nonsense on the North Shore."
He Simu put down the teacup in her hand, sat on the head of Duan Xu's bed, stroked the old wounds of varying depths on his body, and then looked up at him.
There was a calmness and composure in the eyes of this young man. The bottomless cold pond suddenly saw light, and a bit of the deep bottom of the pond could be seen.
He Simu thought, maybe he wanted to untie the ropes tied around the hands of the Han people, take away the cloth stuffed in their mouths, and let them stand up and live in the sun. He wanted no one to be killed like livestock in the future.
Perhaps he also thought that there should never be another person like him, someone like Fifteen, who almost or really lost himself in lies and killing.
He saved the lost seventeen states just like he wanted to save the seventeen states that God knew many years ago.
Time flies, but it is like struggling to rise and fall in the water.
There was not much pity in He Simu's eyes, just calmness: "So? Did you succeed? You? Are you not a weapon now? Are you a human?"
Duan Xu's eyelashes trembled, and a rare hint of uncertainty appeared in his always confident narration. He smiled and said, "It should be a person. But, he is not very normal."
He Simu stared into his eyes, she suddenly laughed, patted his cheek gently. Duan Xu was touched on the wound on his face, "hiss", and then heard He Simu say: "You just treat yourself like an object, hammer and patch yourself up, and for so many years, in such unbearable mud, you didn't grow crooked."
Duan Xu was stunned for a moment, then smiled softly: "Really?..."
"What is normal and what is abnormal? Young general, little fox, my curse-maker, you live well, spend your life in this world, fulfill your wishes, and then die without worries. This is the most normal life."
Duan Xu was silent for a while. He approached He Simu, poked his head out from the shadow of the bed curtains, letting the sunlight fall into his eyes.
Perhaps it was because of the glaring sunlight, his eyes narrowed slightly, covered with a thin layer of mist.
He said softly: "Are you comforting me?"
"No, I don't want to comfort you, or even pity you. Young general, I have seen many tragic lives in the ghost book. Yours is really nothing. So you can believe that I am telling the truth." He Simu's expression was calm and firm.
Duan Xu looked at He Simu for a while, and for a moment he seemed to see the long years behind her, drowning his suffering like a long river. He suddenly smiled, his eyebrows curved, shining like a sea of stars.
He reached out and held her sleeve, shaking her sleeve as if begging for mercy, and said, "Thank you, Simu."
He Simu ignored his disgusting behavior for the moment, raised his eyebrows and repeated, "Simu?"
"Your Highness, can I call you Simu?"
"I am nearly four hundred years older than you. I advise you to think carefully before you speak."
"I like it very much..." Duan Xu paused.
He Simu asked: "What do you like?"
He smiles beautifully, looking like a young man with bright eyes and white teeth.
"I like your name. I make a wish to you, to give you five senses in return, please allow me to call you Simu."