Wen Ning, “Take this sword and go to the banquet hall, to the training field, to anywhere you want and ask every single person you see to pull the sword out. See if any one of them can pull it out! And then you’ll know if I’m lying or not! Sect Leader Jiang—you, so driven of a person, have been comparing yourself to others your whole life, but you have to know that you never should’ve been able to equal him!”
Jiang Cheng kicked Wen Ning before he stumbled toward the banquet hall, holding Suibian in his hand.
He bellowed as he ran in an almost crazed manner. Wen Ning was kicked onto one of the trees in the courtyard. He stood up slowly and turned to the other two. Lan WangJi’s immaculate face was at the moment more than pale. His expression was also covered in frost. After one last look at the YunmengJiang Sect’s ancestral hall, he lifted Wei WuXian’s body so that it rested steadily and finally walk away in the opposite direction without turning back.
Wen Ning, “Y-Young Master Lan, where are you going?”
Lan WangJi’s figure paused before the stairs, “Just now, he told me to take him away.”
Wen Ning followed at once, walking out the gates of Lotus Pier along with him.
At the dock, most of the group of boats that they used to come here had already gone back after they arrived at the destination. Only two old, unattended ferries were left in front of the dock. The ferries were both long and narrow, shaped like willow leaves, able to contain seven or eight people. Both ends of each ferry curved upward, with two oars at one end. Carrying Wei WuXian on his back, Lan WangJi stepped onto the ferry without any hesitation. With hurry, Wen Ning leaped onto the tail of the boat, taking up the oars voluntarily. With just two rows, the ferry steadily drifted quite a few feet away. Soon, the ferry had followed the water’s flow away from the dock, approaching the center of the river.
Lan WangJi let Wei WuXian lean on his body. He first fed him two pills. Only after he confirmed that he swallowed them properly did he take out his handkerchief and slowly wipe away the blood on his face.
Suddenly, Wen Ning’s nervous voice came over, “Y-Young Master Lan.”
Lan WangJi, “What is it?”
Wen Ning’s assertion back when he was in front of Jiang Cheng had already disappeared without a trace. He summoned up all his courage before speaking, “Please… Please don’t tell Young Master Wei that I revealed the secret of his core yet. He’s warned me very seriously to not tell anyone no matter what. Although I probably wouldn’t be able to keep him in the dark for long, I…”
After a moment of silence, Lan WangJi replied, “Do not worry.”
It seemed that Wen Ning let out a sigh of relief, even though dead people had no breath to sigh. He spoke earnestly, “Young Master Lan, thank you.”
Lan WangJi shook his head. Wen Ning, “Thank you for speaking up for me and my sister back then, on Koi Tower. I’ve always remembered it. For how I lost control afterwards, I… really am sorry.”
Lan WangJi didn’t answer. Wen Ning continued, “Thank you even more for looking after A-Yuan all these years.”
Hearing this, Lan WangJi looked up slightly. Wen Ning, “I thought every single person from our sect was dead. I really didn’t expect that A-Yuan would still be alive. He looks so much like my cousin when he was around twenty.”
Lan WangJi, “He hid inside the tree trunk for too long and caught a severe fever.”
Wen Ning nodded, “I know he must’ve been sick. He remembers nothing of his childhood. I chatted with him for a long time. He kept on talking about you.” He said somewhat disappointedly, “In the past, it was about Young Master Wei… It’s never been about me, anyways.”
Lan WangJi, “You did not tell him.”
Wen Ning, “You mean his background? No, I didn’t.”
He turned around with his back facing the two, speaking as he rowed the ferry diligently, “He’s doing very well right now. If he knew too much or remembered things that are too heavy… he wouldn’t be doing as well as he is right now.”
Lan WangJi, “It is only a matter of time.”
Wen Ning hesitated for a moment, “Yes. It’s only a matter of time.” He looked up at the sky, “Just like Young Master Wei and Sect Leader Jiang. It was only a matter of time before Sect Leader Jiang knew about the core. He couldn’t have kept it from Sect Leader Jiang for his whole life, could he?”
The night was silent, and the river’s flow heavy.
Suddenly, Lan WangJi spoke up, “Is it painful?”
Wen Ning, “What?”
Lan WangJi, “Cutting out one’s core. Is it painful?”
Wen Ning, “If I said it wasn’t, Young Master Lan, you wouldn’t believe it either, would you?”
Lan WangJi, “I thought Wen Qing would find a way.”
Wen Ning, “Before we went up the mountain, my sister did make many anesthetics, hoping they’d reduce the pain of cutting out his core. But then she found out that those anesthetics were absolutely useless. Because if the person is under anesthetized conditions when the core is being cut out, seperating from the body, the core would be affected as well. It was hard to tell whether it’d dissolve, when it’d dissolve.”
Lan WangJi, “… And so?”
Wen Ning’s rowing paused for an instant, “And so, the person whose core is being cut out has to be awake.”
He had to be awake. He had to watch the golden core connected to his spiritual pathways be peeled from his body. He had to feel the gradual suppression, sedation, settlement of his originally surging spiritual powers, all until they became a pool of dead water, unable to rise ever again.
Only after a long while did Lan WangJi’s voice sound again, somewhat hoarse. The first word seemed to tremble, “Constantly awake?”
Wen Ning, “Two nights and one day. Constantly awake.”
Lan WangJi, “What were the chances?”
Wen Ning, “About half.”
“Half.” Soundlessly, Lan WangJi took in a deep breath. He then shook his head, repeating, “… Half.”
He tightened the arm he wrapped around Wei WuXian’s shoulders. His knuckles were already growing white.
Wen Ning, “After all, in the past, nobody had ever actually tried transferring golden cores before. Although my sister had written an essay on core transfer, she’d only made some conjectures. Nobody at all would let her experiment on them, so the conjectures stayed conjectures. All of the seniors said that she was letting her imagination run wild. On top of that, it was unrealistic. Everyone knew that nobody would willingly give their golden core to someone else, for if this really happened, they themselves would become absolutely useless, never able to reach the pinnacle or go anywhere in life at all. And so, when Young Master Wei first came back for us, my sister refused to do it. She warned him that the article and actually conducting the experiment were two different things. She was not even half confident.
“But Young Master Wei kept on bothering her. He said that half was fine too. There was an equal chance of succeeding and failing. If his core was ruined, he’d manage to live on, but Sect Leader Jiang was a different case. He was too driven. He laid too much emphasis on such a subject. Cultivation was his life. If Sect Leader Jiang could only be an ordinary person, unable to go anywhere in life, his entire life would be over.”