Chương 14: The Nine-tailed Fox is backed into a corner
Wu Yun tries to flinch away from the unwelcome touch, but the Prince pins him in place by the shoulder. It never ceases to surprise him how even dozens of li away Jiang Tanmei continues to be the bane of his existence.
He sighs, and says, well aware that the Prince won't believe him, "I rubbed it so hard bathing over the years that it washed off."
The Prince pulls his robes back up with a disgusted snort, but keeps his hold on his shoulder. "You think yourself very clever don't you? I haven't seen Jiang Tanmei in six years, so you fooled me at first. But that day, when Rong Jizi was about to whip you I saw your naked back and noticed you didn't have the mole. In the exact same place Jiang Tanmei's mother had one. The mole I know her son inherited because I went to visit the Jiang family when he was born."
The Prince crawls his fingers up into Wu Yun's hair and pulls viciously, turning him around to face him. "Does Jiang Tanmei know? That when his mother left their home she came here? Does he know she died here?"
Wu Yun tries to free himself of the Prince's hold, but that only makes his grip tighten. Jiang Tanmei may very well be aware of all that, but until this very moment Wu Yun didn't even know he had a mother.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Wu Yun says, trying to pry the Prince's fingers away from his scalp. "Your Highness," he adds, spitting the words out.
The Prince's smile widens like a tiger's and he says, "No? Let me show you."
He drags Wu Yun by the arm to the north wall of the room, and pushes down on a particular stone. The walls starts shifting with the metallic clank of levers and gears turning, and an opening appears, leading into a dark cavernous chamber smelling intensely of burning incense.
The Prince pulls him inside, and Wu Yun notices a raised platform in the center of the room, where a beautiful woman seems to lay sleeping, her arms folded gently over her waist. The faint glow of a nearby candle lights up the pallor of her ghostly face.
The platform is surrounded by paper seals Wu Yun can't understand. One rests over the woman's heart, and another between her folded hands. It's only when he looks more closely at her slumbering face that Wu Yun notices the deep red slash on her neck.
"My name is Min Guifen, and this is my cousin Min Fengyi. Our fathers were both royal brothers, sons of an unimportant but beloved concubine of the last Emperor. They received titles and status far above their station in exchange for moving far away from the capital. I and Fengyi grew up together, and I've loved her all my life."
Wu Yun doesn't understand love yet, and looking at Min Fengyi's dead body he's beginning to hope he never will, if this is how it ends.
"How isn't she a pile of bones by now?" Wu Yun asks. As far as he knows all dead things return to the dust from whence they came, why should this woman be any different?
Min Guifen lets out a sharp bark of laughter. "That has consumed my life for the past six years. I've traveled to all cultivation sects across Jianghu looking for an elixir, a pill, a technique that could bring her back, but none of them were any help. I talked with secular doctors, healers, and alchemists, but they proved useless as well. The most they could do was prevent her body from decaying. The only thing I didn't do was pray to the Gods, do you know why?"
His bottomless eyes shine with a manic glow, that make Wu Yun unable to do anything but shake his head.
"Because it was a goddess who drove her to this," he says, leaning down to caress Min Fengyi's face with gentle devotion. "Despite knowing how we felt about each other, her father, my uncle, forced her to marry Jiang Yilong, because he heard from a Daoist priest that marrying within the family weakened the bloodline. Fengyi was reluctant but once her son was born she loved him at once, and couldn't bear to part with him."
Wu Yun wishes the Prince would release him so he could move on with the second part of the plan. While he's wasting time down here, Lan Tian and Qiao Xiaojian are doing their part, waiting for him to join them. There's probably a thousand doves flying over the estate wrecking havoc at this exact moment, and Min Guifen absolutely can't know anything about it, before Wu Yun does what he's supposed to do.
"Then everything worked out fine for her," Wu Yun says, trying to reach discreetly into his sleeve.
Min Guifen holds Wu Yun by the back of his neck and forces his face close to Min Fengyi's. "Does it look like everything worked out well for her? Does it?"
The Prince throws Wu Yun to the ground with an enraged shout. "I prayed to the Gods to deliver her to my side, I prayed that it would pain her to be parted from me. And you know what happened?"
Wu Yun rubs his sore neck and remains silent. Whatever he does, the Prince will just end up saying what he pleases anyway.
"A goddess answered my prayers, and did exactly as I asked. Fengyi started feeling excruciating pain, the only thing she knew was that being close to me would make the pain go away. So she left her house in the middle of the night and rode here, begging me to make the pain stop so she could go back to her son. I begged the goddess for guidance and she gave me an elixir to mix with her son's drink that would solve all our problems."
Wu Yun's eyes widen. He remembers Lan Tian saying that Jiang Tanmei was poisoned by his uncle.
"I took her back with me the next day, the day of Tanmei's fourteenth birthday so she could spend it with him without feeling the pain of our separation. I did as the goddess commanded and dropped the elixir into his tea. The moment it touched his lips he fell to the ground in a violent convulsive fit. The only thing I could do was take Fengyi and leave. I can still hear her screaming that I'd done it. That, 'his uncle did it'."
The Prince circles the platform with Min Fengyi's body and lays his head over her chest. "No matter what I said she wouldn't believe that I never meant to hurt her son. She screamed that I had killed him and cursed her to live and empty existence at my side. She found one of my army swords and killed herself, I couldn't stop her. It was only later that I learnt that Tanmei had survived."
As Wu Yun expected, love makes humans act even more irrational than usual. "But it was your fault, none of it would have happened if you had left her alone."
He regrets his words as soon as they leave his lips, because the Prince runs towards him and wraps his large hands around his neck, squeezing the breath out of his lungs.
"No! It was that goddess' fault! When I asked her why she gave me an elixir to poison Tanmei she told me if Fengyi no longer had a son she could finally be happy with me, and then she laughed."
Wu Yun clutches at the Prince's hands trying to make him release his hold. For a moment he thinks Min Guifen is going to choke him to death, but just as Wu Yun is wavering on the edge of consciousness he lets go.
"In my attempts to bring Fengyi back to life, I heard that mystical beasts hold great power, and that a Phoenix's tears can bring a person back to life. I sent hunters to all corners of Jianghu to find one, and they did. But no manner of torture or cajoling would make the beast cry. I read that if feeds from the blood of exceptional young men, so I had the sons of all of the most distinguished families brought over here."
"And when did you start experimenting on them?" Wu Yun asks, putting some distance between the two of them before the Prince decides to attack him again. He's buying himself some time, trying to reach into his sleeve while Min Guifen is distracted by is own monologue.
"Because that cursed animal would still not cry!" The Prince shouts, slamming his hand against the wall. "So I tried using its blood instead. I couldn't risk Fengyi's already fragile body, so I used theirs, but they only became weaker, stupider, useless."
Wu Yun finally closes his hand around the pouch of crushed herbs Wei Su gave him, and hides his hand behind his back.
The Prince notices his movements and starts approaching him, a big cat stalking its prey. Wu Yun walks backwards until his shoulders meet the wall and he has nowhere else to go.
"That's when I called Jiang Tanmei here. When It seemed all my efforts were in vain," Min Guifen cages Wu Yun against the wall with his body and runs his thumb over his jaw. "I thought that if I couldn't have the mother, I could at least have the son."
Wu Yun turns his face away from Min Guifen's hand, and clutches the herbs in his fist harder.
"But you're not him, so you have no use to me," The Prince says, his cryptic smile promises a world of pain.
A pity Wu Yun won't be around to indulge the Prince's sadistic fantasies.
He has a cryptic smile all of his own. "No I'm not him," he says, and raises his hand to his lips to blow a mixture of herbs into Min Guifen's face.
He ducks under his arm and runs towards the open passageway. Min Guifen tries to run after him, but Wei Su's mixture is fast acting and he can only take a few steps before falling unconscious on the floor.
Outside, Wu Yun pushes down on a protruding stone and closes the entry to Min Fengyi's funeral chamber, locking the Prince inside.
Now he has to find a way to lower the cage and release the phoenix, but Min Guifen is fond of his hidden mechanisms so it won't be an easy task.
He's looking around the stone room, and under tables when a faint voice coming from above his head says, "On your left, behind those sacks of grain."
Wu Yun looks up and sees the phoenix's peacock beak peeking out of the cage bars.
"You can talk? Like a human?"
"No, not in this shape, you can only hear me because you're not a human yourself." The phoenix's voice sounds female, and very aggravated.
"How did you know that?" Wu Yun asks, inspecting his own hands for any signs that betray his fox nature.
"I didn't, until I spoke and you heard me!" she says, growing more aggravated by the minute. "Now get me out of here."
Wu Yun was much more willing to release the phoenix before she started ordering him about. He moves the sacks of grain and finds a small lever in the ground. He pulls it and the cage is slowly lowered onto the floor.
"Do you have the keys?" The phoenix asks him, waving her slender neck towards the heavy iron lock.
Wu Yun groans and returns to the wall to open the funeral chamber again. Thankfully Min Guifen is still lying unconscious on the floor. Wu Yun pats around his waist until he finds a hoop of keys, that he brings back to the cage to show to the phoenix.
"Which one?"
"That large one," she points with her beak at a black key.
Wu Yun manages to open the cage and release the phoenix, but one problem remains. "Can you walk, or...er, fly?"
She squeaks indignantly and spreads her wings, showing all the missing feathers and silvery streaked wounds. "Does it look like I can fly?"
"Right, so what can we do?" Wu Yun looks around the room again and his eyes land on the sacks of grain covering the cage's lever.
He empties one of the sacks, raising a cloud of fine milled millet grains. "Did they feed you this?" he asks, looking at the unappetizing raw grains.
"Even chickens receive better treatment than I did here," she grunts fluffing her feathers at all the indignities she endured.
Wu Yun makes a makeshift sling out of the sack and wraps it around the phoenix's large body so he can carry her under his arm.
"I see there's no end in sight to the humiliations I must suffer," the phoenix says, while being squeezed against Wu Yun's side.
"Will you stop complaining? I'm trying to save you."
He's finally making his way up the stairs when a chilling voice freezes the blood in his veins.
"Where do you think you're going?"
SUY NGHĨ CỦA NGƯỜI SÁNG TẠO 
ThirtyTyrants
ThirtyTyrants The Prince finally has a name, and a backstory, sadly that makes him no less of a creep.
Sorry for the lack of Lan Tian in this chapter, I too, miss him dearly.
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