Copper Coins

Chapter 43: Plague County (I)

    The two waiters led the county clerks around the inn building and pointed up at a shut window on the second floor. In low voices, they said, "Sir, it's that one."

    They worked in customer service all day long so obviously knew just the right things to say––

    As ordinary townspeople, they did not know nor care about the wider context of that county office poster, but they knew to be extremely careful when they reported the monk. They couldn't just barge in and say, "There's a monk in our shop who looks exactly like the Great Priest," as, if they were mistaken, they would have offended all parties and gotten their eyeballs poked out for a good wash. They also couldn't say, "The monk looks exactly like that wanted poster all over town," because what if, somehow, the monk really was the Great Priest or connected to the Great Priest? The Great Priest would definitely not be happy that they had accused him of being a criminal, and they'd be in real trouble.

    The two waiters had pondered this for a while, then had decided to tell the county office, "There's a monk in our shop who seems very strange." If the county clerks wanted to know how the monk was strange, that was not the waiters' problem.

    Even so, as the waiters led the clerks back to the inn, they began to feel conflicted again. They didn't know why, but somehow they felt anxious about it all.

    Although the men outside the inn had made their voices as low as they could, but Xue Xian, curled up on the bed, heard every word.

    They were surrounded again.

    They were... surrounded... by county clerks... again!

    That bald donkey must have been born under the wrong stars. Out of the three cities they'd visited, they'd gotten onto the radar of two county offices, and each time the clerks had directly come to break down the door!

    The weird feeling that had settled into Xue Xian earlier had still not dissipated. Xue Xian turned over so that his back was to Xuanmin now –– at some point in the past few days, he seemed to have entered into an unbreakable cycle by which he was constantly mad at the monk.

    As always, Xuanmin's steps were completely silent, but Xue Xian could still feel their presence by their weight on the floorboards.

    He could feel that Xuanmin had walked up to the bed and was standing there, looking at him.

    Xue Xian assumed, based on Xuanmin's stuck-up and detached personality, that the monk had come over to do one thing –– pick up the money that Xue Xian had snapped at him to take.

    But Xuanmin did not move at all, not toward the mattress nor toward the pile of coin. He simply stood there by the bed, saying not a word.

    Just silence.

    Why wasn't he saying anything? 

    Still staring at the wall, Xue Xian frowned. He really didn't enjoy being stared at like this. With strangers, it was fine, since he saw them as mere dust on the ground anyway, so could reach out a claw and swat them away. But it was different with the bald donkey. When others stared at him it merely made him irritated, but under Xuanmin's gaze, his entire head from the top to the neck felt completely tense.

    His whole dragon skin was going to peel off...

    When will this end? If you have something to say, damn monk, just say it...

    Xue Xian was so self-conscious that he was practically turning into a stick of dragon jerky right there on the bed. In his mind he muttered angrily to himself, but in reality he said nothing.

    The silence in the room was unnerving.

    For a brief moment, everything seemed to vanish from Xue Xian's sharp hearing –– from the noises next door to the movements outside the window and the hush of the street under curfew, they were all gone, hanging in the air, suffocated by that silence. He didn't realise that it was because he was still waiting for Xuanmin to speak.

    Since he'd been standing there for so long unmoving, the thing he wanted to say had to be... unusual. There was no reason to hold back otherwise. Was he about to give more detail on who it was that he was looking for? Or something else?

    The county clerks outside were probably already entering the inn and creeping up the stairs by now. Still, Xuanmin said nothing.

    Xue Xian had already died multiple times in his mind. Why don't you just choke on your words and die already?

    Gradually, the county clerks' voices wormed their way back into Xue Xian's ear: "Be careful where you step. We don't want to alert them. We'll go to the door, and you guys watch the window."

    Xue Xian laughed coldly. If you keep holding it back, you can go hold it in the county jail.

    "You ––" Xuanmin finally said, with something indescribable in his tone that made Xue Xian feel even tenser.

    He was a divine dragon, lord of the seas, and he was letting a single word from a mere mortal get him all worked up like this? What the hell?

    Xue Xian wasn't even breathing anymore. He waited and waited for Xuanmin to finish his sentence. But having just said the word You, the fucking bald donkey had fallen silent again. 

    Xuanmin should be glad Xue Xian wasn't in his dragon form at the moment. He was feeling so nervous that he would've brought the whole inn down.

    The county clerks had made their way into the inn from the back door, but had seemed to have attracted some attention, and had paused to explain. 

    Xue Xian heard Xuanmin's robes suddenly move a little –– he seemed to have heard the noise below. With that, the indescribable feeling in the atmosphere disappeared, leaving no trace at all.

    When he turned his head back, he saw that the dragon was throwing some tantrum again. Xue Xian had burrowed his head deep into the nest of blankets, as though he'd given up on life and was ready to suffocate right then and there. 

    Actually, Xue Xian was angrily thinking, Fine, who cares if we get caught. I can get away anytime. I won't bring you.

    With that thought, his body began to glow dimly with a white light.

    Deng deng deng––    

    So close now, the clerks had given up trying to be quiet. Their footsteps were alarmingly loud and boomed rapidly up the stairs.

    And beneath the window, where more guards stood, there was a slicing sound, like swords being slipped out of scabbards.

    So the door and the window were both blocked.

    The county clerks turned the corner and boomed toward the door to their room, pushing away the inn boy stationed in the corridor.

    And in that instant, the human form on the bed vanished and a long black shadow emerged from the blankets, growing larger and larger as it slithered out.

    Hong––

    The wall against which the bed leant fell away, revealing a shocked Stone Zhang and Twenty-Seven sitting next door.

    Xuanmin was briefly stunned, too –– he hadn't expected Xue Xian to turn into a dragon so casually. When he came back to his senses, he saw that he as holding a black robe, thrown to him by Xue Xian, who seemed to have relegated him to a kind of clothes-holding sidekick role.

    Even more typical, as the dragon tossed him the robe, he didn't forget to take back the golden beads inside his sleeve. With a flick of his claw, the dragon sent the beads spinning, and they swiftly disappeared into him, somehow slipping into his scales. 

    Xuanmin was speechless.

    They'd broken down the wall –– the county clerks had to know that something was happening inside.

    There came a loud shout from beyond the door: "Don't bother! We have you surrounded on all sides, you have no way of escaping!"

    As the clerk yelled, his companions began to ram against the door.

    When the door open, the leading clerk even sneered, "There's nothing you can do except break down the roof and fly out––"

    He stopped.

    The crowd of clerks standing by the door wondered if they were all dreaming...

    Yes, they were definitely dreaming.

    The leading clerk's mouth was still hanging open mid-speech as he gaped at the black dragon curled up inside the room.

    The dragon was inconceivably large - just its tail part filled the room. The bed was crushed, and the wall beside it had been reduced to rubble, leaving behind a thin frame on all four sides like sliced-up tofu.

    But... what kind of knife could slice a wall like tofu?!

    Then, the leading clerk noticed that the enormous black dragon already had broken down much of the roof, and that the top half of its body reached outside, sprawled across the sloping roof of the inn. The whole building seemed to be sagging in one direction under its weight.

    The clerks' faces were still frozen in bewilderment and terror when the dragon lowered its heavy head and looked at the them through the gap in the roof. Then, it reached out a claw and seized the equally stunned middle-aged man and skinny boy from the neighboring room. At the same time, it nudged its head and lifted a young monk wearing a white robe onto its neck. 

    The dragon glared at the clerks once more, then let out a bright roar as its head stretched out.

    Instantly, the wind and clouds responded, and lightning flashed in the distance, intermittently lighting up the dark night sky. Thunder rippled toward them from its epicenter somewhere far away, booming increasingly louder.

    Then, a long, deafening gust of wind blasted into the room.

    The black dragon mounted the wind and ascended to the clouds above. As it departed, its long black shadow flitted in and out of the clouds, pirouetting in the air before vanishing into the darkness.

    Whether they'd been standing by the door or waiting beneath the window, all of the county clerks –– as well as those two waiters and the handful of inhabitants of the nearby houses who'd happened to look up in that moment –– had all seen that dragon fly away into the sky, and could not believe their eyes.

    The leading clerk had not even managed to see what Xuanmin had looked like -- he only remembered that cloud-like robe.

    Shortly after the dragon disappeared, the clouds he'd summoned began to pour with rain.

    The storm was overwhelming, and as the raindrops slapped onto the clerks' faces, they felt so cold that they sent chills down their spines.

    Finally, the clerks came back to their senses. One of them murmured, "They... they really did break down the roof... and fly out..."

    The man's voice seemed squeezed out of the very bottom of his throat, and sounded strained, perhaps from the shock, or from the cold.

    Hearing this, the leading clerk's lips began to tremble, and he turned pale. "We... we were here to arrest the monk, right?"

    "Ah," his colleagues stuttered. "Right..."

    "Just now in the sky... that was a dragon, right?" the leading clerk said, still in a daze.

    "Right..."

    "That monk, did you see it ––" The leading clerk turned his face to the skies again. "That monk flew away with the dragon..."

    "Right..."

    The clerks stretched their necks out as far as they'd go and gawked into the night together like a group of meerkats. Apart from Right... they seemed to have forgotten how to speak. Only when their uniforms had become completely drenched in freezing rain did they suddenly truly realise what had just happened––

    A monk! Riding a dragon!

    Was it every day that you saw a mythical creature like a dragon?

    But that monk actually rode the dragon into the sky, was it every day that you saw a monk like that?

    The same thought seemed to flash simultaneously across the clerks' minds. They slowly looked at each other as their faces shifted from terror to confusion to revelation. "Could it be... that he's... that man?"

    In all the nation, they could only think of one person who could tame a dragon––

    That mysterious masked Great Priest.

    The speed at which rumors can sometimes spread across a town is terrifying. Within the night, all of Huazhi County began only to speak of one thing –– the Great Priest was back! 

    The previously unremarkable inn immediately exploded with customers as crowds came to gawp at its roof and at the two waiters who had been witness to it all –– first they were interrogated by the County Officer, and then the neighbors swarmed in too.

    As the Huazhi county seat whipped itself into a frenzy, the black dragon and white-clad monk in question were swimming in a lake not far from Qingping County. 

    Stone Zhang and Twenty-Seven were still in shock from the flight and floated corpse-like on the surface of the water. Even as the group reached the shore and Xuanmin dragged them out, they continued to gaze off into space in stunned silence.

    Jiang Shining had long reverted to his paper man form. As he shivered on a patch of dry grass by the water, he glanced at the mess of pagodas and towers in the distance and asked Xue Xian, "Sir, could you not land in such a traumatic way next time?"

    Irritated, Xue Xian pointed at those faraway city gates. "A landing is a landing," he snapped. "We didn't even have to spend money on a carriage. Look at the city gates. Can you read? Read it with me: Qing –– Ping –– County. I brought you to your sister's front door, and you're still complaining about this and that. You should be ashamed of yourself!"

Chapter 43: Plague County (I)

    The two waiters led the county clerks around the inn building and pointed up at a shut window on the second floor. In low voices, they said, "Sir, it's that one."

    They worked in customer service all day long so obviously knew just the right things to say––

    As ordinary townspeople, they did not know nor care about the wider context of that county office poster, but they knew to be extremely careful when they reported the monk. They couldn't just barge in and say, "There's a monk in our shop who looks exactly like the Great Priest," as, if they were mistaken, they would have offended all parties and gotten their eyeballs poked out for a good wash. They also couldn't say, "The monk looks exactly like that wanted poster all over town," because what if, somehow, the monk really was the Great Priest or connected to the Great Priest? The Great Priest would definitely not be happy that they had accused him of being a criminal, and they'd be in real trouble.

    The two waiters had pondered this for a while, then had decided to tell the county office, "There's a monk in our shop who seems very strange." If the county clerks wanted to know how the monk was strange, that was not the waiters' problem.

    Even so, as the waiters led the clerks back to the inn, they began to feel conflicted again. They didn't know why, but somehow they felt anxious about it all.

    Although the men outside the inn had made their voices as low as they could, but Xue Xian, curled up on the bed, heard every word.

    They were surrounded again.

    They were... surrounded... by county clerks... again!

    That bald donkey must have been born under the wrong stars. Out of the three cities they'd visited, they'd gotten onto the radar of two county offices, and each time the clerks had directly come to break down the door!

    The weird feeling that had settled into Xue Xian earlier had still not dissipated. Xue Xian turned over so that his back was to Xuanmin now –– at some point in the past few days, he seemed to have entered into an unbreakable cycle by which he was constantly mad at the monk.

    As always, Xuanmin's steps were completely silent, but Xue Xian could still feel their presence by their weight on the floorboards.

    He could feel that Xuanmin had walked up to the bed and was standing there, looking at him.

    Xue Xian assumed, based on Xuanmin's stuck-up and detached personality, that the monk had come over to do one thing –– pick up the money that Xue Xian had snapped at him to take.

    But Xuanmin did not move at all, not toward the mattress nor toward the pile of coin. He simply stood there by the bed, saying not a word.

    Just silence.

    Why wasn't he saying anything? 

    Still staring at the wall, Xue Xian frowned. He really didn't enjoy being stared at like this. With strangers, it was fine, since he saw them as mere dust on the ground anyway, so could reach out a claw and swat them away. But it was different with the bald donkey. When others stared at him it merely made him irritated, but under Xuanmin's gaze, his entire head from the top to the neck felt completely tense.

    His whole dragon skin was going to peel off...

    When will this end? If you have something to say, damn monk, just say it...

    Xue Xian was so self-conscious that he was practically turning into a stick of dragon jerky right there on the bed. In his mind he muttered angrily to himself, but in reality he said nothing.

    The silence in the room was unnerving.

    For a brief moment, everything seemed to vanish from Xue Xian's sharp hearing –– from the noises next door to the movements outside the window and the hush of the street under curfew, they were all gone, hanging in the air, suffocated by that silence. He didn't realise that it was because he was still waiting for Xuanmin to speak.

    Since he'd been standing there for so long unmoving, the thing he wanted to say had to be... unusual. There was no reason to hold back otherwise. Was he about to give more detail on who it was that he was looking for? Or something else?

    The county clerks outside were probably already entering the inn and creeping up the stairs by now. Still, Xuanmin said nothing.

    Xue Xian had already died multiple times in his mind. Why don't you just choke on your words and die already?

    Gradually, the county clerks' voices wormed their way back into Xue Xian's ear: "Be careful where you step. We don't want to alert them. We'll go to the door, and you guys watch the window."

    Xue Xian laughed coldly. If you keep holding it back, you can go hold it in the county jail.

    "You ––" Xuanmin finally said, with something indescribable in his tone that made Xue Xian feel even tenser.

    He was a divine dragon, lord of the seas, and he was letting a single word from a mere mortal get him all worked up like this? What the hell?

    Xue Xian wasn't even breathing anymore. He waited and waited for Xuanmin to finish his sentence. But having just said the word You, the fucking bald donkey had fallen silent again. 

    Xuanmin should be glad Xue Xian wasn't in his dragon form at the moment. He was feeling so nervous that he would've brought the whole inn down.

    The county clerks had made their way into the inn from the back door, but had seemed to have attracted some attention, and had paused to explain. 

    Xue Xian heard Xuanmin's robes suddenly move a little –– he seemed to have heard the noise below. With that, the indescribable feeling in the atmosphere disappeared, leaving no trace at all.

    When he turned his head back, he saw that the dragon was throwing some tantrum again. Xue Xian had burrowed his head deep into the nest of blankets, as though he'd given up on life and was ready to suffocate right then and there. 

    Actually, Xue Xian was angrily thinking, Fine, who cares if we get caught. I can get away anytime. I won't bring you.

    With that thought, his body began to glow dimly with a white light.

    Deng deng deng––    

    So close now, the clerks had given up trying to be quiet. Their footsteps were alarmingly loud and boomed rapidly up the stairs.

    And beneath the window, where more guards stood, there was a slicing sound, like swords being slipped out of scabbards.

    So the door and the window were both blocked.

    The county clerks turned the corner and boomed toward the door to their room, pushing away the inn boy stationed in the corridor.

    And in that instant, the human form on the bed vanished and a long black shadow emerged from the blankets, growing larger and larger as it slithered out.

    Hong––

    The wall against which the bed leant fell away, revealing a shocked Stone Zhang and Twenty-Seven sitting next door.

    Xuanmin was briefly stunned, too –– he hadn't expected Xue Xian to turn into a dragon so casually. When he came back to his senses, he saw that he as holding a black robe, thrown to him by Xue Xian, who seemed to have relegated him to a kind of clothes-holding sidekick role.

    Even more typical, as the dragon tossed him the robe, he didn't forget to take back the golden beads inside his sleeve. With a flick of his claw, the dragon sent the beads spinning, and they swiftly disappeared into him, somehow slipping into his scales. 

    Xuanmin was speechless.

    They'd broken down the wall –– the county clerks had to know that something was happening inside.

    There came a loud shout from beyond the door: "Don't bother! We have you surrounded on all sides, you have no way of escaping!"

    As the clerk yelled, his companions began to ram against the door.

    When the door open, the leading clerk even sneered, "There's nothing you can do except break down the roof and fly out––"

    He stopped.

    The crowd of clerks standing by the door wondered if they were all dreaming...

    Yes, they were definitely dreaming.

    The leading clerk's mouth was still hanging open mid-speech as he gaped at the black dragon curled up inside the room.

    The dragon was inconceivably large - just its tail part filled the room. The bed was crushed, and the wall beside it had been reduced to rubble, leaving behind a thin frame on all four sides like sliced-up tofu.

    But... what kind of knife could slice a wall like tofu?!

    Then, the leading clerk noticed that the enormous black dragon already had broken down much of the roof, and that the top half of its body reached outside, sprawled across the sloping roof of the inn. The whole building seemed to be sagging in one direction under its weight.

    The clerks' faces were still frozen in bewilderment and terror when the dragon lowered its heavy head and looked at the them through the gap in the roof. Then, it reached out a claw and seized the equally stunned middle-aged man and skinny boy from the neighboring room. At the same time, it nudged its head and lifted a young monk wearing a white robe onto its neck. 

    The dragon glared at the clerks once more, then let out a bright roar as its head stretched out.

    Instantly, the wind and clouds responded, and lightning flashed in the distance, intermittently lighting up the dark night sky. Thunder rippled toward them from its epicenter somewhere far away, booming increasingly louder.

    Then, a long, deafening gust of wind blasted into the room.

    The black dragon mounted the wind and ascended to the clouds above. As it departed, its long black shadow flitted in and out of the clouds, pirouetting in the air before vanishing into the darkness.

    Whether they'd been standing by the door or waiting beneath the window, all of the county clerks –– as well as those two waiters and the handful of inhabitants of the nearby houses who'd happened to look up in that moment –– had all seen that dragon fly away into the sky, and could not believe their eyes.

    The leading clerk had not even managed to see what Xuanmin had looked like -- he only remembered that cloud-like robe.

    Shortly after the dragon disappeared, the clouds he'd summoned began to pour with rain.

    The storm was overwhelming, and as the raindrops slapped onto the clerks' faces, they felt so cold that they sent chills down their spines.

    Finally, the clerks came back to their senses. One of them murmured, "They... they really did break down the roof... and fly out..."

    The man's voice seemed squeezed out of the very bottom of his throat, and sounded strained, perhaps from the shock, or from the cold.

    Hearing this, the leading clerk's lips began to tremble, and he turned pale. "We... we were here to arrest the monk, right?"

    "Ah," his colleagues stuttered. "Right..."

    "Just now in the sky... that was a dragon, right?" the leading clerk said, still in a daze.

    "Right..."

    "That monk, did you see it ––" The leading clerk turned his face to the skies again. "That monk flew away with the dragon..."

    "Right..."

    The clerks stretched their necks out as far as they'd go and gawked into the night together like a group of meerkats. Apart from Right... they seemed to have forgotten how to speak. Only when their uniforms had become completely drenched in freezing rain did they suddenly truly realise what had just happened––

    A monk! Riding a dragon!

    Was it every day that you saw a mythical creature like a dragon?

    But that monk actually rode the dragon into the sky, was it every day that you saw a monk like that?

    The same thought seemed to flash simultaneously across the clerks' minds. They slowly looked at each other as their faces shifted from terror to confusion to revelation. "Could it be... that he's... that man?"

    In all the nation, they could only think of one person who could tame a dragon––

    That mysterious masked Great Priest.

    The speed at which rumors can sometimes spread across a town is terrifying. Within the night, all of Huazhi County began only to speak of one thing –– the Great Priest was back! 

    The previously unremarkable inn immediately exploded with customers as crowds came to gawp at its roof and at the two waiters who had been witness to it all –– first they were interrogated by the County Officer, and then the neighbors swarmed in too.

    As the Huazhi county seat whipped itself into a frenzy, the black dragon and white-clad monk in question were swimming in a lake not far from Qingping County. 

    Stone Zhang and Twenty-Seven were still in shock from the flight and floated corpse-like on the surface of the water. Even as the group reached the shore and Xuanmin dragged them out, they continued to gaze off into space in stunned silence.

    Jiang Shining had long reverted to his paper man form. As he shivered on a patch of dry grass by the water, he glanced at the mess of pagodas and towers in the distance and asked Xue Xian, "Sir, could you not land in such a traumatic way next time?"

    Irritated, Xue Xian pointed at those faraway city gates. "A landing is a landing," he snapped. "We didn't even have to spend money on a carriage. Look at the city gates. Can you read? Read it with me: Qing –– Ping –– County. I brought you to your sister's front door, and you're still complaining about this and that. You should be ashamed of yourself!"