When Lu Jiangxian was offered back up onto the stone platform, he silently swept his divine sense across the courtyard, watching Li Mutian walk slowly into the yard, lean against the doorframe, and draw labored breath with closed eyes. A great deal of emotion welled up inside him.
"So much time has already passed." Li Xiangping had yet to lift the magic mirror from the river, Li Mutian had been a stern-faced patriarch with weathered yet powerful eyes, and now he had become an old man past seventy, too feeble to walk.
Since crossing over, Lu Jiangxian had always drifted half-awake within the mirror, and almost twenty years had passed in a daze that his own senses measured as a single month. The Li family had found its footing and become a new cultivation clan. Yet the Li Mutian before him withered day by day, as though the clan's swift rise had been blown into being by a single wisp of breath, and that breath had now reached the end of its life. Under Lu Jiangxian's divine sense, he could plainly watch Li Mutian's vitality drain away; the old man had perhaps no more than a few days left.
Li Mutian, for his part, lingered in peace beside the door, and the eternal solemnity of his face had even taken on a hint of a smile. Gazing at Li Xuanfeng, who stood before him holding a bow and chattering busily, his throat moved, and the man who had made no request in over a dozen years gave his first command.
"I want to eat lamb rice noodles," Li Mutian said.
Li Xuanfeng was stunned speechless for a moment, and heard Li Mutian speak again: "Your grandfather very much wants to eat lamb rice noodles."
Li Xuanfeng answered hurriedly and ran off without looking back, yet the strange way his grandfather had spoken cast a shadow like a vast nightmare over his heart. That speech did not sound like a command but carried a kind of pleading, and it sent a chill through the usually clever boy.
"Father wants lamb rice noodles!" Li Xuanfeng's cry left Lady Ren startled for a moment. Seeing the tears streaming down the child's face, she quickly called for several women of the house, then patted Li Xuanfeng on the shoulder and whispered with a veiled urgency: "Quick, call your father back."
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Steaming lamb rice noodles sprinkled with chopped scallions, the glossy noodles shimmering with flecks of oil and the rich aroma rising thick, sat in a porcelain bowl chipped at one small edge, set upon a wooden table, with a pair of wooden chopsticks laid beside it — neat and plain.
The bowl was one Li Mutian had used for thirty-one years, and the chip had been knocked out by a young Li Xiangping, who earned himself a severe beating for it and howled with pain, skirting around Li Mutian for days afterward.
Li Mutian slowly shuffled to his seat and picked up a trembling mouthful of noodles. The sour-spicy softness of the noodles and the rich fragrance of the mutton broth made his limbs shake, and the taste made him weep aloud, recalling the bowl of lamb rice noodles his own father, Li Genshui, had cooked for him personally.
That bowl had been far less delicious than this one — less vinegar, more chili, and the broth thin and scant — but both his mother and Li Mutian understood it was his father's way of apologizing. Still, he had smashed the bowl and run away from home, and the parting lasted twenty-eight years.
Li Mutian cursed his father for being irresolute and wasteful of the whole family, while Li Genshui cursed his son Li Mutian for being a wolf-hearted ingrate, a bastard child born of his wife's coupling with some wolf. Li Mutian had drawn his blade and pointed it at his father, watching Li Genshui's lips turn purple with rage and tears streak down his face.
Twenty-eight years later, Li Mutian returned home to find his father slain by the hands of the Yuan family. He had laughed coldly and laid the severed heads of the entire Yuan family before his father's grave, dividing the fields with a wooden face — yet woken often in the night to find his pillow wet.
The recollection wound through Li Mutian's mind for only a dozen-odd breaths, for he had taken but one mouthful of the noodles before collapsing rigidly to the ground.
Li Mutian felt as though a burning charcoal had been driven into his chest, scorching his flesh with a sizzle, while blades of steel churned through his belly, and pain shot from head to foot. The charcoal leapt from his chest into his mouth, and his tongue, his throat — all turned parched and dry, his limbs stiffening into iron until the ring of womenfolk around him could not raise him upright.
"Grandfather! Grandfather!" He could faintly make out the sobbing of Li Xuanling, the eldest son of Li Tongya, a child of only five yet already uncannily steady, just like his father had been as a boy.
Growing anxious, Li Mutian forced his tongue about, desperate to make some sound to prove he was unharmed, but could manage only a few hoarse, dog-like grunts.
"Move him to the bed! Move him to the bed!" Lady Ren cried through her tears. She had seen her own father, Ren Ping'an, off only a few years before, and watching this old man slip away, she knew she could not let him die upon that cold, icy ground, and called for several people to lift the old man.
"And mother?" Tian Yun asked hurriedly, and only then learned that Li Mutian's wife, Lady Liu, mother to them all, had gone down the mountain some days ago to visit her family.
The women carried the stiffened Li Mutian onto the bed and made a flustered commotion. In the back courtyard, Lu Jiangxian watched with complicated feelings, and quickly murmured the calming incantation, releasing the power of the lunar essence to prop up the old man's fading life for a while. It was not until he saw Li Xiangping and the others rushing up the mountain that he let the matter rest.
"His span is spent." Lu Jiangxian felt Li Mutian's breath ebb slowly away as Li Xiangping and Li Tongya finally entered the courtyard, Li Xuanfeng trailing behind them in tears.
Li Tongya, his face full of worry, took Li Mutian's hand and slowly fed the power of his peak-of-Embryonic-Breathing cultivation into the old man's body. Li Mutian shuddered throughout, expelled one deep breath, and at last opened his eyes.
"Xiangping... Tongya..." Li Mutian murmured, his gaze drifting over the people around him, his mouth opening and closing as he spoke in a voice barely a whisper.
Li Tongya, weeping, hurriedly bent down and heard Li Mutian murmur: "The Chen, Tian, and Liu families... all are deeply rooted in the villages. Recall their whole clans to Lijing Village, raise the village to a market town, and they will not grow too great..."
"Father... rest first, and speak when you are better..." Li Xiangping entreated in choked voice. Li Mutian looked at him and shook his head, forcing out the words: "The children of the Li clan are often arrogant and reckless. You must establish a clan steward to rein them in... Let the four branches of the direct line be the major branch, the remaining Li surnamed the minor branch, and the most distant the collateral branches. The upper and lower must communicate freely — that you must manage for yourselves."
"Xuanxuan can hold the household, but he will need your guardianship. Xuanfeng is wild and clever, yet you must guard against his indulgence, lust, and killing. Xuanling is steady and calm — he is one who can accomplish things... Jingtian... has beauty... and must be shielded from disaster... The Mountain Yue are a far greater harm... take the greatest care!"
Li Mutian's voice faded thinner and thinner, and Li Xiangping, tears in his eyes, drew closer, watching the old man suddenly raise his hand and seize his wrist with a strength that did not belong to a dying man. A fierce light flashed in his fading eyes as he writhed upon the bed, his voice suddenly swelling, and he ground out between his teeth: "If necessary... all four villages and lands can be abandoned... Do not be like the Wan family... so long as a single son of the Li family escapes, any one can... accomplish... great things..."
Tears streamed down Li Xiangping's face, and he said fiercely: "Father... your son has remembered it all!"
Only then did Li Mutian abruptly release his grip, and in a moment breath left him. The gathered wept aloud with abandon, yet the old man's gaze still fixed straight upon the bowl of lamb rice noodles on the table.
The broth was full-bodied, sour and peppery and delicious, and still warm.