Chapter 538: May Fortune Favour Your Arms
Hei's constitution really was excellent. Even poisoned, he was still alert and spoke clearly.
Of course, it may also have been that feudal-era poison-making just wasn't very good, and mineral and plant poisons didn't kill very efficiently.
So-called crane's-crown red and arsenic didn't kill on the spot when you drank them. It could take two or three days of agony before you died.
For someone with an exceptionally strong constitution, it might drag on for half a month or a month before they finally died of liver and kidney failure.
So Hei drinking all of the poisoned wine wasn't foolish. He just didn't want to spend days dying.
Now Hei and Kian sat facing each other. Even poisoned, Hei kept his formal kneeling posture, while Kian sat on the tatami however he pleased.
Kian asked, "How do you feel right now?"
Hei said, "A salty, bloody taste in my mouth. My limbs are weak and limp. A slight pain in my belly."
Kian said, "That's bleeding in your mouth. The poison's attacking your nerves, which is why you're weak, and the belly pain is damage to your stomach lining.
"You're too heavy for the poison to kill you right away, but it won't be long before things get worse fast, and you'll die in agony."
Hei smiled. "When that time comes, I hope you'll give me a quick end, sir."
For a while, neither of them spoke. After a long silence, Kian asked:
"Hei, any last words?"
Hei thought about it and said:
"Sir, would you take my wife and son with you?"
Kian nodded.
"I will."
Hei said, "Then I can die without regret. Only, dying like this still leaves me feeling a little sorry."
He'd barely finished speaking when an uproar broke out in the palace outside the Minamoto house, with maids and guards shouting in panic.
Kian heard the shouting and suddenly asked:
"Say, when the Son of Heaven sent you poisoned wine, was he really that sure his great general could take out the Big Yōkai?"
Meanwhile, in the Son of Heaven's great hall.
The Son of Heaven looked at the great general, who had been reduced to a limbless stump, his eyes gouged out and his nose bitten off, and asked shakily:
"Oh no!! Oh dear!! You, you, you... didn't you say you could get rid of the Big Yōkai?! You, you, you... how did you end up like this?"
The great general, without hands or feet, lay on a tatami and spoke in a weak voice:
"The G... Giant Yōkai, these five days, he... he had the other Big Yōkai st... steal people for him to eat...
"He... he ate everyone for fifty kilometres around, and his wounds have healed!!!"
When the whole court heard that the Giant Yōkai had recovered, they cried out in panic. One minister even knocked over a vase in the hall. The whole hall descended into chaos!
The Son of Heaven asked shakily:
"W... where is Our three-thousand-strong expedition?"
"Sur... surrounded on Peach Blossom Mountain by the demon army. Being tortured, toyed with, eaten..."
The Son of Heaven couldn't bear to hear any more. He let out a terrified scream, kicked the limbless great general over, and kept stomping on him as he roared:
"Bakayarō! You said you could kill the Giant Yōkai! It was because you said you could kill the Giant Yōkai that We gave Hei the, gave Hei the... AAAH! Commit seppuku and atone!!"
The ministers around him were dumbfounded. The man didn't have any limbs left. How was he supposed to commit seppuku?
One minister hurried to say, "Son of Heaven! He's dead!"
The Son of Heaven looked down. He'd kicked the great general several times, and the already gravely wounded man couldn't take it and had bled to death!
The Son of Heaven froze for a moment, then flew into an even worse rage.
"Drag him out! He's committing seppuku even if he's dead!!"
Two samurai came in and dragged the great general's body out to give it its belly cuts anyway.
But killing him didn't solve anything. The invincible Giant Yōkai had recovered, and the three thousand samurai who were Kyoto's last armed force were trapped on the mountain being toyed with and slaughtered. They had no means of resistance left.
The Son of Heaven looked as if his soul had been drained out of him. He went back to his throne, dropped onto it, and stared blankly at his ministers below, who were even more panicked than he was.
"Our dear ministers, as things stand, what are We to do?"
A minister stepped forward, bowed to the Son of Heaven, and said:
"As long as the green hills remain, there'll always be firewood. Son of Heaven, move the capital! At least save your life!"
The Son of Heaven wanted to cry but had no tears.
"Move the capital? Move it where? Go live in some domain like a cuckoo in another bird's nest?"
There had been times in history when a Son of Heaven lost power and was reduced to living in a daimyō's domain, and every one of them had met a miserable end!
Either they were humiliated by the daimyō, or they were reduced to breeding stock.
Even he himself was the mongrel offspring of a deposed Son of Heaven who had gone to a daimyō's house and been forced by the daimyō to father a child on the daimyō's daughter.
If he sank that low, he felt he'd be better off dead!
Just as he was at his wits' end, that towering figure suddenly came back into his mind: Hei!
"Of course, Hei! Hei could turn this around!!
"Quickly! Send someone for Hei! Have him march at once and rescue the three thousand trapped samurai! Cut off the Giant Yōkai's head and bring it to Us!!"
The words were barely out of his mouth when an old eunuch, bent nearly ninety degrees, scurried up to him on tiny steps and said in a voice only the two of them could hear:
"Has the Son of Heaven forgotten? Lord Minamoto has already drunk the poisoned wine. By now he may already be..."
Panic and regret rose in the Son of Heaven's heart, but he quickly said:
"You old eunuch!! Take the antidote to Hei right now. Have him take the medicine and march out immediately!!"
The old eunuch groaned to himself. Hei had been poisoned all night long. The poison was deep in his body by now, and the antidote probably wouldn't help.
And poisoning a man and then asking him to risk his life for you... really...
But since the Son of Heaven had given the order, his underlings could only obey.
The old eunuch took a few young eunuchs and the antidote pill and hurried to Hei's quarters.
When the old eunuch came into Hei's house, he found Hei kneeling formally in the main hall, talking with a tall man.
Hei's colour looked all right. He didn't have the look of a dying man, and the old eunuch breathed a sigh of relief.
He bowed humbly, a full hundred degrees, holding up a wooden box in both hands. Inside was a pill.
"Lord Minamoto, this is a Vigour Pill bestowed by the Son of Heaven. The Son of Heaven commands that once you've taken this medicine, you march out to Peach Blossom Mountain at once, rescue the three thousand elite samurai trapped by the demon army, and cut off the Giant Yōkai's head!!"
Everyone in the hall looked at the old eunuch with strange expressions. Kian mocked him openly:
"Oh, I see. So the great general's expedition failed, the army's surrounded by the demons, and now you need Hei to bail you out, so here's the antidote.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk. What a pathetic damn excuse for a Son of Heaven!"
Hei's wife and his son Tarō glared at the old eunuch, looking like they wanted to rip him apart.
Hei looked at the pill for a long time, then took it in both hands.
"Thank you to the Son of Heaven for the Vigour Pill. But how is this medicine to be taken?"
The old eunuch said hurriedly:
"Dissolve the pill in water and drink it!"
Hei nodded.
"Your subject understands. Please go back and tell the Son of Heaven that your subject will take the pill at once and march to slay the Giant Yōkai."
The old eunuch was surprised it had been this easy.
He asked Hei with complicated feelings, "Lord Minamoto, is there anything you'd like me to tell the Son of Heaven?"
Hei shook his head.
"The Son of Heaven is lord of all under heaven. Everything in the world belongs to the Son of Heaven, your subject's life included.
"If the Son of Heaven wishes it, your subject would give his life a thousand times over for the Son of Heaven and ask nothing in return.
"Only, your subject would like to tell the Son of Heaven this: if the Son of Heaven wants your subject dead, there's no need for so much trouble. A single word, and your subject would gladly commit seppuku."
With that, he placed both hands on his thighs and bowed deeply toward the castle keep.
The eunuch sighed.
"Lord Minamoto, I'll deliver your words exactly as you said them, every last one. You have my word!"
"Yes. Thank you for your trouble, sir. As soon as the pill takes effect, your subject will set out for Peach Blossom Mountain and take the head of every last Giant Yōkai."
The old eunuch bowed deeply, and this time he meant it.
Bowing low, he backed away one step at a time until he was out of Hei's courtyard, then went back to report.
The hall fell silent again until Tarō slammed his fist into the wooden floor and let out a roar.
"What kind of damn Son of Heaven is this!! When he doesn't need you, he kills you, and when he needs you, he sends for you! What does he think we are? FATHER!!!"
There were tears in his eyes.
By now Hei's wife had dissolved the pill in water, put it in a bowl, and handed it to Hei.
Hei held the bowl, raised it toward the castle keep in salute, then said:
"Watch your tongue! The Son of Heaven is not someone you may insult like that!"
Then his expression softened, and he spoke, to Tarō and to Kian, the philosophy he had lived his whole life by.
"When I was young, to see the world and learn the martial arts, I worked as a guard for a travelling merchant and went all across the realm.
"On that road, I saw all the suffering of the world, and I tasted every kind of hardship and bitterness.
"I saw common people who couldn't fill their bellies, refugees everywhere, bandits running wild, and daimyō oppressing the people as they pleased and throwing the realm into chaos.
"You think our Son of Heaven is foolish and dissolute, that he kills men of merit, that he's absurd beyond words.
"You feel wronged, you feel aggrieved. But have you ever thought about what the realm would look like without a Son of Heaven?"
He raised his head, his gaze seeming to pass straight through the roof.
"In this vast realm there are nearly a thousand domains, great and small, and the ambitious men among them are as many as the carp in a river!
"Without the Son of Heaven holding the realm together, the daimyō would surely fall on each other!
"The dead would be a hundred, a thousand times what they are now, and the chaos would take a dozen generations to pay off!
"In our age, and for a long age to come, unless the great tides of the realm change, the Son of Heaven is the realm!
"Loyalty to the Son of Heaven is loyalty to the realm!
"When the realm is at peace, the people can live in happiness.
"When the Son of Heaven is secure, the realm can be at peace.
"I'm not blindly loyal to the Son of Heaven. I simply don't want the realm to fall into chaos and the people to have no way to live."
When Hei finished, the hall fell silent again.
His wife and Tarō stared at him, stunned. They had never imagined that behind the husband and father they'd thought was blindly loyal to the Son of Heaven, there had been reasoning like this.
Kian's brow relaxed. The faint trace of contempt he'd felt for Hei deep down was gone.
Kian had always been someone who fought endlessly for his freedom. In the broken-down universe of Warhammer 40K, freedom was the most precious thing of all!
So when someone like Hei came along, with his boundless infatuation with the system and his bottomless loyalty to the Son of Heaven, Kian had honestly felt a little contempt for him.
He'd bet that if Hei's story were written up as a book and shown to netizens from the 2K era, they'd all think Hei was hopelessly, blindly loyal. They'd tear him down every which way, and some would even say, why don't you just start a revolution?
If your heart's so full of the common people, why not smash the whole rotten mess and start fresh?
All you could say was that they were thinking far too simply. A change in society is always made up of a great many factors.
If Hei rebelled and killed the Son of Heaven, then, just as he'd said, nearly a thousand daimyō in the realm would surely rise up!
Then all the warlords would fight over the realm, and the population would shrink by whole percentages!
Hei couldn't see any change coming in productive forces or in how society distributed its wealth, not in his generation, nor in the dozens or even hundred generations after. He couldn't see any opening for social reform.
And with no such opening, all the chaos would only add to the suffering.
There was a saying that in a feudal dynasty, loyalty to the emperor was loyalty to the realm.
To someone like Kian with a modern education, that saying was obviously one-sided.
But in this era, it was the rule society lived by.
And Hei, without a doubt, had lived by it all the way to the grave!
The Son of Heaven wanted him dead, so he drank the poisoned wine.
The Son of Heaven wanted him to march out to battle, so he took the antidote, put on his armour, and took up his sword, without a word of complaint.
That was what made Hei tragic. It was the limit of his times.
With nothing more to say, Hei drained the antidote in one long gulp. There seemed to be something in it that stimulated the nerves.
After drinking it, Hei felt his spirit return all at once. The strength the poison had drained from him came flooding back!
He set down the bowl and said to his wife and son:
"Help me into my armour!"
Tarō brought the black armour over. By now he was sobbing too hard to speak.
His father had been poisoned, and he still had to march alone to Peach Blossom Mountain.
The Giant Yōkai was threat enough, and under him there were still so many Big Yōkai, even harder to deal with.
His father would probably not come back from this. He'd die in that demon's jaws!
At that thought, Tarō was sobbing too hard to speak. He dropped to his knees with a thud, holding up the armour in both hands, his shoulders heaving as he wept.
Hei looked at his son tenderly. When Tarō had cried for a good while, he said:
"Tarō, do you remember what I taught you? What should a gentleman be?"
Tarō sniffled and said:
"A gentleman keeps his robes in order and sits upright in his hall.
In the farming season, he bends to tend his fields. In idle hours, he cultivates his character.
Through cold and heat, through snow and the fall of the peach blossom, he forges the heart of a sage and masters the arts of war, and so he enters the hall of the Son of Heaven."
Hei nodded and said, "Armour!"
Tarō stopped crying and began fitting the armour onto Hei.
The ō-yoroi was made of many pieces: helmet, face guard, throat guard, cuirass, shoulder guards, gauntlets, greaves, and more.
With Tarō's help, Hei put on each piece of armour one by one.
Finally, a long sword was hung at his waist. Hei rose and stood in the doorway, and said one last thing to his wife and son:
"I will return victorious!!"
With that, the black iron mask went over his face, and the mighty black samurai strode out of the house toward Peach Blossom Mountain.
His wife and Tarō knelt and bowed their heads to the ground in his direction, and said:
"May fortune favour your arms, my lord."
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Inkshaper
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you