He vaguely came to understand what it meant to lose someone—whether through parting or death

 

The carpenter had just made Chang An split firewood for an entire afternoon, under the fine-sounding pretext of teaching him how to use a saw—but splitting firewood was done with an axe. What the hell did an axe have to do with a saw? Even as dull as Chang An was, he knew perfectly well that the carpenter was using him for free labour. He didn't say anything aloud, just split all the wood the carpenter had set aside for him, leaving a handful of bloody blisters on his hands in the process.

The carpenter had a very bad temper, and only in the brief moments after he returned from Zheyan's place would his attitude toward Chang An soften ever so slightly. The carpenter also had a squint-eyed woman as his wife—perhaps it was because her eyes were naturally crooked, but Chang An always felt that the way she looked at him was strangely off. He had caught the carpenter's wife smirking coldly at him from behind on more than one occasion. 

Although the carpenter hadn't taught him a single thing, Chang An wasn't particularly anxious about it. He had never really been interested in woodworking anyway—could saws and chisels ever really let him live a good, stable life?

Every time he thought about this, Chang An would become troubled again. He had tried several times to express his thoughts to Zheyan, but whenever he actually saw Zheyan, he could never bring himself to say it.
In Zheyan's eyes, the carpenter was probably the most noble and exalted person in the world. Chang An always felt that every morning when Zheyan saw him off at the door, there was a kind of devout reverence in his gaze—as if Chang An wasn't going to learn carpentry, but to become an immortal!

That evening, Chang An didn't dare go straight home, afraid that Zheyan would make a great fuss over nothing at the sight of his hands. He secretly detoured around to the small river behind the wooden hut, and plucked the stem of a thorny grass—this stuff, when dried, was what people usually used to repair roofs. It was extremely tough, with burrs along the sides that could scratch open a wound on you if you weren't careful.
The boy sat by the river, washed the grass stem clean, and silently used the thorny plant to pierce each and every blood blister on his hands. 

It hurt, certainly, but Chang An had been plagued by all kinds of ailments and misfortunes since childhood, so he was used to it. He felt he could endure it.

After piercing all the blisters, Chang An soaked his hands in the icy river water for a while. The stinging sensation faded considerably, and the swelling-reducing effect was immediate.
By the time he had taken care of his little hands, it was already getting late. Chang An finally stood up and was about to head home when he spotted Zheyan sneaking out from the back door of the house.
Chang An still hadn't grown much in stature; crouched behind a large rock by the river, he was completely hidden, and it was hard for anyone to notice him. For some reason, he paused in his steps and didn't move. He just stood there, watching as Zheyan's face looked as awful as a ghost's—pale to the point of being greenish, with only his coughing fits bringing up an ominous flush of crimson.
Zheyan was clutching a roll of grass and leaves, with some strips of cloth mixed in, and he burned all of them together in a fire.

There wasn't a single part of Chang An's body that was in good shape, except for his eyesight, which was remarkably sharp. He could clearly see that the grass leaves and cloth strips were stained with blood.
Perhaps irritated by the smoke, Zheyan suddenly burst into a violent fit of coughing. He doubled over on the ground, looking like a gaunt, bony ghost, his somewhat dry and withered hair hanging down to cover his face; he looked especially pitiful in the twilight. 

As he coughed, thin trickles of blood ran down between his fingers. Zheyan coughed until his face was red and his neck was swollen, and even tears streamed down his face. He just stared blankly at the slowly rising flames, a hint of ominous deathly aura seeming to hang over his face, his expression a mixture of rage and bitter unwillingness.
Chang An didn't dare move. Suddenly, as if by instinct, a thought struck him out of nowhere —Zheyan was going to die, wasn't he?

No one had ever taught him what "death" meant, but once before, an old hunter from the tribe had gone out hunting and had his leg bitten off by a wolf. He was too old, and his sons had long since regarded him as a burden; no one looked after him, and he died soon after.
Chang An had watched as they carried him out of his tent. The man's face was covered with strange spots, his hair had fallen out in patches, his eyes were wide open yet horrifyingly cloudy, maggots crawled all over his body, giving off a foul stench.
Only then did Chang An understand: that was death—you couldn't live anymore.

From then on, for reasons he couldn't explain, Chang An harboured a stubborn fear of death, especially since he still vividly remembered how people had said when he was little that he wouldn't live long.

Chang An's guess was right—Zheyan truly was about to die. In the end, he didn't make it through that winter.
That winter was unusually cold; no matter how many fires were lit, the chill was still enough to freeze a person's blood solid. Outside, panic was spreading as people whispered that something major had happened in the Snow Wolf tribe beyond the mountains. The chieftain's sub-beast son had suddenly turned against his own kin, and somehow slaughtered his father, mother, and several brothers, becoming the new Snow Wolf chieftain. Truly ruthless—a figure both despised and admired.
When they spoke of the word "patricide", their tones were filled with both fear and contempt. Yet from the perspective of an ignorant child like Chang An, killing your biological father with a knife didn't seem much different from abandoning him when he was old, letting him go hunting alone and get mauled by wolves.

Either way, the end result was the same—the father died. 

Chang An didn't understand why others seemed willing to let their fathers die. He himself wasn't willing at all.
That day, A Yan was beside him, watching him with worry. Chang An crouched by Zheyan's bedside, watching him lying on the straw mat, barely clinging to life, and felt a heavy, suffocating ache in his heart—a mixture of bitterness and bewilderment. He had lived in this world for less than seven years, and as far as he could see, his entire life had been spent with Zheyan. Chang An couldn't imagine what he would do if Zheyan were no longer there.
So, with a glimmer of hope, for the first time in his life, he made a request of his foster father.

Chang An asked: "Zheyan, can you not die?"

A Yan let out a sob, but Zheyan used every ounce of strength he had left to lift his eyes and look at him. He opened his mouth and let out a hoarse, single syllable: "You…"
That one word nearly cost him his life. He opened his mouth wide, gasping for breath, his gaze beginning to scatter. But his final words were not yet finished, and Zheyan couldn't bear to close his eyes in death. His scattered gaze miraculously refocused—fixing on Chang An's face. 

"You must… must become a good carpenter!"

He roared this out, a strange, eerie light flaring in his eyes. With strength that seemed to come from nowhere, he gripped the child's thin wrist tightly. A Yan pressed down on Chang An's head and urged him in a low, hurried whisper: "Nod, child. Just nod."

‘But I want to learn the way of the blade,’ Chang An thought to himself. He felt that in his entire life, he had only ever had two wishes: one was that Zheyan wouldn't die—but Zheyan had refused him; the other was to learn the blade—and that, too, seemed to be slipping further and further away from him.
But in the end, Chang An still couldn't bring himself to say those words out loud. He felt that if he did, Zheyan would surely end up like that old hunter—his eyes wide open, refusing to close in death. How pitiful that would be.

In Chang An's small heart, the pain was so great it felt like he might die himself.
Seeing him nod, Zheyan was finally at ease. He released his grip on Chang An's wrist, making a motion as if to hand the boy over to A Yan, and murmured: "A—" 

A Yan hurriedly reached out with both hands and took Chang An's little hand. Zheyan glanced at her, as if he had just completed the very last task of his life, and then his head lolled to the side—he had had his last breath.

That pervasive grief, like a breached dam, poured down upon Chang An in an instant, indiscriminately and without reason. In his dazed confusion, he began to grasp what it meant to part forever in life and death.

The child's feet were planted on the ground as if they had taken root, like a stubborn little beast fiercely guarding its own territory. No matter how A Yan tried to persuade him, he wouldn't budge an inch, and refused to let anyone carry Zheyan away.
Whoever came near, he would glare at them with savage, hostile eyes, as if he were about to lunge forward and bite them.

In the end, even the chieftain was disturbed. The chieftain finally sighed and said to the others: "Look at that child Zheyan picked up. Though he doesn't know how to cry, he's certainly got deep feelings."
After saying this, he thought for a long while, sighed again, and made a pronouncement about Chang An: "This is a good child!" 

Finally, the adults of the tribe lost their patience. An adult beast-kin man grabbed Chang An by the scruff of his neck as easily as if he were picking up a newborn animal cub, and then pressed three fingers into the back of his neck—knocking him unconscious with a single pinch.
By the time Chang An woke up again, Zheyan was gone. They had arranged for him to stay with A Yan. A Yan was a good woman who had always wished Chang An were her own child, but she could never replace Zheyan—no one could ever replace another person.

Chang An followed Zheyan's ridiculous last wish and still went to the carpenter's place every morning at dawn. For a while, he felt as though he had almost given up on that distant dream of learning the blade. Only when the carpenter went on long trips did he have a chance to take a break and go to the woods to watch the warriors train— as if he were starving and thirsting for it.

But the carpenter still refused to teach him anything. In fact, after Zheyan's death, he grew even worse, neglecting and slighting Chang An more than ever.

Chang An concealed all of this from A Yan, using the very same methods he had used to hide things from Zheyan—A Yan was even more prone to making a great fuss over nothing than Zheyan had been. If she saw him with a nosebleed, she would be completely at a loss; if she saw a wound on his body, she would hold his hand and cry endlessly. 

At last, Chang An endured another half a year or so at the carpenter's place. Since the carpenter wouldn't teach him anything, he learned secretely—whenever the carpenter wasn't paying attention, he would sneakily feel the tools, pick up the discarded scraps, and practice on his own. He had an innate, natural sensitivity to people's movements, and he memorized every single gesture the carpenter made.
Despite his reluctance—he had promised Zheyan he would become a good carpenter.

However, that very summer, just after Chang An had turned seven years old, he was carrying an enormous water bucket—taller than he was—to fetch bathwater for the carpenter's wife, when a distant relative of the carpenter, who happened to be visiting, spotted him.
The man gave him a once-over, then casually and dismissively beckoned him over with a wave of his hand out of idle curiosity: "Child, come here and let me have a look."
Chang An didn't want to offend him, so he moved over slowly. The carpenter's relative looked him up and down and asked lazily: "So you're Lu Ke's apprentice? What's your name?"
Chang An instinctively sensed that this man meant him no good, so he just looked up at him without uttering a single word.

The carpenter's relative then turned to the carpenter and joked: "Look at that—your apprentice here is a mute."
The carpenter waved Chang An away impatiently: "Get back to your work. Scram." 

However, apparently assuming that Chang An wouldn't understand, the carpenter hadn't even waited for him to get far before he said contemptuously to his relative: "This one was forced on me by a little slut I used to mess around with. I don't know what came over me—I must have been impulsive at the time and actually agreed to take him in. Now I've saddled myself with this little burden, and a sickly one at that—can't stand the sun, can't stand the cold. He might as well be a young master come to live at my place! Ah, what a headache!"

Chang An paused briefly in his steps, his head hanging low, his small face buried under the shadow cast by his own body, making his expression unreadable. After that one pause, he immediately continued walking forward as if he had heard nothing.
Then he turned a corner, secretly stood behind the wall, and deliberately eavesdropped on their conversation.

The carpenter's relative gave a meaningful "Oh," and lowered his voice with a chuckle: "She must have tasted pretty good, to have you so completely dazzled and disoriented."
The carpenter said dismissively: "A male. Looked decent enough, but as for ecstasy—not really. That place of his has already been worn loose by all the use it's had. Still… the way he cried out did have a certain flavour of its own."
The carpenter's relative laughed and said: "If you ask me, you should have divorced that squint-eyed wife of yours long ago and taken a new one. Then you wouldn't have had to go out looking for some lowly sub-beast man like that." 

The carpenter let out a deep, heavy sigh and lowered his voice: "Don't even mention that bitch. I really want to find a chance to get rid of her. The way she looks at people gives me goosebumps. I only went out for a bit of fun a few times, and she's been stewing and trying to make my life miserable ever since. Guess what—the other day, I saw that Zheyan coughing up blood. The blood he spat out was all purple, just like the way that bitch's brother died… Ah, I still don't know how she managed to slip him the poison…"

When Chang An heard this, he finally lifted the water bucket back onto his back and left without anyone noticing, unseen and unheard. A cold thought formed in his heart: So it was the carpenter and his wife who killed Zheyan.

That very night, after Chang An had finished his work and the carpenter had waved him off with a "get lost," Chang An did not return to A Yan's home.
He climbed up a large tree not far from the carpenter's house and hid himself in the dense canopy. He waited there until it was completely dark, watching until the carpenter's lamps were all extinguished and no more voices could be heard. Only then did he climb down from the tree, slip through a crack in the door, and squeeze into the carpenter's yard. 

Chang An found the tree resin that the carpenter usually used—it was said to be refined from a special kind of "chubby tree," and if it stuck to your fingers, you would have to peel off a layer of skin to get them apart.
As silent as a little cat, without making a single sound, Chang An picked up a brush and carried the bucket of resin. He smeared it all over the cracks around the carpenter's windows and doors, then sealed each seam with thin strips of scrap wood, one by one. He worked with remarkable patience—after finishing one layer, he applied another. He went over it seven or eight times in total, using up the entire large bucket of resin before finally sitting down to rest for a while.
After all that work, he was soaked through with sweat, from head to toe, inside and out.

It was a long while before Chang An, gasping for breath, picked himself up off the ground. Calmly, he stole flint from the kitchen, arranged the scrap wood from the yard all around the carpenter's rather ostentatious wooden house, and then set them alight pile by pile.
Having done all this, he showed not a trace of panic, nor did he flee. Instead, he climbed back up the big tree, sat down, and waited to watch. 

Within the tribe, the wealthy lived in stone houses, covered with large tarps or animal skins, fitted with heavy door curtains—these were called "tents," like the chieftain's residence.
The common folk, on the other hand, simply built makeshift thatched shelters to keep out the wind and rain, just like A Yan's home.
Only the carpenter stood out as unique and singular, priding himself on his superiority, having built this entirely wooden house, which made him appear quite exceptional.
Of course, when it came to burning, it was even more exceptional.

The carpenter's doors and windows had all been sealed shut. Aside from the woman, the carpenter's entire household consisted only of sub-beasts—none of them had the strength to kick through a wooden wall or door. That night, their agonized wails carried for over a mile, so piercing and dreadful that they roused the entire tribe. But by the time people rushed over, the fire had already grown ferocious and uncontrollable, beyond all remedy. It was too late to save them.
They could only stand by and watch helplessly as the carpenter and his family were burned alive inside, in no time at all.

Only then did Chang An seem to feel at ease. He slid down from the tree and, unnoticed by anyone, made his way back toward home.
The carpenter had treated him poorly, shown him no kindness, spoken filth about Zheyan behind his back, and had killed Zheyan. 

Chang An thought: Zheyan raised me, so it is only natural that I should avenge him. There was not the slightest trace of guilt in the child's heart. In fact, he even thought he had done a fine job. The only thing that troubled him was… now he had nowhere left to learn carpentry.

 

Translator : DarNan