Chapter 54
Lin Qingyu watched Gu Fuzhou finish his medicine and he even examined his pulse for him afterwards. “The Sky Spider Poison in the general’s body is almost completely gone. There should be no side effects.”
Gu Fuzhou had been anticipating it for a long time and said indifferently, “Your father stayed by my side in Yongliang, so of course, there couldn’t possibly be any problems.”
Lin Qingyu heart moved slightly. There was something he’d always wanted to ask Gu Fuzhou, but… Lin Qingyu glanced in the direction of the door and said, “It’s getting late, this humble official will be going back first.” At the end, he didn’t forget to remind him, “General, you must remember to lift your weights.”
Being stared at by two pairs of eyes from the Tianji Camp, Gu Fuzhou could only let him go no matter how reluctant he was. “Alright,” he said, sounding as though he had nothing to live for, “I’ll lie down for another hour and then I’ll go and lift weights.”
Lin Qingyu stood up. He heard movement from outside the door. Another person from Tianji Camp had come. Seeing this, Gu Fuzhou sat up from the bed, his tone containing faint excitement. “It’s not yet time for them to change guards.”
If it wasn’t to change the guards, then…
They saw the newcomer say something to the two and the three of them together entered and knelt down in salute to Gu Fuzhou. One of them said, “His Highness the Crown Prince has strengthened the defenses around the capital, adding more patrols. The security of the General’s Mansion will be taken care of by the guards in the future. We will be returning to the Tianji Camp.”
Lin Qingyu breathed out a long sigh of relief. He felt like a wide panorama had opened before his eyes. Gu Fuzhou smiled slowly, “You’ve all worked hard. Take care, I won’t be seeing you out.”
As soon as the Tianji Camp guards left, before Lin Qingyu could say anything, the man behind him scooped him up and embraced him into his arms, forcing him to sit on the bed.
When Gu Fuzhou first returned to the mansion, the bed was still a hard plank bed. He couldn’t bear this kind of grievance and immediately had Yuan Yin change it to a big bed. It was piled with soft beddings and was even covered with cool silk. Sleeping on it in summer, it was both soft and cool.
However, Lin Qingyu only felt the softness. Gu Fuzhou’s body was like a stove. Held in Gu Fuzhou’s arms, his whole body felt hot.
“Qingyu, I’m back.” Gu Fuzhou said, voice deep, “I’m sorry, I’m so useless. I got back late.”
Lin Qingyu closed his eyes and lightly patted Gu Fuzhou’s back. “I know. You’ve been working hard.”
“All that hard work was useless. I still wasn’t able to come back on time.” Gu Fuzhou was brooding over this matter and he couldn’t help but swear, “Damn that Xiao Cheng! He truly is worthy of being the protagonist. He’s so f*cking hard to fool – forget it, let’s not talk about him. Hugs first.”
The arms around Lin Qingyu increased in strength. Lin Qingyu was hugged so hard that he could hardly breathe. Just as he was about to ask Gu Fuzhou to let go, he heard him sigh, “This heart is beating so fast…”
Lin Qingyu instinctively retorted, “Mine isn’t.”
“I meant mine.” Gu Fuzhou said contentedly, “But this time, no matter how fast my heart beats, I won’t faint.”
Memories flooded into his heart and Lin Qingyu also laughed. “Well, if you don’t let go, I’ll faint.”
Only then did Gu Fuzhou let him go. Gu Fuzhou sat cross-legged on the bed and Lin Qingyu sat by the bedside. The two stared at each other for a while under the dim candlelight. Gu Fuzhou was first to lower his eyes. With his current complexion, even if he blushed, Lin Qingyu wouldn’t be able to tell.
Lin Qingyu carefully looked at Gu Fuzhou’s current face. He had a robust silhouette and deep facial features. It was a completely different style from that of the previous handsome son of nobility. Only those eyes remained dazzlingly brilliant, bright like stars.
Lin Qingyu saw that there was a shallow scar on the end of his eyebrow; it missed his eye by the barest bit. This mark looked very new. He must have gotten it two or three months ago.
Lin Qingyu raised his hand, stroked the scar with his fingertips and asked, “How did you transmigrate into General Gu?”
Gu Fuzhou sighed. “I don’t know, I was quite frightened when I woke up.”
The time he woke up after his first death, he saw a classical beauty in a wedding dress. The second time, he saw a burly man in a tent. The gap was simply too big and with the poison circulating in his body, he almost died on the spot. It was not until he faintly caught sight of his father-in-law that he knew that he was still in the Dayu, that he was still in a world with Lin Qingyu in it.
His strong desire to survive kept him going for that two additional days that his father-in-law needed to find the antidote and pull him back from the gates of hell.
“Generals who are deployed to the battlefield cannot go back to the capital without an imperial edict. They can’t even write a letter to their family. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to go back within a short amount of time, so I first recognized your father as my adoptive father and mentioned this matter in my report. My thinking was that once Xiao Cheng knows that you are my adopted brother, he shouldn’t do anything excessive to you.”
Lin Qingyu remembered all the things that happened in the past half a year and said, “My identity as General Gu’s adopted brother has indeed saved me from a lot of trouble.” But that was only when Xiao Cheng was sober. On Jingchun’s birthday, after getting drunk, Xiao Cheng had wanted to use force on him. If it wasn’t for Shen Huaishi, he probably wouldn’t be able to see Gu Fuzhou right now.
“Later, I kept begging to go come back to the capital but those two idiots, the emperor and Xiao Cheng, just wouldn’t let me.” Speaking of this, Gu Fuzhou grew furious. At that time, his heart was burning with anxiety. He suffered insomnia for the first time in his 18 years of life. He couldn’t sleep well all night and he lost a lot of his hair because of it. “Before I knew it, it was soon going to be a hundred days since my death. I had no choice but to find a way to let you know first that I’m still alive.”
Lin Qingyu said, “So, there was never any secret letter from Xixia. You made it all up.”
“That’s right. But when I returned to the capital, I noticed that ordinary people had never heard of ‘if odd, change; if even, remain the same’. I knew then that Xiao Cheng hadn’t done as I asked. When I asked you the secret code under the watchful eyes of Tianji Camp, you calmly said that you’d never heard of it. I guessed that you must have known about it early on.”
Lin Qingyu nodded. “I heard this code from a little eunuch in Qinzheng Hall on the hundredth day since your passing”
“It took til the hundredth day for you to hear it?” Gu Fuzhou felt a little distressed, “Then were you very sad at the time?”
Lin Qingyu paused. “It was fine.”
Gu Fuzhou looked at him. “Did you cry?”
Lin Qingyu shook his head.
Gu Fuzhou breathed a sigh of relief and said with a smile, “What a cruel heart, Imperial Physician Lin. You didn’t shed even a single tear for me.”
Lin Qingyu said softly, “You came back, didn’t you?”
“It’s me, I’m back again.” Gu Fuzhou gave a boundless sigh. “From now on, I will be by your side and live a life of leisure until I die.”
At the word “leisure”, Lin Qingyu didn’t know whether to be moved or be dumbfounded. “Since you’ve already sent the secret code to the capital, why were you so anxious to come back? You should know that your actions were too suspicious and given how overly-suspicious Xiao Cheng is, he definitely won’t let you go.”
“I know, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. First off, I couldn’t guarantee that the code would have reached your ears; second…” Gu Fuzhou hesitated, “I vaguely remembered that Princess Jingchun’s birthday is in summer.”
Lin Qingyu’s expression changed slightly. “I should have died on the day of Jingchun’s birthday, right?”
“How did you…?” Gu Fuzhou widened his eyes, “Did Xiao Cheng lay his hands on you?”
“En.” Lin Qingyu’s tone contained a trace of grievance that even he himself didn’t notice, “He grabbed my arm.”
Gu Fuzhou let out a “f*ck” and asked, “Which arm?”
Lin Qingyu stretched out his left hand. “This one.”
Gu Fuzhou held his arm in his arms and rubbed a couple of times. “Did he touch you anywhere else?”
“No.” Lin Qingyu sneered, “In the middle of trying to force me, he changed targets and forced Shen Huaishi instead.”
Gu Fuzhou was silent. Thousands upon thousands of words came together into one phrase: “That – piece – of – dog – sh*t.”
“How did I die originally?” Lin Qingyu asked, “Was it by Xiao Cheng’s hand or was it by Shen Huashi’s sword?”
“You wanted to die with Xiao Cheng but halfway through Shen Huaishi appeared. He blocked the fatal blow for Xiao Cheng. When you saw that your assassination attempt had failed, you didn’t hesitate to swallow the poison you’d prepared…” Gu Fuzhou couldn’t go on. Even if it was just the original plot, he still couldn’t accept it.
Lin Qingyu said indifferently, “It does sound like something I would do.”
Gu Fuzhou said regretfully, “I should have made up my resolve to come back sooner.”
“When you said ‘made up your resolve’, did you mean to letting my father give you the Sky Spider Poison?”
Gu Fuzhou confessed bitterly, “I didn’t want to, but if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to come back at all.”
Lin Qingyu’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Nonsense.”
Gu Fuzhou smiled. “Your father helped me control the dosage of the Sky Spider Poison. As long as I could return to the capital on time, it would have been fine. Don’t worry, everything was within my plan.”
Everything including being monitored by the Tianji Camp; he had also expected it. In fact, Tianji Camp hadn’t started monitoring him just when he returned to the capital. He had sent dozens of letters of resignation in a row, which already aroused the suspicion of the emperor and Xiao Cheng. Back then, the shadow guards of Tianji Camp had already infiltrated Yongliang and had followed him ever since.
He thought about making himself known to Lin Qingyu as soon as he came back. Even under the eyes of Tianji Camp, it wasn’t impossible to forcibly make themselves known to each other. But Xiao Cheng was thoroughly investigating the people around him and he had already gotten his father-in-law involved. He didn’t want to throw suspicion onto Lin Qingyu as well, so he had to endure for the time being.
It was a pity, the feeling of missing someone wasn’t something that he could hide and with how smart Lin Qingyu was, in the end, he still recognized him. Lin Qingyu knew the current situation and did not act rashly. The two of them had been acting with tacit understanding for so long and it was only now that they were able to free themselves.
Lin Qingyu was silent for a moment and asked, “You did all this, even taking on the risk of poisoning yourself, just to come back to see me?”
Gu Fuzhou said without hesitation, “If not for that, then for what?”
Lin Qingyu closed his eyes, turned his head and stopped looking at him.
“Qingyu?”
“…”
Gu Fuzhou saw that the corner of Lin Qingyu’s eyes were red. For a while, he was at a loss. Then, he smiled, “Actually, it’s not entirely for you. Didn’t I tell you? My days in Yongliang have been so hard and tiring. I had the lives of the 300,000 troops of the Zhengxi Army weighing down on my shoulders. Even when I tried loafing on the job, my conscience would feel uneasy. If I had to suffer another day of that, I think a year would have been shaved off my life.” He took hold of Lin Qingyu’s hair and played with it in his hand. “My desperate return was also for my own sake.”
Lin Qingyu’s rare feelings of tenderness disappeared instantly. “As expected of you.”
“It’s me, it’s me. So don’t be sad, don’t cry.”
Lin Qingyu said indifferently, “I didn’t cry when you died, why would I cry now that you’re alive.”
For the past several months, Gu Fuzhou had been a duck driven onto a perch. He knew the importance of retreating when the enemy advanced and advancing when the enemy retreated. If Lin Qingyu was doing all that he could to remain calm and composed; he had to expose him. “Someone’s eyes are red, but I won’t tell you who.”
Lin Qingyu: “…” This person really hadn’t changed at all.
At this time, Yuan Yin hurriedly ran in. “General, someone has come from the palace. He says that the Emperor has ordered you to have an audience with him.”
Gu Fuzhou was taken aback. “His Majesty? Are you sure it’s the Emperor, not the Crown Prince?”
“It is undoubtedly from the Emperor.”
Gu Fuzhou looked at Lin Qingyu. “Isn’t the Emperor seriously ill?”
Lin Qingyu stood up and calmly straightened his official uniform, “I saved him.”
