Where is Our Agreement to be Each Other’s Arch-Rivals?

By the time Su Yang woke up again, it was already the next morning when the first glimmers of dawn were becoming visible.

The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was Gu Feidi’s sleeping face.

Gu Feidi’s expression was tranquil, his breaths were prolonged and he hadn’t woken up yet. One of his hands was holding tightly onto Su Yang’s fingers beneath the quilt and his other was curled round Su Yang’s waist, as if he hadn’t let go all night.

Su Yang did not want to rouse Gu Feidi, so he lay there quietly and motionlessly staring at the young man’s face in front of him, recalling the dream he’d just had.

The dream was filled with fragmented snippets, strange and seemingly illogical. Suddenly, it was in the underground cave of the Wasteland and then, it was in the Forbidden Area of ​​the Devil Sect. The contents were all excerpts of the times when he was together with Gu Feidi.

But the ‘he’ in the dream was totally different from himself. He was practically arrogant and tyrannical. If he wasn’t coming to blows with Gu Feidi, then he was forcibly holding him down, embracing, pestering Gu Feidi… and kissing him against his will.

Su Yang felt a little confused when he recalled these dream fragments.

He said to himself: Could it be that deep down in his heart, this was what he actually wanted to do to Gu Feidi? How come he didn’t know that he had such a domineering dark side? Was it because he’d once lost to Gu Feidi when they had fought in the Wasteland cave, therefore the subconscious resentment had yet to fade?

Gu Feidi’s sleeping appearance resembled a child’s more than he usually did. Su Yang’s gaze followed his eyebrows, tracing them to the tip of his nose and then to his lips.

Immediately, he recalled the scene in his dream. Su Yang moved his head slightly, inched forward and cautiously kissed Gu Feidi’s lips.

Gu Feidi didn’t awaken.

Su Yang licked his lower lip, stilled for a moment and kissed him again. Seeing that Gu Feidi was sleeping soundly, he couldn’t help curling up the corners of his mouth. He seemed to have carefully thought something through, then he stuck out the tip of his tongue and gently touched Gu Feidi’s lips.

After playing for a while and observing that there was no movement, Su Yang wanted to gently turn over and get up… but was hauled back by a force at his waist.

Gu Feidi tightened his hold on Su Yang’s arms and slowly opened his eyes. His voice was still slightly hoarse from having just woken up: “You kissed me and want to flee?”

“YOU—” Su Yang shoved Gu Feidi’s chest, “—You pretended to be asleep?!”

“Ng, I was sleeping nicely, then was licked awake by a kitten.” Gu Feidi said, “You woke up early today. Did you have a nightmare again? “

Su Yang shook his head and smiled: “I didn’t have a nightmare, but I dreamt a lot of messy things.”

Gu Feidi didn’t say anything more. He just held Su Yang in his arms and stared at him quietly.

“Ak, I,” Su Yang hesitated for a moment and said, “I’m a little hungry. I wonder if there’s any food to eat this early…”

Gu Feidi seemed like he hadn’t understood Su Yang’s words and continued to hold his arms, increasing the pressure a little.

Feeling the increasingly scorching temperature from his skin through the inner shirt, Su Yang felt a little flustered, but it was also a little secretly…… it wasn’t what he’d expected.

An unknown amount of time passed, Gu Feidi let out a long sigh. He loosened his hold around Su Yang’s arms and got out of bed.

“I’ll go and ask, they should’ve prepared some dim sum.” His form was calm as he put on his clothes. He turned to Su Yang before going out, “Stay in the room and rest. Make sure to keep warm.”

As he watched Gu Feidi go out, Su Yang lay back under the quilt and gave a ‘tsk’ in exasperation.

Initially, he wasn’t terribly eager for ‘that’. But once the thought had taken shape in his heart and had been repeatedly cut short and nipped in the bud by Gu Feidi’s self-restraint, he’d been nurturing a greater type of… obsessive compulsion to see it through.

Su Yang thought that it was possible the existence of that obsession had caused him to have those messy dreams; to dream that he would exhaust all means to forcibly kiss Gu Feidi.

Gu Feidi returned before long, but aside from carrying the food box, he’d also brought with him a pot of medicine.

“Why was the medicine decocted so early?” Su Yang asked with a frown, “Does the pharmacy operate twenty-four——twelve periods non-stop, with someone monitoring it all the time?”

Gu Feidi filtered the medicine from the pot into a bowl and smiled: “The medicine is decocted every morning and left to warm in the steamer. It’s just that you only get to drink it at whatever time you wake up. Today is the first time coming across a freshly decocted medicine.”

Su Yang rolled his eyes at that.

He took the bowl of medicine, drank it all in one gulp and habitually asked Gu Feidi for a kiss. Only then did Su Yang lift up quilt to get out of bed and get dressed.

After washing up, they had breakfast, just in time for Luo Yu to come take his pulse. After amending the prescription again according to the pulse condition, Luo Yu repeatedly warned of a few more things that he had to pay attention to recently and left the small courtyard as usual, setting aside time and space for Su Yang and Gu Feidi.

The two of them painted, wrote calligraphy, sang and played chess until they were fed up and it was midday.

After eating lunch, Su Yang was doing some poor calligraphy with a writing brush when suddenly he sensed an onslaught drowsiness rush at him and he was powerless to resist it. In the flash, he plunged into deep sleep without warning. His head knocked onto the table and his body toppled over softly.

Gu Feidi was startled, he reached out and pulled him into his arms. He used his internal strength to probe his meridians and anxiously called out several times.

Once he ascertained that Su Yang had just fallen asleep, Gu Feidi didn’t know how he should feel. He held him closely, buried his face in his neck and took a few deep breaths. Only then did he calm his trembling fingers and carried Su Yang over to the bed to rest.

…In the days that followed, Su Yang spent more and more time asleep.

He would occasionally wake to drink the medicine and eat something. He would only be awake for two to four hours before being engulfed in a seemingly immeasurable and unending sleep.

Aside from his penchant for sleep, his body gradually began to show hints of debilitation. Although he no longer suffered from cold symptoms with the assistance of the medicine, his strength seemed like it was being slowly sapped up by something and he would be languid and unwilling to move every day.

Meanwhile, Su Yang also began to have frequent dreams.

His dreams were all pertinent to his experiences after having transmigrated over, but they were always so dissimilar.

For example, he dreamt that he was practicing the Half Withered Red in the Forbidden Area of ​​the Devil Sect until his whole body was shivering with cold. Then, he hugged Gu Feidi and fondled him all over……

For example, he dreamt that he forcibly kidnapped Gu Feidi into the Devil Sect and used shackles to lock him up. He forced him to change into Ju Hall’s attire and brought him together to parade and swagger about……

For example, he dreamt that he went on a killing spree in the Wasteland. After he had unexpectedly run into Gu Feidi, not only was he unashamed of his actions, he even went to the Tengyun Pavilion campsite at night and forcibly pressed Gu Feidi down and kissed him……

All the dreamscapes seemed to be attempts to conceal everything he had done in a completely different way. Su Yang slowly understood that ‘his’ way of acting in these dreams were perhaps the things that Devil Sect’s Young Saint ought to have done.

He increasingly felt that these dreams probably didn’t originate from his infatuation with Gu Feidi, but from the obsession of the Devil Sect’s Young Saint’s manifestation which had remained in this shell of a body.

Perhaps, he had really reached the end.

Su Yang thought this way silently in his heart.

I wonder how long I’ve slept today…

Su Yang awoke in the pitch black darkness.

In the fragmented dreamscape earlier, he seemed to be in the middle of the Stone Forest Bewilderment Array outside Lesser Jade House… The anxiety of not being able to find a way out gradually fostered evil tendencies, which flooded his heart with tyrannical feelings. In the end, it was like the script he’d originally received. Not only did he fail Lesser Jade House’s assessment, but also sustained a lot of injuries when he attempted to charge through the stone forest formation.

Su Yang couldn’t help frowning.

If these dreams were really the obsession of the Devil Sect’s Young Saint’s manifestation that had remained in his body, why did he dream of failing Lesser Jade House’s assessment?

Why did the dreamscapes here maintain the storyline of the script that he used to possess?

Before he could figure it out, Gu Feidi’s arm on his waist tightened and then a low voice called in his ear: “Shixiong.”

Su Yang replied with a sound.

“Awake?” Gu Feidi’s voice was muted, with a faint nasal sound from just waking up, “Are you hungry? I’ve saved you some dim sum, it’s warming in the steamer…”

Su Yang sighed, “In the past few days, I’ve been either eating or sleeping. Why does it feel that you are rearing a pig?”

Gu Feidi didn’t continue the conversation.

After a long time, he said: “It’ll be good if you could grow some meat, but you’re… getting thinner and thinner.”

Having eaten supper, Su Yang no longer felt sleepy. Gu Feidi lit the candles in the room, sat down beside him and asked him what he wanted to do for amusement.

Su Yang glanced out through the window and saw the showers of snowflakes drifting down in the night. He suddenly felt a little dejected.

“At the moment, I can’t do what I want to do.” He smiled, “When I was a child, my favourite thing was to see the pure white snow buildup outside my window when I woke up every winter morning. I would ecstatically head downstairs and run around in the fresh snow that no one else had yet to step on… I also enjoyed having snowball fights with my friends and building snowmen together…”

Once he’d finished speaking, he looked down at his fingers and said, “Now that I’ve arrived at the snowy mountains and the snow everywhere hasn’t been trampled on, yet I can’t play in it. It’s really disappointing.”

Gu Feidi stared at Su Yang in the flickering candlelight and didn’t look away for a long time.

Su Yang smiled, “Let’s continue to change lyrics, I have two more songs I want you to rewrite.”

The corners of Gu Feidi’s mouth twitched: “Alright.” 

After moving the couch table to the bed, the two sat facing each other. After amending a few paragraphs of lyrics and softly singing a few songs until the sky turned bright, Su Yang couldn’t resist the fatigue and fell asleep as expected.

……

…Winter had arrived and the climate on Yuqiong Peak was becoming even colder.

Several days worth of continual heavy snowfall forced the evergreen trees surrounding the hot spring to droop. Two more warmers were added to Su Yang’s room.

That day, Su Yang woke up nearing dusk. He stared blankly at the window frames that reflected the tangerine red glow of the setting sun. The remnants of the dream in his mind had not yet dissipated.

It was the scene when he first met Gu Feidi in the forests of Meizhu Mountain. Similarly, the two fat and thin martial artists had pushed Gu Feidi to a desperate situation. He was also observing the ongoings from his spot in the tree until Gu Feidi became seriously injured. He leaned against the tree and subsequently ‘Nirvana’ caused him to fall unconscious.

However, the Devil Sect’s Young Saint in the dream did not attempt to save him.

He leapt down from the tree and surveyed Gu Feidi’s seemingly sleeping face with interest. Then, his lips curled into a smile, grasped Gu Feidi’s chin and kissed him head on……

“Awake?”

Gu Feidi, who had been accompanying him by his side, instantly realised that he had woken up and pulled him into his arms to kiss him lightly. He then got up to fetch the medicine and food.

Su Yang wasn’t feeling terribly hungry. He only drank the medicine and felt a little exhausted, so he lay back down on the bed.

Gu Feidi took the empty bowl and gave him a fervent kiss as usual to expel the bitterness that remained in his mouth.

This kiss inexplicably coincided with the kisses in his dream. Su Yang sensed that his body was getting weaker and more feeble. As he reflected on his constantly reduced periods of wakefulness of late, he suddenly felt panic spring into his heart.

He felt that if he didn’t seize this last opportunity, he might truly be……leaving regrets behind.

Gu Feidi was about to get up when all of a sudden, he felt a hand on the back of his neck. It wasn’t very forceful, but it was enough to tug him back to the earlier position.

Su Yang closed his eyes, grabbed Gu Feidi and exchanged a lingering kiss with him again.

After a long time, he loosened his grip and looked at Gu Feidi who had moved back a little before whispering: “Shidi.…..”

Gu Feidi gazed back into his eyes.

Su Yang lay on the pillow and cast Gu Feidi a sweet smile: “Shidi will fulfill all my wishes, right?”