Chapter 5: Thorns and Truths
The days settled into a strange, dual rhythm. Mornings were dust, gunpowder, and the hard geometry of combat at the base. Evenings were the soft, green haze of the garden, where Lu Yuan would slowly stretch out his sore muscles, trying to reconcile the two worlds.
He needed the quiet after the noise. So, one afternoon, when the mansion was still, he slipped out alone.
The garden was a cathedral of green and gold, sunlight filtering through the canopy of ancient trees. The air was thick with the perfume of blooming roses, a wall of crimson and ivory along the eastern path. He walked slowly, fingertips brushing the tops of lavender stalks, feeling the faint, persistent hum of life in the soil—a whisper of potential he couldn’t quite grasp.
“You.”
The voice was a shard of ice. Bai Lian stepped from behind a trellis heavy with wisteria, blocking his path. Her pretty face was a mask of cold fury.
Lu Yuan stopped, blinking. “Sister Lian? Is something—”
Her hand shot out, fingers like talons clamping around his wrist. Her nails dug deep, pinching the skin. “What do you think you are playing at, you little slut?!”
He flinched, trying to pull back. The words made no sense. Slut? “I—I don’t understand.”
“Don’t play dumb with me!” She yanked him closer, her breath hot against his face. It smelled of mint and something bitter. “You think I don’t see your game? All those hours at the base. The looks. The touching. Worming your way into their beds with that innocent act. You think you’re clever? I know what you are.”
Terror, cold and slick, washed over him. This wasn’t the stern instructor or the dismissive acquaintance. This was something primal, hateful. He stammered, “There’s no game. I’m just learning. I’m sorry if I… if I offended…”
His genuine bewilderment was the wrong fuel. It poured straight onto the fire of her paranoia. Her eyes, dark with a knowledge he couldn’t fathom, flashed. “You’re sorry? You ruined everything before. You won’t get a chance to do it again.”
She shoved him, hard.
He stumbled backward, his heel catching on a root. His arms windmilled, balance lost. He fell into the rose bush behind him.
Thorns ripped through the thin fabric of his shirt, scoring lines of fire across his back and shoulders. A particularly thick cane scraped down his forearm, leaving an immediate, beading trail of crimson. He cried out, a short, sharp sound of pain and shock, and landed in a heap among the mulch and torn petals, the coppery scent of his own blood mixing with the cloying sweetness of the roses.
Bai Lian stood over him, her chest heaving. She looked at him trembling in the thorns, his eyes wide with tears of pain and confusion, and she scoffed. All she saw was the ghost of her past, performing.
“Stay away from what’s mine,” she spat, each word a drop of venom.
Then she turned and was gone, melting back into the shadowed path toward the mansion, leaving only the trembling leaves and the sound of his ragged breathing.
Lu Yuan lay there, stunned. The physical pain was bright and specific, but it was drowned by a profound, shaking confusion. What’s mine? What did he take? He thought of Zhang Wei’s patient corrections, Zhou Feng’s steadying hands. Was that stealing? Was learning forbidden? He had apologized. Why was it not accepted?
Hidden in the deep shade of a cedar tree, Zhang Wei had seen the entire encounter.
He had come looking for Lu Yuan, a vague excuse about reviewing a stance on his mind. The sight of Bai Lian emerging had made him pause, instinct telling him to hang back.
What he witnessed stole the air from his lungs.
The vicious grip. The distorted sneer on his fiancée’s face, a face he knew as sweet, if lately strained. The ugly words—“slut,” “beds”—hurled at the bewildered boy. The brutal shove into the thorns.
A cold nausea twisted in his gut. This wasn’t stress. This wasn’t the mild annoyance she’d expressed before about Lu Yuan’s past crush. This was venom. This was cruelty. It felt… practiced.
And the boy on the ground, bleeding among the flowers, wasn’t the scheming provocateur she described. He was just a kid who liked to learn real things, who took a punch without complaint, who smiled when he figured a move out. The attraction Zhang Wei had been trying to bank down flared now, hot and protective, mingling with a deep, unsettling disillusionment.
He didn’t go after Bai Lian. Confronting her now would mean words, explanations, the horrible, practical discussions about the future they were building together. He couldn’t face it. Not with the image of her shoving Lu Yuan so fresh.
He couldn’t ignore the bleeding boy, either.
Lu Yuan was trying to sit up, wincing as thorns pulled at his clothes and hair, his bleeding hand pressed awkwardly to his chest. A petal was stuck to his damp cheek.
Zhang Wei moved then, his boots silent on the grass. He crouched in front of him, blocking the harsh sun.
“Hey,” he said, his voice softer than he’d used at the base.
Lu Yuan startled, eyes flying up. Seeing Zhang Wei, his face flooded with shame and a fresh wave of that awful confusion. “I’m sorry,” he whispered automatically, his voice thick.
“What for?” Zhang Wei asked, gently. He reached out, not touching a wound, but taking Lu Yuan’s uninjured hand, his thumb brushing over the knuckles. The contact was steadying. “What was that all about?”
“I don’t know,” Lu Yuan said, the truth spilling out in a shaky rush. “She said I was playing a game. That I was… trying to get into your beds. I don’t… I wouldn’t.” He looked down at their joined hands, then back up, his gaze unbearably clear. “I just like training with you. And Feng-ge. Is that wrong?”
No. The answer was immediate and absolute. Zhang Wei believed him utterly. The kid didn’t have a deceitful bone in his body. He was strangely, brilliantly transparent.
He tried to assemble a reason, a scaffold to hold his crumbling perception of Bai Lian. “She… hasn’t been around much lately,” he said, the words feeling hollow even as he spoke them. “With all the planning. The pressure. She must not have seen how you’ve changed. She’s remembering how you were before.” It was a feeble excuse, even to his own ears. The violence of the memory didn’t fit.
“Oh,” Lu Yuan said, accepting the explanation because he had no other framework. He looked at the bloody scratches on his arm. “I think I ruined my shirt.”
The mundane concern broke the tension. A low, strained sound that was almost a laugh escaped Zhang Wei. “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
He helped Lu Yuan to his feet, careful to avoid the thorny snags. He kept a hand under his elbow, guiding him out of the rose bed and onto the clear path. Lu Yuan leaned into the support, his slight weight familiar from their sparring sessions, but now it felt different. Fragile.
They didn’t go to the main entrance. Zhang Wei led him through a side veranda door, into a guest bathroom done in cool marble. He sat Lu Yuan on the closed toilet lid.
“Arms out.”
Lu Yuan complied, holding his scratched arms forward like a child. Zhang Wei ran cool water over a clean cloth. The silence was heavy, but not uncomfortable. It was filled with the splash of water, Lu Yuan’s hitched breaths when the cloth found a deep scratch, the unasked questions hanging between them.
Zhang Wei worked with a soldier’s efficiency, washing away the blood and dirt. The scratches were superficial but numerous, a angry red map across pale skin. The one on his forearm was the worst, still oozing faintly.
From the mirrored cabinet, Zhang Wei found a small first-aid kit. Antiseptic, cotton pads, a box of bandages.
“This will sting,” he warned before dabbing the antiseptic.
Lu Yuan sucked in a sharp breath but didn’t pull away. His eyes were fixed on Zhang Wei’s face, studying his concentration.
For Zhang Wei, the task became a kind of meditation. The focus required to clean each scratch, to dry the skin gently, to peel the backing from a large bandage and smooth it over the worst cut on Lu Yuan’s forearm. His fingers lingered on the warm skin just beyond the bandage’s edge. The urge to pull him closer, to offer more than first aid, was a physical pull in his chest.
He fought it down. Now was not the time. She’s stressed about the impending apocalypse. The thought was a mantra, but it was losing its power.
“There,” he said, his voice rough. He applied a last, smaller bandage to a scratch on Lu Yuan’s hand. “All patched up.”
Lu Yuan looked at the bandages, then up at him. The confusion had softened, replaced by a vulnerable gratitude that was harder to look at than the anger had been. “Thank you, Zhang Wei.”
“Don’t mention it.” Zhang Wei stood, putting distance between them, starting to clean up the supplies. “Just… maybe take your walks somewhere else for a while. The orchard, maybe.”
It was a quiet admission, a concession that the garden, Bai Lian’s domain, was not safe. Lu Yuan heard it. He nodded slowly.
“The orchard sounds nice,” he said softly. He stood, testing his movements. The physical pain was muted now, a background ache. The other kind, the confusion laced with a new, faint fear, would take longer to fade.
Zhang Wei watched him go, the boy moving with a newfound caution. The scent of roses and antiseptic hung in the air. The bandage on Lu Yuan’s arm was a stark white flag against his skin, a silent testament to a fracture that had just begun to crack wide open.
The bandage on Lu Yuan’s arm was a stark white flag against his skin, a silent testament to a fracture that had just begun to crack wide open. He avoided the rose garden after that, taking Zhang Wei’s suggestion and walking in the orchard where the apple trees offered a kinder, dappled shade. The incident was not mentioned again. When Zhang Wei and Zhou Feng came by, which was less frequently, their greetings were careful, their eyes skipping over the fading scratches on his arms.
They asked if he was okay, once. He said he was. They didn’t push.
A subtle distance began to grow, not from any lack of care, but from a surplus of grim, unseen business. Apologies were mumbled over missed trainings, texts went unanswered for hours. The world outside the mansion’s walls seemed to be tightening like a coiled spring, stealing their time and attention.
After three weeks, they stopped coming to the mansion altogether.
The silence was palpable. No rumble of the jeep in the drive, no deep voices in the foyer. Lu Yuan’s routine, once defined by anticipation and exhaustion, dissolved. He ran laps alone on the estate’s perimeter road, his soft soled shoes slapping the pavement in a lonely rhythm. He practiced the stances and strikes in the empty tennis court, corrections echoing only in his own head. It felt hollow, like shadowboxing a ghost.
The solitude itched under his skin. He retreated to his room, the vast quiet of the mansion pushing him back toward the glow of his computer screen.
His online wanderings took a new, obsessive turn. It was the plants. Always the plants. The faint, frustrating hum in the garden soil, the latent potential in every leaf and seed, guided his clicks. He fell down a rabbit hole not of games, but of processing. He was fascinated by the sheer, ingenious violence of it.
He learned how immense pressure could coax golden oil from unassuming sunflower seeds. He watched videos of soybeans being steamed, crushed, fermented, and aged for months into a dark, flavorful sauce—a alchemy of time and micro-organisms. He studied how delicate herbs were hung in dusty, warm attics, their essence concentrating as their green life faded into something more potent.
Some methods were familiar, echoes of ancient preparation. Many were startlingly novel. This world, with its low qi and blunt instruments, had developed a breathtaking intimacy with flora. They didn’t just cultivate plants; they unraveled them, transformed them, built entire civilizations on their broken-down components.
One thing led, inevitably, to another. A page on olive oil linked to a recipe for roasted vegetables with rosemary. The rosemary led to a blog about herb-infused salts. Suddenly, he wasn't just reading. He was in the mansion’s vast, underused kitchen, sleeves rolled up, frowning at a bulb of garlic.
It started simply. A stir-fry of crisp broccoli and glossy peppers, the method pulled from a video. The sizzle in the wok was a satisfying sound. The aromas that rose—ginger, garlic, toasted sesame—were complex and thrilling. He plated it, took a bite. The flavors were clean, bright, direct.
A quiet joy bloomed in his chest. It was a different kind of creation. Not fighting, not enduring. Building. Nurturing.
He cooked every day. A creamy potato and leek soup, the leeks sweated down to silky sweetness. A rich tomato sauce simmered for hours, its scent wandering through the quiet halls. Spring rolls with shredded cabbage and carrot, the rice paper tricky to fold. His dishes were overwhelmingly vegetarian, a celebration of the plant matter that so fascinated him.
The kitchen staff, at first wary of the young master’s sudden intrusion, gradually warmed to his polite, single-minded focus. He asked precise questions. “Why does the dough tear?” “At what temperature does the Maillard reaction occur?” They showed him how to knead, how to gauge heat by hovering a hand, little tricks not written in any tutorial.
He ate his experiments at the enormous dining table alone, the clink of his cutlery echoing. He’d note textures, balance, the aftertaste. Each new ingredient—tahini, miso, smoked paprika—sent him back to the internet, digging for its origin story. How were sesame seeds pressed? What mold culture made miso? How did smoke permeate a pepper?
It was a deep, consuming satisfaction. He was mapping the world through its pantry, one transformation at a time.
One evening, he successfully extracted limpid green oil from a pile of pumpkin seeds using a modified pasta press and a lot of patient grinding. He drizzled it over a plate of roasted squash. The flavor was nutty, profound. He sat in the gleaming kitchen, eating under the fluorescent lights, and felt a sense of calm competence he hadn’t felt since the last time Zhang Wei had nodded in approval at a perfectly executed disarm.
The mansion was a silent, well-appointed island. The garden hummed outside, a song he couldn’t yet hear. His body remembered the ache of thorns and the burn of the five-kilometer run. His mind, however, was full of emulsification, enzymatic breakdown, and the gentle application of heat.
He washed his plate, the warm water soothing on his hands. Through the window over the sink, the night was absolute, no different from any other. But the air tasted like smoke and turned earth to everyone else, a harbinger they could not yet name. To Lu Yuan, it just smelled like the quiet end of another day, flavored with pumpkin seed oil and the promise of tomorrow’s experiment.