"Can you play along?" Still across the pool, Liu Cheng heard the pipa and asked Huan Yi quietly beside him.
Huan Yi said nothing. He closed his eyes and listened for a moment, then raised his flute. When the melody repeated, he indeed picked up the rhythm, and for a time, pipa and flute sounded in harmony.
Yet this time, Xie Shang seemed to lack his old enthusiasm for wearing a kindred spirit out once he found one. He played through the piece with him only once, then looked back from the pavilion. On seeing his visitors, he actually stilled the pipa strings.
Only a little over a year had passed. At the sight of his face, Liu Cheng's heart gave a jolt. He walked slowly forward, then asked hesitantly, "General, it's only been a year. How have you grown so thin? And why is so much of your hair white?"
Xie Shang put down his pipa and sighed softly, answering with a question of his own. "Yulong, do you think others can sense it when someone is about to die?"
"Who can really say about such things?" Liu Cheng was momentarily at a loss-genuinely at a loss, not merely being evasive.
"Indeed." Leaning against a pavilion pillar, Xie Shang gazed at the spring grass just sprouting on Mount Bagong outside and answered wistfully. "All my life, I've valued kindred spirits above all else. I always felt that if people could understand each other's music, they could understand each other's feelings, and once their feelings connected, their hearts and souls would naturally connect too... So whenever I acknowledged someone as a kindred spirit, I felt I could cross life and death with him, see through emptiness and form, and reach the state of Wuwang."
Wuwang was the twenty-fifth of the