Page 97 of Elemasters

“Lose ourselves? How?” Dustin wondered aloud. Mr. Liu didn’t answer, he just continued into the swirling mass of clouds… and then everything changed.

Ying Zheng was exhausted. By every metric possible.

This dreaded war had been dragging on for what felt like an eternity, though it hadn’t even been a full decade of actual fighting. The time it took to get himself into a position where war was even possible; espionage, campaigns to weaken potential enemies, consolidating power within the Qin court… that took far longer.

By now, he just wanted this to be at an end.

Such endless violence, constant death, incessant attempts on his own life; it was enough to wear down even the strongest under heaven.

And as the King of Qin, Zheng certainly was the strongest.

As much as he lamented that this is what things had come to, he’d known since he was a boy that this was the only course of action. He’d spent his formative years cowering in a manor inside a besieged city, while the commoners were forced to eat their own children just to survive. Now that he held the power necessary to stop such mass suffering, he would see it through, no matter the cost.

Unfortunately, whenever it came time for Zheng to rest at night, after hours upon hours of sifting through heavy bamboo scrolls with proposals for new laws and edicts, he had to look at himself in his mirror of polished bronze.

The face that was once youthful and even handsome was now paved with fine lines. The hair at his temples greying prematurely. He knew the truth that his officials and servants refused to admit aloud; he would die before he could see this campaign to its end. Before he could unite the disparate kingdoms of the Central Plains into a singular Qin Empire.

Though… not if the genius young recordkeeper he’d recently employed from the recently conquered Han Kingdom was as good as the scholars claimed him to be.

The boy couldn’t have been more than sixteen years of age, stumbling into the throne room with little grace and his face entirely obscured by a mountain of scrolls. He tripped over his too-big feet, scattering them before Ying Zheng in a way that would’ve been punishable by death if he was half as unmerciful as the legends made him out to be.

“M-my king, I am terribly sorry!” the young man’s squeaky voice chirped out, his unbound hair blowing wildly in his exceptionally pretty face.

“Be at ease young Sima Yao,” Zheng did his best to reassure the young man in his gravelly tone, raising a hand, “Prince Fusu and the senior scholars speak highly of your intellect… if not so much of your focus. Tell me what you have uncovered,”

Sima Yao quickly bowed before scrambling to retrieve the scrolls. He cleared his throat and put on his most convincing “serious voice”.

“I have been told that his majesty seeks a cure for the aging process, and thus I have followed up on several leads. Transforming cinnabar into ingestible mercury, beseeching heaven for peaches from the Queen Mother’s garden… ultimately there aren’t many actionable courses of action,”

“Not ‘many’?” Zheng raised an eyebrow, “which seems to suggest that there may yet still be one,”

Sima Yao looked pensive for a long moment, but he eventually nodded, unfurling a scroll that depicted an ink painting of a ferocious dragon, swallowed within storm clouds over the open ocean.

“Ao Guang, Dragon King of the Eastern Sea. Local legends in the Chentang Pass suggest that stealing a scale from his body and mixing it into an elixir, could potentially prolong your life… but I must caution against it,”

The scowl that immediately consumed Ying Zheng’s face was enough to silence the boy immediately.

“Sima Yao, I greatly appreciate your services and your incredible knowledge… but do not mistake my gratitude as permission for insolence,”

Sima Yao’s gaze dropped to the immaculate marble floor, and he pressed his nose against it in a kowtow.

“Forgive me your highness. Shall I alert the officials that you will be journeying to the Chentang Pass?”

“At once,”

Sima Yao collected the scrolls and hastily made his exit from the room, and Zheng simply squeezed the bridge of his nose in frustration. Just like he did when he was sitting on his bedroom floor amidst torn notebook paper pages; a haze of weed smoke heavy in the air as him and Bailey tried to come up with song lyrics.

Wait… what?

No, it was like when he’d been trying to come up with an effective strategy to shatter the resistance of the Chu Kingdom following Li Xin’s humiliating defeat. He’d come up with several good ideas, but then Chris wouldn’t stop blasting Tupac so loud that he couldn’t think straight.

What in the actual fuck was going on?!

“DUSTIN! SNAP OUT OF IT, DAMN!”

Chris’s abrasive voice along with the smack to the back of his head fully pulled Dustin back into the present, where he was still clinging onto the jade dragon as rain absolutely battered the group.

“Huh? What the fuck just happened?”