Guanyin's Visage
Sun Buqi dreamed countless times of drifting and sinking in a sea of blood.
He could never predict whether the dream would turn into a nightmare or something sweeter. In most of them, the corpses floating beside him would twist into hideous sleeping puppets, strangling his neck and dragging him down to the ocean floor.
On rare occasions, a lone boat would drift past him, and upon it, a veiled figure in plain white robes would take his wrist, drawing him aboard to cross the sea together.
Only once did the wind lift her veil, granting him a glimpse of the Bodhisattva's true countenance...
The Bodhisattva's face was the face of his Master, Moonstream.
Jolted awake from the dream, he suddenly remembered it had been over three months since he'd turned his back on his own sect.
The past was like a dust-covered mirror; he and his young master had once been nothing like the distant strangers they'd become.
They had once wandered the provinces together, dispensing medicine side by side. He'd even considered commissioning a statue of Guanyin as a birthday gift for her.
All because he'd heard those he'd helped praise Master Moonstream's face as resembling Guanyin's, compassionate and merciful to the world.
...Tch, as if.
Back then, they were in Qingzhou, and he'd made a circuit of every temple within walking distance. The Bodhisattva statues there mostly wore gentle brows and kind eyes, faces calm and smiling.
His Master wasn't quite the same.
He couldn't say where the difference lay, so he picked up a piece of charcoal from the temple and sharpened it, sketching away on bamboo paper.
For her birthday gift... painting her a small portrait of Guanyin with his own hand to express his feelings would at least count for something.
His painting skills were mediocre at best. When he lifted the finished paper, the charcoal dust on his thumb happened to smudge right over where the veil would be.
The white veil now bore a stain, and it no longer looked like Guanyin at all. He tried to wipe away the fingerprint, but the smear only darkened.
He crumpled the painting into a ball and tossed it aside, only then realizing why his young master never quite resembled those Bodhisattva statues.
Though his young master treated others gently, she never let anyone draw truly close to her. Only a child like Sun Yuan could earn even a flicker of fond expectation from her.
He rarely saw her smile; her expression was almost always still, and even her eyes seldom betrayed any emotion.
He supposed it was only the ignorant who read too much into it, imagining compassion and pity within that emotionless mask. A laughable notion, when he thought about it.
Only once did he see the emotion churning beneath her calm eyes.
Sun Buqi recalled the expression on the "Bodhisattva's" face that he'd seen in his dream.
His last memory of Moonstream stopped right there:
Eyes ablaze with wrath, no longer downcast in mercy.
Now that the bond of master and disciple between him and Moonstream was severed completely, he felt, strangely, a sense of release.
Acting in secrecy, deliberately deceiving her—it had always been agonizing.
When his tracks were finally uncovered, he even felt a measure of relief. At last, he no longer had to tread so carefully to hide himself.
He'd always seen it clearly, even if she never did: mere mercy could only ease the suffering of the world for a moment. Ordinary acts of kindness could never cure the root of its ills.
But another kind of sorrow soon followed close behind:
The fire at the Han Mausoleum had destroyed most of his memories, and the flowing water carried away all that remained.
Left with nothing, all he felt was a hollow, wistful emptiness.
He thought that if he saw the bodhisattva on the lone boat again in his next dream, he would tear his hand free from hers, let the blood-red sea flood over his mouth and nose, and let the sleeping puppets surround him.
Then he would watch the little boat drift past directly above him, while he sank to the ocean floor. From then on, their paths diverged, never to cross again.
But this dream did not recur until many years had passed.
In that dream, the bodhisattva was no longer on the lone boat—he himself was the one poling across the sea.
The surging sea of blood had long since dried up. Countless sleeping puppets raised their arms high, lifting him and the boat into the air, "ferrying" him toward what his heart desired.
Perhaps then, the long-overdue suffering could finally end.
