The King's Mate - Part 1: Banyue

Chapter 39

"E'ming?", Xie Lian asked, hoping his baby had simply hidden underneath the covers.

There was no reply, and Ruoye was still trembling in fright, so he turned to her, and grasped her shoulders tightly in an attempt to ground her.

"Ruoye, what happened? Why did you scream like that? Where's E'ming?", he asked, but Ruoye didn't reply, and only kept staring at the bed she'd shared with E'ming with wide eyes, shaking like a leaf.

"Ruoye!", Xie Lian yelled, and shook her once, trying to snap her out of it. He himself was beginning to panic at her strange behaviour, and the more time they wasted to chase after whoever had taken E'ming, the less likely it was to get him back, and Xie Lian didn't even want to think about such a thing.

Luckily, his shout had done the trick, and Ruoye's head snapped up to look at him.

"Daddy", she said, her voice trembling as much as her body did, clearly on the verge of crying.

"What happened?", Xie Lian asked again, as calmly as he possibly could in this situation..

"I- I don't-... E-E'ming just- there was a b-black s-s-spot on the m-mattress and it it- it sucked E'ming into- into the mattress- '', she explained, before she started bawling loudly. "I'm sorry, daddy! I wanted to grab him but there was a face behind him in that black thing and it looked so scary and then hands came out of there and grabbed E'ming and I panicked and ran away instead- I'm sorry!", she cried and clutched tightly onto Xie Lian's inner robes.

Xie Lian could hardly believe what he was hearing; it just sounded like Ruoye had a bad dream. However, E'ming was truly gone, and it was the first time his daughter reacted so intensely to a nightmare. The most she'd ever done when waking up from such a dream was to cry, and cuddle up to Xie Lian for comfort. She'd never been frightened to such a degree, and Xie Lian could tell that the terror in her was very real. At the very least, Ruoye believed what she'd seen was real, and not a dream. Otherwise she wouldn't be reacting like this.

And the fact of the matter was, E'ming was gone. His shoes were still standing where they had been before they'd gone to sleep last night, and while he was still very young, he already knew very well to put them on before going outside. So he definitely hadn't gone out on his own volition. The door was also still bolted shut; there was no way somebody had come in here without damaging that door. And their room was on the second floor; if there had been a kidnapper coming in from the window, not only would it still have to be open, there would at least also have to be footprints in the dirt below.

Xie Lian quickly went to open the window in order to check for those footprints, but there were none, as he'd expected. It would be impossible to jump out the window and still manage to close the shutters behind oneself. Thus, Xie Lian had no choice but to believe what Ruoye had told him, and so he dove into the bed his children had slept in just a few short moments before, and took it apart in hopes to find any sort of clue as to where E'ming could have disappeared to.

It was impossible to find even the slightest trace, and Ruoye was still wailing loudly.

Xie Lian quite honestly didn't know what to do. He was barely hanging onto his sanity with his baby gone as it was, and for a moment he just put both of his hands on the sides of his head in a weak attempt to focus his thought, to think where in the world E'ming could have been whisked away to.

Obviously Xie Lian didn't believe in supernatural stories; he was a military general, his thing was tactics, strategic thinking and logic. Stories about anything yao were just that- stories. Be it yaogui, yaomo or yaojing, these things, yaoguai, were not real. And now his own daughter was telling him that his son had been abducted by something supernatural. Xie Lian wanted to scream in frustration. He possibly might have, but if he did, it wasn't a conscious thing.