Character Growth

I was the Young Master’s maidservant, and I stayed by his side through every hardship.

When other servants tried to steal the credit that was mine, I put on a bitter little act to make him pity me.

When someone poisoned him, I risked my life to save his.

Step by step, I became the person he trusted most, hoping that, for the sake of all we had been through, he would help erase my name from the slave registry.

But once his wings had fully grown, he destroyed my freedom with his own hands.

In the year of famine, disaster fell upon our entire village.

My little brother was so hungry he no longer had the strength to cry, yet his small belly was swollen tight and shiny.

Mother held him in her arms and sat on the threshold, motionless, like a clay idol that had lost its soul.

In the pot was Guanyin clay boiled in clear water. Eating it made your stomach swell, and then you couldn’t pass it.

“Girl…” Father finally spoke. “Don’t blame your mother and me for being cruel… In the palace, in the palace there’ll at least be a mouthful of food.”

When the human trafficker came in, he brought with him a gust of dry, cold wind.

“She’s decent-looking enough, just a bit too thin and weak.

“Three pecks of millet. Not a grain more.”

I saw Father’s hand trembling violently as he pressed his handprint onto that sheet of paper.

Three pecks of golden-yellow millet were poured into the only broken grain jar in our home, making a soft rustling sound.

It was such a beautiful sound-the most beautiful sound I had ever heard.

My little brother would probably live through this winter.

In the unluckiest year of my life, a wandering Daoist priest came to town.

He gave my father an idea: have me worship a Household Guardian Immortal to suppress my bad luck, and maybe I would live past the age of ten.

My father was a rough man who had made his fortune in troubled times by the barrel of a gun.

He called his adjutant over and did the math for him. “One Household Guardian Immortal keeps her alive to ten, two keep her alive to twenty, and twenty keep her alive to two hundred. Right?”

The adjutant counted on his fingers. “Marshal, your math is absolutely correct.”

My father hardened his heart and rounded up all the pigs, cattle, and sheep from miles around as offerings.

“My damn girl is going to live ten thousand years!”

That year, my father rode into the old mountain forest on a pig with me and took eleven Household Guardian Immortal into our household.

He flew into a rage. “Damn it, that’s still one short of the twelve zodiac animals!”

Later, who knew where he bought a Daoist boy from, but that made the twelfth.