Chapter 1

Chapter 1

People cursed the Old Blind Man for having no morals, saying the heavens would punish him.

The Old Blind Man flew into a rage.

“How am I immoral? You can eat whatever nonsense you like, but you can’t go around spouting nonsense!”

“I was only joking with them. They chose to believe me. What’s that got to do with me?

“Besides, everyone says beautiful women bring disaster. Who told her to be born so pretty? I had foresight, that’s all-removing a public menace before she could hurt anyone!”

Fu Qiu lay in the muddy water and listened in silence, unsure whether to cry or laugh.

The fate she had believed in all her life had turned out to be nothing more than a scoundrel’s careless lie.

Hatred filled her chest to bursting.

But she was about to die.

The last trace she would leave in this world was the claw marks her fingernails had gouged into the earth.

Soon, the rain would wash even those clean.

Fu Qiu forced her eyes wide open. She refused to die like this.

An unknown amount of time passed.

“This woman’s dead with her eyes wide open!” someone said.

“Dead with her eyes open is still dead.”

The other man wrapped Fu Qiu in a straw mat, muttering curses nonstop.

“Couldn’t even find herself a proper place to die. Just had to make more work for us.”

The two men carried her to the mass grave outside the city and tossed her into the burial pit. The straw mat around her came loose, revealing Fu Qiu’s stiff, ashen body.

The torrential rain returned.

Rain struck Fu Qiu’s body, struck her wide-open eyes.

Drop after drop.

Yet when the water flowed from the corners of her eyes, it had somehow turned red.

A young man in white approached beneath an umbrella. He stopped before the mass grave and let out a faint sigh.

“Such resentment, enough to reach the heavens.”

He lightly tossed the umbrella into the air. As if it had eyes of its own, it flew straight toward Fu Qiu and hovered above her corpse, circling slowly.

The young man in white cut his index and middle fingers with a dagger. Blood welled up. Raising his hand, he drew a talisman in the empty air.

“Still.”

In an instant, Fu Qiu’s corpse began to tremble, as though battered by some invisible force.

After a long while, Fu Qiu’s eyes, streaming tears of blood, blinked.

The clouds dispersed, and the rain cleared. The young man in white recalled his umbrella.

“My surname is Yuan. You may call me Yuan Sheng.

“I have sealed your soul within your corpse, allowing you to command your body as an ordinary person would.

“However, this act defies the will of heaven. To conceal it from heaven and earth, I destroyed your Book of Fate.

“From now on, the mortal realm holds no fortune for you, and the underworld holds no register of your soul. You are a living corpse treading the boundary between yin and yang.

“If you can find three people whose bone weight is four taels and nine mace, take the bone from over each of their hearts, and bring them to me, I will grind them into powder, add it to the Water of Supreme Goodness, steep it in the Ink of the Six Paths, and rewrite your Book of Fate. Then you will be able to return to your youth and change your destiny.

“If you cannot retrieve those three bones, then being dumped here in this mass grave will remain the ending of your life. Everything that happens from today onward will have been nothing but a dream.”

At this point, Yuan Sheng lightly swept his sleeve.

“I will also gift you a Compass and a blade.

“The Compass will guide your path. The Soul Blade will take the bones.

“When the Compass shatters and the blade turns to blood, I will come find you again.”

With that, Yuan Sheng drifted away, vanishing at the end of the road.

Fu Qiu’s fingers twitched. At some point, a pair of blue-gray jade bracelets had appeared out of thin air on her wrists, one on each side. If one did not look closely, they could almost be mistaken for shackles.