Chapter 4

For reasons I could never explain aloud, I had always possessed certain peculiar appetites.

Master Huiyun often preached that every living thing carried the Buddha-nature, that one must be compassionate and never take life without cause.

I understood the words. I simply could not grasp their truth.

In the kitchen, I pondered this while snapping a live chicken’s neck. I breathed in, entranced by the metallic scent of blood trickling from its beak.

How delicious.

My eyes softened with pleasure, heat touched my cheeks, and my heart pounded wildly against my ribs.

I scalded away the feathers and pulled out the organs with my bare hands. Heart, lungs, purple-red liver—they lay smooth, springy, and soft in my palm.

At last, I took up the cleaver and chopped through skin, flesh, and bone. Each fine tremor that traveled up the handle as the blade cut tender meat made my whole body shudder in bliss.

But this was *wrong*.

Pleasure warred with guilt. When the water boiled, I reluctantly dropped in the pieces one by one, fed the scraps and splintered bones to the crows outside, then leaned against the window with my chin in my hand and sighed.

At my parents’ home I had never needed to cook, so I had not known how delightful killing could be.

Only after I entered the Zhu household did the knowledge awaken in me.

Chickens. Fish. Best of all had been the day I slaughtered a tender lamb as it bleated and struggled.

When the milk-white creature collapsed in a spray of blood and twitched upon the ground, I felt no pity. Only fascination.

It was not even half a person’s height, and one stroke had killed it.

What, then, of a person?

Lost in speculation at dinner, I licked my lips and narrowed my eyes as I swept my gaze over every member of the Zhu family.

Killing a single chicken had burned the skin over my heart red beneath the bone relic.

Even so, I remembered Master Huiyun’s warning and never dared remove it.

Zhu Jinyu did not return that evening.

Instead, Zhou Que’er came swaying in with her little son in her arms.

She was the concubine Zhu Jinyu had installed before marrying me. In her two and a half years in the household, she had borne the Zhus a daughter and a son.

She disliked the elder child, Zhu Ying, and left the girl to a wet nurse. The boy she carried everywhere, flaunting him through the residence like a banner of victory.

I had heard that Zhou Que’er was once a respectable girl fleeing south with her family. Poverty drove her father to sell her to the House of Willows. After a year there, she caught Zhu Jinyu’s eye when he came drinking, and he kept her as his mistress.

Once she became pregnant, she hounded him without end until, despite the scandal, he finally brought her into the household.

My parents-in-law disliked her, but they adored their grandson and therefore indulged his mother.

Zhou Que’er only grew more arrogant.

I had just lifted my chopsticks when she swept through the door.

“Oh, Elder Sister, what delicacy are you having tonight?” Her speech retained a northern country accent, and years of singing had sharpened her voice to a shrill edge.

I put down my chopsticks, sat straight, and inclined my head. “You have come, Younger Sister.”

Without waiting for permission, Zhou Que’er settled into the seat of honor.

“My, what rich chicken soup. Such a pity the young lord’s heart belongs to the wild women outside. He won’t even smell it.”

She smacked her lips in false regret, then held her son out to me.

“There, darling, let your lawful mother hold you. She has no son of her own and spends every day longing for you.”

The child was not yet a year old. He was soft and delicate, limp in my arms as though he had no bones.

My entire body stiffened as I held him with painstaking care. Not a spark of maternal affection stirred in me. I only found the drool running down his chin rather filthy.

But that, too, was *wrong*.

I forced on my customary smile and pretended tenderness as I wiggled a finger before him. Beside us, his mother ladled herself a heaping bowl of soup and gulped it down like a starving ghost.

People who had known hunger always ate that way.

I had seen them as a child at the porridge shed outside Dingguo Temple.

To the refugees fleeing south, one bowl of thin white gruel was a banquet beyond compare.

Master Huiyun walked among them with me, treating the injured and chanting rites for the dead.

Tears filled his compassionate eyes as he told me, *All beings suffer.*

They certainly did.

I agreed aloud, while inwardly wondering: where did the grain for that porridge come from? Where did the money to hire all those workers come from?

What a performance.

The instant that wicked thought arose, the Lotus Seal blazed across my brow and stabbed until my skull swelled with pain and dizziness.

Master Huiyun looked deeply at me. His gaze held unwillingness and anguish, and the desolation of a fate he had always known would come.