chapter 1

We demons do not usually like humans.

Unless that human is like Dongye Pengpeng—perfectly willing to earn money and support me.

Night had fallen.

I had spent the entire day lying around the house like a corpse. She had gone out to treat a patient, but when she returned, she looked utterly distracted.

I asked casually, “Couldn’t cure them?”

Dongye Pengpeng shook her head. “They wouldn’t let me try.”

There had not been a drop of rain all last year. Most farming families had eaten through their stores, even part of the grain they had saved for seed.

They were counting on the spring planting now, but there were still long months of famine ahead.

The officials did nothing. They kept squeezing the common people for every last coin as if nothing had happened.

Who knew how long it would be before no one could survive at all?

The patient Pengpeng had gone to see was a little girl with nothing more serious than a common chill.

Pengpeng offered to treat her for free. The head of the household still refused.

Even if the child recovered, he said, she had always been frail. Where would they find the money to nurse her back to health?

She would be another mouth to feed and too weak to work. With her around, the whole family might starve before the autumn harvest.

Better not to treat her at all.

Whether she lived or died would be left to fate. If she died, so much the better.

The girl’s mother nearly wept herself senseless.

Neither her husband nor her mother-in-law softened.

“They said every household is doing the same,” Pengpeng murmured. “The girl’s mother invited me in secret.”

So a great many children were dying this way.

And there would only be more as the year wore on.

“In a famine, with the realm in chaos, an early start on the next life isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” I said.

Dongye Pengpeng glared at me.

She was no good at quarreling, though, so that was the end of it.

That night, she tossed and turned until dawn.

First thing the next morning, she made an important decision.

“I’m going to the palace.”

Dongye Pengpeng had been hiding a crumpled imperial proclamation.

It announced that Noble Consort Song was gravely ill and the imperial physicians were at their wits’ end. Any capable healer among the common people was invited to enter the palace and treat her.

Pengpeng had kept the proclamation hidden for a long time. At last, she had brought it out.

She left me all the silver she had saved and apologized as she did so.

“This should last you a month or two. If I’m not back by then…”

She hesitated.

“Ask Auntie Ma at the east end of the village to find you a decent family to marry into.”

She said that because I was the laziest woman in the whole village.

Dongye Pengpeng was foolishly kind.

Now she looked at me with eyes full of guilt, afraid I would starve to death if she never returned.

“Oh,” I said.

She looked exasperated. “You don’t seem the least bit sorry to see me go!”

Once she had packed, she reminded me again and again to take care of myself. When I ignored her, she finally left.

I watched her retreating figure, thoughtful.

She had no reason to worry about me. I was not human at all. I was a demon—and a very powerful one.

The day we met, the young demon under my command had torn out my core and thrown me into Longyin River.

A downpour flooded the river that day and washed me out from the spot where I had been sleeping on the riverbed.

Dongye Pengpeng thought I was drowning. Without a thought for herself, she plunged in to save me.

Back then she was a pregnant beggar, five months along.

It was a spectacularly stupid decision. Longyin River was in full flood, and I slept so soundly that she was on the verge of drowning along with me.

By some mercy of heaven, she miscarried beneath the water—the bastard child whose father she could not even name.

The fresh blood jolted me awake.

I was the one who carried her to shore.

That left us forever arguing over which of us had actually saved the other’s life.

I took pity on her and conjured a little silver, intending to settle accounts with my treacherous disciple.

But Pengpeng called me back.

“Don’t wander off alone. Let me take care of you.”

I had told her I was a nobleman’s daughter whose entire family had perished, and she had believed every word.

Judging me by her own circumstances, she said it was unsafe for a beautiful young woman to travel alone.

“I know a trade. I can keep the two of us alive.”

Only then did I notice the aura of my wicked disciple Erhuan clinging to her.

Yet her soul radiated a nobility utterly at odds with the body it inhabited.

I realized her soul had been exchanged with someone else’s—taken from high station and imprisoned in the lowest.

It struck me as interesting, so I agreed. “All right.”

Pengpeng brought me to this village, found us a home, treated the sick, and gathered herbs in the mountains.

Little by little, we reached the point where we could eat our fill every day.

In fairness, she might have been stingy, but she took excellent care of me.

Her temper was good. Far too good.

Making a living in this world was hard enough, yet she never once complained that I sat at home eating and doing nothing.