Chapter 3

Chapter 3

When I opened my eyes again, I was inside a cave.

The ceiling was high, with beads of water dripping from cracks in the stone, yet the ground was covered in clean straw. In one corner, there was even a makeshift stove and a wooden bed. Several tung oil lamps hung from the stone walls, bathing the entire cave in a dim, warm glow.

A woman in her thirties sat by the bed. A deep scar ran down the left side of her face, stretching from her brow bone all the way to her chin. She was looking down, whittling wood with quick, steady movements, as if carving a series of small knives.

Seeing that I was awake, she tossed a wood chip onto the ground.

“You’re a tough one.”

I instinctively reached for my lantern. The woman handed it to me. “It’s not broken.”

I stared at her. “Who are you?”

“Ah Ruo,” she said. “I was also a bride given to the Mountain God by Blackstone Village.”

As her voice trailed off, four or five other women slowly emerged from behind the other beds in the cave. One was missing half a pinky finger; another still bore the scars on her ankles from old chains. The oldest was barely in her thirties, while the youngest looked like a girl who hadn’t even finished growing yet.

They all wore coarse cloth clothes, but their eyes were different from the women in the village.

It wasn’t numbness.

It was a deeply hidden fire.

I sat up, my voice raspy. “You’re all… alive?”

A thin young girl sneered. “They certainly wished we were dead.”

Ah Ruo handed me a bowl of hot water. “The ones chasing you up the mountain earlier were Wu Shoucai’s two nephews and Granny Gui’s dog. Every time they deliver a bride, they keep watch at the mountain pass for a night. If they can scavenge a corpse, they do; if they can’t, they claim the Mountain God ate her.”

I asked, “Then all these years, you’ve been…”

“Some lived,” Ah Ruo said. “Some didn’t.”

She pointed deeper into the cave.

“Those tablets you saw at the temple entrance-those are the names of the ones who didn’t come back.”

My chest felt tight, as if something were blocking it. It took a long time before I could ask, “Then why don’t you go down the mountain?”

“How could we?” another woman said, pulling up her sleeve to reveal a dense network of whip scars. “Who out there would recognize us? Every time Blackstone Village sells a girl, they claim she was a properly wedded wife. Once the girl is in the mountains, they turn around and report to the officials that the wife offended the Mountain God and was taken by the mountain. Most families poor enough to sell their daughters won’t actually come looking. As for those who weren’t sold willingly, anyone who comes searching is usually blocked at the gates by the villagers.”

Ah Ruo looked at me and asked, “How did you dare to enter the mountain alone?”

I touched the old red lantern and said, “Because my mother taught me that while gods and ghosts might not eat people, humans certainly do.”

The cave suddenly went silent.

A woman at the very back who hadn’t spoken finally looked up. She stared at the lantern for a long time, her voice trembling. “That lantern… where did you get it?”

“My mother left it to me.”

“What was your mother’s name?”

I paused. “Zhu Hongxiao.”

The ceramic bowl hit the ground with a loud crack, shattering into pieces.

The woman’s eyes turned red. “She… she actually made it out of the mountains alive?”