Chapter 4

Chapter 4

We crawled out through a half-collapsed secret passage at the back of the cellar. By the time we broke the surface, the snow was falling heavily.

I looked back at the small cabin. A fire flickered in the window, but a hunched figure stood at the door, draped in a gray headscarf. The silhouette was identical to Rong Duyue. She watched us from a distance, her face obscured as if veiled by a thick white mist.

Jing Guanming dragged me deep into the forest.

The blood from his shoulder dripped into the snow, a piercing, vivid red. I tried to shake him off several times, but his grip was unyielding. It wasn’t until we reached an abandoned mill that he finally let go, leaning against the wall and gasping for air.

“You have a choice now,” he whispered. “Go back to the village and keep believing her, or listen to what I have to say before you decide whether to kill me.”

I held the silver knife across my chest, glaring at him through gritted teeth. “Speak.”

There were no lamps in the mill. Only the moonlight leaked through the broken windows, illuminating half of his face. Jing Guanming raised a hand to wipe the blood from his lips, his voice cold and calm.

“In the beginning, Baiyu Village didn’t hunt wolves. They begged them.”

Over thirty years ago, a great famine struck this place. The river ran dry, the crops died, and the villagers ate all their livestock before turning to tree bark. Eventually, someone found a spring deep within the Black Pine Forest, but a pack of wolves lived beside it. Their leader was Jing Guanming.

Rong Duyue was an abandoned orphan in the village back then, and she also had a red mark behind her ear. She volunteered to enter the forest to find a way for the village to survive. When she returned, she brought water-and a rule.

Every twenty years, the village had to send a girl with a red mark into the forest. The village would live, and the girl would die.

“But why?” I couldn’t help but ask.

The corner of Jing Guanming’s mouth twitched into a smile that was terrifyingly cold. “Because they were afraid. Afraid of wolves, afraid of famine, afraid of death. It is much easier to push a girl out than it is to face the truth.”

“What is the truth?”

He didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he looked up at me. “Have you ever seen your grandmother’s teeth?”

I froze.

Rong Duyue rarely laughed heartily in front of me, and she always turned away when she ate. I only remembered that when she scolded me, her lips would pull back to reveal teeth that were sharp and thin, as if they had been filed down.

Jing Guanming continued, “The first time she entered the forest, no wolf ate her. She walked out of those woods on her own. But from then on, every time a Red Cloak Girl died, she grew a little younger, and her teeth grew a little sharper.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

“You’re lying,” I said, my voice trembling. “She raised me.”

“Because she was waiting for you to grow up.” Jing Guanming stared at the area behind my ear as if looking at a scar. “Your mother hid you before she died, but Rong Duyue found you anyway. She waited nineteen years-not to be your grandmother, but to wait for the sharpest blade of all.”

My hand shook, and I nearly dropped the silver knife.

Suddenly, the sound of a copper bell rang out from outside the mill.

It was crisp, chiming rhythmically as it slowly approached from across the snowy expanse.

I instinctively covered my wrist, only to realize that my own copper bell had gone silent at some point.

Whose bell was ringing outside?

Jing Guanming lunged to his feet and grabbed my shoulders. “She’s looking for you. If you want to know the truth, go back to the village before dawn. Look under the loom in Rong Duyue’s room. There is something your mother left for you there.”

The ringing drew closer.

He shoved me toward the back window of the mill and turned toward the door.

“Jing Guanming!”

He didn’t look back, only leaving me with a faint parting word:

“Hate me after you’ve seen it.”