Chapter 5

Chapter 5

I slipped back into the village just as dawn was breaking.

The main gate was closed as expected, but the north wall had long fallen into disrepair, leaving a narrow gap near the woodshed. When we were children, Xing Zhaoming and I used to sneak out through there to go bird-hunting, something Rong Duyue never knew about.

The village was silent, as if everyone had tacitly accepted the funeral procession from the previous night.

I ran toward home, my feet crunching over the frozen snow. The door was unlocked, but no lights were on inside. Rong Duyue was gone. I didn’t have time to overthink it and rushed straight into her room. Everything was exactly as it always was-the offering table, the medicine jars, the loom, the camphor chest. The air smelled of herbs and mildew, but in that moment, all I could scent was a faint, metallic sweetness.

I lunged at the loom and shoved the entire thing aside.

Sure enough, there was a loose floorboard beneath it.

I pried the board up with my fingernails, immediately drawing blood as splinters pierced my fingertips. Under the floor was a small hidden compartment, just large enough for a person to crouch inside. There were no riches here, only a stack of neatly wrapped red cloth and a yellowed journal.

I opened the journal first.

A name was written on the first page.

Yan Mingmie.

That was my mother.

The handwriting in the journal was somewhat scrawled, as if written in a great hurry.

“If you are reading this, it means I failed to get you out of Baiyu Village. Jinghong, do not trust Rong Duyue. She didn’t come to save us. She came to eat us.”

My fingers gave a violent tremor.

The pages that followed had been water-damaged, leaving much of the writing blurred, but I forced myself to read on page by page.

Mother wrote that in the year she turned seventeen, she was chosen to be the Red Cloak Girl. She had intended to die in the forest, but she encountered the injured Wolf King, Jing Guanming, in the snow. That night, the ones who truly wanted to eat her weren’t the wolves, but the villagers who had followed her into the woods. Jing Guanming saved her and hid her in the forest for three months. She thought she could escape, but she was pregnant with me.

The people of Baiyu Village knew she was alive, and Rong Duyue used the lives of the entire village to force her back.

“She said that as long as I handed over the child, she would let Jing Guanming and the pack go. But the day I entered the village, the first thing I saw was a wolf pelt she had hung out to dry in the courtyard.”

My vision went dark, and I nearly collapsed.

Tucked inside the journal was a scrap from a baby’s swaddling cloth, embroidered with a crooked black wolf.

“If my daughter has a red mark behind her ear, it is not a curse. It is a path I fought to leave behind. She has human blood in her veins, but she also carries the blood of the forest. Jinghong, if you enter the forest when you grow up, do not fear Jing Guanming. Fear the one who told you the fairy tales.”

I wanted to keep reading, but the sound of a cane tapping against the ground suddenly echoed from the courtyard.

Thump. Thump.

Before I could hide the journal, the door was pushed open.

Rong Duyue stood in the doorway, a light dusting of snow on her shoulders and her face devoid of expression. Her gaze fell first on the displaced loom, then on the journal in my hands. A slow smile spread across her face.

“I knew you were just like your mother,” she said softly. “Always fond of poking around where you shouldn’t.”

I took a step back, my hands shaking uncontrollably. “You’ve lied to me for nineteen years.”

“Is nineteen years a long time?” She leaned on her cane, taking one step after another toward me, her soles grinding against the floor with a grating sound. “I waited twenty years for your mother, and another nineteen for you. You’ve only just found out, that’s all.”

She reached me and raised her hand to stroke the red mark behind my ear. Her fingertips were ice-cold yet possessed a greasy, cloying texture, as if they had just been pulled out of raw meat.

“Tonight is the Blood Moon. It’s time for you to go to your true maternal grandmother’s home.”

I turned to run.

But just as I reached the door, a sharp numbness shot through the back of my neck.

A fine needle had sprung from the head of Rong Duyue’s cane at some point, plunging straight into my flesh. My vision went black and my legs gave way. The last thing I saw was her face as she leaned over me, her eyes shining like two damp embers in the dark.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said with a smile. “I’ll make sure you die more beautifully than your mother did.”