Chapter 4
I should have known she wasn’t someone who could harden her heart.
She actually stole money from someone or other to give her father.
That night she didn’t come back.
Early the next morning, she lay in the courtyard, drenched in blood. A corpse.
The overseer looked down on us. He seized Cuicui’s hand, beaten to a pulp of flesh and bone, and held it up like a victorious general displaying his spoils.
“Tell me. Did she deserve to die?”
His whip swept past each trembling servant before stopping at me. “You. Answer.”
I couldn’t stop shaking. My mouth felt stuffed with cotton.
He raised his thick arm. The whip cracked across me.
Agony.
“She did!” I fell to my knees, sobbing, my head almost touching his toes. “She deserved to die! She deserved to die!”
He went away laughing. I collapsed where I was. No one dared help me up.
They threw Cuicui’s body into the paupers’ burial ground.
The new girl placed beside me was called Hui’er. She was about the age I’d been when I arrived, and had two dimples when she smiled.
Three months later, she was beaten to death for being slow at her work.
Ning’er died after six months.
Ah Liang died after eight.
Jin’er died after a year.
…
I no longer let myself grow close to the people beside me.
They died without a sound.
Not only the girls. Boys died just as often in the servants’ compound.
A cultivator failed to refine a pill. A talisman went wrong. Someone was in a bad mood…
The most trifling thing could be reason enough for a life to vanish.
Would Li Shen’ai do the same?
When a hunter draws his bow, he doesn’t wonder whether the hare has family waiting for it to come home.
When a cultivator casts a spell, he doesn’t care whether that servant has friends who cherish them.
What difference is there between a hare and a servant?
Li Shen’ai was a hunter now too. Would she one day turn her bow on me?
The Mother Goddess’s enormous statue loomed as though among the clouds, smiling like a specter beneath the gray vault of the sky.
They sent me into the mountains to catch spirit beasts.
They might as well have tried to slaughter an ox with a knife meant for chickens.
I was a mere mortal, too weak to truss a chicken. I might not even catch an ordinary animal, let alone a spirit beast.
The sacred mountain was vast. I wandered aimlessly through it.
When thirsty, I drank from springs. When hungry, I picked wild fruit.
After several days of wandering, I suddenly realized I couldn’t find my way back.
I understood. By some accident, I must have walked beyond Divine Sword Mountain’s wards. A mortal like me couldn’t get back in without a guide.
Then I wouldn’t go back.
Apart from having no company, wasn’t everything about the mountains better than the servants’ compound?
After eight whole months, loneliness drove me to go down the mountain.
Lingzhou, the city below, was utterly unfamiliar. It wasn’t even in the same kingdom as my hometown.
I followed the directions Cuicui had given me.
Desolation met my eyes everywhere.
In Jingzhou, everyone said Lingzhou was a boundless paradise.
Everyone here knew immortal arts. Houses stood in orderly rows among a thousand miles of fertile fields. Lost belongings lay untouched in the streets; doors went unbarred at night.
But the people I saw were sallow and skeletal, withered figures with the vacant eyes of puppets.
They not only knew no immortal arts—they couldn’t get far enough away from cultivators.
I should have understood long ago.
Wasn’t this how the world worked?
For every person enjoying a life of ease, a hundred suffered in their place.
So many people enjoyed themselves on Divine Sword Mountain. Naturally, all of Lingzhou had to suffer for them.
I found Cuicui’s home.
I’d thought the overseer would wipe out her family too. He hadn’t.
Perhaps he simply couldn’t be bothered with a household of mortals.
Cuicui’s mother sat in the doorway stitching shoe soles. She showed no sign of illness. In fact, she was fairer and plumper than the people in the city.
Her father reclined on a lounge chair beneath a tree, holding a child of three or four.
A passing neighbor greeted them, a hoe over his shoulder. I followed him until we were alone. “Brother, how is that family doing so well?”
The man spat contemptuously.
“They sold their daughter into that living hell on Divine Sword Mountain, then pretended to be ill to trick her. Got the girl beaten to death. Didn’t even collect her body. And here they are, living like lords without a care.”
So that was how it was!
Cuicui, look.
They had no reasons, no helpless excuses. They were drinking your blood, eating your flesh, devouring your corpse.
That night I set a fire and burned the little courtyard house to the ground.
Cuicui’s man-eating parents and bloodsucking brother died in the flames.
Only her nephew survived. I left him at the door of a wealthy household in Lingzhou.
The child was innocent, after all.
They said Sihai Zi, the great Nascent Soul cultivator, could sweep all of Lingzhou with his spiritual sense.
But surely he wouldn’t use it to search for a servant who had wandered off.
No more than you would notice the ant beneath your foot.