Chapter 6: 6 The Grudge of a Thousand Needles

◎Yan Rushi. Do not betray me◎

The Pagoda Festival served two purposes: rite and revelry. The former honored the dead; the latter begged the year to come.

Beyond the festival’s high dais, the hem of You Fusang’s dark-gold robes swept past ranks of kneeling Devil Cultivators.

All of them gazed up at her in perfect reverence, faces full of longing, as if she were a god of the Nine Heavens—all but one, who narrowed her eyes in wariness.

Little Mi—the girl who had attended Yan Rushi’s bath.

It was the very moment You Fusang stepped onto the festival dais—Little Mi leapt from the crowd, short blade in hand, its point driving straight for You Fusang!!!

But it lasted only the flash of a blade.

As if she had long expected it, You Fusang did not even turn; a fingertip brushed lightly through the sunset wind, and a formless edge tore across the sky.

A Crimson-Gold Phoenix Tail shrieked through the air. Little Mi’s body hung suspended, the short blade flying from her grip, black Devil Qi and blood spilling from her seven apertures.

Between lightning and firelight, the dais was drenched.

Uproar on every side.

Little Mi lay where she had fallen. You Fusang walked unhurriedly down from the dais, and in a breath, the dying prisoner and the composed celebrant of the high rite met eyes—and it was the prisoner who spent the last of her strength dragging herself upright.

“Devil Fiend… I will make you pay in blood!”

You Fusang laughed. “The way you look right now… I fear you won’t manage to collect.”

Little Mi ground her teeth. “Devil Fiend…”

“Tell me, then.” You Fusang toyed idly with her cinnabar-colored nails. “What grudge is there between us, that you would lie hidden in Pagoda all this time for your revenge?”

“A Blood Feud!” Little Mi’s eyes went scarlet. “You slaughtered my sect. You killed my parents and my elder sister…”

“Sect? And what was the sect called?”

Little Mi drew herself up, neither servile nor proud: “The sect was Jiang Chaosheng.”

Jiang Chaosheng?

You Fusang searched her memory and could not catch the shadow of it anywhere. So she smiled, very apologetically: “No impression. I’ve stained my hands with too much righteous blood; the ledger’s grown hard to read.”

“My elder sister was Jiang Ru… You Fusang. You cannot possibly have forgotten her.”

“Jiang Ru…” You Fusang said the name softly. “Jiang Chaosheng…”

Ah. Now she remembered.

Jiang Ru—that student back in the Yan Sect’s Outer Sect days who had delighted in bullying her. When she saw You Fusang taken in by Yan Qingjue, Jiang Ru had developed an itch to climb the same ladder, but in her bones she still despised You Fusang, always convinced the girl was merely preternaturally lucky and possessed no real skill. Quarrel after quarrel—and the last clash fell squarely on the day You Fusang was being eaten alive by Devil Qi—

Jiang Ru was the first life You Fusang ever took after falling into devilhood.

When Jiang Ru breathed her last in front of her, You Fusang had felt nothing at all—until the warm blood filled her vision, and only then did she think, dully: These eyes will never sneer at me again. This mouth will never spit its cruel, ugly words again.

Good.

Afterward, You Fusang was struck from the Yan Sect’s rolls, pursued nearly to annihilation.

On the road of flight she met two people: Geng Ying, and the then-City Lord of Pagoda City.

Geng Ying had been no more than a child of four, abandoned in the field-paths, left to fate. We’re all stray dogs, all dogs from a burned house—so thinking, You Fusang picked Geng Ying up, even though this sniffling child was a dead weight to her.

Across the two years of flight, Geng Ying grew, grew lively and quick to laugh, with one puzzling quirk: touch the back of her head, however lightly, and Geng Ying would wail without end.

She couldn’t explain why herself. She only sobbed and clung to You Fusang, crying that it hurt.

From the back of Geng Ying’s skull, the City Lord of Pagoda City drew out one long, slender Silver Needle.

After a silence, the City Lord said, “Mortals prize sons and despise daughters—forever begging for boy-children, discarding and destroying girl infants. Perhaps Little Ying was one of those poor fated children too.”

You Fusang looked at Geng Ying, at this unknowing child, and thought only: How pitiful… unwanted from the moment of birth.

Just like me.

And by sheer coincidence, those were the very days they passed through Geng Ying’s home village.

At the village’s highest point stood an Abandoned Infant Tower.

So that night the Devil Qi ran amok; three hundred-some villagers, body and soul, were snuffed out, and in one night the village went up in flame and exile.

Too great a toll of sins? When the fire guttered out, You Fusang stood on the hilltop and saw that above the scorched earth and blue smoke, not a single wronged ghost remained.

Sunrise after dawn, and the wind in the far forests, knowing nothing of human suffering, was still laughing.

But whatever the cause, a single night’s slaughter of three hundred souls had inflamed the righteous world.

Thereafter, led by the small sect “Jiang Chaosheng,” the righteous path marched against You Fusang—for the daughter Jiang Ru on one hand, for the village of that night on the other; private grudge and public cause together, a war with a name.

The result, of course…

was total annihilation.

Devil Cultivators take slaughter for their cultivation. Under the previous City Lord’s guidance and the light of blood, You Fusang had mastered the fourth layer of the Pagoda Token.

“I remember now. Jiang Ru. Jiang Chaosheng. Dead souls under This Venerable One’s hand.” On the festival dais, You Fusang smiled brilliantly. “Little Mi. You came to avenge them, did you?”

“How can you… how can you… smile like it means nothing!!!??”

Little Mi must have been maddened past bearing, to launch one last, life-spending ambush in so lopsided a fight.

You Fusang merely reached out her hand.

Merely reached out her hand.

Little Mi felt her body go hollow; her breath stopped.

You Fusang’s hand passed through her chest and closed, living, around her organ. Little Mi’s heart.

A freshly carved-out heart still beats—bloody and blotched, it soaked You Fusang’s sleeve. Some shred of consciousness must have remained, for Little Mi lowered her head in disbelief and looked at the empty hole in her own chest.

Crash—

The child of vengeance died with her eyes open.

You Fusang stood before her. On her face was blood, was cinnabar, was also the flaming pink of peach blossom in full riot.

The high rite’s dais was struck dumb for one instant—and then boiled over with cheering.

Devil Cultivators thirst for blood—right and wrong mean nothing to them—and nothing delights them like a spectacle bloody and pitiless.

It was at this very moment that Yan Rushi arrived, belated.

The cheering on all sides stunned her. She stood as one turned to stone, her face pale with the beginnings of sickness.

Yan Rushi was too thin—a breath of east wind might scatter her into white smoke.

She looked at Little Mi, and at You Fusang.

The moment their gazes touched, You Fusang saw those clear black-and-white eyes brimming with helpless bewilderment.

Without care, without scruple, You Fusang curled her lips in a smile.

Afraid of me? Be afraid of me…

Just like all the others.

Amid the endless mist of blood, You Fusang turned leisurely back. The heart in her hand had long since stopped beating. She dropped it; her blood-dripping fingers twitched slightly, and attendants stepped up at once to wipe them clean, carefully.

“Such is the end of those who hide among us and betray.”

The heart rolled down from the dais, rolling through the roar of the crowd toward some neglected corner, silent as the dead.

Yan Rushi’s lashes quivered; she could not hold down dry heaves.

That was a living, breathing person—the very one she had spoken with only yesterday…

She had eaten nothing, so there was nothing to bring up, but her whole body felt wrong. Even so, Yan Rushi walked, shaking, to where Little Mi’s body lay, and closed the girl’s eyes for her.

“Scared?” Geng Ying looked at her with open contempt. “So the Young Sect Master of the Yan Sect has such a weak stomach after all?”

“I…”

Geng Ying spoke as if she couldn’t stomach it. “Hmph. Every one of these people deserved to die! The mortal world rots, its officials are useless, the whole crawling mess of them… What, your righteous sects call robbing the rich to feed the poor ‘chivalry,’ but when the Venerable Lord punishes evil, it’s heresy and devilry?”

Geng Ying hated the world for having its own reasons. But Yan Rushi was different. From childhood she had possessed everything—the four seasons, the seven melodies, the eight pleasures of the mortal world; she had savored them all, touched them all—and so she loved this world more than she resented it.

No one had done wrong. What they resented or loved alike was their own mortal world.

And now, here in Pagoda, Yan Rushi was no longer the carefree, unrestrained Little Peacock of old.

Whom should I hate?

Hate whom, exactly?

She only felt so tired—and did not know where to throw the hate.

As her mind wandered, a tremendous crack sounded at her ear; something shattered, bursting into a mist of blood.

Little Mi’s corpse!

In an instant the blood-mist became blood arrows, scything outward in all directions, terribly fast—

Sandalwood swept close before her; You Fusang caught Yan Rushi and fell back, sparing her the spray.

Geng Ying’s weapon flashed out, cutting down every last blood arrow.

Only then did You Fusang understand. So that’s it. So that’s it. Whether or not she’d touched You Fusang, Little Mi was fated to die today. Best case, she’d have grappled with You Fusang and, at the closest range, used her own body as the charge to fire those blood arrows—wounding You Fusang a little in turn.

Smashing the jade together with the stone. Mutual destruction.

A pity the gap in strength was too wide. Little Mi hadn’t lasted long enough.

You Fusang’s smile was cold. “That’s a heavy investment. That’s real hatred.”

Lightning and slaughter, corpses and blood-mist and blood arrows—it had all happened too fast. Yan Rushi, still in her arms, shook with terror, teeth clenched.

You Fusang let her go, face expressionless. “Young Sect Master Yan. If you mean to stay long in Pagoda, you had best grow used to such things quickly.”

Used to it? Used to what? Used to human lives, to the difference between living and dying in the space of a blink, to blood-stench blanketing everything?

That day, Yan Rushi closed Little Mi’s eyes, wrapped the lonely heart in white cloth, and buried it with her own hands.

Barren dark earth, a blood-colored dying sun, a nameless grave.

Yan Rushi sat in silence beside the mound until the crows fell quiet and the moon climbed the branches.

That night, under a waning moon’s broken song, Yan Rushi returned to her quarters and lay on the bed unable to close her eyes, not even daring to put out the lamp. Over and over her mind circled the same things: her mother’s little finger, Little Mi dying with open eyes, that silent, dead heart…

The nameless grave.

If she was a spy, then Little Mi too must have gone by a false name, no? Had she used a Disguise Technique, reshaped even her bones? Then what was her true name? What did her true face look like?

Cast off the true name, cast off the first face, cast off the life.

Even the corpse became blood-mist—a grave to visit was more than could be had.

Little Mi’s family was long gone. No one in this world would remember her now.

Will this be my ending too? Yan Rushi thought, sick with dread.

Flutter-flutter—

Abruptly a black messenger pigeon slammed into the canopy—but before she could look, another hand reached from behind the bead curtain, seized the pigeon, and gave it a light twist.

The pigeon crumbled to ash on the spot—and this time there wasn’t even a mist of blood.

From behind the bead curtain came You Fusang’s bantering voice: “Solitary Mountain’s pigeon?”

You Fusang pushed the curtain aside and stepped up onto the edge of the bed, the Golden Crow on her sleeve trailing low over the silk quilt as she crept toward Yan Rushi inch by inch. She was smiling, but the cold at the bottom of her eyes was unmistakable, and Yan Rushi read her mood keenly: this was angrier than when she’d torn a heart from a chest in broad daylight.

At last she stopped within a hand’s breadth of Yan Rushi, tipped up her chin, and looked straight into her eyes. “Yan Rushi. Are you going to betray me too?”