Chapter 2

On the twenty-second day of the third month, heavy snow fell in swirling flurries.

Deep in the wild mountains, frost gathered in thick, layered clusters.

It was as if someone were whispering by her ear, though Luo Jiao couldn’t make out the words. Then came a jolt, and she was jolted awake by the cold.

A heavy red bridal veil pressed down on her until she could barely breathe. As the sedan chair swayed, the ornaments strung across her dress rustled and clinked.

The bearers must have lost their footing, because the entire chair lurched and plunged nose-first into the snow.

Luo Jiao tumbled inside, sprawling every which way. “Ow!”

The sound that came out of this body startled her badly.

Hoarse through and through, as if it hadn’t tasted water in ages.

…Wait?

Luo Jiao sat bolt upright, yanked off the red bridal veil, and studied her own hands.

These were absolutely not her hands.

Luo Jiao had trained with the sword for years and worn thick calluses into her fingers. Her hands had never been particularly powerful, but they certainly hadn’t looked like this: skin and bone, pale and bloodless. No calluses, but cracked skin between the nails, like someone who had scrubbed floors her whole life.

She measured “her own” frame from top to bottom, then picked up the dressing case beneath the stool and fished out a shard of bronze mirror.

The mirror reflected a pretty, delicate face, around thirteen or fourteen years old.

She didn’t know this person. And Luo Jiao had been dead for many years.

Luo Jiao wrinkled her nose at the bronze mirror. Could it be… her soul has returned by borrowing a corpse?

No one answered.

Luo Jiao set the mirror down. She didn’t know where this place was, much less what year it was. All she knew was that she had slept for a very, very long time, long enough that her thoughts were muddled and her mind sluggish.

The sedan chair was cramped, its bedding thin and shabby. Luo Jiao glanced at the dressing case at her feet and frowned, almost imperceptibly.

Pretty bracelets lay neatly arranged inside. The materials weren’t precious and the craftsmanship was mediocre, but they were well maintained, clearly treasured by whoever owned them.

She searched the case for clues and came up empty.

Luo Jiao simply sat up straight instead.

Turning her gaze to the wedding robes on her body, she sighed inwardly. She’s barely of age, and she’s already married off?

Before that silent rebuke could even settle, a violent pain shot up from the soles of her feet and burrowed into her body.

She clenched her teeth against it and lifted the great red hem of her skirt, only to find a pair of red embroidered shoes soaked through with blood.

Hunching her back and bending at the waist, Luo Jiao tried to work off the shoes and socks. The embroidered shoes were as hard as ice, and wouldn’t come off; and in the gaps between shoe and sock, fresh blood was still seeping, drop by drop.

Luo Jiao’s expression dimmed.

It suddenly occurred to her: this girl might have been pained to death, alive and screaming.

Wild mountains, snow churning like tangled hemp. The flowing blood leached the warmth from the body, and simply staying conscious took every ounce of strength.

A living life had slipped away without a sound, and her wronged soul had slipped into the gap it left behind.

Luo Jiao sighed and sat back in her place.

The sedan chair kept jolting forward.

Snow fell heavily outside the window. The procession was heading deep into the mountains, into a landscape of blinding white, pale and dreadful. The wedding sedan wandered through it all, garish as a smear of congealed blood.

Luo Jiao tore some strips from her sash and wrapped them around her feet, then stripped off the heavy beaded ornaments from her dress and lifted the beaded curtain.

Three or four burly men surrounded the sedan chair; beyond them she could see nothing.

When she, the “bride,” poked her head out of the chair, the men didn’t spare her so much as a glance. Their eyes were dull and vacant, their coarse-cloth shoes crunching through the snow, one step deep and one step shallow. Slush splashed against the blood-red sedan, leaving dark red stains.

Wild mountains and snowy plains stretched in every direction. Where were they going to find a household out here?

Luo Jiao couldn’t help but wonder. Who was ‘she’? And who was she being married off to?

She was just about to call out and ask, but the moment her lips parted, her body began to resist on instinct.

The instinct of the body’s original owner.

Luo Jiao bit down hard on her lower lip. The dead-eyed look of these men didn’t feel like a bridal procession at all.

It looked more like a funeral procession. Like men carrying a coffin.

She retreated back into the sedan. Warming her hands as best she could, she drew a jade-green phoenix hairpin from the dressing case. The pin wasn’t fine in make or sturdy in material, but its tip was sharp enough, and at least it meant she wouldn’t be entirely helpless.

Two characters were engraved on the tail of the phoenix hairpin: “Liangdi.”

Luo Jiao stared at those two characters, turned the pin this way and that, then tucked it into her sleeve.

This body’s strength was nothing like her old one. Thin arms and legs, a gaunt pale face, exhaustion haunting the eyes. Just standing there with her head drooping and her lids lowered, the whole girl was one frail, sickly lament: a young lady in the flower of her youth who had never once eaten her fill.

Luo Jiao gathered her wits and let out a long sigh.

Back in the day, before the Daoist Sanqing had picked her up off the streets and taken her up the mountain to train with the sword, she had fought stray dogs for scraps in the market alleys. She’d been just as skeletal then.

Luo Jiao shook her head, raised the shard of bronze mirror, and gazed at the girl within. “Your name is Liangdi?”

No one answered.

Luo Jiao tried again. “They say a soul doesn’t scatter until seven days after death. If so, you can probably still hear everything I’m saying. Since you found me… is there some unfulfilled wish of yours?”

Just as before, the question sank like a stone into a deep pool. No reply.

But suddenly.

Luo Jiao heard a burst of frantic screaming, right inside her sea of consciousness.

Faint. Very, very faint.

Luo Jiao closed her eyes and concentrated, summoning every scrap of strength in her body.

In the sea of consciousness, the fragmented voice gradually sharpened into clarity.

The voice said:

“RUN!”

At the foot of Zou’ao Mountain stood a small manor.

A big red embroidered ball hung above the gate. The first few stitches were exquisite; the rest grew progressively sloppier. Drifting snow veiled the cluster of red leaves in the courtyard, trimmed into the shape of the character for “joy,” lending the whole estate a faint air of mourning.

“Mother!”

At the end of the covered walkway, a stout figure came barreling along. He was young, dressed in wedding robes, fat-headed and big-eared, his features far from refined, with drool even hanging at the corner of his mouth.

But on the beauty couch along the walkway, a lovely woman wearing a golden buyao hairpin that gleamed like pearls didn’t mind in the least, smiling as she gathered him into her arms. “Slow down, you’ll hurt yourself.”

Lifting her handkerchief, she dabbed at the corner of his mouth.

The boy slurred out, “Mother, where’s the new mother?”

The beauty blinked. “What new mother?”

The boy giggled. “The bride is the new mother, and Mother is the old mother… I want the new mother, the new mother…”

“What kind of talk is that!” The woman’s mouth pulled down, but she only feigned anger. “A-Bao, don’t tell me you’re turning into an ungrateful wolf cub. Got a new bride, forgot your old mother?”

As if he couldn’t hear her at all, A-Bao just kept mumbling “new mother” over and over, round and round.

At the mouth of the walkway, an old nanny in rough hemp clothing shuffled over and dipped into a bow.

The woman understood at once. Patting the crown of A-Bao’s head, she soothed him with a smile. “A-Bao, go get ready now. That bride you keep going on about, she’s at the front gate.”

A-Bao whooped with joy and instantly vanished from sight.

The old nanny stepped forward and greeted the woman. “Madam Zou.”

The woman patted the corner of the couch beside her. “Nanny Zhao, sit.”

Nanny Zhao hesitated several times but didn’t sit. Head lowered, she asked, “Madam Zou, that Miss Xu… will she truly arrive at the manor today?”

Madam Zou smiled. “Of course.”

Nanny Zhao pressed on. “When I went to arrange the match half a month ago, I couldn’t help feeling the girl wasn’t very willing. She’s a clever little thing, sharp as a tack. She’ll find some way to run on the road.”

Madam Zou’s lips curled. “No need to fear. I gave orders beforehand: if she tries to run, use all the force necessary. Sparing anyone’s face is the last thing they should worry about.”

She paused, brow furrowing slightly, and a trace of malice flickered in her eyes. “It’s not as if… last time she tried to run, I soaked her feet in snowmelt. Her feet are half ruined. Where exactly does she think she’ll run to?”

Nanny Zhao’s brow knitted tight.

But before she could speak, Madam Zou went on. “Hmph. That Xu Liangdi is nothing but a fisher girl, lowborn trash by birth. If my son hadn’t fallen into a lake in the dead of winter as a child and addled his brain, would a fisher girl ever have the chance to climb so high? The boy in her family is ill-fated too, coughing nonstop since he was small. If the Zou family hadn’t tossed them a bit of loose silver, he’d have coughed himself into an early grave long ago! And now that we ask for their daughter’s hand, they hem and haw and drag their feet. Utterly heartless!”

Nanny Zhao stood rooted in place, saying nothing for a long moment.

Xu Liangdi, Xu Liangdi. The name alone told you how desperately the Xu family had longed for a son. A pity that the brother they’d summoned turned out to be a sickly thing, surviving day to day on medicine paid for by his elder sister and their parents.

But the Xu family had never had anything to their name anyway. A pot with a hole in it, used until it couldn’t be used; rough clothing, worn until it fell apart. Medicine, too, was a bottomless pit of silver, and before long they had spent their final copper coin.

The Zou family had marked precisely that moment and moved in for the kill, offering to take the family’s daughter as a bride for their idiot son.

The words had barely left Madam Zou’s mouth before the Xu family agreed, quick as a flash, without a moment’s thought. In the Xu family’s eyes, this Xu Liangdi was nothing more than a tool for producing sons, and now that the boy was gravely ill, the “tool” ought to be put to its best possible use.

And so Xu Liangdi, in the full bloom of her fourteenth year, was sold off by her own flesh and blood to the only “great household” for miles around.

At the thought, Nanny Zhao shook her head, her voice low and hoarse, uncertain whether she was muttering to herself or to someone else. “True enough. To be born in this age, to be born a woman, that is the greatest misfortune of all.”

“That’s enough!”

Perhaps she’d heard the sympathy in Nanny Zhao’s words, because open disgust rose in Madam Zou’s eyes.

Madam Zou said, “Back then, I too was led to this remote mountain manor by my parents, tricked and deceived, for the price of a sack of coarse grain. I didn’t understand the first thing about marriage either, and look at me, living just fine. Xu Liangdi has it far better than I did. No dowry, no betrothal gifts, sure, but at the very least it’s a proper match, made openly through a matchmaker.”

Nanny Zhao started to speak, then stopped. The words reached her lips and came out only as a sigh.

Madam Zou, for her part, curled her lips in contentment. “Nanny, you can rest easy. So long as the girl behaves, I won’t mistreat her.”

The moment the words fell, a shrill suona horn split the courtyard.

Both women turned toward the sound.

From the raised vantage of the walkway, Madam Zou rose calmly and watched the front gate of the Zou estate, where three or four burly men carried a wedding sedan chair ever closer.

Pointing at the sedan outside, Madam Zou smiled at Nanny Zhao.

“There, see? Delivered, just as promised.”