In the end, Luo Jiao failed to escape along the way.
Her feet had been shredded raw, and her legs refused to obey her. Just walking normally was a struggle, let alone outrunning the four burly men carrying the sedan.
With the red bridal veil settled back over her head, Luo Jiao was escorted into the Zou family courtyard.
Her escort spoke in a soft, gentle voice. “Miss Xu, you know how it is. Our Young Master A-Bao… Young Master A-Bao’s mind was only addled by a fever. He’s not a bad person, truly…”
Luo Jiao listened in silence and gave no reply.
Only at a bend in the corridor, when she caught her foot on a step, did she hiss out in pain.
Her escort immediately steadied her, brimming with concern, and murmured, “Careful, Miss Xu. Stay close to me.”
Luo Jiao could only think that this woman moved gently and had a remarkably patient temper. She herself hadn’t uttered a single word the whole way, and yet the woman could chatter on this long without a trace of annoyance.
Still, Luo Jiao didn’t dare let her guard down.
She couldn’t be bothered to ask where this place was, or the name of the man she was marrying. After all, since the original owner of this body, the young girl, had wanted to flee, then whether the family she married into was good or bad, rich or poor, none of it was her concern anymore.
But having taken over her body, Luo Jiao ought to at least lend her a hand.
One doubt remained, though.
The girl said she wanted to ‘escape’. Escape to where, exactly?
Inside the wedding sedan, Luo Jiao had strained to reach the girl again, all to no avail.
She didn’t know where the girl’s home was, or where her heart longed to go, much less what other hidden wishes lay beneath that single, unfulfilled word.
“And yet the situation right now is genuinely dire.”
Escorted into the side chamber, Luo Jiao had barely settled onto a chair when the wooden door slammed shut behind her.
She yanked off the red veil. “Xu Liangdi? Xu Liangdi?”
The room was empty, with only red candles burning high.
Silence filled the chamber.
“Fine. I’ll give you one more incense stick’s worth of time. If you still won’t speak… cough, cough.” Luo Jiao faked a few coughs. “Then I’ll make my own arrangements, all right?”
The room stayed silent.
Half the allotted time slipped past.
Luo Jiao suddenly clapped a hand over her mouth. “…Don’t tell me you’re still sitting in that sedan?”
Xu Liangdi, of course, did not answer.
The moment the words left her mouth, Luo Jiao ruefully rapped her own knuckles. She always despised her own ill-timed optimism. How did she still have the leisure to crack jokes at a time like this?
Luo Jiao lowered her head.
Right now, these half-crippled feet alone were a massive problem.
Back in her old body, Luo Jiao could circulate her qi and move as she pleased. But Xu Liangdi was no cultivator, without even the most basic grounding in Qi Breathing.
No Cultivation Method could be mastered in a mere few hours.
A Cultivation Method…
Luo Jiao rubbed her nose.
Xu Liangdi’s body was frail to begin with, with injured feet on top of it, so brute force was hopeless. As for Luo Jiao herself, though she had slumbered far too long, in life she had after all been the Master of the Bujue Sword, standing above ten thousand others. In her day she had traded fists across the Southern Slope and kicked her way down the Northern River, the envy of all who knew her name. When it came to mastery of the Heart Method, she had ranked among the very best.
A Heart Method that could be put to use right now, one that would genuinely work with this body? It wasn’t as if she couldn’t think of one.
The Heart Illusion Art.
The Heart Illusion Art, as the name suggested, bewitched a person’s mind and turned it to one’s own service.
At a shallow level of attainment, it could coax others into small favors, running errands or handing over money. At a deep level, one could build an entire Illusion Realm out of a person’s heart, and even make that Illusion Realm surface into reality itself.
Of course, the art was simply too sinister. Long before Luo Jiao had ever left her mountain, it had been outlawed by the world of cultivators.
But back then at Thousand-Li Slope, with the mountain gates sealed and the Sanqing Sect washing its hands of worldly affairs, Luo Jiao paid no mind to outside opinions. Whatever the sorcerers’ texts contained, she read it, and she learned it.
She had considered using the Heart Illusion Art on these people, of course. Back in the wedding sedan, she had casually practiced on the burly man nearest her.
Unfortunately, the man hadn’t spared her a single proper glance, and Xu Liangdi was terrified of these people. The mere thought of opening her mouth to speak made her body resist on instinct, and Luo Jiao, seriously lacking in vital energy, could not withstand the panic flooding Xu Liangdi’s heart… And so Luo Jiao’s Heart Illusion Art died halfway to birth.
Just as she was scowling in frustration, Luo Jiao suddenly heard a noise.
Rustle, rustle. Rustle, rustle. Like fabric dragging across the ground.
Jerking her head up, she saw, pressed against the outside of the window, a fat and hideous face, grinning at her like an idiot!
Even Luo Jiao, who prided herself on having seen everything the world had to offer, was scared half out of her wits in that instant.
Setting aside the man’s unspeakably ugly features, that expression alone, paired with such elaborate, heavy wedding robes…
Luo Jiao instinctively clutched the red veil on the seat, her voice wary. “You are… Young Master Zou?”
Seeing her look over, the man’s face split into an even more terrifying smile. “Bride… my new bride…”
Luo Jiao had just furrowed her brow when something seemed to strike her, and she smacked her own forehead.
What had that nanny who escorted her said? ‘His mind was addled by a fever’? Young Master?
Don’t tell me…
Luo Jiao probed carefully, “Are you a simpleton?”
“Bride, my bride…” The man before her seemed not to hear at all, still repeating those same few words. “My bride…”
His expression never changed, vacant and foolish, like a lunatic’s.
But Luo Jiao’s face lit up with delight.
I searched high and low for an opening, and one walks right up to my door, she thought. The easiest target for the Heart Illusion Art is a simpleton, isn’t it?
“Where has A-Bao gone?”
In the main hall of Zou Manor, several maids paced in anxious circles. Everyone knew Madam Zou’s severe temper, and when it came to anything involving the Young Master, she watched with an iron grip.
Three or five maids huddled to one side. One said the Young Master had gone to the garden. Another said he was hiding in his room. Another swore he was napping behind the rockery. The accounts multiplied by the minute.
“Think before you speak,” Madam Zou said, her face expressionless. “Or keep your tongues.”
But they honestly didn’t know where the Young Master had gone! He had been sitting in his room just fine, and in the blink of an eye, he had vanished into thin air!
Madam Zou pressed a hand to her forehead. “If you don’t know where he is, then tell me where he is most likely to be.” She turned to Nanny Zhao. “Is this the caliber of work you manage with these things, day in and day out?”
Nanny Zhao said, “They’re all storeroom girls. They don’t usually go anywhere near the Young Master.”
Madam Zou clicked her tongue and let the matter drop.
“First Madam…” a young maid ventured in a tiny voice. “Could he be in the side chamber? Because…”
“Hm?” Madam Zou’s gaze snapped over.
The young maid flinched under that knife-sharp look and went silent again. Instead, a bolder maid beside her nimbly picked up the thread. “That’s right, that’s right! The Young Master kept muttering about a ‘bride’. Could he have run off to the side chamber?”
The words had barely fallen when Madam Zou shot to her feet and snapped, “What are you standing around for? Go find him!”
Walking alone to the western side chamber, the young maid was trembling with fear. The flagstone path stretched endlessly ahead, wind and snow stinging her eyes as the night deepened around her; the trees along the road clawed at the air, ghastly and menacing.
Huh? This darkness? Halfway there, the thought belatedly struck her. It was barely sunset when I left the main hall. How is it already…
She was still puzzling over it when, at the far end of the path, she spotted a bride in red robes and a red veil, standing there rigid as a post.
The young maid’s eyes lit up. “Miss Xu! Miss Xu, why are you…”
But as she looked closer, the figure before her was clearly bloated and heavyset. How could that possibly be the slender Miss Xu from before!
The young maid staggered back two steps in fright.
In the next breath, the ‘bride’ spoke, in a thick man’s voice. “My bride… I’m looking for my bride…”
Beneath that red veil was, unmistakably, unmistakably Young Master A-Bao!
The young maid forced herself to steady. “Young Master! We were just looking for you. Why are you dressed like this? Where is Miss Xu?”
She reached up to lift A-Bao’s red veil, only to be shoved, caught completely off guard.
“…My bride! I’m the bride! I’m the bride!” A-Bao kicked the young maid to the ground, raised his fist, and muttered under his breath, “How dare you lift my veil! Die! Die!…”
Young Master A-Bao was a simpleton, but a gentle one, at least. He, at this moment, was like a beast gone mad, his falling fists hard as stone. Aching and terrified, the young maid was frightened nearly out of her mind.
A-Bao pounded and kicked for a while, and as if that weren’t enough, snatched up a forked wooden stick from beside the flagstones.
“H… Help!” Seizing the gap, the young maid scrambled up, crawling and tumbling, and fled back screaming. “Nanny Zhao! Nanny Zhao! Nanny—”
She ran straight into a furious Madam Zou at the door of the main hall. “You again!” Madam Zou was clearly livid. “What could possibly be worth all this shrieking?”
“First Madam!!”
Forgetting entirely how she usually feared the woman, the young maid clutched at her like a drowning girl at a rope and dashed over. “First Madam! First Madam! The Young Master… the Young Master seems to have taken ill again, worse than ever…”
Madam Zou’s brow knotted, and she moved to hurry forward.
It was precisely at that moment that A-Bao appeared on the plank bridge path, wooden stick in hand.
“A-Bao!” Madam Zou was overjoyed. Her cold face melted at once, her whole bearing turning warm and doting. “A-Bao, where did you run off to! You had your mother searching everywhere!”
Then she saw the wooden stick in A-Bao’s hand, dripping with something.
Madam Zou reached out and touched it. “A-Bao! Whose blood is this?… Are you hurt?”
A-Bao remained as deaf to her as ever, except that a strange curve suddenly crept across his lips.
“Hehe…” He grabbed hold of Madam Zou’s hand, grinning foolishly. “Mother, I’m hungry…”
Madam Zou took his hand in hers. “The wedding feast? It’s all prepared! Everything’s ready, all your favorites!” She squeezed A-Bao’s hand, smiling. “Today is our A-Bao’s great day. Of course we wouldn’t let you go hungry. Come, now…”
Who could have known that A-Bao would suddenly raise his other hand, clamp it onto Madam Zou’s forearm, and wrench inward with brutal force!
The strength of it was enough to snap the woman’s arm clean in two.
“So, Mother…” Under Madam Zou’s astonished gaze, A-Bao lifted his head, smiling a twisted smile, fresh blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.
“Have you seen my bride?”
In the forty-seventh year of the Zhouqi Dynasty, on the twenty-second day of the third month, Zou Manor descended into chaos.
It was meant to be a day of great celebration, yet the bridegroom had abruptly become an Evil Ghost of unbound bloodlust, mad beyond saving.
Simple-minded though A-Bao was, his frame was first-rate and powerfully built. Squire Zou had died early, and apart from the hired sedan bearers, the manor counted barely a dozen men among its ranks.
And so the household servants were no match for the ‘Evil Ghost’. That bizarre, blood-soaked banquet raged on for several hours.
Thus the Young Master Zou’s wedding feast came to its close in the most absurd fashion imaginable.
“Twenty-two wounded throughout the manor. Seven corpses.”
In a government office in Yiyun Town, just outside Zou’ao Mountain, a few Minor Clerks were delivering their report. “The only one unaccounted for is… is the bride.”
Another clerk cut in, “Though some say she was, that she was, by that simple-minded Young Master…” The speaker swallowed hard, and whether from disbelief or from finding the words too dreadful to utter, dropped to a much lower register.
In the chair of honor sat an official of fine, delicate features, who rapped his knuckles lightly on the table.”Speak freely.”
“…Swallowed. Swallowed alive.”
The youth lifted “his” eyelids. “Then summon the Coroner. Open the body.”
“Vice Minister Zhou.” An old man nearby raised his eyes, bowing and smiling obsequiously. “We opened it.”
The youth: “And found nothing?”
The Coroner: “…Nothing. The stomach was empty. In this humble official’s view… most likely, most likely this Zou A-Bao had not, from midday onward, taken a single bite of food.”
The youth said, “According to the neighbors’ testimony, the incident occurred at dusk, and Zou A-Bao was captured late that night, dying without any apparent cause. From midday to late night is eight hours at the least, twelve at the most. The autopsy shows his stomach empty. Then this bride who was supposedly swallowed alive…”
A Minor Clerk couldn’t help cutting in. “Vice Minister Zhou, wasn’t it said the man was possessed by an Evil Ghost? If an Evil Ghost devours a person, how would they truly end up in the stomach?”
“I put no faith in talk of gods and ghosts.” Vice Minister Zhou shot him a sideways glance. “I believe only that things happen because people make them happen.”
“This Zou A-Bao was simple-minded to begin with, unable to withstand any great shock. For him to go mad so suddenly, there must be a reason. Perhaps someone ‘guided’ him along. Or some Cultivator Heart Method… gently coaxed him.”
The old Coroner narrowed his eyes almost imperceptibly, and the Minor Clerk could only slink back to his place in embarrassment.
The youth in the chair of honor was none other than the most blazing figure at the current court: the Vice Minister of Judicial Review, Zhou Zhaoyue.
Three years ago, at just fifteen years of age, Zhou Zhaoyue had won the title of Third-Place Scholar, and had risen without pause ever since, ascending as smoothly as if carried on the wind.
His Majesty had once declared before the entire court that though Zhou Zhaoyue bore the name of Third-Place Scholar, it was with the substance of a Top Imperial Scholar.
Upright and incorruptible in office, unyielding and impartial, he was deeply beloved by the common people of the provinces and held in high favor by the Sovereign. Before even reaching twenty, he had risen to the Court of Judicial Review, and had later been decreed by imperial order Prince Consort to the Eldest Princess.
Whoever spoke of him praised a future without limit. And now this Vice Minister and Prince Consort sat grim-faced in the chair of honor, lifted his brush, and said flatly:
“Find the bride.”
