The night rain still hadn’t let up, dripping steadily.
Inside the ruined temple, the campfire glowed dim red.
The girl sat cross-legged, her inner robe half slipped down, baring the smooth, pale skin of her upper body.
Grandma Yun bent low, her cracked, weathered hand pinching a thin silver needle, moving it slowly toward Fengxue, the needle almost touching that snow-white skin.
In the firelight, the girl’s body seemed to glow, it was so fair.
“Little Immortal Maiden,” Grandma Yun said, holding the needle steady, “I’m going to open your chest now. Don’t move.”
Fengxue nodded.
The silver needle pierced Fengxue’s skin, then lifted again, as though undoing stitches, weaving its way across her skin. Her entire chest seemed to turn into a sheet of translucent white cloth, once the needle had undone its threads, it could simply be lifted open by hand.
Fengxue lowered her eyes and watched as the skin peeled back, faintly revealing the deep red flesh underneath.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t see what lay within the flesh itself.
Grandma Yun leaned in close to the opened chest and peered inside, studying it for a long moment. Suddenly she gave a soft gasp, an expression of shock crossing her face, and stepped back several paces.
Fengxue asked, “What is it?”
Grandma Yun’s fingers trembled faintly as she stared at Fengxue’s face, uncertain and unsettled.
The girl’s eyes were clear and unclouded, tinged with confusion as she looked back, not understanding. A flap of skin still hung loose from her chest like a scrap of torn cloth, the flesh beneath clearly visible.
Grandma Yun’s gaze slid past her, landing on the stone platform behind.
On the platform still sat a cooled piece of wine-lees cake, and a bloodied rat’s tail.
Grandma Yun seemed to be turning something over in her mind. After a moment, she stepped forward again and silently stitched the skin of Fengxue’s chest back together.
Fengxue looked down again, the skin was smooth as before, without a single scar.
Such fine needlework.
Grandma Yun sat back down across from Fengxue and waved a hand, the ruined temple transformed once more into that mountain summit wreathed in cloud and rosy mist. Except now she was frowning, and a few more silver strands seemed to have appeared in her hair.
Fengxue asked, “Grandma, what did you see?”
Grandma Yun said quietly, “Little Immortal Maiden, if I didn’t trust your character, I would have nearly mistaken you for something malevolent.”
Fengxue’s brow furrowed. She’d assumed she was simply infected with demonic qi, and had still been holding onto the hope that Grandma Yun could open her chest and purge it for her. But seeing Grandma Yun so shaken, it seemed that wasn’t the case at all.
Grandma Yun’s face had gone pale. She looked at Fengxue and said softly, “Child, there is a temple inside your heart.”
“A temple?”
Grandma Yun nodded.
Fengxue said, brow slightly creased, “I’ve only ever heard of the saying about the temple of the five organs.”
Common folk sometimes joked about eating a meal as “making offerings to the temple of the five organs”, the belief that the heart houses the spirit, the lungs the vital essence, the liver the soul, the spleen the intent, and the kidneys the will. That kind of “temple” was purely figurative, with no physical form.
While cultivating on Qingming Mountain, she’d heard the elders speak of some art of refining the temple of the five organs, tempering the organs, strengthening the body, nourishing one’s qi to extend one’s lifespan.
But what Grandma Yun was describing didn’t sound like that kind of abstract temple at all, it sounded like an actual, physical building.
“It isn’t large, about the same size as my own little temple, white walls, black-tiled roof, its door shut tight, no plaque bearing a name over the eaves. A trace of demonic qi is leaking out from inside.” Grandma Yun looked at the girl, her expression worried. “Little Immortal Maiden, that surely isn’t one of the Three Pure Ones your Xuanmen sect worships, is it?”
Fengxue touched her own chest, and suddenly remembered, in her past life, in the moment before her death, run through by a blade’s qi, she’d seemed to glimpse something.
She pressed her lips together, unable to recall it clearly no matter how hard she tried, though a rough guess had already begun forming in her mind—
Could this heart-temple be the reason she’d lived two lives?
“Grandma, could you open my chest again,” Fengxue said. “Bring a mirror, let me look for myself.”
Grandma Yun waved a hand. “I don’t dare look again, little Immortal Maiden…” She seemed to hesitate, then couldn’t help but go on. “Even with that temple’s door shut tight, I could still feel the malevolence of whatever’s inside. I’ve never heard of anything like it in all my years, that your heart should be enshrining an evil god.”
Fengxue shook her head. “I’ve never made offerings to it.”
Across two lifetimes, this was the first time she’d learned there was such a thing lodged in her chest, it was almost darkly funny. But thinking about it this way, perhaps the many attempts on her life in her past life hadn’t only been because she’d turned into a demon.
Grandma Yun nodded gently. “I know you’re a good child. That giant rat was far stronger than you, and yet you drew your sword for the sake of a single promise. But child, can you keep holding fast to your own heart, and never let it be corrupted by evil thoughts?”
Fengxue considered this, her expression calm, her eyes resolute. “I can.”
In her past life, the change working through her body had grown steadily worse, and yet in the end she’d managed to hold onto her own clarity, never letting the demonic qi take full control and turn her into some mindless, bloodthirsty monster.
If she could manage it in her last life, she could certainly manage it in this one.
Grandma Yun sighed, pressing the silver needle into her palm. “Don’t let anyone else discover this secret of yours.”
She said, with real sympathy, “Child, the road ahead of you won’t be an easy one.”
…
When she woke, the night rain had stopped, and dawn was just breaking, its first light gathering at the horizon.
After the rain, the sky had turned a clean, washed blue.
The fire in front of her had long since gone out, leaving only a bed of black charcoal ash.
And yet Fengxue didn’t feel the cold at all. Draped over her shoulders now was a piece of soft, light brocade, brilliant as sunset clouds, thin as mist, its fabric shaped into a red cloak.
She slowly opened her hand, and a thin silver needle appeared in her palm.
In the dream, Grandma Yun had said her own power was too weak to safely open her chest a second time, and so had passed on to her the needle and the technique of stitching threads instead.
Fengxue had no mirror on her, so she set the Fuwei sword upon the stone platform, using its frost-white blade as a makeshift mirror, reflecting her own solemn face. She adjusted her position until it was right, slipped her robe down, and pressed the silver needle to her chest, beginning the same threading technique Grandma Yun had used in the dream.
Grandma Yun’s skill had been masterful, working the needle directly on the soul without harming the flesh at all. This was Fengxue’s first time attempting it, and her movements were rough and unpracticed, she couldn’t work directly on the soul itself, and had to cut through skin and flesh first before reaching it.
She drove the needle into her own chest, stitch after stitch, expression unchanged, piercing skin and flesh, hot blood staining her pale fingertips red. This concerned both of her lives, she wasn’t about to flinch from a little pain.
She peeled back the bloodied flesh, and at last the silver needle reached down to the soul itself.
Once she’d lifted that thin layer of skin away entirely, she looked down into the bloody opening in her chest, by the cold glow reflected off her sword.
Beyond the flesh lay an entirely different world.
A small temple sat hidden within her chest.
It matched Grandma Yun’s description almost exactly, the temple door shut tight, its very appearance carrying something deeply unsettling at first glance.
Fengxue leaned in for a closer look.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t actually touch the little temple… She wanted to push the door open, to see exactly which deity was enshrined inside, and why it had taken up residence coiled around her heart.
If she could, she’d have liked to pull her own heart out entirely and examine it properly.
The image reflected in the sword’s light was hazy and indistinct, Fengxue studied it for a long while and still couldn’t make out much. Aside from the fact that her own heart had somehow become a temple, there didn’t seem to be anything else especially remarkable about it.
Hm… well, that was tolerable enough, all things considered.
She found herself tugging at the corner of her mouth, for no particular reason.
Suddenly, the temple door creaked slowly open a narrow crack, and gray mist came rushing out from within, spilling forth in an instant.
In the span of a single breath, the mist had wrapped around the stone platform and surged straight toward Grandma Yun’s statue.
Fengxue immediately spun around and dashed outside, her needle flying rapidly across her chest, stitching it back closed.
“Grandma?” she called out, anxious, staring at the statue, terrified something might happen to Grandma Yun because of her.
Grandma Yun’s ethereal, distant voice reached her ears. “I’m fine.”
Fengxue let out a breath of relief, then looked down at her own chest and frowned. In her haste, the stitches had come out crooked and uneven, leaving what looked like a blood-red centipede sprawled across her chest.
Although even without the haste, it probably wouldn’t have looked much better.
“Little Immortal Maiden,” Grandma Yun said with a soft sigh, “you’ve made an offering.”
Fengxue blinked, and objected, “But I never made any offering. What offering could there possibly—”
Her gaze landed on the stone platform, and froze.
There really was an offering on the platform.
A piece of cool wine-lees cake and a bowl of Jingquan’s fine wine, she’d set them out herself earlier, out of pity for this old forgotten deity who’d gone so long without worship. Beyond that, the platform should also have held the rat’s tail she’d cut off, and the Fuwei sword she’d used as a mirror.
Now, looking over, that bloodied rat’s tail, the wine-lees cake, and the wine had all vanished completely.
The rat’s tail had carried a thick trace of demonic energy. That her heart’s “evil god” would accept such a thing confirmed it really was no benevolent presence, it could rightly be called a malevolent spirit.
But why take the wine-lees cake and the wine too?
Was even a malevolent spirit fond of good food?
Grandma Yun cautioned her, “Now that it’s accepted an offering, it will surely come to fulfill your wish. It will seek you out again, little Immortal Maiden, be careful.”
Fengxue said, “But I’ve never made any wish.”
Still, she knew perfectly well that in the realm of gods and spirits, there was no such thing as accepting an offering and doing nothing in return. Taking an offering meant a debt to repay, whether the deity in question was righteous or malevolent, that was simply the rule. It was just that a malevolent god tended to be a good deal cruder and stranger in how it went about granting a wish.
Take, for instance, a prayer for sudden wealth and good fortune.
A righteous deity might simply hand someone a genuine opportunity to grow rich. A malevolent one, on the other hand, had considerably more inventive methods.
Once, in Yuenan, there had been a scholar named Zhao who prayed to an evil god for riches. That very night he’d dropped dead suddenly, and his grieving family had burned a great deal of paper money for him in mourning.
And who was to say paper money didn’t count as money?
That gave some sense of just how twisted and strange a malevolent deity’s methods could be.
As Fengxue thought this over, she carefully wiped the dust from the statue, and the once-blurred face gradually came into focus, revealing a faintly smiling mouth and gentle eyes.
Exactly as she’d seen in the dream.
Once she’d finished wiping it down, she moved on to tidying the offering table. She picked up the Fuwei sword and stared at the face reflected in its blade, and suddenly remembered, perhaps she really had made some kind of wish, once.
Back in her past life, during this same stretch of time, there had only been two things she’d wanted most in the world: for her talent in cultivation to improve, and for Shen Yujing to finally remember who had actually saved him.
She wondered what that thing lodged in her heart intended to do to grant her wish.
Fengxue suddenly found the whole thing rather amusing.
She swept the ashes clean from the temple, repaired the roof, cleared away the dust and cobwebs throughout, wiped the dust from the shrine platform, and took out another cold piece of wine-lees cake from her cloth bundle, setting it respectfully on the platform.
Then she refilled the broken bowl with wine from her gourd.
Fengxue pressed her palms together and bowed deeply to the forgotten old deity. “Farewell, Grandma.”
“Safe travels, little Immortal Maiden.”