In Qiuxu, alcohol was sold by the drop.
Chang Jiu finally came back to her senses.
She stayed crouched in the most comfortable position that she could manage, her eyes half-open as she stared at the seemingly endless line of people waiting to buy wine across the street.
They were a group of miners, each surrounded by a layer of strange black energy. From a distance, they looked like mindless insects, lured forward by the sweet scent of food and slowly crawling toward it.
The person holding that bait was an old man with a white goatee standing at the very front of the line.
He looked as though he belonged to an entirely different world from the miners. His green robe trailed along the ground, and a small green jade pendant hung from his waist, bearing a faint character that seemed to be the word “Dong”.
The old man sat steadily on a white jade chair half a person’s height, holding a small golden flask in his hand.
Whenever someone knelt before him holding a piece of gleaming white stone and handed it to the young boy serving beside him, the old man would shake the little flask.
Not a drop more or less, a single drop of murky yellow liquor would fly neatly from its long, slender spout.
If they handed over several stones, the amount of liquor would increase accordingly.
Those who reached the front of the line hurriedly tilted their heads back and opened their mouths to catch the drop of wine, their expressions as though they had just received rain after a long drought.
The black energy lingering around their bodies would also dissipate slightly.
Chang Jiu had been tied up here for three days. From the snippets she had overheard from passersby, she already knew what that wine was.
Soul-Calming Wine.
Dangerous soul beasts roamed throughout Qiuxu. Anyone injured by a soul beast would inevitably suffer damage to their soul.
In mild cases, they would become mad or foolish.
In severe cases, their souls would be completely annihilated, leaving them dead beyond recovery.
This wine was outrageously expensive, but at least it could stabilize a person’s soul and disperse the deathly energy left behind by soul beasts.
There weren’t many good things available in the mining district.
Soul-Calming Wine was one of them.
One soul stone bought one drop, conveniently making it the same price as one person.
That’s right.
In Qiuxu, people were sold by the head.
Except Chang Jiu.
She lowered her head and glanced at the wooden sign beside her feet.
A crooked line of writing was scrawled across it: “Special Price: Buy One, Get One Free.”
Tied together with Chang Jiu was an old woman whose hair was completely white.
She spent most of her time dozing. Whenever she closed her eyes and her breathing became faint, it was impossible to tell whether she was alive or dead.
The man guarding this group of refugees was a one-eyed man.
His good eye kept darting toward another group of people, while his ruined eye faced Chang Jiu and the old woman.
He seemed completely unconcerned that either of them might escape.
Chang Jiu quietly made a suggestion to the one-eyed man.
“I can see she’s quite old. Even as a free bonus, I doubt the boss would want her. Why don’t you let her go and sell me by myself? I might be easier to get rid of that way.”
The one-eyed man slowly turned his head and stared at Chang Jiu for a long while.
Then he suddenly grinned.
“You little brat, have you got it wrong?”
He kicked the old woman and sneered.
“Old woman, tell me what you can do! Keep pretending to be dead, and I’ll throw you to the soul beasts!”
The old woman, who had looked half-dead just moments ago, really did open her eyes.
In a hoarse, trembling voice, she answered, “I…I’ve lived in Qiuxu my whole life. I know where to find wild vegetables and fruits nearby! I…I also know where soul beasts tend to roam. I can help all of you avoid them.”
The one-eyed man picked at his teeth and clicked his tongue.
“You came here begging me to bring you to the mining district and give you a chance to survive after your village was trampled flat by soul beasts, didn’t you?”
The old woman’s face turned bitter.
She stammered for a long while but didn’t dare contradict him.
Satisfied, the one-eyed man nodded.
Then he moved closer to Chang Jiu and grabbed a handful of the flesh on her cheek, which was already so thin that it was nearly sunken in.
His grip was so hard it looked as though he wanted to crush her to death.
“That’s why a useless little thing like you—small, weak, and half-dead—is the kind of freebie nobody wants to buy separately. Understand?”
Chang Jiu immediately nodded.
“Got it.”
Only then did the one-eyed man release her and return to his seat, muttering curses under his breath.
“Damn it. A half-dead brat I picked up from a mass grave actually managed to come back to life. Too bad the soul beasts already chewed her brains away!”
He wasn’t wrong.
The person had indeed been dragged out of a mass grave.
It was just that the true owner of this body had already died long ago.
The one who had come back to life three days ago was Chang Jiu, who had come from modern society.
She had originally been a game tester.
She had worked through three consecutive all-nighters to complete the final round of internal testing before a game officially launched. Exhausted, she had fallen asleep inside her gaming pod.
When she opened her eyes again, the entire world had changed.
Over the past few days, a series of unfamiliar memories belonging to this body had surfaced in her mind.
This was the Soul Realm.
Terrifying soul beasts roamed everywhere, and these monsters could easily tear apart a person’s soul. They were also mysterious and unpredictable, making them almost impossible to guard against.
Only a special group of people possessed the innate talents needed to strengthen their souls and fight against soul beasts.
These people were respectfully known as Soul Refiners.
In the Soul Realm, they possessed extraordinary status.
People of such lofty status should have had nothing to do with the original owner.
After all, she had merely been an ordinary 15-year-old girl from one of countless mountain villages.
The most troublesome thing she should have had to worry about was being randomly called on by the village teacher to recite her lessons—
The teacher was her father, after all.
He certainly wouldn’t have let her off the hook when it came to recitation.
Yet instead of waiting for her father to call on her, she waited for a terrifying horde of soul beasts to descend upon the village and devour it whole.
A cold, bone-deep agony surged from the depths of her soul.
Nonhuman shrieks filled her ears, mixed with the anguished cries of men, women, and children throughout the village—
While hundreds of lives struggled desperately for survival, she saw a group of people standing in the clouds behind the horde of soul beasts.
Their bearing was lofty and untouchable, like gods descending upon the mortal world.
The jade pendants hanging at their waists were incomparably luxurious.
The original owner’s father was the most knowledgeable person in the entire village.
He recognized their identities.
Like a drowning man grasping the final piece of driftwood, he bit down hard on his own arm to keep himself conscious through the pain while joyfully kowtowing.
“Great masters! Please save our village!”
When Chang Jiu recalled this scene again, she closed her eyes.
This body was simply too sensitive.
Its senses of both sight and hearing were extraordinary.
That was why, within that horrific memory, she remembered so clearly the casual words spoken by the person leading those people—
“Hm? They’re not all dead yet? Bring over another soul beast.”
The final image was of the gods leaving.
A small jade pendant swayed gently with the movement of the person turning around, like a streak of sacred moonlight—
Pale and cold.
The original owner’s memories ended there.
There was no mass grave in Qiuxu.
It was simply another village that had been completely devoured by soul beasts.
As for where those absurdly powerful soul beasts had come from, or why they had appeared, no one would bother investigating.
Except Chang Jiu.
Her gaze returned to the old man with the goatee.
She stared at the jade pendant hanging from his waist.
In the gloomy mining district, it was slightly different from the pendants worn by the people she had seen in the original owner’s memories.
But they all bore the same character.
“Dong.”
The original owner didn’t know what it meant.
Chang Jiu had watched this place for three days.
And today, after seeing the Soul Refiner who sold Soul-Calming Wine and listening to the discussions of passersby, she finally learned what it was.
An identification token belonging to the citizens of Dongli City.
“So…the ‘upper-class people’ from there were the ones who killed you?” Chang Jiu murmured.
She had stared for too long, and her eyes gradually began to ache.
But perhaps because she hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for 3 whole days, even her tears had dried up.
Night gradually deepened.
The old man selling wine left.
The miners who had come to buy wine also quickly dispersed.
This place had only been a temporary trading point set up over the past three days. Once everyone left, it became nothing more than another desolate patch of land covered in mining dust.
The one-eyed man stared at the last few refugees he had yet to sell, beginning to hesitate over whether he should leave.
Earlier, there had been plenty of people around, and with the Soul Refiner selling Soul-Calming Wine nearby, the soul beasts roaming Qiuxu naturally hadn’t dared approach.
But now that almost everyone had left, there was no guarantee that soul beasts wouldn’t appear again.
Recently, soul beasts had been appearing with increasing frequency.
Who knew how many villages throughout Qiuxu had already been destroyed?
There were plenty of refugees.
Bringing along this group of elderly, weak, sick, and disabled people was practically asking to die.