A breeze passed through, scattering the smoke of the incense burner.
Yang Zengyue lit the small stove on the table, then went to the well out back to draw water and poured it into an earthenware pot, the pot soon began to steam.
She took teacups from the back-basket and rinsed them with the boiling water, then opened the packet of tea leaves, a clear fragrance rushed at her. This should be the Qingming tea she’d picked when she came home for the holiday around Tomb-Sweeping Day, and roasted herself.
She hadn’t smelled this scent in a very, very long time, long enough that a whole brief lifetime had passed.
After rinsing the tea twice, she’d found her feel for brewing again.
Jiuxiao had been watching her movements the whole time, and noticed more details.
It had only been one night, yet his granddaughter seemed rusty at these everyday tasks she’d done so often.
Jiuxiao ran through every possible explanation countless times in his mind, and still couldn’t make sense of it.
Yang Zengyue knew her master’s gaze had stayed on her all along, there was no way to hide her strangeness from him.
She concentrated on brewing the tea, and once it was ready she pushed the cup in front of her master and poured one for Chen Jia’er too. Then she picked up her own cup and breathed in the tea’s fragrance gently through her nose, not drinking right away.
Instead losing herself in the aroma, unable to come back to herself for a long while.
Watching her, Jiuxiao sighed soundlessly. “Drink.”
Then, holding the cup in his right hand, he blew away the froth and took the first sip.
Hearing her master, Yang Zengyue’s face turned reverent. Holding a heart full of awe, she slowly sipped, swallowed, and set the cup down.
Then she drew a deep breath and, unhurried, began to speak, laying out, one thing at a time, her seven years in the apocalypse.
She told her whole life, starting from the day she’d parted with Master.
Trivial, and long.
Painful, and sorrowful.
“I can still remember the scene of that final moment. My death, it was a glorious one…”
Outside the great hall, the clear, pleasant voice of a young girl, mingling with the curling tea-smoke, poured out all at once the hardships of the apocalypse and the pain of losing family, to the family member she had once lost and now, by grace, gotten back.
It was a very, very painful ending…
“Zengyue, the sun is setting in the west again.” A young woman’s somewhat weary voice came on the breeze.
The speaker was Yu Huishu, her voice dry and pained, stripped of its former softness, grating to hear.
In the last light of day, that face, still faintly beautiful, wore a look of desolation.
Her lips had cracked, threads of dried blood crusted on them, clearly she hadn’t drunk water in a long time, and her eyes were bloodshot.
The people standing beside her were in no better shape, rveryone had lost their old vitality.
“Mm, get ready. This time, we may well be past caring whether we live or die. Yang Zengyue has been blessed in this life to meet you all. To die, no regrets, but yes, one sorrow left behind.”
Having said this, Yang Zengyue sighed heavily inside and cast her gaze off into the distance.
Over there were a dozen or so mounds of fresh earth.
Buried beneath them were the teammates who’d died in the fighting this past month, for most, they hadn’t even been able to find whole bodies, and some were only cenotaphs.
When she’d set out on this assignment, she’d never imagined her team would end up with not a single person returning whole, rxcept for Ren Xiyuan, the first to be wounded.
She raised her head, before her eyes was already dusk.
In the far sky, red clouds churned, so heavy they seemed about to fall.
And their color, like blood ready to drip, far too vivid. This scene was utterly unlike anything before the apocalypse arrived.
After the apocalypse, where was there any place still the same as before? Everything had been rendered unrecognizable.
Yang Zengyue remembered going to the banks of the Yunshui River to watch the sunset in the old days, that image had made you feel the long, quiet peace of the years.
She pulled her thoughts back, estimated the time until the fighting would begin, probably a dozen or so minutes of peace remained.
In the distance, the setting sun was just a waxing-moon’s breadth from sinking completely over the far edge of the sky. They would have to take up their blades and step onto the battlefield again.
The stretch of land within her sight took on an eerie cold glow in the sun’s scattered rays.
Night was about to come.
Their team was about to face the most dangerous life-or-death battle of the whole month.
After tonight, they most likely wouldn’t be alive anymore.
This was the last time they would use these already exhausted eyes to take in this eerie spectacle of the sun setting in the west.
With light, it was truly beautiful.
Once the light was gone, only savagery remained.
By the last remnant of sunset, if you looked closely, you could see the ground was covered in a thick layer of brown, dried-up matter, patch upon patch, harrowing to behold.
Clearly, a large-scale blo~odshed had happened here not long ago.
And it repeated every single day, that was why there could be so thick a layer of dark brown.
The sun sank fast, the time left to them was short.
As the last ray of sunlight slipped into darkness and the surroundings became a range of grayish-black hills, a heaven-shaking roar suddenly rang out.
This sound had to come from some kind of large ferocious beast, in numbers beyond counting, otherwise the roar could never be so deafening.
Hearing it, Yu Huishu and the others reflexively covered their ears to ease the discomfort inside.
Yang Zengyue said in a low voice, “They’re here. Everyone, get ready for battle. Use your weapons as you see fit. I won’t bother with any farewell words.”
With that she put on her ear-protection device, her eyes fixed intently ahead.
She didn’t look at the others’ faces, the night was thickening, and she could no longer see them clearly anyway.
No sooner had she spoken than a man beside her, eyes slightly narrowed, looked at her by the faint firelight. “Boss Zengyue, in this life Han Tiankun has no regrets walking this road at your side. In the next, let’s be brothers again.”
Han Tiankun’s square-jawed face wore, at this moment, a kind of freedom and abandon.
He stretched out a hand, covered in wounds, bandages tied on haphazardly, bone faintly visible.
Yang Zengyue lowered her head, looked at such a hand, and clasped it. Her heart suddenly ached, her voice trembling a little. “Brother Tiankun, it’s Zengyue who dragged you all into this…”
By tonight’s turn of events, Yang Zengyue had already realized she’d fallen into someone’s scheme.
The ferocious beasts here at Zhaoqi Mountain had never been this numerous. No single mountain could hold beasts numbering in the tens of thousands.
Even sprawling a thousand li, Zhaoqi Mountain could not naturally have such numbers.
These beasts had been lured here from all directions of Zhaoqi Mountain after their arrival, drawn in by a man-made luring agent.
Don’t say it’s impossible.
The trace of that luring agent lingering in the air—Yang Zengyue could never forget it.
Because it was something she herself had formulated from a prescription, and she’d left a portion of it with Meng Chuyang, who had a family tie to Master.
“Sister Zengyue, don’t talk like that. When Jia’er joined the team, I told you, in this life, if I die, I’ll die together with Yang Zengyue.”
Chen Jia’er’s voice still had its crispness, the same as always, her phrasing lively, sounding a bit innocent.
She didn’t care who had schemed against them, or for whom the path had been paved, even knowing it now, she couldn’t go back and give him two cuts of the blade, much less go collect the debt.
So then, let’s just fight to our hearts’ content.
And besides, she’d decided: how she died was for her to say.
“That’s right. To die together with my brothers, that too settles a wish of mine.” Jiang Huiyong chimed in, firm as nails driven into iron.
After the apocalypse, they’d all lost their families and had nowhere to go.
After meeting Yang Zengyue, they’d formed a team, been through countless brushes with death, and long since come to regard one another as family.