Yu Sanqi was dead.
The servants wrapped her body in a coarse straw mat and tossed it straight out the front gates.
Her corpse was exposed to the public eye.
As the commoners gathered around, a servant loudly proclaimed her “crimes”:
“The daughter of the Yu family was unfilial and disrespectful, a rebel against her superiors! Yu Sanqi offended the Empress Dowager in the palace. Knowing her crimes were monstrous, she committed suicide to escape punishment. The Master is ashamed to have such a wicked creature in the family. Today, her name is struck from the Yu family register as a warning to all!”
The young girl’s eyes were wide open in death, dried tears of blood staining their corners.
Yet, among the onlookers, there was not a shred of sympathy—only an endless stream of spittle and disdain.
Her consciousness was blurred. Her soul had been wrenched from her body, drifting into the air.
She “saw” her family.
Her father lamented the family’s misfortune for bringing such a jinx back to the mansion.
Her mother covered her face and wept, saying she regretted giving birth to her and should have let her die in the wilderness.
Her eldest brother sighed, calling her beyond redemption.
Her second brother cursed her for being vicious and stupid, wishing he could have strangled her himself.
Her fourth sister, eyes brimming with tears, asked why she had to drag the whole family down with her.
They all resented her. They hated her! They couldn’t wait for her to die!!
But Yu Sanqi didn’t understand. What exactly had she done to earn such hatred?
She had clearly saved the Empress Dowager! Even the Emperor had said the matter was not yet settled and that judgment would wait until the Empress Dowager woke. Yet her own family couldn’t wait to brand her a criminal!
“Granny, Sanqi was wrong. Sanqi shouldn’t have come back,” her soul trembled.
She had been kidnapped by human traffickers as a child and had struggled to escape to Huangquan Cun. There, she met Granny Meng and found companionship among a group of brothers and uncles.
At fifteen, it was the Yu family who came begging at her door to bring her back.
When her father’s career was failing, she consulted ghosts and gods to help him find fortune and avoid disaster.
When her eldest brother was desperate for academic honors, she spent her heart’s blood asking spirits to find the lost manuscripts of deceased great scholars for him.
When her second brother fell from a horse and injured his leg—when doctors said he would be a cripple for life—she offered herself as a substitute. Using her soul as a sacrifice, she transferred his disability onto her own spiritual form.
They gave her life but did not raise her; they raised her but showed no kindness. Yet, she had poured out her heart and blood to treat them as family!
And what did she get in return?
Disdain, disgust, and contempt!
Nothing but their repeated cries of: “You deserve to die! Why don’t you just die!”
Sanqi—Notoginseng—is a herb used in medicine to disperse stasis, stop bleeding, promote circulation, and ease pain. She had “refined” herself into a dose of medicine, offering it all to her so-called family.
She hadn’t kept a single bit for herself!
She was born with Yinyangyan; she could see the Youming and the hearts of men. So why had she been blinded by familial love? Why had she failed to see the true faces of her kin? It was only at the moment of death that the fog covering her eyes finally dissipated.
It shouldn’t have been like this. She shouldn’t have been so blind and foolish. She shouldn’t have!
The young girl’s eyes remained wide in death, dried tears of blood at their corners.
She drifted beside her own corpse.
Invisible to ordinary people, countless wisps of black energy surged through the snow, coalescing into humanoid shapes of dark mist.
Ghosts swarmed toward the spot. They circled Yu Sanqi’s soul, whispering in ear-piercing, venomous giggles, mocking her past and her stupidity.
They looked at her with greedy longing.
Eat her!
If we eat her, we can become stronger!
A literal tide of ghosts lunged toward her.
A sudden thunder of galloping hooves interrupted the feeding frenzy. The ghosts shrieked as if seeing something terrifying and scattered in all directions.
In the middle of the blizzard, under the watchful eyes of the crowd, a young general came charging on horseback. His crimson cloak snapped in the wind, a squad of soldiers following behind him.
Someone in the crowd gasped, “It’s Young General Yan! The Young General has returned victorious!!”
Amidst the mountain-shaking cheers, the young man’s expression was grim. His face, handsome as carved jade, was cold and indifferent. Even the dust of travel could not hide his aura; he brought to mind the phrase, ‘A nature like white jade, cold even when burned.’
He dismounted and walked toward Yu Sanqi’s body.
The crowd parted like the Red Sea, automatically making a path.
The young general stood by her corpse, silent for a long moment.
Yu Sanqi stared at him blankly.
Young General Yan! The nephew of the Empress, the last remaining son of the Protectorate Yan clan!
The Tiansi Shenjiang personally titled by the Emperor!
What was he doing here?
In life, Yu Sanqi had little interaction with Yan Du. The only possibility she could think of was that he had heard on his way back that she had “plotted against” the Empress Dowager. Perhaps he couldn’t even wait to see the Emperor and had broken protocol to come to the Yu Mansion to settle the score?
Yu Sanqi thought self-mockingly. What a pity, Yan Du. You’re too late. I’m already dead.
However, in the next moment…
This man, cold as jade, passed through her soul like a ball of raging fire. He carefully picked up her corpse, and the heat of his presence scorched her soul.
She heard him say, word by word, like a proclamation:
“The third daughter of the Yu family is pure, kind, loyal, and brave. She is a person of great virtue!”
“The Yu family abandons her!”
“I, Yan Du, do not!”
Yu Sanqi’s body was taken away by Yan Du.
Her soul was tethered along with it. Drifting beside the young general, she saw him gallop back to his estate and watched as he carefully placed her in his own bedroom.
He summoned military doctors to treat her.
She saw the bloodshot veins in his eyes and his suppressed fury.
“Save her!”
“I want her to live!”
The doctor checked her pulse in vain. “Young General, the third Miss Yu’s breath has stopped. It’s better to… better to let her go early…”
“Where is the Xuming Jindan bestowed by the Emperor?”
“Young General, you mustn’t! There are only two of those Golden Pills. They are for saving your own life…”
“Feed it to her!”
The doctor and the personal guards all looked pained. That pill was a life-saving miracle! Miss Yu had already stopped breathing; how could she be saved? She couldn’t even swallow the medicine. Wasn’t this a waste?
But Yan Du was deaf to their pleas.
He gazed at the girl’s cold corpse, murmuring something.
Others couldn’t hear it.
But Yu Sanqi did. Yan Du said:
“I’m sorry…”
—I’m sorry I came back late.
—I’m sorry I failed to protect you.
Every word was etched with bone-deep heartache and self-reproach.
Yu Sanqi’s freezing soul felt as if it had been thrown into a roaring furnace. She was confused; she was lost.
Why was Yan Du saying sorry?
They clearly didn’t have much of a connection…
Yu Sanqi stared at him. Yan Du had not yet reached twenty; a nineteen-year-old youth standing on the threshold of manhood, yet he carried the solemn, murderous weight of the battlefield.
His temperament had always been cold. Countless noble ladies in the capital admired him, but he never gave them a second glance.
Yet this man of cold jade was now looking at her cold, almost ghastly corpse with an irrepressible look of heartache and guilt.
Heartache?
Her family had never pitied her, yet Yan Du, a virtual stranger, had been thinking of her all along.
At her most infamous moment, when she was cursed and abandoned by thousands, he was the only one to step forward and stand firmly by her side.
She was already dead—who would fight ten thousand people for a dead woman? Who would risk offending the Emperor just to choose her?
Even her own family didn’t want her…
“General! News from the Palace!”
A guard rushed in, panting. He glanced at Yu Sanqi’s body on the bed, his eyes flashing with pity and indignation.
“The Empress Dowager has awakened. Her Highness personally stated that it was the third Miss Yu who saved her.”
“The Emperor does not yet know she is dead. He has issued a decree to reward the Yu family. The eunuch delivering the decree is almost at the Yu Mansion!”
Yan Du turned sharply, his face terrifyingly dark.
“Prepare my horse! I am going to the palace to see the Emperor!”
“General, what about Miss Yu…?”
“Keep trying to save her! She won’t die.” Yan Du was almost maniacally certain. He sat by the bedside, gently wiping the dried blood-tears from the corners of her eyes. His voice was more tender than it had ever been. “Yu Sanqi, don’t give up.”
“Wake up.”
“Don’t give up on yourself.”
“Wake up and see for yourself what happens to those people!”
Yan Du left; he was heading to the palace to collect Yu Sanqi’s debts.
After he left, the people in the room gradually filtered out. It wasn’t that the doctor didn’t want to save her, but there was truly no hope…
A white cloth was draped over Yu Sanqi’s body.
Her soul stood beside the corpse. The pulling sensation grew stronger and stronger, dragging her toward her own body.
A pitch-black ghostly hand suddenly erupted from the floor, grabbing her ankle.
Countless ghosts appeared once more, swirling around her like black mist.
—Come join us…
—We are your kind, tee-hee.
The ghosts shrieked as they lunged, intending to devour her.
Yu Sanqi raised her hand and caught a ghost.
Her eyes turned a ghastly crimson. The ghosts biting her soul froze simultaneously. In the next instant, they erupted in shrill wails—screams of terror, of the natural fear a predator feels toward something even more monstrous.
“No one… will ever hurt me again…”
“Not even ghosts!”
She was like a black quagmire, a malice more concentrated and terrifying than any spirit. Anything that dared to swallow her would be swallowed by her instead.
She was born with the ability to devour ghosts. When she lived in the countryside, she didn’t think she was strange. It was only after being taken back to the Yu Mansion that she realized… ah, so I am a freak.
She had been ashamed of being an “anomaly.”
An evil spirit had put on a sheepskin, domesticating itself into a lamb, thinking that by doing so, it could blend into the flock and gain acceptance.
But she was never human. she was a born aberration.
Why should she wrong herself, domesticate herself, and flatter others for the sake of that ridiculous, shallow “family love” and that hypocritical warmth?
The soul returned to its seat! The white cloth flew back!
Yu Sanqi snapped her eyes open.
The evil spirit had returned. Those who owed her, the debts they owed…
They would all be cast into hell!
They deserved to live nowhere else!