Yu Sanqi was dead.
The servants wrapped her corpse in a straw mat and tossed it straight outside the main gate.
Her body was left exposed beneath the eyes of the entire crowd.
The commoners gathered around as a servant loudly announced her “crimes”:
“The Yu Family has an unfilial and unrighteous daughter who defied her superiors and committed treason. Yu Sanqi offended Her Majesty the Empress Dowager in the palace. Knowing that her crimes were heinous, she took her own life out of fear of punishment. Our master is ashamed to have such a vile wretch in the family. Today, he is expelling her from the Yu Family genealogy as a warning to all!”
The girl’s eyes remained wide open in death, blood and tears dried at their corners.
Yet no one around her showed the slightest sympathy. All that filled the air were endless voices of contempt and disgust.
Her consciousness had already grown hazy. Her soul was dragged out of her body, as though it had drifted into the sky.
She “saw” her family.
Her father said that misfortune had befallen the family, that he should never have brought such a bringer of calamity home.
Her mother covered her face and wept, saying she regretted giving birth to her and should have left her to die outside.
Her Eldest Brother sighed and said she was beyond saving.
Her Second Brother cursed her as vicious and foolish, wishing he could strangle her on the spot.
Her Fourth Younger Sister’s eyes brimmed with tears as she said she could not understand why Sanqi had to drag the entire family down with her.
They all resented her. They all hated her! They could not wait for her to die that very instant!
But Yu Sanqi did not understand. What exactly had she done to make them hate her so deeply?
She had clearly saved the Empress Dowager. Even His Majesty had said that the matter had yet to be determined and that they would wait until the Empress Dowager awoke before passing judgment. Yet her family had eagerly branded her a criminal!
“Granny, Sanqi was wrong. Sanqi shouldn’t have come back.” Her soul trembled.
She had been kidnapped and sold by human traffickers when she was a child. After finally escaping to Huangquan Village, she met Granny Meng and gained the companionship of a whole group of elder brothers, uncles, and elders.
When she was fifteen, the Yu Family had come to her themselves and brought her home.
When her father’s official career had gone poorly, she had consulted ghosts and spirits to help him avoid misfortune and pursue good fortune.
Her Eldest Brother had been devoted to pursuing scholarly honors, so she had exhausted herself petitioning ghosts and gods to find him the authentic works of a deceased great Confucian.
When her Second Brother had fallen from his horse and injured his leg, the physician had said he would be left crippled. She had taken his place, using her soul as an offering to transfer the disability onto her own soul.
Born without their care, raised without their affection, she had poured out her heart and blood and treated them as her family!
And what had she received in return?
Contempt, loathing, and disgust!
Their repeated words: “You deserve to die! Why don’t you go die already?”
Sanqi could be used as medicine. It could disperse blood stasis, stop bleeding, invigorate the blood, and relieve pain. She had “refined” herself into a medicinal herb and offered herself entirely to those so-called family members.
Yet she had never kept even the slightest bit for herself!
She had been born with Yin-Yang Eyes and could see the netherworld as well as the human heart. So why had familial affection blinded her? Why had she been unable to see the true faces of those closest to her? Only at the moment of her death had the fog covering her eyes finally dispersed.
This should not have happened. She should not have been so blind and foolish. She should not have been!
The girl’s eyes remained wide open in death, blood and tears dried at their corners.
Her soul drifted beside her own corpse.
Ordinary people could not see them, but countless strands of black energy churned through the snow, gathering into one shadowy human form after another.
The ghost entities converged on the spot. They circled Yu Sanqi’s soul, whispering around her as they let out shrill, venomous laughter, mocking her past and her foolishness.
They gazed at her with greed and ravenous desire.
Eat her!
Eat her, and we can become stronger!
Ghost entities surged toward her from every direction.
A sudden burst of hurried hoofbeats interrupted their feast. The ghost entities shrieked as though they had seen some terrifying existence, scattering in every direction.
Amid the blizzard and beneath the eyes of the entire crowd, a young general rode toward them on horseback. His scarlet cloak snapped in the wind, and soldiers marched in formation behind him.
Someone in the crowd cried out, “It’s Young General Yan! Young General Yan has returned victorious!”
Amid the roaring cheers and fervent throng, the young general’s face was cold and solemn. His jade-like features were utterly impassive. Even after enduring the dust and hardships of the road, he still possessed such an imposing bearing that he reminded one of the words: “His nature is like white jade, still cold even when burned.”
He dismounted and walked toward Yu Sanqi’s corpse.
The crowd parted like the Red Sea, making way for him of their own accord.
The young general stood beside her corpse and remained silent for a long while.
Yu Sanqi stared blankly at him as well.
Young General Yan! The Empress’s nephew, the last surviving son of the Protector of the Nation Yan clan!
The divinely bestowed god-general personally appointed by His Majesty!
What had he come here for?
Yu Sanqi had had little contact with Yan Du while alive. The only possibility she could think of was that the Young General had heard on his way back that she had “attempted to murder” the Empress Dowager. Perhaps he had been in such a hurry to settle accounts with her that he had come to the Yu Residence before entering the palace to pay his respects to His Majesty, disregarding protocol.
Yu Sanqi thought this with self-mockery. What a pity. Yan Du had come too late.
She was already dead.
Yet in the next instant—
The man as cold as carved jade passed through her soul. Like a blazing fire, he carefully lifted her corpse into his arms, and the heat seared even her soul.
She heard him proclaim, each word clear and firm:
“Third Miss Yu is pure and benevolent, loyal, righteous, and brave. She is a truly virtuous person!”
“The Yu Family has abandoned her!”
“But I, Yan Du, will not!”
Yan Du took Yu Sanqi’s corpse away.
Her soul was dragged along with it. Floating beside the young general, she watched him ride swiftly back to his residence and carefully place her in his own bedchamber.
He summoned a military physician to treat her.
She saw the bloodshot veins in his eyes and the rage he struggled to suppress.
“Save her!”
“I want her alive!”
The military physician examined her pulse in vain. “Young General, Third Miss Yu has stopped breathing. You should, you should let her—”
“What about the life-preserving golden pill His Majesty bestowed?”
“Young General, no! There are only two of those life-preserving golden pills. They are meant to save—”
“Give it to her!”
Pain crossed the faces of the military physician and the personal guards. That golden pill was a life-saving medicine! Third Miss Yu had already stopped breathing. How could it possibly bring her back? She could not even swallow the medicine. Wouldn’t giving it to her simply be a waste?
But Yan Du paid them no heed.
He gazed at the girl’s cold corpse and murmured something.
The others could not hear him.
But Yu Sanqi did.
Yan Du said:
“I’m sorry…”
—I’m sorry I came back too late.
—I’m sorry I failed to protect you.
Every word was filled with heart-wrenching anguish and self-reproach.
Yu Sanqi’s cold soul felt as though it had been cast into a blazing inferno. She was confused. She was lost.
Why was Yan Du apologizing?
They had clearly shared neither much interaction nor any deep bond…
Yu Sanqi stared blankly at him. Yan Du had not yet reached adulthood; at nineteen by the traditional count, he was still a young man caught between youth and maturity. Yet his body already carried the grave composure and murderous air forged by blood and sand on the battlefield.
His temperament had always been cold. Countless young ladies in the capital admired him, but he had never shown any interest in them.
Yet this man, cold as jade, was now gazing at her icy, even frightening corpse with grief and self-reproach he could not conceal.
Grief?
Her family had never felt sorry for her. Yet Yan Du, an outsider, had always kept her in his thoughts.
When her reputation had been at its worst, when she had been cursed and abandoned by everyone, he alone had stepped forward and stood firmly at her side.
She was already dead. Who would still contend with the entire world for a dead person? Who would risk angering His Majesty, all to choose her without hesitation?
Even her own family had abandoned her…
“General! There’s news from the palace!”
A personal guard hurried in, panting for breath. He glanced at Yu Sanqi’s corpse on the bed, pain and indignation flickering in his eyes.
“Her Majesty the Empress Dowager has awakened. Her Majesty personally said that Third Miss Yu was the one who saved her.”
“His Majesty still doesn’t know that Third Miss Yu has died. He has issued an edict rewarding the Yu Family, and the eunuch delivering it should be almost at the Yu Residence.”
Yan Du turned around abruptly. His face was terrifyingly dark.
“Prepare the horses! I’m going to the palace to see His Majesty!”
“General, what about Third Miss Yu—”
“Keep saving her! She will not die.” Yan Du was almost fanatical in his certainty. He sat beside the bed and gently wiped the blood and tears from the corner of her eye, his voice more tender than it had ever been. “Yu Sanqi, don’t give up.”
“Come back to life.”
“Don’t give up on yourself.”
“Come back to life and witness those people’s fate with your own eyes!”
Yan Du left. He was going to the palace to demand repayment from those who had wronged Yu Sanqi.
After he departed, the people in the room gradually left as well. It was not that the military physician did not want to save her. There was simply no medicine in the world that could save her anymore…
A white cloth covered Yu Sanqi’s corpse.
Her soul stood beside it. The sensation pulling at her grew stronger and stronger, dragging her toward her own body.
A pitch-black ghost hand suddenly emerged from the ground and seized her ankle.
Countless ghost entities appeared once more, gathering around her like black mist.
—Come keep us company…
—We’re your true kindred, hee-hee.
The ghost entities howled as they rushed toward her, intending to devour her.
Yu Sanqi raised her hand and seized one of them.
Her blood-red eyes were cold and terrifying. The ghost entities biting into her soul froze in unison. In the next moment, they burst into shrill wails—screaming in terror, instinctively fearing an existence even more terrifying than themselves.
“No one can hurt me again…”
“Not even ghosts!”
She was like a pool of black mire, an evil more dense and terrifying than the ghost entities themselves. Those who dared to devour her would be devoured by her instead.
She had been able to devour ghost entities from birth. In the countryside, she had never thought there was anything strange about herself. Only after being brought back to the Yu Family did she realize—
Ah. So she was a freak.
She had been ashamed of being an “outsider.”
A malicious ghost had donned a sheep’s skin and tamed itself into a lamb, believing that this would allow it to blend into the flock and gain their acceptance.
But she had never been human to begin with. She had been born an aberration.
Why had she humbled and tamed herself, and fawned over others, all for that laughable, shallow familial affection and that hypocritical warmth?
Her soul returned to her body.
The white cloth was thrown back.
Yu Sanqi suddenly opened her eyes.
The malicious ghost had returned, along with all those who owed her and all the debts owed to her.
They would all be cast into hell!
Hell was the only place they deserved to live!