“Huh?”
When her thumb touched the totem, a faint yet familiar energy fluctuation pierced through her skin, and a pure, refined wood-type energy flowed along her meridians into every limb and bone.
Sheng Yuntan jerked her head up.
This… this energy frequency. It was her wood-type ability from her past life.
No. That wasn’t right.
It was older than that, cleaner, purer, closer to the source of nature itself, like something that existed only in the ancient legends she had read in old texts during the apocalypse.
At the same time, light blazed within her sea of consciousness.
All the memories of her past life and the original owner’s memories crashed together like two rivers, then merged into a single great current, becoming one.
“So we were the same person all along.”
Those twenty-eight years in the apocalypse were merely a wisp of soul split from her seven souls and six spirits, traveling through a rift in time and space to live out another existence. Now that the split soul had returned to its original body, the complete her had also gained the jade bracelet’s recognition as its master.
Her spiritual sense had already probed into the jade bracelet. Inside was a void of chaotic space, nothing but a vast, dense fog.
“A bracelet that can recognize its master on its own is no ordinary thing.”
“It’s empty now. Maybe it’s waiting for me, its master, to develop and explore it.”
Sheng Yuntan had seen a great deal in the apocalypse and witnessed many strange and fantastical things. Her mental fortitude was strong, and so was her adaptability. She had accepted reality in the shortest time possible and prepared herself to survive here long-term.
“Store!”
At her instinctive command, the emerald bracelet lying in her palm vanished into thin air.
Sheng Yuntan smiled faintly and clenched her hand. Then she closed her eyes and sensed the spiritual power within her body. Her dantian was pure and clear, but the wood spiritual power inside was so thin it was almost nonexistent, and the psychic attack power in her sea of consciousness was similarly weak.
“It’s fine. The foundation is all there, and the psychic technique is carved into my soul. With time, I’ll recover.”
When she opened her eyes again, those clear almond eyes had taken on the ruthlessness of the apocalypse. “Training can come step by step. Grandmother’s revenge, I’ll collect interest on today.”
Shen Yuntan stepped out in her cloth shoes, found a rusty firewood knife in the corner by the small kitchen, and sat under the old locust tree in the yard, unhurriedly sharpening it on the whetstone.
The metal scraping against the stone let out an ear-piercing sound, startling the old hen in the chicken coop into flapping and fluttering wildly.
Her sharpening motions were steady, her expression calm, as composed as someone who had killed many people.
The truth was, she had killed many people.
The rules of the apocalypse were the true law of the jungle.
Anyone who could survive twenty-eight years in an environment as brutal as the apocalypse had hundreds, even thousands of lives on their hands.
Just then, two sets of footsteps of differing weight came from beyond the courtyard gate, and one of them spoke in a shrill voice. “Mother, didn’t I say so? This ugly girl is tough as nails. She’s not so easy to kill.”
Shen Yuntan knew who they were. She didn’t even look up, and her hands didn’t stop.
They had come at just the right time. She had been about to go looking for them.
The visitors were Grandmother’s elder sister-in-law by marriage, Madam Qian, and her eldest son’s wife, Madam Chen. They were among the murderers who had killed Grandmother. Against shrews and trash like these, she wouldn’t grant them a quick death with a single blade. She was going to toy with them and enjoy it.
Madam Qian and her daughter-in-law had no idea the miserable days ahead of them. The two swaggered into the yard, greed gleaming in both pairs of eyes.
This Madam Qian was a vicious old hag in her fifties, broad-shouldered and thick-waisted, with a face full of spite. She looked around the mud-brick house where grandmother and granddaughter had lived, a smile of certain victory on her lips.
Madam Chen followed behind her, a bamboo basket in hand. It looked like she had come to carry things off.
“You ugly little wretch, don’t you dare blame us for your Grandmother’s death. If you two had obediently handed over the house back then, she wouldn’t have gone and gotten herself killed.” Madam Qian glanced at Shen Yuntan like she was something filthy, her words utterly vicious. “An old thing with one foot in the grave, raising an unwanted ugly brat, and still stubbornly clinging to this house. We came to talk nicely and she wouldn’t listen, so she forced us to get rough.”
“You’d better behave. Hand over the house deed and the land deed, and every last coin the old thing saved up. Hand it all over, not a penny less, or I’ll—”
Before she could finish, Shen Yuntan stopped sharpening and slowly raised her head.
Madam Qian met her gaze, and the words rushing to her throat died there.
The feeling of being watched right now was like being marked by a lurking beast. The hairs on her back stood up one by one.
“Or you’ll what?” Shen Yuntan’s voice was very soft.
Her eyes were different from usual. Madam Qian swallowed, then felt that being frightened by a little girl was truly shameful. She puffed out her chest. “If you hand it over obediently, I’ll give you a mouthful of food.”
“Hmph.”
Shen Yuntan gave a cold snort and slowly stood, slapping the firewood knife against her palm.
Beside her, Madam Chen, perhaps because she was younger and more perceptive, sensed danger in that instant and quickly backed away. “Mother, hurry…”
They had delivered themselves to her door. Shen Yuntan wouldn’t give them the chance to leave.
“You want to go?”
Neither of the Liu women saw her move. They only felt a shadow drift toward them and instinctively shrank back to dodge.
But how could they be a match for Shen Yuntan, who had fought and struggled her way out of the apocalypse?
Smack!
The flat of the blade struck Madam Qian’s mouth, crisp and loud.
Not the edge, not the spine, but the cold flat of the blade.
Shen Yuntan didn’t intend to let them die yet. Death was too easy for them, and she didn’t want them chasing after Grandmother right away. She couldn’t let this scum disturb Grandmother’s path of reincarnation.
“Aah!”
Madam Qian let out a miserable scream, blood spraying from her mouth, two front teeth flying out and rolling twice across the muddy ground.
She instinctively clutched her spurting mouth, her body toppling backward, the back of her head hitting the doorframe. Her vision went black, and before she could recover, the second blow came.
One, two, three.
Shen Yuntan swung the firewood knife continuously, the flat of the blade striking precisely against her gums. Not wild strikes, but from the upper row of teeth to the lower, then from right to left, as if she were compelled to tap them out in perfect order.
Every tooth she could reach, twenty or thirty of them, not one spared.
All knocked onto the muddy ground.
Madam Qian’s mouth was full of blood, and she rolled on the ground in pain, her screams like a pig being slaughtered for the New Year. Her lips swelled at a rate visible to the naked eye, until she looked like a pig’s snout.
“Mother, Mother…”
Madam Chen had long since been scared witless. The bamboo basket fell to the ground, and she didn’t even know how to run.
She didn’t run, but the nearby neighbors had all come at the commotion. Several had already reached the yard.
Shen Yuntan ignored the others’ stares. After finishing with Madam Qian, she backhanded a slap across Madam Chen’s face, hard enough to spin her halfway around, her right cheek swelling up high in an instant.
One slap wasn’t enough. Another backhand, and her left cheek swelled up too.
As Madam Chen screamed at the top of her lungs, Shen Yuntan grabbed her hair and dragged her toward the courtyard gate like a dead pig, then kicked her in the stomach. The plump woman, weighing over a hundred and forty pounds, flew through the air like a rag doll in a clean arc and landed with a splash in the ditch in front of the gate.
The water wasn’t deep, but it was all mud.
Madam Chen plunged headfirst into the mud, her two legs kicking wildly in the air, her mouth filled with foul mud water. She couldn’t even scream.