A Quiet Homecoming

And so, after they'd repeated that cycle of flipping the red silk open and closed several times, the little boy finally realized he was no match for this person's inexhaustible patience. In the old days, he would have had someone drag this insolent fool out and execute her on the spot—but now he was too tired, and couldn't muster the energy.

He gave up on playing this tedious game with He Zhuoming. Leaving the red silk flipped open, he sat up cross-legged.

The wide, vivid red silk draped half over his shoulders, its fine sheen catching the light along his neck and cheeks, making the boy's delicate face all the more fair and lovely—setting aside, of course, the dense, strange runes covering his skin.

It was his expression that was too cold—cold enough to seem almost mature, at odds with his apparent age. When he tilted his head slightly to look at He Zhuoming, impatience leaked from his brows and eyes.

He gave her a cold stare. Seeing him react at last, He Zhuoming gripped her wooden sword and assumed he might finally be willing to talk to her. She flashed him a guileless smile. "Don't be scared. I'm not a bad person."

The little boy: "..."

He Zhuoming: "Can you tell your big sister why you're all alone in here? What's your name? What are those scribbles on your face? Do you know who wrote these words on the floor? You—"

She was too talkative—not a single thing she said was what the little boy wanted to hear. He simply closed his eyes, choosing not to see, not to hear, not to respond.

He Zhuoming leaned in close, staring at him and chattering on and on until her mouth went dry, but the little boy gave no reaction at all.

Yet he'd spoken to her just moments ago—so clearly he was neither deaf nor mute.

Exhausted from talking, He Zhuoming took a brief rest, then poked his chest with the wooden sword. The Corrupted Deity's puppet had once taught her exactly where to stab for a one-strike kill. She'd been terrified back then, but she'd remembered it vividly—and now, poking at the little boy, she unconsciously aimed at that same fatal spot on his chest.

A wooden sword had no edge when there was no danger, so it wouldn't really wound him.

Still, the threat of a death point being pressed startled him into widening his eyes. He instinctively leaned back to dodge, forgetting his knees were still crossed—his head tipped backward, and with a thud, he toppled flat onto his back. The impact made the back of his skull ache fiercely, his brain buzzing, and left him dazed for a couple of seconds.

He Zhuoming leaned over to look at him. "You okay?"

His dazed expression vanished in an instant, replaced by icy composure as he stared at He Zhuoming with a deadpan face.

She, meanwhile, had no sense of having harmed anyone. She only looked at him with total focus, and even extended a hand as if to help him up.

The little boy was about to slap her hand away and snap at her to get lost—but his swing hit nothing, because He Zhuoming yanked her arm back, dodging his counter.

She was quick when she wanted to be, that agility making her earlier clumsy acts look almost deliberately harmful.

His rebuke caught in his throat. After a long pause, he let out a laugh of pure exasperation. "What are you dodging for?"

He Zhuoming: "You were about to hit my hand. I'm not an idiot—of course I'd dodge. I reach out to help you up out of the kindness of my heart, and you try to hit me. That's just 'scolding the Bodhisattva when he saves you'—no good deed goes unpunished."

The little boy pointed at himself. "You're calling me a dog?"

He still wore that exasperated smile, his eyes half curved, and the paired dimples at the corners of his mouth looked very sweet.

He Zhuoming scrunched up her face. "I'm not calling you a dog. It's just a metaphor, meaning you repay kindness with spite. I'd never call someone a dog. Puppies are adorable. Don't insult puppies."

"If you didn't look so much like my boyfriend, I wouldn't bother with you at all!"

The little boy sneered. "Then it's your friend who looks like me. It'd be his blessing to have even a bit of my resemblance."

After the sneer, his brow suddenly furrowed as he caught something off. "What do you mean, 'repay kindness with spite'? What kindness have you done me?"

He Zhuoming poked his knee with the wooden sword, annoyed. "Nonsense! He's older than you. If anything, it's you who looks like him—and now that I look more carefully... you don't look like him at all! He's way better-looking than you!"

The last two sentences were spoken purely out of spite, and even she felt a pang of guilt the moment they left her mouth.

Because as she'd said them, she'd studied the little boy's face more closely, and realized his faint, teasing half-smile was even more similar to Lin Qingyun's—so much so that she grew increasingly convinced the two might actually share blood.

Could this be why Lin Qingyun refused to leave the Pear Garden?

Because his younger brother was held by the Pear Garden, the older brother had no choice but to sell himself into labor for that cult den, working a hard nine-to-five with no overtime pay...

How tragic.

But not as tragic as her own situation. Her friend was still waiting to be saved, and here she was, trapped in this strange room, with only a rude little brat who looked like Lin Qingyun for company.

The more He Zhuoming thought about it, the closer she came to tears.

But crying in front of a grade-schooler felt unbelievably embarrassing. She gritted her teeth, swallowed the sob, rubbed her eyes, and got up to keep searching this room for anything suspicious.

The room had no door and no windows, so sealed shut that He Zhuoming couldn't even figure out how she'd gotten in.

Three walls were smooth and flat. Only one wall was covered in thick, climbing tree roots—sturdy and tangled, with a hollow carved into their midst, forming a suspended shrine.

Inside the shrine sat a wooden idol, draped in a robe of white silk, its features blurred beyond recognition. On its shoulder perched a swallow holding a flower in its beak.

Though the idol was carved from wood, it gave off a faint glow, and that scattered light let her make out the entire room well enough to see.

Standing before the shrine and gazing up at the idol, He Zhuoming felt a flicker of doubt: had this shrine been here before?

She tried to recall, but for some reason, her memories of this room were always vague, muddy—so much so that she couldn't even be certain whether the shrine had suddenly appeared or had always been here.

He Zhuoming poked the little boy with her wooden sword. "Hey. Whose statue is this? Some True Deity?"

The little boy irritably knocked her sword away. "You don't recognize it?"

He Zhuoming shook her head. "No."

The little boy tugged at the corner of his mouth, lazy and indifferent. "Then I don't either."

He Zhuoming pursed her lips and turned her head away, deciding never to speak to this guy again—everything he said was unbearable!

How could he look so much like Lin Qingyun and have such a different personality?

Even if Lin Qingyun often had a sharp tongue, he was still polite overall—endearing, even.

He Zhuoming took another look at the idol. No matter how she studied it, she couldn't find anything special about it, so she cautiously poked at the statue and the rest of the shrine with her wooden sword. The idol carved from tree roots was rock hard—her pokes rang with a solid clang.

That chunk of root seemed as dead as a doornail. Not a hint of green sprout was visible, only interlaced, gnarled tendrils.

The little boy watched her poke here and there, and once she'd confirmed the idol wasn't about to come to life, she actually had the audacity to climb straight up!

This was the first time he'd ever witnessed such a bold defiler of a sacred image. For a moment, he almost felt a grudging respect for He Zhuoming, and even let go of his earlier intent to punish all her insolent transgressions.

The little boy: "Hey. You said earlier you had a friend who looks like me—what's his name?"

He Zhuoming didn't answer.

On purpose.

She'd climbed into the shrine already, standing right up close to the idol.

Getting near, she realized the idol's robe was made of real fabric. She couldn't help reaching out to touch it. It was slippery.

Not silk-slippery, but a damp, mossy sort of slipperiness. The texture disgusted her—she snatched her hand back and sidestepped a step.

Before she knew it, she stepped on the hem of the idol's robe. It was like stepping on wet moss. Her foot slid, and down she went.

As it happened, the little boy had walked over to watch her climb the shrine, so she landed right on top of him—and both of them screamed in unison.

He Zhuoming rolled aside, scrambled up, and clutched her shin. The little boy held his head, gritting his teeth. "You did that on purpose!"

He Zhuoming: "I'm not that childish!"

The little boy rubbed the back of his head and felt a smear of wet blood in his palm. His face darkened, turning sullen and hostile as he fixed his glare on He Zhuoming. "I asked you a question just now. Why didn't you answer?"

He Zhuoming widened her eyes, standing her ground. "You ask, so I have to answer? Is that any way to ask someone something? Didn't your mother ever teach you to be polite when you ask people questions?"

The little boy gave a cold laugh. "She didn't teach me. So what?"

He Zhuoming: "..."

They had nothing in common to talk about. He Zhuoming couldn't be bothered to wonder whether his bad temper came from poor upbringing or plain nature. She rubbed her ankle, trying to stand.

It seemed twisted—she couldn't put weight on it, and walking hurt.

Lim ping, she made her way to the wall and sat down, wanting to rest until her ankle hurt less before climbing back into the shrine to look for a way out.

The little boy: "Why aren't you talking? You were so chatty earlier. Turned mute now?"

He Zhuoming zipped her jacket all the way up, raised her collar to cover half her face, and closed her eyes.

The little boy sneered. "You talk about me, but you're not so polite yourself."

"You fell off a shrine climbing it. This is the first time I've seen someone so stupid. Hey, what about that friend of yours? Why hasn't he come looking for you? Did he abandon you?"

...

Not a single word he said was pleasant, and he had so many of them.

He Zhuoming was already feeling miserable. The more ugly things he said, the sadder she grew, but she refused to let some grade-schooler see her cry. So she simply covered her ears and turned her back to him.

The little boy chattered on at length until even he grew bored, and when he saw He Zhuoming still unmoved, he felt a grumble of dissatisfaction. He walked over to look—and found He Zhuoming with her forehead against the wall, fast asleep!

Even in sleep her lips pouted, and a tear clung to her closed lashes. She must have been crying quietly for a while.

The little boy meant to reach out and wake her, but his hand hesitated, then stopped.

The teardrop on her lashes trembled, and with a soft pat, it landed on his outstretched finger. It felt like it burned his hand. He yanked his arm back.

After a moment's silence, he whispered, barely audible, "Falling asleep even like this."

But he no longer tried to wake her.

Even without outside interference, He Zhuoming's sleep wasn't peaceful. It was a shallow rest tangled with fragmented nightmares—one moment, tree trunks coiling around her, unable to break free; the next, a pair of bloodshot eyeballs jutting out of a blank, featureless face...

Lin Qingyun's smiling face wove through the nightmare fragments, flashing now and then, leaving He Zhuoming physically and mentally drained.

She struggled free from the nightmare, still hearing pained, gasping breaths ringing in her ears. She blinked, dazed, and realized that agonizing sound was still there.

It hadn't been a dream. It was a real sound!

She turned around and saw that the red cloth had somehow been pulled back over the little boy without her noticing.

But the shape of the lumpy red silk was strange—pointed in several uneven places. No matter how she looked at it, it didn't resemble a human silhouette at all.

The child's pained breaths came from beneath it, though he somehow didn't scream or shout. The breaths were suppressed, punctuated by the occasional chattering of teeth.

Even though she'd bickered with the rude little kid before sleeping, He Zhuoming couldn't just ignore a grade-schooler in trouble. She braced herself against the wall, limped a few steps toward him, and poked the red cloth with her wooden sword. "Hey... hey, kid. You okay?"

A bulge suddenly rose where her sword pressed down, startling her into yanking the blade back and gaping.

Then, blood began to seep out slowly from beneath the red silk, thick and dark, flooding over the 'go die' written on the floor.

One of the child's hands reached out from under the cloth too—veins bulging on the back, fingers clawing wildly at the ground. The jade-smooth floor gave him nothing to grip; his nails screeched across the surface in an earsplitting sound.

The scene slammed into He Zhuoming's mind with overwhelming force. She stumbled back, forgetting her twisted ankle for a moment, and barely made it one step before the sharp pain sent her crashing to the floor.

Her tailbone hurt from the fall, her ankle throbbed, and there was a school-age boy clawing at the floor in a pool of blood right in front of her—all three striking at once, setting off fireworks in He Zhuoming's brain until she was stunned, senseless, frozen in place.

After a long moment, she gathered her courage. Trembling, she used her wooden sword to lift the red cloth—and beneath it, the little boy lay face down, his pitch-black hair sprawled messily through the blood, while a slender branch tore through the skin at the spine of his back, growing outward.

The runes all over his skin were glowing, a faint red light casting a hideously twisted expression across his face.

It was the first time He Zhuoming had ever seen a handsome face twist into something like an evil ghost's grimace.

At the same time, the hem of the wooden idol's white robe began to pour and flow downward like water, thinning as it went, until it became countless fine white threads, inching toward the boy in the pool of blood.

He Zhuoming's eyelids twitched violently at the sight. Gritting her teeth, she swung her wooden sword at the white threads—she put all her strength into it, and the threads snapped cleanly apart. But the next second, they fused back together.

They touched the blood on the floor, slowly turning the same red, as if they were drawing something from the boy's blood.

Remembering that she'd climbed into the shrine and touched these very things, He Zhuoming's scalp crawled. The wooden sword couldn't cut them, so she pulled out the warding talismans Xu Feixian had given her and flung them all at once.

Within half a second, the talismans turned to ash, leaving only a wisp of smoke.

He Zhuoming shouted, "What is this stuff?! Harder to kill than a cockroach!"

Seeing the white threads start creeping toward the boy again, she turned her head, took one look at the little brat now covered in branches like a hedgehog, took a deep breath, and made up her mind. She hooked an arm under his and scooped him up, then ran!

The boy, still writhing in agony, was stunned speechless.

Even the white threads, which had been crawling lazily and only swallowed blood, paused in hesitation.

He Zhuoming ran with an uneven, limping gait, tears streaming down her face from the pain as she sobbed, "I-I, waaah—"

Her arms were growing weak from crying. She sniffed, hitched the boy higher up, and as her arms flexed, she pressed down and snapped two twigs off his back.

The boy's feet dangled off the ground. He nearly fainted from the pain, and found his feelings toward He Zhuoming growing thoroughly complicated.

The room was only so big. With a half-crippled woman lugging a sickly grade-schooler, she could only run in circles. At least the white threads didn't seem clever—they were slow too, and after crawling around the floor a few times, they ended up tying themselves in knots.