Chapter One (continued)

Wen Xiao squatted down to gather the fallen flowers, inhaling their fragrance. “Huanling Powder, a demon knockout drug. A gift for a gift. Your flowers are pretty, I accept.”

A moment later, Zhao Yuanzhou blacked out and dropped heavily to the ground.

Wen Xiao put away her dagger and joined Zhuo Yichen. “Lock him back in the dungeon.”

Zhuo Yichen hesitated in his reply. “The dungeon…lock…can’t hold him. He just escaped from there.”

“Really?” Wen Xiao turned to inspect the collapsed Zhao Yuanzhou, then deliberately raised her voice. “Then I’ll just keep slashing[1] him with my dagger.”

Zhao Yuanzhou jerked suddenly upright. “No-no-no-no. Don’t slash me. I promise I won’t escape, okay? I’ll take myself back. … I promise I won’t escape…” After standing, he obediently trotted back into the dungeon.

A shocked Zhuo Yichen watched him depart, then looked at Wen Xiao, mouth gaping, at a loss for words.

“His acting was terrible, I could tell at a glance,” Wen Xiao explained, chuckling at his confusion.

Zhuo Yichen just shook his head and pulled out a small bottle. He handed it over to her. “You’re injured. Use this powder to recover a little faster.”

Wen Xiao blinked, looking at him blankly a moment. She took the bottle and gave him a small smile as thanks. 

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As night fell, Wen Xiao sat alone looking into a bronze mirror to treat her wound. The blood stain on her shoulder had already dried, clothing and flesh practically glued together. She took a deep breath, them bit down hard on the towel between her teeth as she began peeling the cloth away from her skin.

Her clothing dropped to reveal a clear, unblemished shoulder. She was astonished to see the wound had been healed without a trace…

She changed into fresh white robes, and sat down at a long, narrow desk. A single lamp illuminated a stack of books, all records about deceptive beasts. She scanned the pages with ink brush in hand, adding her own notes.

“Deceptive beasts, resembling rabbits, can speak in human form…speaking ‘East’ while pointing West, speaking evil and acting nice…” Wen Xiao repeated to herself in a whisper, as memories of the Deceptive Beast returned unbidden. What the mind thought the mouth could not speak; the words spoken always ran counter to the wants of the heart. Wasn’t this a kind of curse?

Cool night breezes blew. Quiet settled all around. The only sound was the rustle of Wen Xiao’s ink brush against paper. She picked up one of the old, shabby books and pored over it, looking for records related to deceptive beasts. “From birth, deceptive beasts are doomed to never express sorrow, heart and mouth in contradiction. In their whole lives, only in the moments before death can they abide by their hearts and speak their true meaning.”

Wen Xiao felt panic-stricken, thinking back to the words spoken with the Deceptive Beast’s last gasp of life. “Big sister, thank you…”

As the beast died, the light and dark of the world gradually blurred before her eyes, her life flashing through her mind in a fractured tableau. When she’d been in the Great Wilderness, she feared the more powerful demons, darting and hiding from them all day long. Later, she took advantage of all the chaos to flee into the human world. Yet, even in the human world, she had to dart and hide, fearing the Chongwu Camp would catch her. It was unavoidable, she realized, even if she did nothing wrong; just to have been born a demon was wrong.  She was insignificant, so who could ever care about the fate of one little demon beast? The tableau of a life settled on a final image, the sight of a person’s narrow back, a person making herself a shield, risking her own life to protect a little demon beast. It turned out, there was someone who cared about her fate, someone willing to fight to defend her. Official Wen Xiao. … How could she be so stupid?

From birth, deceptive beasts are doomed to never express sorrow, heart and mouth in contradiction. … Only in the moments before death can they abide by their hearts and speak their true meaning. … So her “thank you” had been sincere.

Slowly, drop by drop, the Deceptive Beast could no longer feel the rain falling on her body, could no longer hear Wen Xiao’s words. She’d heard that humans see a vision when they die. Their parents and their elders come to meet them, so they’re not alone. What about demons? Why did she only see a vast expanse of white? When would the rain stop falling in Tiandu? She really wanted to stand and bask in the sunlight.

A single tear drop fell to the book’s pages, smudging the ink.

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[1] Fun linguistic fact! The verb she uses here (and Zhao Yuanzhou repeats) is 划 (huà) which means “stroke of a Chinese character,” so she’s really joking about “stroking” him with blood by using the dagger. It doesn’t fit well in English because, in Mandarin, it’s a singular character, so it flows much more simply than it can in English. As my friend Audrey said, “Chinese is so efficient!”

Idioms that appear in this section:

礼尚往来 (lǐshàng-wǎnglái) – Courtesy demands reciprocity; deal with a man as he deals with you; pay a man back with his own coin; give as good as one gets

背道而驰 (bèidào’érchí) – run in the opposite direction; run counter to

微不足道 (wēibùzúdào) – too trivial or insignificant to mention; insignificant; inconsiderable