Winter thunder cracked across the sky.

Lang Jiuchuan raised her eyes and glanced outside. Needles of snow were falling in dense curtains; cold seeped through the gaps in the window frame, making one instinctively shrink inward.

It was a cold winter.

Lang Jiuchuan bit into a piping hot vegetable bun and lifted the warm soup to her lips, taking a mouthful and letting it slide down her throat. A wave of heat rolled into her stomach, and she let out a contented sigh.

This was her first meal since she had come back to life.

The taste and warmth of food made her feel, at last, that she was truly alive.

Alive — how wonderful.

To be alive was to feel the warmth and smoke of the human world, and to find within it the threads of hope.

Just like right now.

The soup was hot. It had salt in it. It was not the bland, flavorless taste of candlelight and incense.

If only there were meat — but being in mourning made that impossible. No — the days of vegetarian fare still stretched long ahead.

Lang Jiuchuan swallowed the entire bun in a few bites, earning a sidelong glance from the maidservant attending her. She looked delicate and frail, yet she could certainly eat. Though — was there not something of an odor about the Ninth Young Miss?

Catching the maidservant’s movement to cover her nose in her peripheral vision, Lang Jiuchuan blinked and looked down at herself.

This was going to be a problem.

She had clawed her way out of a pile of corpses in a mass burial ground. At the manor where she had briefly stopped, there had been no time to wash before the people from the Marquis estate arrived to fetch her. She had cast a dust-cleansing incantation, but come to think of it — she had never actually bathed and washed properly.

The smell of the dead was the hardest of all to remove.

Lang Jiuchuan set down her bowl and chopsticks and said, “Have someone bring hot water. I wish to bathe.”

The maidservant hesitated. The household was in the middle of mourning — everyone else was keeping vigil, and here the Young Miss wanted to bathe. This would surely invite criticism.

Seeing her hesitate, Lang Jiuchuan’s gaze swept over her — cool and clear as still water. The maidservant gave an involuntary shiver, clasped her hands together, dipped a curtsy, and retreated hastily.

Half an hour later, Lang Jiuchuan stood before the full-length bronze mirror in the bathing room, examining by the warm amber candlelight the corpse — no, the body — reflected back at her.

Lang Jiuchuan would not come of age until next year, but she had shot up quickly, standing more than half a head taller than most girls her age. She was slender, her skin cool-white, fine and smooth. One would not think she had endured much hardship — yet had she not?

What then were the thin calluses along her palms and fingertips?

According to Nanny Wang, though Lang Jiuchuan had lived at the manor, the Old Madame had always had people attending her — including one old Nanny who had been the Old Madame’s personal servant since girlhood. But that old Nanny had fallen ill and died two years ago, leaving no one at her side. And with the Old Madame herself suffering from the fog of age, unable to look after her, and the Marquis estate never sending word to call her back — she had spent these last two years like an abandoned child, entirely forgotten.

People follow power and spurn the weak. Once it became clear she was an outcast, no one would bother with her.

So she had died alone, in a mass burial ground, amid a heap of corpses. Had the Marquis estate not suddenly sent people to collect her, would she have lain there rotting until someone finally noticed?

Lang Jiuchuan lifted her hand and released her intent — all the cultivated arts concealing this body fell away at once. The figure in the mirror changed instantly. Two hollow, blood-red eye sockets stared back at her. The tendons in both hands and feet had been severed, the wounds crusted over with dark scabs. Below the left side of her chest, a long incision had been made, and one rib was missing entirely. The heart was pierced with several small, precise holes — as if something had been extracted, as if blood had been drawn.

“What on earth happened to you?”

Looking at the broken, ravaged body before her, Lang Jiuchuan’s eyes flushed red. A dark, savage energy stirred and churned in her gaze, and the temperature inside the bathing room dropped sharply.

What hatred, what grievance — to do something so vicious to a young girl?

As if the body still held remnants of resentment within it, two trails of bloody tears began to seep from those hollow sockets.

The savage energy flooded out.

Bang.

The bronze mirror shattered. Shards flew out, slicing across her skin.

“Ninth Young Miss?”

Outside, a maidservant who had heard the noise called out hesitantly.

Lang Jiuchuan raised her hand. The cultivated arts settled back over her body — and what had been broken and ruined appeared whole once more. She looked at the many fragmented reflections of herself scattered across the shards of the mirror and murmured, “Since I have taken your body, I will find justice for you in the end.”

She turned away. The amber candlelight shivered as the wind caught it — and neither she nor anyone else noticed: in the reflection of the shattered mirror, a point of golden light flashed briefly at her neck, then vanished in an instant, so fast it might have been nothing more than a trick of the flickering flame.

Having dressed, Lang Jiuchuan found herself winded and breathless — a single back-and-forth shift of the cultivated arts, and this body was already struggling to hold on. So terribly weak.

Hmm?

She suddenly raised her eyes toward the direction of the memorial hall, her gaze half-narrowed.

It was time to go and fulfill her filial duties.