Lang Jiuchuan took no part in the work of gathering evidence and building the case. That wasn’t her domain. Since darkness had long since fallen, and Shen Qinghe was also worried about her constitution — what with all that blood on her, which was deeply alarming to behold — he decided they would stay the night in the village and return to Wu Jing the following day.

Lang Jiuchuan offered no objection to this consideration. She borrowed a room in the village to stay in, cleaned herself up, then told the maidservant assigned to attend her that she wished to rest and dismissed her. Once alone, she first sent the maple tree spirits she had left in the village on their way through the ghost gate, then went with Jiangche to the bottom of the cliff.

“This place is thick with yin energy,” Jiangche said, thoroughly puzzled. “What are you coming here for?”

The cliff bottom at night was even more terrifying than it had been by day. Bones lay scattered all around, and ghost-fire flickered up and down in the air, sometimes high, sometimes low. Most people would have been frightened out of their wits.

Even Jiangche found the atmosphere deeply unpleasant.

Lang Jiuchuan said, “I’ve got nothing else to do — thought I’d come and take a look around.”

Jiangche gave a short, dismissive sound.

It would simply wait and watch her keep up the act.

Lang Jiuchuan said nothing more. She looked out over the bones at the base of the cliff, where she could even perceive a few scattered, fragmented remnant souls still drifting about.

She took out incense, lit it, and pressed the sticks into the earth. Then she lifted the Dizhong from her waist.

One ring of the bell — a note of mournful lamentation rose.

Two utterances of the verse — guiding the souls home.

Three recitations of the sutra — carrying the spirits onward to Wangsheng.

The bell’s sound was peaceful, serene, stilling the heart, dissolving malevolent energy and releasing the weight of old sins.

The ghost gate opened wide.

It was as though a bell echoed from somewhere within, and a faint light spilled out through the opening, drawing the wandering souls that lingered here toward the road of Wangsheng.

One after another, pale, fragmented, wispy shadows followed the light and passed through.

Jiangche fell silent.

It watched the slender young woman standing in the center of the bones, face expressionless, quietly ringing the Dizhong and chanting the sutra of passage, and found that she was growing harder and harder to read.

She said one thing and did another — how did she manage it?

She had come to perform rites for the dead. Why not simply say so, instead of claiming she had merely come to “take a look around”?

As the ghost gate was drawing closed, a handful of scattered golden motes of merit came drifting toward Lang Jiuchuan and flew directly into her spiritual core.

Lang Jiuchuan was genuinely pleased. What a wonderful surprise.

Jiangche felt a warmth of its own — they shared one body, after all. What was good for her was good for it.

Lang Jiuchuan gently touched the space of her spiritual core. “So this is what it means to do good deeds without seeking reward?”

She vaguely remembered hearing that phrase somewhere before.

Jiangche: ——?

Lang Jiuchuan smiled. “Let’s go back.”

The following day, just as evening was descending, Lang Jiuchuan was escorted back to Wu Jing under Shen Qinghe’s protection.

On the road, Shen Qinghe asked her quite a number of questions. Just before they reached the marquis’s estate, Lang Jiuchuan turned the tables and asked him: “After all you’ve witnessed on this journey, Your Lordship — will you still maintain that there are no gods in this world?”

Shen Qinghe paused. He ran his thumb over the official seal in his hand, and after a long moment, shook his head. “I still believe there are no true gods in this world. And yet — they do exist.”

“Oh?”

“They exist in the hearts of people.” Shen Qinghe gave a quiet smile. “All gods and all Buddhas exist within the hearts of the people who believe in them. Once a person believes, they exist — because faith brings them into being. The Honglian evil idol was exactly this: someone simply used the wrong means and desecrated her, turning her into something wicked.”

Calling something like that an “evil god” was just a more palatable way of putting it.

Lang Jiuchuan said, “Your Lordship sounds rather like a Buddhist monk with that. I think you’d get along quite well with the senior masters at the temple.”

Shen Qinghe’s mouth twitched slightly at the corner.

“You’re not entirely wrong, though. The existence of the divine lives in the human heart — wherever there is belief, there is presence. Just as the Buddha resides within the mind.” Lang Jiuchuan said, “The path of righteousness in this world is a long and arduous one. Keep that truth close to you, Your Lordship, and it will serve you well.”

The path of righteousness in this world is a long and arduous one.

Shen Qinghe turned the words over in his mind carefully. “How is it that you, a young girl, speak with such old-souled gravity?”

What kind of life had this child been living?

Lang Jiuchuan smiled slightly. “I have fulfilled my end of our agreement, Your Lordship. It’s time to deliver my compensation.”

Shen Qinghe went rigid for a moment, then closed his eyes with the serene expression of someone who had made peace with their fate. “You may proceed.”

Lang Jiuchuan smiled and turned her palm upward. The Panguan brush appeared in her hand, and she traced careful marks across his forehead. Golden light sank into him, and then a single bone — glowing with the same pale gold — came back along the tip of the brush and settled into the empty space in her chest cavity, connecting to the network of meridians around it, and taking its place there.

Unyielding bone: firm and resilient, impervious to all things. With it, she would no longer have to live with that unsettled hollowness in her chest, that rootless, drifting anxiety.

She felt that fullness in her chest, and Lang Jiuchuan let out a long, satisfied exhale.

The gains from this journey had been exceptional. She had come out ahead.

“All done.”

Shen Qinghe opened his eyes and instinctively pressed a hand to his chest. No chest cracked open, no bones displaced — everything was where it should be. So that was it?

She wasn’t playing a trick on him, was she?

“Your Lordship should try to keep your temper in check in the future, keep an open heart, eat more things that nourish the blood and replenish the vital energy, and help protect the eyesight. And handkerchiefs — do keep a few extra on hand at all times.” Lang Jiuchuan offered this advice in a tone of genuine helpfulness.

Shen Qinghe: ——?

Lang Jiuchuan didn’t elaborate further. He would understand soon enough.

The carriage had already arrived at Kaiping Marquis’s estate. Shen Qinghe stepped out first, then had a maidservant help her down as well, and said, “I’ll leave you here. Once my son has recovered, I’ll bring him and my wife to pay you our proper thanks.”

Lang Jiuchuan said, “You needn’t bother — my payment has already been received. We can part ways here.”

She gave a small nod and walked toward the gates of the estate.

Shen Qinghe watched her disappear inside before boarding the carriage again. “Take me to Ci’en Temple.”

He touched his chest again. Something still felt slightly off, though when he carefully counted his ribs, not a single one was missing. So then — what exactly was this “unyielding bone”?

The carriage had left the city when it suddenly jolted to a stop.

“What is it?” Shen Qinghe’s head knocked against the carriage wall.

The coachman’s voice came through. “Your Lordship, there’s an old woman being beaten up ahead.”

Shen Qinghe opened the carriage door and looked out. Sure enough, there was an old woman in tattered clothing, her face bruised and swollen, being kicked away by a young man, weeping and wailing as she beat the ground in anguished protest.

She was crying about an ungrateful son — she had raised him from infancy with her own hands, and yet the moment he took a wife he forgot his own mother, leaving the old woman to fend for herself, even tricking her out of the money she had saved for her own funeral. Heaven had no justice, the earth had no laws.

It was the kind of sight that wrung tears from anyone who heard it.

Shen Qinghe was furious. “Detain him. Hand him over to the Metropolitan Office.”

“Yes, Your Lordship.”

“Your Lordship!” The maidservant stared at him in dismay, pointing at his face.

Shen Qinghe froze, raised a hand to his face, and found it wet. Something had dripped to the corner of his mouth — salty.

And his eyes were aching and stinging, tears pouring from them without any sign of stopping. The moment he heard the old woman’s keening cry, the ache in his chest deepened unbearably, and the moment his mind turned to how he was going to write up the report on this evil god case, the tears flowed even harder, cascading down without pause.

Keep extra handkerchiefs on hand.

That was what Lang Jiuchuan had said. And: try not to let your temper flare.

Was this what she had meant? That he would cry whenever he saw something unjust or heartbreaking?

Shen Qinghe’s heart was in a state of pure panic. He could already picture it — Shen the Iron-Faced Judge, the impartial and fearsome Lord Shen who presided over his court with the severity of a god, breaking into tears while hearing a case, weeping and sniffling as he handed down his verdicts…

He could not let himself think about it. If he kept thinking, he would lose his mind.

Shen Qinghe pressed a hand hard over the aching space in his chest. So this was what it meant to be without the unyielding bone — becoming a weeping, sodden mess?

Lang Jiuchuan, who was being quietly, silently hated with seething vehemence by Shen Qinghe, had at that very moment just arrived in the courtyard of Cui Shi’s residence. The moment they came face to face, a copy of the Classic of Filial Piety was flung directly at her head.

“Go to the ancestral hall and kneel while you read it,” Cui Shi said, her voice as cold as winter stone. “Let’s see if you have any understanding at all of what it means to be a dutiful child.”