Song Niangzi never imagined that the string of disasters befalling her had been brought by a childhood friend. She had thought reuniting with a companion from her youth was a matter of fate, never expecting it to mark the beginning of calamity. How she regretted it — if only she had never accepted that embroidered Guanyin portrait, would she have ever crossed paths with this bringer of ruin?

Luo Chan was unfortunate. She had once been a daughter of wealth, but the moment her father fell into gambling, she became mud beneath everyone’s feet — sold off, beaten, robbed of her child. Her suffering was immense, yet none of it was of her own making. How had she come to deserve such a fate?

“The greatest malice in human nature is the inability to bear seeing others thrive — especially those one once looked down upon, who have now become people one must look up to, regard with envy and jealousy. That malice grows alongside the envy until it becomes utterly uncontrollable.” Lang Jiuchuan said with quiet indifference. “Her thinking is easy enough to guess: I am in hell, so come down and keep me company.“

Song Niangzi trembled all over. Memories of the past flooded back — Luo Chan’s every move and gesture. After the troubles at home began, Luo Chan had offered comfort with feigned sincerity, yet once, Song Niangzi had distinctly caught the faint upward curve of her lips, as though she were smiling.

But she had paid it no mind, assuming her eyes were playing tricks from the exhaustion of caring for two elderly in-laws. Then later, after her parents-in-law passed, Luo Chan had come again. The way she looked at Die’er — a gaze of mingled sorrow and pity, profoundly unsettling.

When Die’er fell ill, she had brought lingzhi mushrooms, personally simmered a broth, and fed it to her mouth like a devoted mother. That broth, that meat…

Retch.

Song Niangzi lurched from the bed and collapsed onto the floor, heaving violently. She had barely eaten anything and could bring nothing up, so she shoved two fingers down her throat, retching up bile over and over.

She retched and wept and pounded the floor with wild, frenzied fists, venting her fury, until her hands were raw and bloody.

What kind of mother was she — to have never noticed that a wolf had crept to her side, fixing its hungry gaze upon her daughter?

Luo Chan. Luo Chan. AAAAAAHHHH!

Song Niangzi’s hatred surged to the heavens. She threw her head back and screamed — hating Luo Chan, hating herself even more.

Blood-tinged tears seeped from her eyes. The sight made Fu Qi’s heart clench. He glanced at Lang Jiuchuan — was she not going to stop her this time?

Lang Jiuchuan did not stop her. She needed to let that fury out. If she kept it locked inside, she would not survive — she would only torment herself day after day in self-reproach, and ultimately shatter completely into madness.

She still had a daughter to raise!

Lang Jiuchuan turned her gaze back to Zhao Xin, who had been frozen in place by Song Niangzi’s overwhelming hatred, and asked, “That sorcerer — who exactly are they, and where are they now?”

“In the shrine temple at Marquis Zhenbei’s estate.” Zhao Xin was terrified. He wanted to reach the road to the underworld as quickly as possible, and held nothing back. “That estate — aren’t they a military household? They built themselves a shrine, a kind of family temple, and they keep a company of Daoist priests who oversee ritual ceremonies, hand out new year talismans and such, and tend to the ritual fields. The entire estate, including the servants — whenever there’s a death, they hire only the shrine priests to conduct the funeral rites. I heard that when wounded soldiers die, the priests at that shrine handle all burial matters.”

Great households often built private temples — either Daoist shrines or female convents — for the purposes of ancestral sacrifice, or to send servants who had committed offenses to live there as lay monastics, which also served as a way to keep scandals quietly buried.

The household of Marquis Zhenbei was vast and powerful, a military family guarding the northern frontier, so building a shrine temple was simply a matter of convenience.

Yet — did the Marquis Zhenbei household know that their shrine temple harbored a wicked sorcerer?

“Is that sorcerer the head of the shrine?”

“Not exactly. It’s a female Daoist, looks to be only about twelve or thirteen years old, but she is utterly ruthless.” Zhao Xin thought of the shrine’s so-called Spirit Witch, and shuddered again.

That young female Daoist — she might look at you with a beaming smile, the picture of innocent sweetness, but she was venomous through and through, impossible to guard against. When she carved out his heart’s flesh, she didn’t even blink — and then had it shaped into meatballs, poured into a broth by that wretched woman, and fed to the child to drink.

Vile. Absolutely vile!

Young girls these days were all so ruthless — the Spirit Witch was one, and the killing god standing before him was another. Neither was to be trifled with. He needed to hurry off to the underworld!

Spirit Witch.

Lang Jiuchuan turned the name over on her tongue, finding it deeply interesting. A shrine temple at Marquis Zhenbei’s estate was unremarkable enough, but a female Daoist who practiced voodoo and gu magic dwelling within — now that was genuinely fascinating.

Gu was even harder to guard against than poison, harder still to cure, and even more difficult for others to detect. Certain gu toxins were such that a person could die without anyone ever knowing what had killed them.

What exactly was the Marquis Zhenbei household keeping this person for?

“That’s everything I know. Can you send me on my way now?” Zhao Xin stammered nervously. “I didn’t kill anyone else — I only killed that madwoman, and that counts as avenging this mother and daughter, doesn’t it? I won’t hold a grudge over them eating my flesh either.”

“They were forced to,” Fu Qi said coldly, in three flat words.

Zhao Xin shrank. In life he had been a coward, and in death, after much deliberation, he had managed to kill one person — ambushing her while she was a newly-minted ghost and devouring her soul — transforming himself into a malevolent spirit with ambitions of cultivating into a ghost king and ruling the ghost realm. Yet before he could even set out on that path, he had stumbled upon this pairing of ghost and human.

Both of them are killing gods not to be trifled with!

Lang Jiuchuan asked a few more questions, and when she could extract nothing further, she summoned the ghost official. As they were about to depart with Zhao Xin, something occurred to her, and she spoke in an icy, bone-chilling tone: “Pass along my regards to Panguan Cui. Tell him that I miss the old gentleman, and that I long for a meeting.”

The ghost official: “?!”

Why did this greeting carry a distinct edge of murderous intent?

He grabbed Zhao Xin and fled at full speed. Once back in the underworld, he relayed the message, and Panguan Cui felt his hair stand on end. Impossible. The mortal realm did not favor him right now — he was not going anywhere.

By this time, Lang Jiuchuan had already moved to the bedside. She lifted Song Yuedie’s hand and with two sharp, precise snaps, set her dislocated wrists — which had been wrenched out of place from her earlier thrashing — back into place. From the corner of her eye, she caught Song Niangzi staggering to her feet in a daze and shuffling toward the door.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

Song Niangzi did not turn back. “I’m going to kill her. Kill her!”

“She’s already dead,” Lang Jiuchuan said. “Her soul is gone too. Where exactly do you intend to kill her?”

Song Niangzi shuddered violently. She spun around, her eyes still streaked with blood, and screamed: “Why? Why does she get to die so easily? I had no quarrel with her — and simply because my life was good, she did this to me? What a vicious heart she had! She can’t be allowed such a swift death. She should have been left for me, so that I could—”

Lang Jiuchuan watched her disheveled, half-mad state and said coolly: “Then we’ll grind her bones to dust and scatter them a little later.”

The sanctity of the dead meant nothing in her view. The only thing that mattered was giving the living the courage to go on. For Song Niangzi to live, she needed to vent this burning rage on her own terms.

Song Niangzi’s voice cut off. She stared blankly. “Grind her bones to dust?”

“That’s right.” Lang Jiuchuan nodded. “An obscure servant — after death, her fate was to be flung onto the paupers’ burial grounds. The vengeful ghost that had been tormenting you confirmed it: that man took the burial money from the estate and dragged the body off to the mass graves. If you want to kill her, grinding her bones to dust is your only option.”