ON THE SIXTH DAY, the doors of Wushan Palace opened with a creak.
The storm continued to rage outside. The figure in the doorway set aside his dripping umbrella, yanking aside his soaking robes and striding into the hall. "Shizun."
His clothes were the pale cream of lotus root, and he wore a headband across his brow. Those gently slanted peach-blossom eyes, usually so beautifully expressive, were smudged with shadow.
It was the first time Shi Mei had come to Wushan Palace to see him since the battle at the Heaven-Piercing Tower. "I wanted to visit Shizun earlier, but I couldn't step away until now. Please forgive my tardiness."
Chu Wanning spared him only a glance before turning aside.
Shi Mei didn't seem to mind; he settled down in front of Chu Wanning, looking quite pleased with himself. Perhaps construction of the bridge was proceeding more smoothly than anticipated, or he'd received some other good news—his eyes were sparkling and bright. "Are you still mad at me? The door to the demon realm is soon to open. Shizun, don't you have any questions for me?"
Chu Wanning kept his silence, staring out the window at the rain. His helplessness and vulnerability were things only visible to the man he loved; Shi Mingjing had bled away all the warmth he'd had for him, reducing Chu Wanning to unfeeling stone. No words of his would melt him anymore.
Shi Mei sighed. "I meant to have a good talk with you today. Say something, at the very least."
Chu Wanning finally deigned to give him a response. "Get out."
Now that success was close at hand, Shi Mei was more at ease than the last time they'd spoken. Chu Wanning's coolness didn't enrage him. Instead he smiled. "Look, you did say something."
Rain drummed against the windows. The Space-Time Gate had thrown both worlds into chaos; this unending rain was the least of the unusual phenomena that had occurred. Chu Wanning thought the storm might never end—that the rain would pour from the sky until it drowned both worlds.
Shi Mei didn't mind his silence. He rose and poured two cups of tea, only continuing once he'd slid one next to Chu Wanning's hand. "If you're going to ignore me, I'll go ahead and talk at you. I don't like explaining myself, but I don't want there to be misunderstandings between Shizun and me."
The tea was still hot. He blew at the tea leaves on the surface and took a measured sip. "Where should I start? Since I was a child, I've done many awful deeds and told lies upon lies—but I never wanted to take innocent lives."
Chu Wanning's hands clenched against his will, tendons protruding from bloodless skin.
"Shizun's seen the Martyr's Path, right? At the start, I only wanted to fill it with people worse than beasts. Their deaths would be no loss. Later, when I realized the distance it needed to span—so great it required the bodies from two universes to reach the other side," Shi Mei said, "my heart ached too."
A pause. "I don't like having blood on my hands, so I've hardly killed anyone. I didn't lie to you."
"That's true," said Chu Wanning suddenly. "I believe that you've hardly ever killed with your own hands."
Shi Mei raised an eyebrow, bemused.
Chu Wanning turned to him with eyes colder than ice. "You're soft-hearted and benevolent. You don't want to take innocent lives, you don't like having blood on your hands. You wouldn't do any of that yourself, and that's why you created a Taxian-jun—so he'd be the one to slaughter Rufeng Sect, so he'd be the one befouled. He did everything you needed to do but didn't want to. How clever."
"Now that's unfair of you, Shizun." Shi Mei sighed. "I never wanted to slaughter Rufeng Sect. That was his own personal grudge."
"Without the Flower of Eightfold Sorrows, he would never have committed such a grave sin."
"Are you so sure of that?"
Chu Wanning held Shi Mei's gaze. "I am."
Shi Mei smiled and waved a hand, dismissing the topic. "Sure. Not worth fighting over. I once told Xu Shuanglin I hoped for a world where the competent had power and the useless were powerless, where good and evil both received their just rewards. That was the truth. I didn't lie. But for the Butterfly-Boned clan, kindness to others comes at the cost of our own lives. Our way home must be paved in blood. I had no other choice."
Chu Wanning closed his eyes.
Shi Mei refilled his cup. "Shizun can't understand why I would sacrifice the living of two worlds to bring the Butterfly-Boned clan back to the demon realm," he said with a sigh. "It's really quite simple."
He stared at the spirals of steam rising from his cup. The room was silent but for the ebb and flow of Shi Mei's gentle voice. "Shizun, have you ever seen a herd of hunted bison? Maddened and desperate, charging every which way, ready to gore anyone standing in front of them, be they human or beast. It's their basic instinct to survive."
Chu Wanning knew what he meant. The Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts were like animals driven to the edge of a cliff, surrounded by ravenous mouths ready to tear them apart.
"The Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts have only two options: Return to the demon realm or die out entirely. A choice between life and death." Shi Mei's eyes darkened. "If the cultivation world didn't see Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts as livestock, to be sold and abused at will—if we had seen a future for our people in the mortal realm, nobody would wish to carry out such atrocities."
Shi Mei fell silent, emotions churning in his eyes. As Chu Wanning watched, they went from dark to distressed to apathetic before taking on a crazed glint, as if mirroring the course of his own life.
"The hunted bison never wanted to kill. But when the butchers bring down their knives—when the people around you start to die, one after another… Shizun, how do you expect us to forgive a world like this?" Shi Mei's voice shook. "The cultivation realm has never kept a historical record of the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts; they see us as meat, or as cultivation vessels. But we've kept our own records. By the eleventh year after the next great battle between mortals and demons, nearly all pure-blooded Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts had been murdered. In the thousands of years that followed, we never escaped cultivators' greed no matter how carefully we hid.
"Four thousand years ago, two thousand five hundred years ago, nine hundred years ago, seven hundred years ago. Again and again, the hunters came for us. Those carrying the Butterfly-Boned bloodline were chased down and consumed, imprisoned and brutalized… They stopped at nothing to wipe us out."
Shi Mei's fingers tightened around his cup, the strain visible in the tendons of his wrist. "If we'd died out, that would've been the end of it, at least. But how could they give up such a promising cultivation method?"
He paused. "Shizun is very well-read. I'm sure you know to what lengths the previous sect leader of Guyueye went to keep Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts from dying out completely." Shi Mei looked up at him, his peach-blossom eyes stained crimson.
Chu Wanning did. Any history of Guyueye made mention of the fact, lauding it as some kind of marvelous achievement—
The medicinal sect Guyueye had captured twenty young women carrying the blood of the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts and invited strong and virile male cultivators to breed them day and night until they were with child. The sect leader plied them with drugs that shortened gestation to four months. After the babes were born, those women, still weak from birth, would be defiled again, forced to carry another child and forced into unnatural labor, over and over, to continue the Butterfly-Boned line.
This propagation was like breeding livestock for the slaughterhouse. No, not like—they were livestock. The male infants were dismembered to make pills or sold to rich clients like Rufeng Sect. The female infants were kept and reared in captivity until they became fertile and could be seeded to start the next batch.
Seeded. Chu Wanning still remembered the shock and disgust he'd felt the first time he'd seen the word in a copy of Handbook on the Pills and Potions of Guyueye.
Shi Mei smiled again. For the first time, that smile looked drawn and pallid. "They reared Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts the way one would venomous snakes and won the cultivation realm's praise for it. But they were human beings…all human beings. Just because they had some ancient demon blood in their veins—enough to be useful for cultivation—everyone deemed them animals."
Shi Mei took a sip of tea to hide his own agony, but his fingers were trembling. "The drugs used to induce labor left the mothers very weak. None of the captive Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts lived past the age of thirty, but for them, that was a blessing: a quicker end to that nightmarish cycle of endless breeding and birthing."
Spots of hateful color appeared on Shi Mei's cheeks when he said the words breeding and birthing, as if someone had slapped him. He fell silent. For a moment, it seemed he'd lose control and start cursing, but he only pursed his mouth around a few bitter syllables. "A mercy."
Chu Wanning finally opened his eyes and looked at Shi Mei. With hatred so vividly etched on his face, this man who'd always been serene and enigmatic resembled any other person driven by revenge.
Shi Mei lapsed into silence. Whatever he was thinking, it seemed to push him over the edge—he put down the cup and buried his face in his hands. He scrubbed at it, then took a deep breath. When he looked up again, his eyes were rimmed in red. Chu Wanning couldn't remember ever seeing Shi Mei so emotional before. "Does Shizun remember why Guyueye stopped breeding Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts?"
Chu Wanning didn't know how he felt. "There was a bloodbath," he rasped.
Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts weren't animals, no matter how they were treated. Even gu worms would bite back, much less living, breathing humans. During Jiang Xi's shifu's term as sect leader, one captive Butterfly-Boned girl refused to submit.
Unlike her sisters, she was neither hollowly suicidal nor numbly unresisting, but possessed a calculating mind. Using sweet words and wiles, she seduced a high-ranking disciple of Tianyin Pavilion who'd come to Guyueye to peruse their wares. The disciple was a lascivious man, and he visited the beautiful girl's bed that very night. The next day, she begged her new lover to buy her from Guyueye. She swore to be his for a lifetime and aid in his cultivation however she could.
Blinded by lust, the disciple did as she asked—only for her to run away a few days later. She somehow found the spark for apocalyptic fire and snuck back to Rainbell Isle under cover of darkness. The girl set the entire side courtyard where she'd been imprisoned alight. She helped the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts escape and left nearly a hundred Guyueye disciples to perish in the flames.
The other sects looked on with indifference, offering public words of consolation while privately mocking Guyueye for failing to manage a mere girl. The medicinal sect was deeply humiliated. Furious, the sect leader ended the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast breeding program. "If it's so amusing to you," he'd declared, "don't come asking for medicines in the future. After all, so many of them escaped—if you have the skill, hunt them yourself."
By the time Jiang Xi took up the position of sect leader, Song Qiutong was the only Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast who remained in Guyueye's possession. She was meant to serve the sect leader, but Jiang Xi disdained carnal matters, disliked women, and saw Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts as a source of disaster. He persisted in auctioning her off against the wishes of the sect elders.
Shi Mei knew Chu Wanning remembered all this. He smiled. "Let me tell you something you don't know."
"Go on."
"That day at Xuanyuan Pavilion—yes, the day Miss Song was auctioned. I was there as well."
Chu Wanning blinked.
"I was there, in the Xuan booth. I bid thirty-five million."
That did ring a bell. Mo Ran had been there with him. He'd taken pity on Song Qiutong and wanted to save her, but the guest in the veiled chamber above him had bid thirty-five million right from the start. He'd even tried asking Mo Ran for money to bid against them…
"That was you?"
"It was." Shi Mei's composure slowly returned. "I swore an oath, long ago, to protect any Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast I could. Song Qiutong was my kin. Once I heard the news, I tried to save her. Of course, I also hoped to use Bugui to trigger the fiendish energy in Mo Ran in that life. Who would've thought the half of your earth soul in him would work so perfectly as a shield—it even resonated with you instead… But enough. It's all in the past now. Shizun knows, regardless, that it was Ye Wangxi who bought her."
"She was your kin. Back at Rufeng Sect—why did you…"
"Why did I look on as she died?" Shi Mei smiled. "I had no choice. I had to keep my identity secret. To tell you the truth, I was the one who commanded Mount Huang to open—she was only a pretense. If things had gone differently, perhaps I could have saved her, but in front of Xu Shuanglin… Shizun knows my spiritual energy is weak. Xu Shuanglin was my source of strength at the time. He saw me as his confidant, but I'd befriended him under the guise of Shi Mingjing of Sisheng Peak."
Chu Wanning watched him quietly.
"If he knew I was a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast, would he still work with me?" Shi Mei asked evenly. "I said earlier that most cultivators see us as livestock, and Xu Shuanglin was no exception. I could tell from the way he treated Miss Song."
All these revelations weighed on Chu Wanning; he didn't know what to say. But Shi Mei was still in the mood to talk. "But that is neither here nor there. The one I wish to tell you about is the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast who escaped Guyueye."
Chu Wanning looked down in silence. After a moment, he raised his eyes to Shi Mei's peerlessly beautiful face. He'd already put the pieces together during his earlier tale. "That woman." It was almost a sigh. "She was your mother, wasn't she?"
Shi Mei blinked. The tension bled out of his back, the tight lines of his jaw unclenching. He laughed, a hollow sound. "You always figure it out. Yes. She was my mother."