Twenty copper coins an hour. That was the rental fee for the cheapest class of farewell boat, and it also happened to be Yidan's hourly wage for decontamination work.
Standing on the darkened shore, Milady felt as if she were in a dream.
Lately, she had taken to measuring the cost of everything in units of her mother's decontamination hours: eight hours of work in life, traded for eight hours' use of a boat after death; twenty days spent in the contamination zone, traded for a thin wooden coffin with a thick iron plate fastened to its bottom.
Because she had decided to set sail late at night, she had to pay the boatman and the coffin porters extra—the equivalent of half a day of Yidan's work.
"Is no one else coming?" Hailan asked in a low voice, looking around as she stood beside her.
After the coffin porters had left, only the two of them remained on the dock in the dead of night. Beneath the cold, sparse white stars, the soft, black sea wrinkled and smoothed with each successive wave.
The thin wooden coffin was already on board. The boat, still unlit, was shrouded by the night; it felt as if Milady could blink and discover the farewell boat was just an illusion.
"The clan doesn't know Mom is being sent off today," she said, her voice calm. "Those who wanted to pay their respects have already done so. Why make Mom suffer through empty formalities at the very end? Aunt Hailan, it means a lot to me that you came to see her off. I'm content with that. You should head back and get some rest. It's time for me to go."
Hailan reached out, as if to take Milady's hand, but she drew back when she saw the girl's calm, almost numb expression. She sighed. "If there's anything at all I can do to help, you just have to tell me... Yidan was my best friend."
"I know," Milady said, her gaze fixed on the sea. The farewell boat was a decommissioned vessel from the Haidu shipping routes—small and decrepit. It carried the slumbering Yidan in its belly, bobbing gently on the black waves.
Hailan nodded silently. As she was about to leave, she finally said, "As long as the crystals exist... getting sick is inevitable. No medicine is one hundred percent effective. Perhaps this is just the fate of us Haidu People."
'Is this fate?' For the first time in her seventeen years, such a hazy thought drifted through Milady's mind.
For the past few days, one moment she wanted to tear something to shreds with her teeth and nails, the next she felt as if regret were devouring her from the inside out... Her mind had been a relentless, raging storm.
But tonight, the storm had fallen into a dead silence.
After more than four hours of sailing at full speed toward the open sea, Milady finally had the boatman stop the rumbling old vessel and sat down on the deck.
The starlight and moonlight grew faint, and the sea breeze was bone-chilling. The endless Black Sea was like a silent cosmos. Only after the engine stopped did the sounds of the waves and the wind gradually seep back in from the distant darkness, filling her ears.
"Mom," she said softly, "this is a nice place, isn't it? It's called Still Bay. I found it especially for you on a nautical chart. The main shipping lanes don't pass this way, so there are no boats. It's so quiet. It's rare to find a place like this near Haidu."
On the deck, the thin wooden coffin answered only with silence.
It was secured by latches to a hinged board on the deck. A single pull on a lever would cause the board to rise and tilt over the side of the ship. Then, Yidan, just like thousands upon thousands of Haidu People before her, would slide off and sink into the sea.
Milady leaned against the wooden coffin and lay down on the deck. The old boat was like a cradle, and she and her mother were just two children within it. 'If only she could just sleep on forever through the long, starlit night, it wouldn't be so bad. After all, what reason was there to return to Haidu? No one was waiting for her there anymore.'
"That decontamination device you used... I didn't bring it," she whispered. "Even though they say you should be buried with the last few things you used, so you can remember your life in the hereafter... but you probably wouldn't want to look at that thing anyway. It's better without it, right?"
Despite her words, she had packed the device in her bag before leaving. That way, if she changed her mind, she wouldn't have any regrets.
The decontamination device was a low-cost yet cleverly engineered mechanism. It couldn't operate automatically; it simply mimicked the movements of its operator—so long as the motions were simple enough. In this way, bringing the device to a job was like having two people working on the decontamination.
The last thing Yidan had ever used in her life was just such a clumsy, blockheaded device.
The boatman had been ferrying these farewells for years and knew to keep his distance. At this moment, it was as if he didn't exist; he didn't come to rush her. 'If she were to fall into the sea along with the coffin, perhaps they would both become the sea-maidens from the nursery rhymes, swimming freely in the ocean currents...' But she had to open the coffin first so Yidan could get out.