By the Road to the Yellow Springs - Chapter 2

Chapter 2

“What?” Black Impermanence was shocked.

“You! You actually want us brothers to do such a thing for you!” White Impermanence’s face flushed a deep red.

My father explained over and over again.

“It’s for the child, for the child. It’s all for the sake of the child.”

“No!” Black Impermanence refused.

“This is absolutely out of the question!” White Impermanence stomped his foot.

The two deities turned to leave, but my father chased after them, shouting at the top of his lungs.

“At worst, I’ll have my daughter acknowledge you both as her godfathers! How’s that?”

Black and White Impermanence paused in their tracks, but they still vanished without looking back.

In the dead of night.

Black and White Impermanence knocked on the door.

My father opened it.

“Here, what you wanted.”

White Impermanence handed over a bulging leather canteen.

My father took it; it was actually still warm.

“Thank you, thank you! I truly cannot thank you enough!”

My father tried to close the door, but Black Impermanence reached out and blocked it.

White Impermanence said with a smile:

“Master Zhao, you’d better keep your word.”

My father nodded repeatedly like a chicken pecking at grain.

“Of course I’ll keep my word. My little girl will have to rely on you two lords to support her in the future.”

Black and White Impermanence were a bit confused and asked in unison:

“The future?”

“Support her?”

“Yeah, as her godfathers, shouldn’t you find food for her and raise her?”

Upon hearing this, Black and White Impermanence simultaneously raised their fingers and pointed at the canteen in my father’s hand.

“Didn’t we already give it to you?”

My father looked shocked. These two lords didn’t think they could trade a single canteen of milk for a daughter, did they?

“…”

Not a chance!

And so, I drank Black and White Impermanence’s milk for three years.

…

Uh.

Of course, they didn’t produce it themselves.

Every time they went to the Mortal Realm to reap souls, they would steal some for me on the way back.

Sometimes it was cow’s milk, sometimes it was goat’s milk.

When luck was poor, they would rather crawl into a wolf’s den and chase a mother wolf to squeeze out a canteen of wolf milk for me.

They were absolutely unwilling to do as my father suggested-transforming into a young woman to find a nursing mother and pitifully beg for a bowl of human milk.

So, during those three years, I drank the milk of every animal in the mammalian kingdom, but I never once tasted human milk.

My mother had quite a few complaints about my father’s inability to get human milk.

“If you ask me, humans should drink human milk. My girl hasn’t had a drop of it, which is why she’s so slow to start talking.”

My father was easygoing. He beckoned to me and said:

“Yan’er, sit down.”

I plopped my butt onto the ground.

“Yan’er, wave.”

I raised my hand and waved it vigorously.

“Yan’er, what does your Seventh Father look like?”

I decisively stuck out my tongue.

“See, wife? She’s not stupid or deaf. She’ll talk sooner or later.”

My mother: “…”