The Beast's Way Out - Chapter 2

After Qi Yao left, Mother brought me a bowl of red-bean porridge.

It was soft and sweet, cooked with her own hands.

I buried my head in it and finished every drop. When I looked up, I saw that her eyes were red. She smiled at me.

That night, I slept deeply.

In my dream, someone cut open my flesh with a knife and stuffed two red-hot bones inside me. I wanted to scream, but no sound came out. I could only watch the wound close, without even leaving a scar.

When I opened my eyes again, something extra rested inside my chest.

My eldest sister truly grew well. She stopped coughing blood, and color slowly returned to her face.

My second brother stopped breaking bones with a series of cracks at the slightest movement.

He could run and jump. For the first time, he lifted me over his head and spun me around three times.

My parents held each other and cried. Before their tears had dried, they looked at me, and an inescapable grief spread through their eyes.

At first, that grief was so thick it choked the air.

Whenever I skipped past them, their smiles froze, as if they suddenly forgot what expression to wear around me.

As the years passed, the grief faded. After one year, then two, only an occasional dazed glance at me remained.

My sister’s reputation for talent gradually spread. Poetry gatherings and banquets followed one after another, and all the young men in the capital crowded around her.

My brother’s business sense blossomed too. He praised a potted peony to the skies, held an auction, and sold it for an astonishing price. Then he gave me half the silver.

When he stuffed the banknotes into my hands, his eyes curved with his smile. “Jiang Li, you’ll always have a share of everything Second Brother earns.”

I simply had little chance to spend that money.

I could no longer go out.

My parents confined me to the residence. They locked the courtyard gate and added iron spikes to all four walls.

Maidservants and matrons took turns watching me. Someone even followed me when I went to the privy.

At first I fought. I smashed things, rammed the door, and pounded my head against the wall until my forehead bled. The women wept as they restrained me, and my father rushed in to hold me, his arms trembling uncontrollably.

Later, I stopped making trouble. Every time I did, my sister would cough blood, and my brother would break an arm.

The two bones in my chest seemed to have eyes.

When I hurt, they hurt too.

Father said the world outside was dangerous. Even the young son of a noble family could vanish into thin air when he went out alone.

These kidnappers could supposedly steal you with a touch: one tap, and your soul followed them away.

I knew he was trying to frighten me, but I still nodded obediently and sat back in the courtyard, watching the sky, the trees, and the ants move their belongings.

Wu Nanfeng’s little brother disappeared, so he had no time to fight Qi Yao over territory. He spent every day searching the city with his followers.

Qi Yao helped search too.

Later, they found an arm behind a ruined temple.

The old scar on it was the same burn Wu Nanfeng’s brother had suffered as a child.

He cried himself unconscious on the spot.

When Qi Yao climbed over the wall to find me, his face was ghostly white, his lips still trembling.

“Little Fence, the outside is terrifying… Wu Nanfeng’s brother was eaten by wild dogs. Don’t become a dog, whatever you do.”

I shuddered and hurriedly said, “Then I won’t be a dog.”

A few days later, a group of beggars was beheaded at the market gate for supposedly having gone mad.

But everyone knew they weren’t beggars. They were refugees who had slipped into the city.

Wu Nanfeng’s father went too. He took the executed people’s bodies away and fed them to his own dogs.

When the dogs had finished eating, he killed every one of them as well.

The story spread across half the capital. Everyone said Master Wu had gone mad.