Xiutu Meat - Chapter 2

I didn’t know what raw food she’d eaten. Whatever it was, she’d picked up a parasitic gu worm. It writhed inside my brain. The pain burned through my whole body, and I rolled on the ground.

Mother held me and cried. She cooled me with cold water again and again, watching the blue veins ripple all over my skin.

Father wanted to go to Lady Ruyi and beg for mercy.

“I’ll tell her you aren’t even my own child! I found you outside Xiutu. You aren’t from here. You shouldn’t have to suffer this. It should be me! Me!”

With one hand pressed to my head, I clung to Father’s leg with the other.

“You—can’t—go.”

He couldn’t go. He would die if he went!

The head of the last person who had tried to reason with Lady Ruyi—who had gone to the Immortal Lord’s shrine without permission to complain—was still hanging on the city wall.

I would never forget that man. Half his body had rotted away, bit by bit, but he couldn’t die. Every day, all he could do was repeat, “I was wrong. I shouldn’t have disrespected Lady Ruyi. I was wrong.”

Later, his body had filled with maggots and fallen off the wall. Only his head remained.

I couldn’t imagine Father’s head hanging there. I let go of him, took Mother’s scissors, and drove a blade straight into my own brain.

Then I pulled out the blue-and-red gu worm.

“You don’t have to go now.”

My parents stared at me, dumbfounded.

I felt much better, though. Maybe the worm had eaten the unnecessary, obedient part of my brain.

Father stared at my rapidly healing wound, then at the scissors I had crushed into a ball with my bare hand. It took him a long time to speak.

“Nanzhi, you… from now on, you have to be careful. Don’t hurt anyone. You’re a little… just a little bit stronger now…”

“What if someone hurts you?” I asked.

“We can reason with them.”

“And if they won’t listen? What if it’s that Lady Ruyi?”

Father’s face changed in terror. He hastily covered my mouth.

He was afraid some patrolling deity might hear us, from the air or wherever they were.

Last time, after punishing that mortal for complaining, the Immortal Lord had appeared in the sky, terribly disappointed.

“I have sheltered Xiutu from war and bandits for twenty years. Am I to be condemned merely for showing a little concern for my suffering wife? Your greed knows no bounds!

“Not one child who was meant to be born in Xiutu has gone unborn. Not one year you were meant to live has been taken away. You suffer a little now, but cause and effect turn through the cycle of rebirth. In your next lives, you will surely have wealth and honor! People must not be so greedy! So jealous! All Ruyi wants is a little good food and a peaceful life. Is that a crime?

“You have disappointed me deeply! Anyone who dares speak against Ruyi again will not be treated leniently!”

This time, he said he would return in just ten years.

Today was the day he was due to arrive.

It was also when Ruyi’s lackeys were busiest, choosing things for her. Father had taken a desperate chance to find my little brother and sister a way to live.

We had been caught anyway.

On the road back, my normally meek father looked sorrowfully at me and the little ones. Slowly, something fierce crept into his eyes.

He suddenly lunged at Ruyi’s lackeys.

But Father was too thin. The bones in his tall body were as brittle as dried cornstalks.

They overpowered him in no time.

When one of those lackeys raised an arrow to stab Father’s eye, I couldn’t hold back any longer.

I snapped both their necks with my bare hands. As their blood splashed over me, its sweet fragrance made me dizzy.

Something hazy and indistinct spread through my limbs.

I liked blood.

Father said he had found me in a mountain of corpses. I had been covered in blood, with hardly any teeth yet.

But my eyes had been frighteningly bright.

When he came near, I hadn’t cried. I had sunk my teeth into him. Thinking I was hungry, he had offered me his other hand to bite too and told me to take my time.

Then he had brought me home. It had taken him a long time to break me of biting people, before all my teeth came in.

What I really wanted to tell him was that I didn’t like biting people. I just liked blood.

It was a liking deep in my bones. The old man next door said only the mightiest demonic cultivators had a taste for blood.

They gained the power of the demon realm through living human sacrifices. Once every hundred thousand years, they began another cycle, growing up again from infancy.

Once they awakened, they brought ruin to the living and slaughtered people without number.

That was the first time Father had ever sworn at anyone. He cursed the old man for frightening little children all day.

“You’re not a demonic cultivator,” he told me. “You’re my daughter. Listen to your father. Understand?”

He put an ancestral bracelet of prayer beads around my wrist.

“Wear this, and you won’t hear those bad voices in your head anymore.”