Chapter 217 — Homeland

Her steps had been light at first, but somehow they suddenly slowed. Her delicate brows drew faintly together; deep in her heart, something important seemed to have flashed past, and yet she could not catch hold of it.

Deep within her memories, something seemed quietly to be waking.

She stopped and stood still. The scene just past replayed swiftly in her mind, and the woodcutters' words echoed once more: "That one there, you'd best not take. Years ago it was a lively village too, but it's all ruined now—nobody left."

"There used to be a temple in that village—they say it was very efficacious."

Lu Xueling suddenly gave a violent start. A moment later, she slowly turned around and once again looked toward that weed-choked path, seemingly already swallowed by the lingering shadows of time.

Ten years—how much could change in ten years?

A face, a mood, or a hatred?

No one can truly understand another—and sometimes, not even oneself. But this one road alone had truly, utterly changed.

For there was no longer a road here.

The wild grass grew thick and lush, year after year, covering over the history of the past, bearing witness to time's heartlessness. Until a solitary figure in white quietly drew near the dust-sealed place.

Among the weeds, broken walls and ruined remnants could still faintly be made out. In the breeze that met her face there was long since no trace of that old smell of blood; there was only the faintly green, fresh fragrance of wild grass.

She passed through one ruined doorway after another, gazing at the stone steps and walls that leaned every which way, quietly mantled in moss. Those smiles and laughter that had once been, the happiness that had once been possessed—had they all scattered with the wind?

Lu Xueling's face was faintly pale, and her slender, delicate hands gripped Tianxuan more tightly. In this abandoned village, it was as though someone's gaze were quietly fixed upon her.

She even had a feeling of being unable to breathe.

Yet she never stopped walking, only paced on in silence, past every house. Once upon a time—who still remembered the people here?

Until she saw that ruined temple.

Unlike its surroundings, the ground around that long-shattered temple, for some reason, bore not a blade of grass. To call it a house was perhaps less apt than to call it a few pillars; only on the few shattered stones still lying scattered on the ground could the vague shapes of divine images be made out, betraying what had once stood here.

Lu Xueling slowly walked over.

No wild grass, no moss—everything here seemed out of place with its surroundings. For what reason, no one knew; even the grass that grew so stubbornly was unwilling to enter this place.

Or was it that the old resentments and grievances had all gathered here?

Then in the dead of night, would someone weep and whisper, pouring out the past?

Lu Xueling whipped around—at some point, tears had come glinting into her eyes.

Liu Miao Village!

This place, long since swallowed by oblivion.

She sat down quietly in a corner, motionless, as if listening in silence to something, or feeling something.

Wind came from afar, stirring her black hair where it drifted softly at her temples.

Sun rose and moon set, morning and dusk, day and night, dawn and evening; the stars shifted in their courses.

Above the firmament white clouds shifted like grey dogs, vanishing like shooting stars. Time flowed like water, and in the end departed so resolutely, never pausing for any soul.

From somewhere in the distant weeds came the sound of insects. Apart from the wind, it was the sound most full of life in this place. Perhaps in another ten years, this place would become a thriving settlement again?

Or perhaps it would remain forever just as it was.

And who cared?

Three days—for three days Lu Xueling had sat quietly in this desolate place. The world's constraints, the weighty charge—it turned out that only in a place like this was there room to breathe and to flee.

Quietly—let it be an indulgence, just this once; let herself hide.

But in the end, she still had to go.

Her white robes stirred; she had come silently, and now Lu Xueling's figure reappeared, leaving that ruined little temple, passing once more through the doorways of the little houses beneath the crumbling walls. Somehow, as she looked at this place, her gaze seemed already to hold a deep, reluctant tenderness.

In the distant sky, clouds drifted; among the faint layers of cloud, as if brushed by the wind, a thin white line quietly streaked across the heavens. Lu Xueling cast one last look at these houses, turned, and departed, never looking back. That figure in fluttering white walked quietly away through the weeds into the distance.

Above the firmament, the white clouds remained silent as ever.

Only from within the clouds a swift glimmer of light suddenly darted forth, soundless and fast, trailing a few strands of clinging white cloud that scattered away in the air. Soon the light came down upon this abandoned little village.

"Zhizhi, zhizhi."

That familiar monkey cry—the grey-furred, three-eyed monkey leaped to the ground and looked all about. Plainly this wild place pleased it far more than the mountain belly of Huqi Mountain. In a moment the monkey had bounded off of its own accord and burrowed into the thick weeds, who knew where to play.

Hades stood silently at the center of the village, his face expressionless.

Except in his eyes, where the weariness and pain could not be concealed.

He stared blankly at everything around him, slowly turning. The places he had once known so well surfaced one by one in his mind; even the wind that came from afar carried a trace of a familiar scent.

The fragrance of his homeland's soil.

And far behind him, beyond the dense weeds, that white, somewhat lonely figure at last vanished into the distance.

He walked slowly on. The same things that had met Lu Xueling's eyes appeared before him as well: broken walls, mossy stone steps, and at last that shattered, ruined little temple.

But he did not walk over to it. He only gazed at the little temple from afar, lost in a daze. It was there that a young boy's whole life had been changed!

He stood a long while and looked a long while, but in the end he did not go over. After a long time he turned, trod through the wild grass, and walked along the path where the spacing between houses could still barely be made out. He walked very slowly, as if every step were immeasurably heavy, until before the third house in the second row he stopped.

It was a house no different from any of the other ruined ones: the same fallen doors and windows, the same desolate abandonment; even the moss on its stone steps seemed a little thicker than on the others.

Hades's lips began to tremble faintly. For the first time in many years, tears welled in his eyes beyond all restraint. Slowly, he knelt before the little house and buried his head deep in the earth before it, in the wild grass.

What the wind faintly carried was a choked, struggling whisper: "Father. Mother."

He Yin City.

After the catastrophe of the beast demons, He Yin City had been gravely weakened, with countless dead and wounded; but after calamity passes, life must go on. People coming into the city from all directions, and refugees returning home, gradually brought this old town back to life.

On the busiest of its great streets, the finest tavern in all He Yin City was still the Shanhai Yuan, the very place where Zhang Qingyue had stayed when he first came down the mountain in those years. Though because of the calamity it seemed far quieter than it had ten years before—after all, people who had escaped death had little heart left for feasting and drinking.