Li Yunxian watched as the three men returned. They had endured their injuries to bring back some food—wild rabbits, pheasants, wild vegetables, and wild fruits—filling two large back baskets to the brim.
A group of children watched the haul, their eyes lighting up. They crowded around the men, cheering and jumping with joy.
“Wow, is this edible?”
“I saw this before! It looked so scary. How are we supposed to eat it?”
“Sanli fruit! My favorite sanli fruit!”
The three burly men laughed heartily, naturally soothing the children as they assigned them tasks.
“Alright, alright, stop making a fuss. Those who need to pick vegetables, get to it. And get these rabbits and chickens processed.”
The children, big and small, gave a cheer. Each took their assigned job and set to work diligently.
Being village children, none of them were pampered. Even a three-year-old knew how to fetch water and carry firewood.
The scene looked almost like a peaceful, beautiful moment frozen in time. Li Yunxian sat on the eaves, quietly watching.
She watched for about ten days.
The three newcomers needed to heal their wounds, and the village children needed elders to look after them.
Furthermore, since there were few people here and even the creepy anomalies rarely appeared, the days passed quite peacefully.
But it could not stay peaceful forever.
Amidst the children’s constant chatter about when their families would return, the three men’s injuries gradually healed.
Even the most seriously wounded one found his gashes scabbed over, thanks to the medicinal herbs they had scavenged.
As for any other lingering illnesses, if ten days had not fixed them, they likely would not be fixed anytime soon.
Thus, they changed back into the clothes they arrived in and picked up their modified woodchoppers.
The ropes securing the blades to the handles had been reinforced, and the curled edges of the metal had been sharpened once more.
They were sharp enough to blow a hair across the blade and see it part.
The three men grinned, patting the heads of one child after another. Finally, they turned to Fu Ling and said, “Scare Girl, after we leave, you make sure to keep a good eye on these little brats.”
“Don’t forget the knife techniques we taught you. They’re quite useful for killing chickens and rabbits!”
Before Fu Ling could respond, the other children grabbed the men’s legs, crying and shouting for them not to go.
The three laughed loudly, prying them off one by one. “If we don’t go, how will your parents and aunts ever come back?”
“We’re going to rescue them!”
Thinking of their families, the children wavered through their tears. They loosened their grip but still sobbed, “Then you have to come back with our mommy and daddy.”
The men played with the children’s hair one last time, looking cheerful. “Yes, yes, yes. We’ll come back. Everyone will come back.”
“You must also remember what I taught you.”
The children nodded, stumbling through the lessons they had recently learned—what was edible and what was not, which herbs were for emergencies, and so on.
The three men nodded in approval and asked, “And what else?”
The children furrowed their brows in deep thought. They answered with uncertainty, “If I have no home, the world is my home?”
“If my family dies, the world shall mourn?”
The three men burst into laughter. “That’s right! If they want us dead, we’ll make those high-born nobles die with us! Hahaha!”
None of the children understood what those words meant. They watched with innocent, bewildered eyes as the three men walked out of the village and disappeared from their sight.
***
Li Yunxian reappeared then, landing in front of Fu Ling. She couldn’t help but complain, “With just those three, trying to rob a government office… I doubt they’ll ever return.”
As her voice fell, Li Yunxian noticed that Fu Ling seemed startled, her whole body jolting. It was as if she had only just noticed Li Yunxian’s presence.
Seeing this reaction, Li Yunxian’s brow furrowed. ‘…Have you been assimilated by the past?’
Fu Ling pressed her fingers to her temples to nurse a headache.
When she first entered the past, Fu Ling remembered that she was the Fu Ling of the spirit fusion stage. But as she stayed in the past longer and longer, she gradually began to merge with it.
It was as if a force was making her slowly forget the future, leaving only the memory that she was Fu Xiamei of the Fu family.
As a child raised in a remote village, Fu Ling originally didn’t have a formal name. “Fu Ling” was a name given to her later by her master.
“Yes,” Fu Ling said, nodding slowly. She sighed with emotion. “This place has too many hidden killing moves.”
If she really forgot herself and only considered herself Fu Xiamei, she was afraid she would stay trapped in this marker forever, slowly destroying herself.
“It’s a good thing you came in too,” Fu Ling said, feeling a sense of relief.
Li Yunxian, however, did not share that view. She thought for a moment and said, “Taking shortcuts isn’t necessarily a good thing.”
“If immersion is a requirement of this place and you don’t complete the trial on your own, I’m afraid problems will arise later,” Li Yunxian said, drawing from her own experience.
Fu Ling was stunned for a moment, but she quickly agreed with Li Yunxian’s logic. Indeed, this was her trial. How could she rely on someone else?
“I understand,” Fu Ling said. “If I ultimately cannot free myself, please step in to wake me up then.”
Li Yunxian naturally would not refuse such a request.
After making her choice, Fu Ling merged back into the environment of the village once more.
She gradually stopped seeing Li Yunxian. She led the children in a daily struggle for food, ensuring everyone lived a life where they were hungry one day and starving the next.
Fu Ling, who had only studied knife techniques with those three men for a few days, was truly a bit lacking in skill.
This wasn’t really her fault—she was a body cultivator, and her adaptation to her old, weak body was quite poor. She couldn’t control her strength very well.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to endure these days for long.
Less than ten days later, at dusk one day, a small group of people of various ages, dressed in tattered rags and stumbling along, slowly approached their small village.
A child sitting at the village entrance struggling to clean wild vegetables spotted them first. His eyes instantly lit up. “Mommy!”
Hearing that cheer, children working in other parts of the village popped out one after another, running toward the group as fast as their legs could carry them.
“Daddy!”
“Sister! Brother!”
They called out to their loved ones, but as they ran closer, they saw the wretched state of the survivors and…
“Auntie, where is my mommy?”
“Second Uncle, where is my brother?”
“Where are Uncle Dagou, Uncle Dan, and Uncle Cai?”
Facing these questions, no one could answer.
“Go back first. We’ll talk once we’re back,” one of the returnees said, their voice exhausted.
However, after returning, those people did not answer the children’s questions. Instead, they asked in return, “Uncle Dagou, Uncle Dan, Uncle Cai? Who are they?”
The children’s attention was quickly diverted. They prattled on to their families about everything that had happened over the past few days.
The returning villagers had complicated looks in their eyes, but they still did not answer the children’s doubts.
However, from the reactions of these villagers and the whispers they shared behind the children’s backs, Li Yunxian had already pieced together the truth.
The Sang Army had previously passed through the town to which this village belonged and looted it entirely. After the sang army left, the “noble lords” returned.
Though they weren’t the same lords as before, new lords were still lords. They also wanted luxurious mansions, gold, and silver.
Thus, the corners and outskirts that the Sang Army hadn’t even bothered to visit were targeted by these lords.
The Sang Army didn’t have the time or energy to manage these small places, but these new lords did!
So, people came from the town-sealing city and dragged away the village’s property, grain, and people, regardless of age. Only these few children who had managed to hide were left behind.
Fu Ling was originally supposed to be taken as well, but she had been so sick that she lost consciousness. Her sickly appearance looked as if it might be contagious, so she was simply discarded.
The reason Fu Ling had woken up in the middle of the village wasn’t because she had gone out to find medicine as she had initially deduced; she had simply been abandoned as trash.
These abducted villagers had been taken to the city to perform lethal corvée labor. If they weren’t diligent or efficient enough, they were brutally beaten.
Those lords hated them deeply. Wasn’t it people like them who made up the sang army? If the lords couldn’t defeat the Sang Army, couldn’t they at least vent their rage on these people?
As a result, even though only ten days had passed, the casualties were heavy.
Of the thirty-some people who had originally left, only about twenty returned. Every single one of them was covered in wounds.
But they had returned nonetheless.
And the reason they were able to return…
The villagers looked on with complicated expressions, remembering the three names the children had mentioned.
Those three men, carrying woodchoppers or bamboo poles picked up from who-knows-where, had charged into the city shouting the slogans of the sang army.
“Cursed dog officials! How dare you still bully our comrades! Everyone, kill them together!!” the three had shouted.
Then… it was as if everyone’s hands had moved involuntarily.
The result was good. It was just that the first three who had charged at the front—the ones whose names no one originally knew—had fallen.
They were at the very front. They had fought the lords with their lives, their eyes bloodshot with rage.
Those arrogant lords had initially looked at the three men with disdain. But once those three killed a lord in a desperate gamble, others were emboldened. The remaining lords and their dog legs were so terrified they fled in a panic.
The city was left with no one in charge again. That was how the villagers managed to return alive.
“If I have no home, the world is my home; if my family dies, the world shall mourn?” someone murmured, repeating the words they had heard from the children.
At that time, those three seemed to have been shouting such slogans as well. But no one had heard them clearly then.
Now they heard them clearly.
But…
Looking at the children, the villagers swallowed their thoughts. They just wanted to live a good life. They didn’t know anything about the sang army or whatever.
Now that the lords in the village had been driven away, life should be able to start over, right?
But it didn’t.
Another month passed, and more people came to the village. This time, the visitors wore clean cloth and held long spears and halberds.
They claimed to be subordinates of some general, here to suppress rebels.
They wanted conscripts. They wanted grain. They wanted valuables.
The meager supplies the villagers had finally managed to bring back from the city were once again looted.
The children lost their fathers again, their uncles were gone, and even their older brothers were taken away. The village was filled with the sound of wailing.
Li Yunxian’s gaze fell on Fu Ling.
Her father had died the last time he was taken to build houses for the lords. This time she was relatively lucky; her younger brother, two years her junior, was considered a young man now.
He had been taken last time, but this time he had learned to be smart and hid well enough that he wasn’t found.
Her mother was there, her grandmother was there, and her brother was there. The surviving family members were still present.
The days continued to pass one by one.
Then, people came again.
This time, they were looking for people to build a great bridge, saying some high official was coming. It didn’t matter if the village had no adult men; after all, it was just bridge-building.
Just carry however much wood your strength allowed and add more bodies to the pile.
They intended to take every single person left in the village.
The villagers recalled the last time they were taken to build houses. Screams of agony filled the air.
And then…
Fu Ling stared blankly at the kitchen knife she had picked up at some unknown moment. The blade was stained with blood.
It was the blood of the official who had come to seize people.
Seeing their fallen comrade, the other officials were stunned. The familiar scene made them recall the fear from less than a year ago.
And it wasn’t just the officials who remembered. The shift in atmosphere happened in a single instant.
The village was dyed in a shade of blood.
The officials who had come to arrest them all lay on the ground, lifeless.
When it was over, someone asked in a trembling voice, “Now… what do we do now?”
Fu Ling was also trembling and lost, but the mother beside her stepped forward.
“Is it a crime that we want to live?”
“It is they who will not let us live!”
“If I have no home, the world is my home; if my family dies, the world shall mourn!!”
“I will join the sang army!”