The laughter drifted through the mill like wind through dry bones — uncertain, coming from every direction at once, thin and terrible, seeping into the marrow.
Then, like the echo of a long-ignored grievance, a handful of low, sorrowful sighs followed, each one heavier than the last. In the silence of the ruined mill they sounded so clear they made the heart falter.
An Peng was frozen with terror, her body shaking as if stricken with fever. There was nowhere to cling to, no one to steady her. Zhang Yushu could not bear to look at the pale skull again. Instinct made him try to cover his daughter’s eyes — but Xiaoxiao sat perfectly still, blinkless, staring directly at the bones. Her dark, shining eyes were unnervingly calm.
Then, without warning, she freed herself from his hand and walked slowly toward An Peng.
Everyone’s attention snapped to the little girl. An Peng stared at her, bewildered. From the day she was born Xiaoxiao had always seemed to belong to Zhang Yushu more than to her. The child’s temperament was the opposite of An Peng’s loud, indulgent manner. From early on there had been something in Xiaoxiao — an age-old chill, a reserve that made the mother’s skin crawl in ways she could never explain.
An Peng had tried to break it. She’d bent her pride and brought newly made dresses and delicate toys, hoping to tease out the child’s dependence, to find the warm, trusting look any infant would give a mother. But Xiaoxiao merely watched, clear-eyed, like a deep, bottomless pool that reflected no heat. All An Peng’s efforts felt clumsy and useless.
And yet now, in this rotten, death-stinking mill, at the nadir of her fear, that distant child came forward and — to An Peng’s amazement — reached out those small, pale hands.
All thoughts of coldness and distance vanished. “My good girl…” A surge of blood-knowledge, of instinctive warmth, flooded An Peng. She pulled the child to her, burying her face in the thin nape, greedily drinking the illusion of comfort and safety.
Then a voice, low and icy, pressed close to her ear — not a child’s voice, but a woman’s laugh, hollow and murderous.
“An Peng… you’ve finally come to find me.”
It was not a playful taunt. Every syllable seemed squeezed out of a grave, laden with old grievances. The sound made An Peng’s spine seize; her scalp prickled, every hair standing to attention.
“Ah—!” She screamed, as if scalded, throwing the child away with savage force.
“You… what are you?!” The question tore from her in a warped pitch, her finger trembling as she pointed at the little figure now knocked to the floor.
Xiaoxiao rose slowly, her movements unnaturally measured for a child. When she lifted her face, the once-innocent features were twisted into a smile that mixed endless hatred with cold mockery.
“Don’t you recognize me?” she tilted her head, and those dead, fathomless eyes fixed on An Peng like a blade.
Zhang Yushu stood like a man struck dumb, every thought evaporated. The mill held its breath. Then Shen Cuiyu’s voice, cold and precise, cut through the suspended panic like a drawn sword.
“You’re Shi Qiu, aren’t you.”
The name fell like thunder. The scattered clues snapped into place.
As soon as An Peng had ripped the red cloth from the altar, the protective array the Taoist had set up had been damaged. The crucial truth: that altar had never truly pacified Shi Qiu’s hatred. It had been a crude, temporary trap—baited with incense and offerings to keep her spirit bound, neither allowing vengeance nor final rest.
For seven years Shi Qiu’s soul had been cramped into a clay figure, watching the people who doomed her thrive in finery while she and her household were destroyed, buried under the cold millstone with no one to speak for her. No wonder her hatred had settled into her bones.
When the array was broken, Shi Qiu did not reveal herself at once. Fearful of being crushed again by talismans, she waited for the perfect moment. That moment came when An Peng’s later pregnancy ended in a stillbirth. The dead fetus — a body without breath — was an unguarded vessel. Shi Qiu abandoned the cracked clay shell and slipped, silent as soot, into that tiny hollow of a body. She became, in the eyes of the living, the daughter who slept in An Peng’s arms.
An Peng had smashed the clay figure thinking she’d buried the past forever, never knowing the real avenger had already insinuated itself into her blood and days.
Xiaoxiao’s chronic sleepiness had been because that pure young body could hardly bear seven years of compressed resentment. Only when the little body fell into deep sleep could Shi Qiu’s soul peel free and appear in her original vengeful form to seek out An Peng.
Now the child — or rather the soul within her — stared at An Peng with a hatred colder than winter and spoke, each word full of accusation.
“You haven’t been able to forget me all these years, have you, An Peng? I was always the one you could abuse. I was your contemptible servant, unfit to be near you. I was the one you killed. I was the one you ruined.”
“ I tried so hard to get away from you. Why won’t you let me go?!” Her voice grew to a cry. Then, with a sound like a dam breaking, pure, black resentment burst from the small body, a thick fog of anger that swallowed the light around them.
The mill’s heavy door slammed shut with a metallic boom as if the world itself had been divided in two.
The small body went limp on the floor. Before An Peng rose a ghostly girl, hair clinging wet to cheeks and throat. Her face was pale and hollowed; a gaping hole marred her temple where dark blood welled and ran, staining half her face and dripping from her chin into nothing, sending ripples through the air. Her neck hung at an unnatural angle. Both eyes were milky and sightless, fixated on An Peng with a murderous, unclosing stare.