Chapter 14: Time to Fulfill Filial Duty

 Chapter 14: Time to Fulfill Filial Duty

A clap of thunder broke the stillness of winter.

Lang Jiuchuan lifted her eyes to the window. Snowflakes, sharp as needles, fell thickly, and the chill seeped in through the cracks, making one involuntarily shiver.

It was a bitter winter.

She bit into a steaming vegetarian bun, then raised the bowl of hot broth and drank it down. Warmth spread into her stomach, and she let out a long sigh of relief.

This was the first proper meal she had eaten since her rebirth.

The taste of food and the heat of it finally made her feel alive again.

To live—how precious it was.

Only by living could one savor the smoke and fire of the mortal world; only amidst that could one find hope.

Just like now—

The soup was hot, salted, flavorful, not the faint and tasteless waxy incense of the underworld.

If there had been meat, it would have been better still. Unfortunately, during mourning, abstinence was long required, and she must remain on a vegetarian diet.

Lang Jiuchuan swallowed the entire bun in one bite. The maidservant attending her could not help but glance over, surprised that the frail young lady had such an appetite. Yet at the same time… was there not a strange odor about her?

Catching sight of the girl covering her nose in the corner of her vision, Lang Jiuchuan blinked, lowered her head, and looked at herself.

Not good.

She had only just crawled out of a heap of corpses at the mass grave. After reaching the village estate, she had not even had the chance to cleanse herself before the people from the Marquis of Kaiping Manor came to fetch her. She had relied only on a Dust-Clearing Incantation. In truth, she had yet to properly bathe.

The stench of death—hardest of all to wash away.

She set down her chopsticks and said, “Bring water. I will bathe.”

The maid hesitated. It was still the period of mourning; others were keeping vigil before the spirit hall, yet the young lady wished to bathe—would this not invite gossip?

But when Lang Jiuchuan’s cool, clear gaze swept over her, the girl shuddered, folded her hands, bent in a curtsey, and hastily withdrew.

Half an hour later, Lang Jiuchuan stood before the great bronze mirror in the cleansing chamber, the orange candlelight flickering over her figure. She studied the reflection of the body… or rather, the corpse.

She would come of age next year, and though only in her teens, she had grown taller than most of her peers. Her frame was slender, her skin pale, delicate—hardly the look of someone who had suffered hardship. And yet, was that really so?

The calluses along her palms and fingertips—what did those say?

According to Nanny Wang, even though she had been left at the estate, she had always been under the protection of the Dowager Marchioness, with servants attending her. One of the older matrons had even been the dowager’s own trusted maid, but after falling ill and dying two years ago, Lang Jiuchuan had been left with no one close by.

The Dowager Marchioness herself had since fallen into senility and could no longer protect her. Nor had the Marquis’s household shown any intention of bringing her back. Thus, for these past years, she had been left to wither like a discarded orphan.

That was how she came to die alone in the wilderness. If the Marquis’s men had not happened to fetch her that day, would she have rotted away among corpses before anyone noticed?

With a wave of her hand, she withdrew the spell concealing her condition. The figure in the mirror instantly changed—two hollow sockets where eyes should be, the tendons of hands and feet severed and crusted with blood, the chest split open with one rib missing, the heart punctured by tiny holes as if blood had been drawn out.

“What grudge did you bear, that they wrought such cruelty on you?”

Her eyes burned red, a killing aura rising. The air in the chamber chilled in an instant.

Such malice—against a mere young girl?

As though echoing her fury, tears of blood welled from the eyeless hollows.

The aura burst forth.

With a crack, the bronze mirror shattered. Shards flew, slicing her skin.

“Ninth Young Lady?”

The maid outside, hearing the noise, called hesitantly.

Lang Jiuchuan swept her hand, covering herself once more with spellwork. In the fragments of the mirror, her form appeared whole again. Staring into the broken reflections, she murmured, “Since I now inhabit your body, I will see you avenged.”

She turned away. The candlelight flickered in the draft, and for an instant, a faint golden gleam flashed at her throat, vanishing so quickly it might have been a trick of the flame.

After donning her robes, she was already breathless. Even such small use of sorcery left this body on the verge of collapse—so frail.

Her gaze shifted toward the direction of the spirit hall. Her eyes narrowed.

It was time to fulfill her duty of filial piety.

(End of Chapter)