Chapter 279: A Long Time Ago

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The shattering of jade rings in Liu Jin’s ears and reverberates in his hands. A familiar weightless feeling takes hold of his body as his surroundings fade to white and a new scenery takes their place.

However, something is different.

Whenever he shatters one of Old Jiang’s memory jades, Liu Jin sees the memory stored inside from the perspective of his master. It is as if the two were sharing a body. As a result, Liu Jin has become somewhat familiar with the feel of Old Jiang’s old bones.

This is not it.

His height is wrong. His eyesight is wrong. His limbs are too small and feeble. There is no power in his muscles. He is… He is…

He is young.

“It stinks here,” Liu Jin hears himself say. Sure enough, his voice is that of a young boy.

“What did you expect?” Someone next to him, an older boy, asks him. He’s at least half a head taller, and his round belly protrudes from the dirty rags he calls clothes. “Can’t exactly smell like a field of flowers, can it?”

Old Jiang, a young Old Jiang, snorts.

“Got that right.”

The two boys are in a field of corpses.

Hundreds of bodies are scattered over the land. Some of them soldiers. Some of them not. A few hundred yards away, Liu Jin can make out the smoldering remains of what was formerly a city. Its great walls have been smashed open, and its insides lie ransacked. Crows and vultures fly in great numbers above their heads, and hundreds more have already landed to feast on the dead.

“They really made a mess of things,” his master says while patting down one of the bodies. As he does, Liu Jin notices how small and thin his arms are. Nothing more than skin and bones. His master rummages through the corpse’s clothes before moving to the next one. He clicks his tongue when one of the crows picks the same corpse as him and shoos it away. “You’d think they’d at least leave the city standing so they could use it.”

“Ah, that just shows how little you know, Brother Jiang,” the other kid says while rummaging through a different corpse.

They are looting them for valuables.

“Ah?” Jiang raises an eyebrow. “You’re suddenly an expert on war, Brother Wang?”

“At the very least, this Wang has lived five more years than you, so he knows five years worth of things more,” the now-named Wang replies. “Once a siege has gone long enough, the soldiers get so angry they’ll smash the city and everyone inside out of principle.”

“Seems wasteful,” Jiang says, kicking away another crow. This one caws and pecks at him, resulting in a brief scuffle between the two in which Jiang ultimately proves superior. “Dumb bird.”

“Try telling the angry soldiers that it’s wasteful,” Wang says. He suddenly grins and stands up, something shiny held between his fingers. “Look! Look! It’s a gold pendant! Gold! This is going to pay for at least five meals!”

Jiang snorts.

“Yeah, right. The old man is just going to say it’s tin and not worth more than a bag of rice that’s already gone bad and that we should thank him for being so nice, the greedy buzzard.” He spits to the side. A vulture hisses at him. “I’m not talking about you!”

“He would do that, wouldn’t he?” Wang deflates and sits on top of one of the soldiers. “It doesn’t make sense. We’re surrounded by so much stuff! We should be living like kings from selling all this metal to the blacksmiths!”

“We only got four arms between the two of us,” Jiang says, turning over another corpse. “That’s nowhere near enough to carry all the weapons and armors here. We can only take as much as we can. By the time we return, there’ll be bigger and stronger scavengers filling their pockets.”

“Oh, cruel fate,” Wang laments.

Jiang frowns deeply. “Things were better during the war.”

“Brother Jiang!” Wang stands up and almost trips over a corpse as he backs away. “You can’t say that!”

“Why not?” Jiang shrugs, trying to appear unconcerned, but Liu Jin can feel the beating of his heart. “I’m right, aren’t I? At least we were all fighting on the same side back then! Once the war stopped, we all turned on ourselves.”

Wang looks away. “Things have been bad lately.”

Jiang lets out a harsh laugh. “Just bad?! Five months ago, the White Boars took over the area. The Eleven Rings turned on them, and then the Azure Skies crushed them both. Now the Red Tribe are going around sacking every city! Everyone’s gone crazy!”

“It’s not all bleak, brother,” Wang says, trying to cheer both himself and Jiang. “I hear the Heavenly Sword are giving protection to all who ask!”

“Isn’t everything the Heavenly Sword’s fault anyway?”

“Brother!” Wang hisses at him, looking around in a panic. “You can’t say stuff like that! What if someone hears you!”

“Who is going to hear me? The crows?” Jiang laughs. “I don’t think they’re the type to tell on anyone.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised.”

Jiang and Wang immediately position themselves back to back, looking at their surroundings with wary eyes. Their cultivation, Liu Jin realizes, is at least in the Nascent Realm despite their seeming youth.

Alas, it does not matter here.

A tree of bones and flesh rises from the ground, scaring away the birds. Its branches wrap around the children, disabling them in the blink of an eye and leaving the two hanging upside down.

“A ghost! It’s a hungry ghost!” Wang cries. His face is red, and tears stream from his eyes. “Please have mercy on me, ghost! I always pay respect to my ancestors, and I have always been nice to old people!”

“Idiot! Does this feel like a ghost to you!” Jiang yells at his companion, desperately trying to break free from the bone branches with little success.

“How would you know what a ghost feels like, child?”

The person who captured the two children, a woman judging by the sound of her voice, suddenly becomes visible. She wears a dark cloak over her body. A white mask with dark horns but no eyes covers her face.

“Ghost! It’s a ghost! I knew it!” Wang yells. “Please forgive me, great ghost!”

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Wang desperately tries to bow his head as he speaks, but the effect is somewhat ruined by him being upside down.

“Should I forgive you?” the mysterious woman asks herself, putting a finger on the chin of her mask. Two large vultures land beside her. “You were saying quite outrageous things. Blasphemous things, even. Don’t you know humanity is a beautiful brotherhood?”

“As if!” Jiang yells, quite a bit less afraid than his friend. “You’re just another scavenger, aren’t you? Just take what you want! There’s no point paying attention to people like us.”

“A bold one, aren’t you?” The woman sounds amused. “You should at least try to show fear in situations like this. It’s only courteous.”

“What’s courteous about that?!” Jiang yells. “If you’re going to kill us, just be done with it! You’ll probably be doing us a favor! We haven’t eaten in weeks and have nowhere to go! You see that belly of his?” He jerks his head in Wang’s direction. “It’s all gas. There’s no fat there.”

“It’s true!” Wang cries. “This one can’t recall his last decent meal. My round belly is a lie!”

“We’re the sorriest, most pathetic bastards you have ever met!” Jiang yells. “The world doesn’t care if we live or die, so why should us? Even looking at us is a waste of your time!”

The masked woman is silent for a moment.

“That is no way for children to think of themselves. Not as a joke. Not even to save your own skins.”

She snaps her fingers. Jiang and Wang yell as the tree branches throw them up into the air, then scream when the bones of the tree open up like a malevolent maw. Flesh rises around it as it snaps shut around the two children. They scream at the top of their lungs as the flesh and bones cling to their skin, but Liu Jin feels what Jiang is too panicked to realize.

A distinct absence of pain.

Finally, with a sudden jerk, the tree throws them out into the ground, all covered in bile and other things.

“Am I dead?” Wang asks, touching his body. “Did I die? Is this hell?”

“You… You…You…” Jiang is torn between fear and fury. The words he wants to say cannot be uttered out of fear of what might happen to him if he does.

“Is that really any way to treat someone who just did you a favor?” The woman asks them.