Chapter 153 – Festival of Sins (V)

Chapter 153

Festival of Sins (V)

Dai Xiu stepped through a seeming nothing, yet she immediately felt her surroundings morph. The trees vanished in the blinding flash of light, and the dark, morose sensation of the orchard was replaced by a spattering of rays from the sky.

By the time she could see full shapes again, she found herself in a vaguely familiar garden; flowerbeds of roses and lilies decorated the four corners, while concentric squares housed several other forms of flowers, all the way to the center, where a majestic tree arose from the ground.

Its trunk would require at least three or four grown men to chain their arms together to wrap around it, and it went up for nearly forty feet. Despite having an amazingly thick canopy, rays of gold fell through it like a shower of light, basking everything that ought to have been in its shade.

Beyond the garden’s walls, however, she couldn’t quite make out the scenery; it was misty and hazy, like a painting that was never quite finished.

She stood at the heart of it, somewhat confused, until a garbled voice called out.

“Little one, you’re here again.” She spun around, ready to fight, but stopped. What met her was an ordinary-seeming figure, a man from the looks of it, with one exception: he… had no face.

Rather than the eyes and the nose and the lips, there was just skin.

She nearly cried out in horror at the sight, as it was perhaps the scariest thing she’d ever seen in her life: a faceless man! Wasn’t there a story, she recalled, that her Brother Hua told her a long time ago? About how there existed people without faces who would cut up faces of other people and wear them?

She trembled at the horror, a surge of Qi detonating throughout her body.

“AAAAGGHHHH!!!” She yelled and promptly flashed forward, leg extended, pulverizing the figure in front of her.

By the time she opened her eyes, she found herself back in the orchard.

And she was more confused than perhaps ever before in her life.

“… what?”

**

As soon as Wan Lan saw the tiny room scantly lit by a single torch, she understood the nature of this illusion.

She saw Madame sitting by the window, her hands busy sewing a shawl.

Wan Lan recalled a distant memory with fondness; she must have been eight, perhaps nine, on this day. It was becoming rather cold, with the winter drawing near. She never much minded the cold, however; rather, she preferred it to the scalding warmth of the summer.

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She loved snow, the way the flakes would pool together into tiny little mountains. She’d throw herself at them with glee, often bumping her head as she didn’t realize how shallow that ‘mountain’ truly was.

One day, she came back home from one of her ‘expeditions’. It really meant that she swung by the shops owned by the Madame or her friends, where she’d be spoiled rotten by the owners.