Threads 479-Grudge 3

“Wanting to possess someone always looks ugly, doesn’t it?”

Ling Qi didn’t know about that. She couldn’t deny the validity of that clawing feeling which scratched at her thoughts from the mind of the woman she immersed in. Too real, too deep. It felt like it could drown her, just as easily as the void of gray, that yawning depression, nearly had.

Shu Yue was right. Even here, at the start of the birth of a grudge, she’d been unprepared. She had thought she had an inkling of what hate could be from her encounters with Yan Renshu. His poisoning of her little brother, that awful attack he had helped the ith plan on that town…

It wasn’t the same at all. Those had been anger, indignation, and perhaps other feelings. What she had never felt before was real, enduring hate.

She had never had the luxury, or so she had told herself. Her tormentors had never really had faces in her mind. She couldn’t hate the cold or the feeling of her empty stomach twisting in a knot. Well, she could, but not like this. She had never hated a person like this, not even the man who had driven her away from her mother in fear.

Ling Qi was far too much a frightened and cowering rat at heart to hate so deeply.

“Qi, I will thump you. You do not get to call yourself a coward.”

“Then, don’t talk about being ugly. That’s the last thing you could ever be, Sixiang,”

“It is, though. That I even thought of doing that, even with gramps juicing up my darker side, was gross. I don’t want to lock you up or lock you down. I want to fly with you. But it’s not so easy for humans is it? There was no happy ending where Ming Xia gets her guy, and he gets his job, and everyone skips off into the sunset. Feelings aint enough, down in the Real.”

Maybe with a better man, a man willing to live in mediocrity to marry a former prostitute, Ming Xia could have found a happy ending, but would the woman Ling Qi was immersed in fall for such a man in the first place? Ling Qi didn’t think she would. The same traits that attracted her were the same ones that made this outcome inevitable in the world that was. She didn’t believe even the ministries under the Duchess currently were really free of this kind of social maneuvering.

Family was the core. Every person sought advantage for their family, even if their family was just themself. She could see the core of Renxiang’s criticism of family being the root of corruption.

If Wei Jun had existed in today’s world, he might be able to rise a little further by himself, but eventually, he’d have to tie himself to someone higher. For Ming Xia, the only happiness she might have obtained was a life alone, growing up to replace the madam she now felt this hideous, all-consuming hate toward.

That was the worst part, being inside of her head, yet retaining perspective. Were the players switched around, she was certain that the same situation would have played out under Ming Xia’s authority.

That was the twisted nature of society. It molded every person who lived within it.

The first person Ming Xia killed was an accident. Down in the deep roots, even the plain clothes she had worn out to market were considered rich items, merely for being clean and new. On edge, hungry, tired, and still stewing in the hate that brought her here, she had stopped to rest and push away the feeling of her growling stomach.

A man had tapped on her shoulder. She spun and slapped him out of instinct. He was a mortal man, and she was a cultivator, even if one of only the meanest strength. Something cracked in his jaw, his head bounced off the side of the building, and he collapsed like a puppet with his strings cut. She fled.

It had panicked her in the moment, but after, in the shadowed and sheltered mud of an alleyway where she sat down to rest, it tantalized.

Strength. Power.

Her subconscious wove a leer onto the indistinct blur that was the dead man’s face in her memory and cobbled together a menacing intent. She would have been a victim again. This time, she had been able to act.

Ling Qi did not know what the man’s intent had been. Although she could perceive more than Ming Xia, she still could not see what was outside of the woman’s senses.

Ling Qi had glimpsed wispy gray and wrinkles. She had heard the clatter and splash of a breaking bowl full of something warm. The building Ming Xia had been leaning against, cradling her stomach, was an eatery. And Ming Xia had not been a paragon of strength in the first realm. She would have been barely stronger than a fit mortal man.

In the end, Ming Xia thought, what had been done to her was done because she was weak. They were going to pay. They were going to pay. Theyweregoingtopay.

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All of them would pay.

Blood spilled in the dust. A sacrifice, without intention. She was better than the dust, better than the cruelty done. She was a jewel, not a sow. She only needed to make it so.

You are so much greater. We hear you. We feel you. Your ambitions whisper to us in the dark. So. So. Worthy. Won’t you give us just a little blood, just one more drop? One more, O Jewel.

Ming Xia heard voices like buzzing wasps and whispering wings in the dark, the tittering of nightmare faeries.

“Yeah, we were pretty thick in the air here back then. Honestly, it’s amazing that reality held together as well as it did, with us wriggling our fingers in to claw apart every crack.”