Chapter 617: I Am Wronged (7)

Five dishes on a big platter.

She’d eaten evenly off each, and what was left on every plate was “this much,” so all told it added up to a full dish’s worth remaining.

She’d already ladled out tasting portions to the poison quack on the right and the adulterer on the left, and there was still a fair bit left.

“Since there’s some left anyway, can’t you give me a little more? Ah—are you maybe curious about the others’ stories?”

“If it’s leftovers anyway, be a little generous. Who else are you going to give it to but us? You going to pass plates down the line? Yeah, right. Whatever else they are, the bastards in here are absolute degenerates when it comes to food.”

Left and right were still eyeing Qing’s leftovers. In Repentance Hall they might yield in other things, but never food.

“Pass plates, my ass. Already forgetting? My door is open.”

Qing swung the cell door and stepped out into the corridor.

“Alright, you all heard me. Let’s see... looks like I can let about three more try a bite. So—Dongpo Pork, and the white-flower steamed—”

“Me—me! Give it to me!” “Over here! Over here! I’ll talk!” “There are people in back too, newbie!” “Great one! Me! I’ll speak!”

Before she could finish listing the leftovers, the hall erupted with pleas from every direction, and Qing’s words jammed in her throat.

And of course—bang, bang, bang!—iron bars rattling.

Frantic gestures, anything to draw her eye.

Even if she’d promised to let a few live, the reaction wouldn’t have been this fierce.

“Hm. What to do.”

Qing picked up a plate and click-clacked her steps for show.

She paced from the entrance side to the rear, looking over the prisoners.

Up front, when she’d first come in, not one man had clean karma; in back—same.

Five years of digging into crimes, and if a case was still ambiguous they were released outright—under that regime, it would be harder to find someone who truly was “wronged.”

Seven cells to a side, with one empty.

Excluding Qing, twelve men in total.

Second from the far end, right-hand row.

An old man with hair white as snow sat unmoved amid the clamor, legs folded, projecting weight.

What’s this old one’s deal—putting on lofty airs? With your core smashed, what does sitting cross-legged prove?

Or is this a tactic?

Everyone else is clamoring “me, me,” and he sits alone like this, so the eye is drawn.

If not for karma, it would cut a fitting figure—but Qing’s eyes see more than most.

“What, old man. Too old to have an appetite?”

“I’ve no business with you. Go.”

Mm. What’s with the gravitas?

“What is this old man? Anyone care to explain?”

“I—I can tell you.”

“That one’s the Butcher Demon! So—thirty years ago—”

“You ####—no sense of marketplace ethics, pulling your pants down before you’ve haggled!?”

Butcher Demon?

Ximen Surin hadn’t made her memorize the captured demonheads, so of course Qing didn’t know him.

But she knew how epithets worked.

“Butcher Demon”? Two characters?

Two-character epithets are a special class—titles granted to those truly acknowledged by all of the martial world—a nationwide master.

Meaning: among the demonheads who once terrorized the Central Plains, this one was a great demonhead.

So what.

Does a two-character epithet mean you won’t demean yourself by begging for food?

Let’s see about that.

Qing’s lips curled.

“Butcher Demon! Ooh—I’m so ter-ri-fied my hands are shaking—oops. Slipped.”

Splat. A chunk of Dongpo Pork smacked down rich and sticky in front of the old man.

He opened his eyes and looked at the piece that had fallen before him.

Qing’s beyond-human eyesight did not miss the old man’s throat bobbing as he swallowed.

“My, my. Sorry. Your aura was so overwhelming I trembled without thinking. But what’s fallen is fallen. Surely the world-famous Butcher Demon won’t pick things up off the floor like a dog or a worm. There’s a privy out back; clean your own cell. Sorry about the drop.”

With a face that was not sorry at all, Qing turned and went to the opposite bars.

One voice there had been particularly servile—the one Qing had marked as her pick.

“Ah! Great one, are you curious about my story!? Of course. I’ll tell you as much as you wish. But—if I tell it...”

“I keep my bargains. Lately I wonder if there’s any need to—but. You want to eat, right?”

“Heh-heh, my name is Pal Daehak. Ohh—great one, anyone can tell at a glance—you are truly a beauty. How can your eyes be so large, so deep, so limpid—”

“Enough. How’d you get caught?”

“Despite how I look, I was running a small sect and—uh—doing a little business moving goods. Trouble is, those goods were prohibited by state law.”

“You broke state law openly? What, were you selling salt?”

“No-no-no, nothing like that. A little opium. But opium isn’t some dire substance—everyone moves a little. Tobacco’s banned by law too, and the apothecaries all sell it.”

“Opium? Hm.”

Qing’s eyes narrowed.

So this bastard was a drug peddler.

Still, it’s a bit gray.

Opium’s sale to commoners is banned by law, but it isn’t exactly hard to get.

Apothecaries carry opium powder as a medicinal; tip them right and you can get it in cakes.

Right on cue, the gloss came in:

“What he sold wasn’t opium—it was ‘A-Breath-Delight,’ a refined smoke you burn and inhale. Famous for driving people mad.”

Not just opium—a fully refined hard drug.

“It wasn’t ‘that kind of thing.’ I’d added a little medicinal for those already gravely ill. Some people bought it and misused [N O V E L I G H T] it—how could I police all that?”

“You know how many opium dens he dug across Gansu and Shaanxi? The authorities endured and endured, then put out reward posters. Word was he was one of the ten richest in the Central Plains—sent wagonloads of gold to the yamen out of ‘sincerity.’ Even so, it was beyond what they could overlook.”

“Mm. A real piece of ####.”

Qing nodded.

In the Central Plains, a lot of illegality—even killing a few people—can be offset with gold.

And yet this was beyond indulgence?

And the gall of it—he still says he’s wronged.

“It’s the buyers who misused it; how is that my fault”—the classic dodge.

Either way, she pays for the story with food.

Now—did that Butcher Demon old man pick up the Dongpo Pork or not?

Checked: still cross-legged; the pork, still there.

Mm. Slightly disappointing.

After she ladled out dishes for the two story-fees, the platters were scraped clean.

Qing gathered the emptied plates and returned meekly to her own cell.

Then the poison quack sidled up with a murmur.

“E—excuse me.”

“Mm? What.”

“Those plates... here, we usually—ah—clean the plates a bit before returning them.”

He stared at the empty dishes and swallowed.

Qing’s brow twitched.

This bastard—does he want to lick the plates?

For the experiment, Qing slid a wide serving dish toward the poison quack’s side.

His face lit up.

The dish couldn’t pass the bars crisscrossed into a grid, so he stretched both arms into Qing’s cell, seized the plate, and pressed it flat to the iron.

Mm. Even I don’t lick plates.

Sure, sometimes, hungry, I scrape them so clean it amounts to the same—but Qing does not stick out her tongue and do the dishwashing in front of others.

Even back home, we didn’t do that.

With the bars between them, the poison quack hid his face behind the dish.

Qing clicked her tongue at the sheer squalor of it—then from behind came another audible swallow.

“What, Adulterer—you want to lick a plate too?”

“Ahem. Those Kunlun warder brats only ever serve bland crap. ####. Nothing salty or sweet—nothing that makes a man lose his mind.”

Boiled chicken and dumplings do make for a mild menu.

It’s well-prepared, but they don’t serve anything stimulating.

No wonder they went rabid over the food.

They’d said eating was the only pleasure in Repentance Hall; add in a lifetime of bland fare, and—yeah.

“Hmph. I only handed him one to see if he’d really lick it like a dog.”

The poison quack froze a beat.

Only a beat—then the plate resumed its up-down, left-right motions: pride be damned, he was going to keep licking.

“If something goes out, something should come back, no?”

“Mm. A story do? The one next to me is called ‘Small-Life Executioner’—a heartless demonhead—”

“You rotten ####—why are you hawking my story? Shut it. Now.”

The neighbor—Small-Life Executioner—barked and glowered.

The Adulterer didn’t care.

“He’s the one who cut down anyone who laughed at him for laughing, and beat to death anyone who cried for crying.”

“Why?”

“Come on—first day in the rivers and lakes? You think there aren’t countless freaks who get hooked on killing? Why would he need a reason? He did it because it was fun.”

And if you kept a straight face, would he spare you?

Then he’d tickle you until you laughed.

If you didn’t tickle, he’d crush your bones, dunk you in water—any torture to make you cry.

In the end, he couldn’t rest easy unless the caught one died.

“He split open the laughing one’s mouth and hung him up. Gouged out the crying one’s eyes and hung those. Pull that #### and you think you won’t get caught?”

Qing grunted.

“So there you have it. Someone who became a cripple with no room to whine about ‘wronged.’ Got anything to say?”

“Ha. Unbelievable. You think I’m some murderer? I’m a chivalrous man, a chivalrous man. I only killed those who deserved it.”

“Eh.”

“Of course, can any human endeavor be perfect? I made a few mistakes. But the trash I took out far exceeds a few slips. Balance the ledger and you’d have to call me a chivalrous man.”

Qing double-checked with the Adulterer.

“That true?”

“Bull####. When he strung people up, he scrawled ‘charges’—killed one for shitting by the roadside; a gouging merchant; a physician who didn’t make a house call; a thug rude to an elder. He picked easy marks, and none of it was a hanging offense.”

Mm. Figures.

With three serving dishes left, Qing harvested three more stories through her chatty flanks.

Counting the Butcher Demon, she’d collected nine pleas of “wronged”—not one man “not wronged.”

From “I have no sin,” to “I have sins, but not enough to deserve being crippled and caged,” to “I only followed orders—those above me are fine and I got my tail cut,” and so on.

No grave without excuses.

Still, whether out of the mentality that “I can’t be the only bastard,” or what—after the very subjective self-defense came the objective denunciations, so the truth wasn’t hard to sort.

Three men’s stories were still unsold.

At this point, it’s all the same.

Sure to be #### and sure to be “wronged.”

Still, maybe not—so you listen and see. And it’s not hard to listen.

Dinner will come anyway.

First I’ll shake the stories loose; then I’ll let them taste the dishes.

It’s a petty tactic, but for now boosting my inner work comes first.