Chapter 789: Bloodline (23)

Qing remembered the Ashiya she’d seen running the Heavenly-Maiden Temple event—if she had to put it into words, the “Evil-Scum Recycling Fair.”

The heretical mantra that had echoed for the entire event. The dance. The dagger moving like she was possessed.

It looked like random scraping, but it was slaughterwork so experienced it was almost obscene—done so that blood wouldn’t spray wastefully from small vessels to large ones.

If it hadn’t been a situation where they were butchering a beast wearing human skin, Qing would’ve drawn her blade on the spot and declared there was no forgiving sorcery like this.

That evil pressure—wasn’t it the aura of a woman who carried the dignity of a sect master?

She was going to ask about Yeonsul’s resurrection rite, but the imperial family’s stance on Yeonsul was basically, “There was no such thing, forget it ever happened.”

Still, Ashiya would’ve realized one thing for sure.

That the imperial family needed Qing.

Mm. First, read the room.

If Qing said she wasn’t here with hostility, that she was just curious—

But even if they were burying it as “nothing happened,” openly admitting that there had been a flaw in the rite she performed was another matter.

Would she really answer cleanly...?

Thinking that, Qing stopped before the door.

The moment Gabiya slid the door open with a rasp, Qing’s lower field of view filled with a shiny crown of a head, fully exposed.

A torso plastered flat to the filthy floor—Central Plains culture was a shoes-on indoor culture. Two legs spread at perfect right angles.

Toes and knees, hips, belly, chest, forehead, elbows, and the backs of both hands pressed hard into the ground, like they’d been nailed there—

A textbook full-body prostration.

Then, with absurd skill, she wriggled forward, kissed the tip of Qing’s shoe, and clamped both arms around her ankle as she screamed,

“I was wrong! I committed a sin worthy of death!”

A clean answer, my ass.

From the very first meeting, it was a groveling confession, shoved into Qing’s face.

“Your Highness, please, please—just once, grant mercy, we—we, I, this Heavenly Maiden, this lowly bitch will tell you everything, yes? Please, please, mercy—”

Mm. That voice. Yeah, that had to be her.

Ashiya rubbed her cheek against Qing’s shoe like she was going to polish it to a shine, begging.

Unfortunately, shoes in the Central Plains weren’t made of a material you could actually buff to gloss, so it couldn’t serve as proof of a new polishing technique—neither water-gloss nor fire-gloss, but cheek-gloss.

“Mm.”

Qing held back her words for now.

Ashiya was crawling on her own, crawling in the literal physical sense, too—and it seemed more fun to leave her like that for a bit.

Yeah. Somehow...

This was kind of fun.

If I told her to lick, would she actually lick?

“Do you know the Khitan bow? It’s a bow they use to apologize. You press both forearms to the ground, keep your torso straight, and do a handstand vertical to the earth—”

“I was wrong!”

“Oh.”

Qing clapped. CLAP CLAP CLAP.

Ashiya really did get it in one shot.

“Okay, okay, calm down. I didn’t come here to blame you.”

At that, THUMP— Ashiya flattened herself to the floor again and scuttled like some kind of bug, arms snapping around Qing’s ankle.

“Then—my younger sisters, Your Highness— I’m the criminal. Cut me down instead, and my younger sisters— I won’t even ask you to let them go. Even if they become palace servants, that’s fine, please, use them lowly as you want, just please, spare their lives—”

“Huh. Your younger sisters?”

“They’re pitiful children! In the country they were born and raised in, they were oppressed and despised, treated worse than livestock—only now have they finally begun to smile, please! I can tell you everything, my words, Your Highness—!”

“First, calm down.”

“No! I’ll take the punishment like this! How could a lowly bitch commit such arrogant crimes and still stand upright—Your Highness, but this Heavenly Maiden and my younger sisters truly did our utmost! For forty-nine days we tried to keep Your Highness’s breath tethered, the children who stayed up through the nights and collapsed over and over—look at that devotion, please. Punish the Heavenly Maiden instead, and—an arm, no, both arms, if you want, I’ll give you legs too, yes?”

So she wasn’t offering her neck.

Looks like she didn’t want to die, but... if you lose your limbs, is that even living?

“No. First, calm down. And why are you yanking my skirt—let go.”

“Waaah, please, we did our best, and in a way, Your Highness being alive now in this dignified, sunlike form was possible because of our tiny assistance, so—so if you get down to it, we were going to save you, and we’re sorry we abandoned you, but we didn’t know, and if you get down to it, we were deceived too, it’s just that we couldn’t receive the proper time for the soul’s death—”

“No. Calm down. I get it. I’m not here to blame you.”

Ashiya’s face lit up.

Because of the position she was in, she had to crank her neck at a horrifying angle that looked like it would wreck her spine—she stared up at Qing with desperate eyes.

“Then... my younger sisters...”

“No, why the younger sisters?”

“AAAH—Your Highness, don’t do this, please! I’ll do anything, anything at all, just my younger sisters—!”

Back to square one.

Only after Qing coaxed and soothed her for quite a while did she finally get Ashiya’s story.

The imperial family had decided to resolve the Yeonsul matter with a truly Central Plains solution: “Nothing happened.”

But they weren’t going to let the crime of daring to swap the princess go that easily.

About half of the Heavenly-Maiden Temple yoga practitioners—

a squad of fighters had stormed in, seized whoever they saw by the hair, and dragged them away.

Now they were apparently locked in the Eastern Depot’s infamous underground prison, waiting for the day they died.

“If you would just spare the Heavenly Maiden’s younger sisters, the Heavenly Maiden will—will—will serve with all her parsha, please, Your Highness...!”

“Mm. Wait for now. You’re not in any condition to have a conversation.”

And so Qing withdrew for the time being.

Even Qing found it awkward.

Qing had no right to interfere with what the imperial family did in their own “events.”

Officially, she’d already been stripped of her princess status.

Which meant: over there, Fake Yeonsul was Real Yeonsul, and Qing was just Cheonhwa Seomun Cheong, wasn’t she.

Not that it mattered—she had not even the slightest intention of playing princess.

And she didn’t have ties to the imperial family anymore.

If there was even someone she could ask, someone she could inquire with—

maybe only Her Majesty the Empress?

Someone hearing that might say, That’s not just a “tie,” that’s the strongest tie on earth—you’re not holding it, you’re wrapped in it from head to toe.

Her Majesty the Empress only smiled gently.

“Yes, my daughter. Remember this. To tame people, you don’t threaten them—you grant them grace. Even women you couldn’t feel satisfied without tearing to pieces... (GRIT) even beasts like those, once they receive your grace, won’t there be somewhere you can use them?”

“Uh. Yes.”

“Still, it would be best to wait a little. At least, shouldn’t you let them put their necks into the chopping block once, so the ones who survived death understand grace?”

Meaning: she’d known Qing would come looking for Ashiya, and she’d deliberately thrown them in so they’d become obedient—so Qing could “grant grace.”

And grace, apparently, hit harder when you’d died and come back.

So: let them stick their necks into the guillotine for a moment, then save them.

Mm. Her Majesty the Empress.

Your affection is heavy.

And terrifying.

Back to the Heavenly-Maiden Temple.

This time, when the door opened, there were multiple shiny crowns of heads packed tight.

The Heavenly-Maiden Temple yoga practitioners were all here.

Not in the ridiculous full-body prostration pose—this time they sat properly and bowed, a formal deep bow of a woman.

After crawling around kissing shoes and rubbing cheeks on them, trying to act dignified now wouldn’t undo that first impression.

“Your Highness, this grace—your benevolence is beyond measure.”

“““Your benevolence is beyond measure.”””

“No, well. That’s... a bit much.”

“No! These are children who thought they would never see sunlight again—locked in the Eastern Depot’s underground prison, trembling through every hour and every moment in fear of death. You freed them immediately. Just that alone is grace they will carry for life.”

Qing’s conscience—almost worn down into a triangle, almost a circle—spun in place.

Mm. She doesn’t know she’s doing this on purpose, right?

Still, it wasn’t the kind of thing that demanded crushing guilt.

You could say Her Majesty the Empress had gone too far.

Just to let Qing “grant grace,” she’d shoved them into days of terror—no wonder the nuns’ cheeks were hollow, their eyes sunken, faces like they’d crawled out of the grave.

But—

they weren’t exactly innocent, either.

The Heavenly-Maiden Temple nuns had performed Yeonsul’s return-to-abode rite, and when it failed, they hid the corpse and found a substitute and presented a fake Yeonsul.

When you thought about a mother being forced to welcome a fake without even knowing her daughter had died...

Even if she’d actually taken a real chopping block and cut their necks off, you couldn’t say a word against it.

And the Son of Heaven, while he was at it, didn’t cut sinners because he cared about justice.

He cut sinners because he wanted to use them.

Did he slice what was handed to him. Would he have bothered to sort good from evil before slicing?

“Return-to-abode rite?”

“Yes. A transmigrated parsha—a soul? In the Central Plains language, I think it’s closer to ‘mind.’ The Central Plains believes that after one dies, being born again is a closed system—that one cannot escape the bound world among the three thousand worlds. But in truth, once freed from the flesh, the soul is reborn in another world, in a world of equal height among the three thousand worlds.”

Ashiya was confident.

In India, she’d successfully performed return-to-abode rites before.

It was just that, because of it, the Order itself ended up hunted as a heretical sorcery group—but still.

The rite had been performed successfully.

And yet Yeonsul didn’t awaken.

She’d thought maybe the soul was just arriving late, but later, thinking back, she’d realized—

Ah. The Central Plains might go somewhere different than Indians did.

“‘Ah’?”

“But in the end, we attended to Your Highness, so one could say it turned out well—so, in that sense, anyway, we saved you, and—uh, I think I just said something guilty. Should I kneel?”

Isn’t she just a total quack?

From what the Empress had said, Qing had expected some unspeakably evil group.

But just looking at the leader, she was... simply, disastrously sloppy. A complete airhead.

So that was where Gabiya’s “deadly” act came from.

This one was an airhead too—she just tried to look refined on the outside.

Qing suddenly understood the Son of Heaven’s decision.

Why he’d buried it, even though swapping the princess was a grave crime.

Sure, it was humiliating to say out loud.

And they were also still valuable as a production method for enhanced Golden Guard.

But at the base of it—

they were kind of harmless.

Not dangerous if left alone, terrified cowards who crawled and begged, “Just let us live,” clinging on—

so the plan was to keep them around and use them again and again.

Or maybe this was Ashiya’s survival strategy.

No one wastes effort controlling a fool.

So she acted dumb on purpose—soft outside, empty inside.

Otherwise, how could she have maintained the fake Yeonsul for so long without it being exposed?

Maybe even the way she cherished her “younger sisters” was an offering—claiming them as hostages given over to the imperial family.

But what was the point of dissecting Ashiya’s true nature now.

They weren’t going to see each other much longer anyway.

“Could it be... during the return-to-abode rite, a different soul might enter?”

On the surface, it almost sounded no different from a rite that made a corpse-soldier.

But—

culture was different, so the rites were different.

Sorcery was, at its core, a civil domain: when enough people are captivated by a story that “makes sense” and believe it, the belief becomes real.

So even if the imperial soul-return rite and the return-to-abode rite sounded similar, they couldn’t be the same.

“Oh, Your Highness. We don’t beg the mind to return. We seize the chain that remains in the flesh and pull back the mind that is bound. Why would a mind ever wish to enter a dreadful prison?”

In India’s frame, the flesh was a prison that caged the mind.

Every mind wanted to [N O V E L I G H T] be free from the flesh, but the laws of the world blocked it—so it was chased into another world, another flesh, and caged again.

The only difference was that by karma—by deeds—those who had piled up evil karma were caged in miserable flesh, and those who had piled up good karma were caged in noble flesh.

So the return-to-abode rite was an evil rite.

It grabbed a soul that had already found freedom outside the prison of flesh, seized the chain that hadn’t fully snapped, and dragged it back to cage it again.

That was why no other mind could “enter” instead.

You were pulling on the tether bound to that flesh—how could some other mind be dragged along?

If you tug the leash tied to a doghouse, the dog that lives in that house comes.

A random dog doesn’t show up wearing the collar out of nowhere.

“GASP—sorry! I absolutely didn’t mean Your Highness is a dog!”

Gabiya immediately flipped into a handstand.

A Khitan bow that didn’t even exist among the Khitan—an apology bow.

But Qing didn’t have the headspace to enjoy the sight.

A different soul can’t be dragged in?

Then... me?

What the hell am I, then?