Sleepless Night

One day.

Bai Yujun arrived at a mass graveyard. Perhaps because it was so close to town, this mass graveyard was enormous. Bai Yujun had thought she would have to work herself to death reciting salvation scriptures all night again, but the moment she entered and looked around, she was utterly dumbfounded.

No lost souls? Was someone messing with a snake?

Bai Yujun, who had originally planned to dig up graves, stared at the silent burial ground, unsure whether she should be happy or puzzled. Such a vast mass graveyard, littered with corpses and fresh graves, yet not a single lost soul? Could it be that all those ghosts heavy with resentment had awakened to their humanity, transcended themselves, and gone to the underworld? If that were true, then it really would be a ghostly thing.

Amid the mass graves, Bai Yujun was left disheveled in the wind...

She headed to town to rest.

The town was large. Perhaps because some wealthy families lived there, its people looked as though they could barely avoid starving to death. Many local militia men patrolled the streets with hunting bows and cudgels in hand, and outsiders were their chief targets for inspection. Bandits were running rampant everywhere these days—who knew whether scouts had been secretly sent in?

Every shop in town had hung up signs declaring closure, and hardly a soul could be seen.

As she passed the high-walled residence of a wealthy family, she saw several refugees squatting beside a drainage ditch, fishing for something. Curious, she went over to take a look. Once she saw clearly what they were doing, Bai Yujun could only sigh.

Even in a year of famine, wealthy families still had rice and meat. The leftover soup and scraps they could not finish were simply poured into the drainage ditch.

The floating grease was precious stuff. The refugees laid scraps of cloth on the water, then lifted them out and wrung them dry, scooping up some vegetable scraps as well. After working for half a day, they could make themselves a bowl of food. At least it was far better than eating grass roots and tree bark. "Wine and meat rot behind vermilion gates, while frozen bones lie by the roadside" was no fabrication. The more chaotic the times, the more the aristocratic clans flourished.

Famine killed people. Once enough people died, their fields became ownerless things. So long as one gave the officials a little money, one could buy vast stretches of fine farmland. Every famine was a time for the aristocratic clans to grow stronger.

What the ancients loved most was still land. If a family produced someone with scholarly rank, they no longer had to pay taxes. Seizing thousands of mu of fertile fields through trickery and force while paying not a single coin in tax—there was truly no one else like them. The nation's major taxpayers were those poor farmers. Driven beyond endurance, those farmers simply offered their own farmland to the local wealthy families in exchange for exemption from those crushing miscellaneous taxes. The wealthy grew ever wealthier, tax revenues shrank ever smaller, and without tax revenue, what could be used to provide famine relief and distribute grain?

Fortunately, those were human affairs. The White Snake only needed to follow Chunyang Palace's orders.

The town was bleak and desolate. Bai Yujun carried her book box as she searched for somewhere to stay.

Suddenly, a man in black brushing past her caught the attention of her snake eyes...

That person's aura was exceedingly cold and sinister. By all reason, a human could not possibly be that cold—he was nearly on par with a cold-blooded creature. He carried a bulging pack on his back, though who knew what was inside.

After glancing at him twice, she continued looking for lodging.

In the end, she found a ruined house in town whose roof had leaked for years and which had long been unoccupied. She tossed out two cleansing spells and tidied it up a little.

She found an oil lamp buried beneath a thick layer of dust in the weeds, blew off the dust, and set it on the stove. Taking a small clay jar from her book box, she carefully poured out a little lamp oil, then picked up a scrap of rag, tore it into strips, and twisted them into a wick.

She placed the wick in the oil lamp, leaving a short piece outside. Once the oil had soaked through it, she used a minor spell to light the lamp.

She could have revealed her identity as a Chunyang Disciple and asked one of those wealthy families for a nice room, but Bai Yujun did not want to get too close to those human-shaped vampires. So long as she had food and drink, the sleeping conditions did not matter. A snake was easily satisfied.

Lighting the oil lamp was to let others know that someone would be staying in this house tonight, so they should not disturb her.

She stuck her head into the book box and rummaged around, pushing aside several strips of cured meat before finding books wrapped in oiled paper. Along the way, she had picked up some books from many homes—miscellaneous collections and wild chronicles, all sorts of things. They could help pass the boring hours. Of course, it would have been better if they did not always tell stories about fox spirits and ghosts falling in love with scholars, only to be abandoned by those scholars afterward. As if fox spirits liked scholars not for that skin-and-bones scrap of lean meat, but for their character.

Night fell.

In the silent night, sounds carried far. Bai Yujun could clearly hear the wealthy families in town raising cups, drinking wine, and shouting drinking-game calls, along with the smell of wine and meat. Being able to find meat to eat in these times was a skill in itself.

She turned over, no longer looking out the window.

After several days down the mountain, Bai Yujun finally understood why Yu Rong had sent her, a snake demon, down the mountain to provide disaster relief. At first, she had been deeply dissatisfied, and had even considered finding somewhere to hibernate until the disaster passed. But after traveling all this way, she realized Yu Rong's painstaking intentions.

Cultivation tempered not only the body, but the heart.

Walking step by step with one's feet, seeing little by little with one's eyes—the state of one's heart rose along with the journey. Observing the myriad faces of life along the way allowed one to see many things clearly, making cultivation more solid. If one cultivated only power and not the heart, it was difficult to go farther, and one might even suffer deviation. Most cultivators did not understand what cultivation truly was. They only knew to blindly cultivate their bodies and gather magical treasures and pills, while neglecting the most important thing: cultivating the heart.

For a snake spirit to cultivate the orthodox path was rather bizarre as well.

There was no helping it. Bai Yujun had to cultivate the orthodox path. The human race was flourishing, its destiny soaring to the heavens. If she wanted to become immortal, she had to follow humanity's rules. If she followed the ways of demons alone, she would very likely be taken out by Demon Subjugation.

Only while alive could a snake be free and unfettered. Once dead, there was nothing left.

A fierce wind rose outside the window. After struggling for a while, the broken window with only half its frame left finally breathed its last. What left Bai Yujun speechless was that several shattered roof tiles fell as well, letting her see the moon in the sky even more clearly.

She hurriedly reached out to protect the oil lamp from being extinguished by dust and broken tiles. Before long, the wind stopped.

"This wind is pretty wicked. It blows twice, then quits whenever it feels like it."

With a few quick swipes, she brushed the fallen dust from herself. She had also lost interest in reading, so she put the book away, lay down with her arms behind her head, and looked at the moon through the hole in the roof.

Then Bai Yujun saw a vicious ghost with disheveled hair flash past the hole in the roof...

After freezing for two seconds, she snatched up two weapons and shot out of the house, leaping onto the roof!

Where was there any sign of the vicious ghost beneath the moonlight? On the empty roof stood only Bai Yujun in her white Daoist robe. She lifted her head and discovered that the moon was shrouded in a faint light red glow. There had to have been slaughter nearby!

Her keen sense of smell caught the scent of blood in the air. Without another word, she leapt from rooftop to rooftop in search of its source. With such a thick stench of blood, quite a few people had likely died. For something like this to happen in the area under her charge was practically asking for trouble with a snake.

She quickly found the source.

Miserable screams carried from a wealthy family's home in town, and neighbors nearby gathered around with torches held high.

"A vicious ghost is claiming lives... Save us..."

Lights gradually came on throughout the quiet town. People inside the wealthy estate were still wailing and screaming. The neighbors outside hammered on the gate, but those within only cried and shouted, with no one opening it. Realizing something was wrong, the crowd began to ram the gate.

After several attempts, they finally smashed the main gate open with a thunderous crash. The moment they saw clearly the scene in the courtyard, everyone screamed in terror and fled.

The courtyard was like hell. Limbs and amputations and chunks of flesh lay everywhere, while the white window paper was splattered with blood. Only a few people dressed as servants and maids remained, hiding in a corner as they cried and screamed.

Standing on the roof, Bai Yujun shook her head, then turned and chased after the direction in which the vicious ghost had vanished.