When she returned home, she discovered that her stepfather's corpse had long since been devoured by the Demon Race, leaving behind only a few broken bones.
The authorities did not arrest her. Everyone believed that Li Hua's stepfather had died in that Demonic Calamity.
But in the end, Li Hua no longer had a home.
More than half the people in the village had died or been injured. The few elderly, weak, sick, and disabled who remained either waited to die or left to seek refuge with relatives.
Others, with no one to rely on, left their ruined homes and began a life on the road.
Li Hua had no one to rely on, either. She became one of them.
Still young, she walked with the band of refugees, on and on, never knowing how far she had gone or how long she had been walking.
Many people died.
Some died of illness, some of hunger, some of sheer exhaustion, and some were devoured by wandering members of the Demon Race.
Yet Li Hua miraculously survived.
She had no particular reason to keep going. Perhaps she simply didn't want to die. She just wanted to live.
It was that fierce will to survive that carried her through one bitter cold and bout of hunger after another, through humiliations and darkness that others could scarcely endure.
To stay alive, she had done grueling labor usually reserved for men, endured the whips of many unscrupulous foremen, and trudged through vast snowy nights that seemed to have no end. She had even eaten the corpses of people who had only just died.
Everything was just to stay alive.
That had also been the time she came closest to death.
That time, everyone else had frozen to death. By eating the corpses of her