The Fragile Thread
So it wasn't mental cleanliness, but physical cleanliness?
Did it reject men because they couldn't give birth?
The transformation happened incredibly fast. In the blink of an eye, the entire outer layer had taken on the appearance of a placenta. Even someone with the worst eyesight could recognize it.
Faced with this change, Fu Qian's first reaction was to try to make peace with his double standard from earlier.
There was a reason it wasn't interested in him. The snake head hadn't been trying to devour flesh and blood; it had been looking for a vessel to carry a child.
And if he followed the line of thought from earlier, that to some extent explained the hatchet's effect... Was this thing actually a fertility aid? Whoever it struck got pregnant?
It also made sense that the hatchet hadn't worked on Xixi when she chopped off her hand. After all, she'd been far too young at the time.
The fact that it didn't choose men proved the hatchet still respected basic biology. So it probably screened for the mother's age as well.
But that raised the question of whether it really had some kind of attraction to the Ji Clan.
At the moment, there seemed to be two possibilities. First, the hatchet wasn't specifically connected to the Ji Clan at all. It was simply a fertility aid with a special effect: if it touched a woman of childbearing age, she became pregnant.
If that was the case, then the circumstances surrounding Ji Xue back then suddenly looked far more sinister.
Why had she suddenly become interested in it?
It wasn't some inexplicable sense of connection. She had most likely been influenced by some kind of psychological suggestion.
It was also easy enough to guess who had done it.