"D-Did they really chop him up?"
The inner gardens of the traveling palace, Cat and Dog Room.
Several eunuchs worked together to carry in a corpse that had lost all warmth. Zheng Qiao was tyrannical and killed often, so the eunuchs at the traveling palace were replaced frequently. They were all young men from poor families who had castrated themselves just to earn a meal by serving others.
They had heard of Yan An's reputation.
At first, they had hated him for abetting the Tyrannical Lord. But when they saw that, from top to bottom, only a handful in the entire court truly sought to bring blessings to the common people, they realized they had misunderstood him. If not for Master Yan's steadfast insistence, the snow disasters of just the past two years would have added tens of thousands more lonely souls to the world.
Some of them had even benefited indirectly from Yan An's kindness. The thought of taking up knives to hack their benefactor's corpse to pieces and feed it to the feral little beasts in the Cat and Dog Room was truly unbearable. But if they didn't do it, and the tyrant found out they had disobeyed his command, their fate would probably be tens of thousands of times more miserable than Yan An's. For a while, they hesitated, their faces twisted with inner conflict, and no one dared speak.
"Why don't we—burn him?"
Someone abruptly made the suggestion.
"Burn him?"
The others were horrified by the idea.
That would mean reducing him to ashes!
A eunuch on duty in the Cat and Dog Room said softly, "We... we can just say the little beasts were full and fussy, and weren't interested in human flesh for the time being. We were afraid the meat would spoil and