"Thank you."
The little girl flashed a grin, turned, and ran off, her braid swishing behind her.
Chu Yang pinned the little yellow flower to the lapel of his robe.
The moon over White Tiger Ridge was white.
Not the usual full moon tinged with warm yellow, but a cold, almost desolate pure white, like a bone bleached countless times, hanging in the dim night sky and pouring its chill light over the barren rocks and dead trees covering the mountain.
Moonlight made the rocks white, the soil white, and those twisted dead branches even more terrifyingly white—the entire mountain had been drained of all color beneath the moonlight, like an ink painting scrubbed over and over until only its rough draft remained.
Beneath a cliff halfway up the mountain lay a cave entrance.
It was not large, half-concealed by clumps of gray-white brambles. The brambles had no leaves, only dense, sharp thorns. Their tips glimmered silver beneath the moonlight, and from afar, they resembled a half-open mouth lined with long, slender teeth.
Inside the entrance was a passage sloping downward. Its walls were unnaturally smooth—not the sort of smoothness achieved through carving, but the result of years of erosion by some viscous substance. Their surfaces carried a cold white sheen like bone glaze.
At the end of the passage stood a spacious stone chamber.
There were no torches, no lanterns, no source of light whatsoever—yet the chamber was not dark. A faint white glow of unknown origin filled the entire space, seeming to seep from the stone walls themselves and illuminating every detail.
The chamber's furnishings were completely unlike those of an ordinary demon's lair.
There were no animal-skin carpets, no tiger-bone throne, no mountains of gold, silver, and jewels. A thin layer of white gauze covered the floor,