Ever since Zhang Siyu returned to Dragon-Tiger Mountain,
she had been kneeling on the cold blue-brick floor of its Ancestral Hall, her knees so numb she could no longer feel them.
Mountain winds howled outside, while candlelight flickered within, casting shifting light and shadow over the memorial tablets of generations of ancestral masters.
She held her back straight and looked at the middle-aged man in Daoist robes standing before her, his hands clasped behind his back.
He was her master, Zhang Xuanqing, the current sect leader of Dragon-Tiger Mountain.
"Do you understand what you did wrong?"
Zhang Xuanqing's voice was quiet, but every word seemed to have been pulled from an ice cellar.
Zhang Siyu lowered her head and said nothing.
After returning, she had told her master everything she had seen on Black Wind Mountain.
Granny Hedgehog feeding wild raspberries to a little wild rabbit, Stone Spirit not getting angry even after his foot was stepped on, and the little carp spirit waiting beside a pond for someone for three hundred years.
She had thought her master would understand, even just a little, even if it only changed his view of monsters slightly.
But after listening, Zhang Xuanqing had asked only one question.
"How many monsters did you slay on this trip down the mountain?"
Zhang Siyu had said she had not slain a single one.
Zhang Xuanqing had fallen silent for a long time after hearing that, then ordered her to kneel in the Ancestral Hall.
But Zhang Siyu had never uttered the words,
"I understand what I did wrong."
Because she did not know what she had done wrong.
"I'll ask you one more time."
Zhang Xuanqing turned around and looked down at her.
"What are monsters?"
Zhang Siyu raised her head. For the first time in