Hearing the mournful cawing of rooks, Shi Xuedong drew his neck in, then sniffed hard. The bleak, desolate surroundings sent a chill through his heart. "Brother," he murmured, "do you think we'll end up buried here someday too?"
Hu Xiaotian looked up at the pale sun. It hung whitish in the gray sky, without the slightest trace of warmth. He said softly, "Kill and burn, and you wear a golden belt; build bridges and mend roads, and not even your bones remain." Cruel reality had once again proved that good people died young, while scourges lived on for ten thousand years.
Beside him, Shi Xuedong sighed. "Not necessarily. Bad people don't come to good ends either. Thinking back, if I'd stored up a little more virtue back then, I wouldn't have been sent into the Imperial Palace and turned into a eunuch with one snip..." Before he finished, the crows in the distance began clamoring again. He instinctively hunched his neck. "Let's go. This place gives me the creeps."
They had barely returned to the Palace Gardens Bureau when a group of beaming eunuchs came forward to greet them, bowing from afar. "Congratulations, Eunuch Hu! Our congratulations!"
Bewildered by their behavior, Hu Xiaotian frowned. "What is there to congratulate me on?"
Xiao Dengzi limped out of the crowd on a crutch. "Congratulations, Eunuch Hu! We just received a verbal decree from above. From now on, you're the Assistant Director of the Palace Gardens Bureau." The eunuchs crowded around Hu Xiaotian, talking over one another, terrified of being late to flatter him.
Shi Xuedong, Xiao Zhuozi, and his other close attendants were naturally overjoyed. They had been worrying that someone else would be sent to manage the Palace Gardens Bureau after Liu Yuzhang's death. If that happened, they certainly would not