These similar murmurs made Luo Yuan have a momentary illusion that her brain was about to be pierced through. In the midst of the violent headache, she pressed her hand over that fissure. The man-tall porcelain deity statue should have felt icy cold, but the moment her hand touched it, she was scalded into a shiver — the surface of the statue was actually blazing hot.

The voices saying “so hot” and “so painful” paused for an instant, then drilled out of the fissure even more fiercely.

Luo Yuan herself was now both scorched and hurting. If she hadn’t quickly regained her senses and opened her eyes to see the black curtain of the real world, she might truly have been infected by that kind of pain and started groaning along with it.

She climbed up from the ground and once again came before the clan deity. The clan deity sat upright on the divine platform; he didn’t look exactly the same as the porcelain statue from that dark world, but he gave a very similar impression.

“Clan Deity, what should I do?” Luo Yuan was not a very clever person. Encountering something like this, she didn’t dare make decisions on her own and could only come to ask the clan deity. If that statue had something to do with him, he would definitely give instructions.

The clan deity listened to her question and, smiling, offered a suggestion: “Why don’t you try seeing what’s inside that fissure?”

Luo Yuan: “I can’t see clearly… Do I have to break it to look?”

The clan deity’s tone was unhurried and especially mild: “Break it? Then break it and see.”

Because his tone was so peaceful and indifferent, the bit of anxiety in Luo Yuan’s heart slowly faded. Since the clan deity acted so unconcerned, it should be fine… right?

She prepared herself. That night, when she again saw the porcelain deity statue with the cracked fissure, she gathered her strength and tried to push it off the divine platform to shatter it. But the statue was much heavier than she expected. Not only did she fail to move it, her palms were reddened from the heat. Luo Yuan didn’t give up easily. She climbed onto the divine platform, looked at the fissure, and stuck four fingers inside, wanting to force it open.

She thought that since there was a fissure, it would be easier to break. If she could pry the small crack into a bigger opening, she could see what was inside. The moment her fingers slid into that dark fissure, she felt something was wrong. The temperature inside was far hotter than the porcelain surface — it was practically like a raging fire was burning within.

Luo Yuan was scorched into pulling her hand back, hugging her flaming red hand helplessly. A lock of hair by her cheek was blown toward her lips by a breeze from who-knows-where. Luo Yuan lifted her hand to tuck her hair behind her ear, and when she lowered it, she found two long strands of hair caught between her fingers.

Hair?

She pinched the two strands and held them near the statue’s fissure, trying to insert them inside. Then she leaned closer to sniff if there was any smell of burning hair.

There was no burnt-hair smell, only a faint, unknown fragrance. However, the terrifying sounds inside the fissure stopped.

It seemed to have some effect? After a while, the sounds started again. Luo Yuan grabbed her thick hair and thought for a moment. People grow new hair every day; correspondingly, a lot of hair naturally falls out. So she patiently combed her fingers through her hair for a while and collected more than ten strands. Whenever the sound from the fissure started up, she stuffed one strand inside.

She felt she had found a way to block out the sound.

In the morning, she woke up and, as usual, came before the clan deity. Before she could speak, she saw the clan deity suddenly cover his mouth and cough for a while. When he lowered his hand, there were more than ten long hairs in his palm.

Luo Yuan stared at the strands of hair in the clan deity’s porcelain-white hand.

The clan deity said gently, “Next time, don’t randomly stuff things into my body.”

Into your body…?

Luo Yuan awkwardly took back her own hair. “Okay… sorry.”

She suddenly realized the meaning hidden inside and exclaimed, “That was your body? If that’s the case, why did you tell me to break it?”

The clan deity smiled and said, “Precisely because you couldn’t break it, so I let you try. There was nothing else to do anyway.”

Thinking of that nightmarish experience, Luo Yuan suddenly reacted. Could it be that every night, all of that… was the clan deity playing some sort of game? Was he too bored? If that was the case, and the clan deity wanted her to accompany him, she probably couldn’t refuse.

That night, when she went there again and heard the groans from inside the fissure, her head started to ache, so she began singing, wanting to drown out the clan deity’s voice that could drill into a person’s skull. It really worked. At least once her voice covered the sound from the fissure, the fissure went quiet. She kept singing without pause, sang for a long time, and woke up in the morning feeling her throat was a bit sore.

She pressed her hands together and asked the clan deity, “Last night, how did you feel?”

The clan deity nodded with a smile. “It was fine, but… I hope you can change to a different song.”

Luo Yuan felt embarrassed. She couldn’t really sing, and she couldn’t remember lyrics, so she had sung that extremely catchy song the downstairs supermarket always played.

“Then… telling you stories or reciting some poetry, would that be okay?”

“That seems easier to accept than the song from last night.”

The terrifying scenes had inexplicably turned into strange scenes. Aside from Luo Yuan feeling like she had become a night owl, her days and nights reversed and needing some extra sleep during the day, there were no other problems.

At noon, there was no music outside the courtyard. The clan women were burning spirit paper outside again.

Those were sacrificial texts personally copied by the Qin clan people, hoping to soothe the clan deity’s suffering during the divine birth month. But as generations passed, the habit had become mere formality; the power of the texts to ease pain had long disappeared. Long ago, when the clan copied sacrificial texts for the clan deity, it was to thank him for his protection — the intense guilt and sincere gratitude could be conveyed that way. But now, the emotions inside those texts were extremely thin, and no longer carried any strong feelings.

Even the soul-calming music that played through the night could not comfort him as much as the genuine worry of a little human girl.

The small human girl he kept by his side was curled up sleeping behind him. Thanks to her, this divine birth month did not seem quite so painful.

Although it was a little different from what he had originally imagined.

───♡───

On the day the divine birth month ended, snow fell outside. The quiet snowfall covered the entire courtyard, hiding that cluster of red camellias. The clan women stepped over the snow into the courtyard, their expressions more solemn than usual.

They carried in a tree with many branches. The trunk was gold, the branches silver, and on the countless split twigs hung innumerable white beads.

“Clan Deity, the clan tree has been delivered.” After speaking, they retreated beyond the curtain to wait.

The clan deity’s long hair and sleeves floated slightly. From within his sleeves extended countless thin red threads, which slowly wound around the clan tree. The process continued for a long time. When the red threads were finally withdrawn, the originally gold-and-silver tree now had scattered dots of red, and several of the white beads had changed color.

The clan women entered, carefully inspecting the beads that had turned red, identifying the corresponding clan members on the clan tree.

“Clan Deity, this time there are four people. Tomorrow we will bring them here for your judgment.”

Luo Yuan poked her head out to watch them carry the tree away, feeling a bit curious. “Clan Deity, what is that?”

The clan deity said, “The Qin clan tree. Each bead represents a living member of the Qin clan. A large tree with deep roots inevitably grows withered branches and decayed leaves. I simply find them and prune them. It is the same every year.”

The next day, the clan women brought in four people. Two looked between forty and fifty, and two seemed only in their teens or twenties. All four were brought in with ashen faces.

The clan women lowered the curtain and withdrew. From the clan deity’s sleeve emerged four blood threads, falling before the four people’s foreheads, wriggling as they prepared to pierce through their brow centers and see through everything in them. The two older ones did not dare resist; the youngest one, startled, tried to retreat. His reflexes were good — in a blink, he was about to flee out of the shrine. Seeing this, the other young man in his twenties also began to stir restlessly, resisting the red thread reaching toward him.

Before he could also retreat, the young man who had run out first had already fallen in the snow. After a scream, the fallen figure melted into a pile of red blood-foam, leaving behind a red human-shaped mark on the white snow.

The gentle-faced clan deity looked at the remaining three with a smile and said nothing. The young man collapsed in terror and despair, allowing a blood thread to pierce into his brain. With their foreheads connected by the threads, the clan deity closed his eyes and examined them. After a moment, he let out a soft sigh and withdrew the threads.

Luo Yuan had hidden behind the clan deity from beginning to end. She hadn’t seen what happened — she only heard that scream, and the clan deity’s sigh.

The three were taken away by the clan women, their expressions vacant. When the clan women asked how the three should be dealt with, the clan deity simply uttered one word: death.

The red-stained snow in the courtyard was cleaned away.

“Did they have evil on them?”

“Not only evil, they were filled with malice. They had to be cut away.”

“I thought… you would devour them?”

“Those devoured by me will have no next life.”

Luo Yuan was silent for a moment, hugging her knees as she zoned out. No next life — was that a very severe punishment?

After the divine birth month came the first month of the New Year in the calendar. Ordinary households nowadays didn’t pay much attention to New Year traditions anymore, but here it was different. The divine birth month was suffocating and oppressive; the first month of the New Year, however, was lively from beginning to end. The people in the old estate were brimming with joy, even the food in the dining hall was much richer, and many more Qin clan members had arrived — all coming to worship the clan deity. This old estate seemed to be their ancestral hall.

Some people could only kowtow outside the deity courtyard. When Luo Yuan went out to eat, she saw rows of incense burners added outside the courtyard, stuffed full with thick incense sticks. The smoke drifted around the entire courtyard, and even the clan deity couldn’t help sighing to her that the smoke was truly overwhelming. It wasn’t the first time he’d said that.

A small number of people were allowed into the courtyard to worship — mostly elderly folks. The clan women called them clan elders. One by one, the grey-haired old men knelt inside the shrine to offer incense to the clan deity. The one leading them had an extremely dignified presence and said, “We pray that the clan deity will continue to protect the family in the coming year.”

Luo Yuan suspected they actually couldn’t see the clan deity, or maybe he used some illusion technique. In any case, when they kowtowed toward the divine platform, the clan deity was actually standing behind them watching. Luo Yuan held his sleeve as she stood beside him and heard him point at several of the leading elders: “These children were also ones I blessed when they were first born. Now they are about to return to death.”

“Human time passes truly fast.”

───♡───

After those elderly men left, offerings were brought in one after another — all from members of the Qin clan with certain status. They nearly filled the entire shrine.

“So many offerings… and they’re all food.”

“Mm. You may eat all of these.”

Luo Yuan now didn’t mind at all whether the clan women would notice offerings going missing. They had already noticed countless times during this period that things seemed off, but since they could never find the reason, they could only blame it on mice.

After rummaging for a while, she dug out a special offering among the expensive pastries and natural dried fruits — a beautifully packaged assortment of snacks.

The clan deity pinched the rustling packaging bag. “Is this tasty?”

Luo Yuan tore it open and tasted it, feeling like she had never eaten such delicious snacks in her entire life. But… since people had progressed enough to offer snacks, why had no one thought to offer a phone or a computer to the clan deity?

Because the shrine was so full of offerings, Luo Yuan had to sleep on the second level of the shrine, very close to the clan deity. In her drowsiness, she smelled a chill scent like ice and snow, with a faint fragrance lingering at the tip of her nose — a scent she had grown very familiar with over this period.

She opened her eyes and saw, by her cheek, a red camellia with green leaves. Within its slightly closed petals was a bit of white snow, as if it had just been plucked from the snow-covered ground.

Was this a gift from the clan deity?