Chapter 18: Dismemberment
The birds in the mountains chirped incessantly, and the water flowed with a splashing sound.
Qin Luoxia felt that her husband certainly wouldn’t believe her, so she carried the wild boar and found a mountain stream with running water.
She thought of a good solution and set the wild boar down. A live wild boar was a bit intimidating, but once dead, it wasn’t so scary.
Qin Luoxia butchered the wild boar by the water’s edge, using her spear as a meat-cutting tool.
It was only today that she discovered how truly useful this spear was. It could be disassembled, with the shaft separating into three sections. By taking one section and attaching the spearhead, it could serve as a short blade, which was extremely convenient for cutting meat.
Qin Luoxia worked with clean, decisive movements. She cut off the boar’s head first. Whenever she encountered bone, she used clever leverage to slice through the fascia.
It was the afternoon, and the slanting sun shone on the water falling over the mountain stream, making it look like a curtain of colorful beads descending drop by drop. The colorful beads fell into the deep pool, creating ripples.
Standing by the pool was a woman with a large chest, long legs, and long hair. Her back was athletic and toned, and her hips were also quite shapely. She possessed a natural, sexy beauty. It wasn’t the delicate, willow-like beauty admired in the capital, but rather the tall and curvaceous beauty found in exotic lands.
She tilted her head back and wiped the blood from her face. Standing beneath the mountain stream, facing the water droplets and feeling the cool breeze, she felt comfortable.
If one ignored the chunks of wild boar meat scattered at her feet, the scene before her could have composed a beautiful painting of a lady.
After cooling off, Qin Luoxia found large leaves, wrapped the pieces of the dismembered wild boar meat, placed them into a basket, covered them with grass, and carried it on her back as she headed home.
Walking along, thinking about how her whole family would be able to drink meat soup and eat meat, Qin Luoxia couldn’t help but beam with joy. Her pace quickened until she broke into a light jog.
The sun set in the west. The birds chirped, urging travelers to return home.
Jiang Mianmian’s face was squashed from sleeping. Jiang Yu worked while glancing at her little sister. She felt that her sister was truly like cotton—so soft. When she was asleep, letting out little snores, she was incredibly well-behaved.
When she told her sister that eating fine grains would make her skin fairer and prettier, she wasn’t fooling her. Her sister really was completely different from when she was born. Back then, she was dark and looked like a little grey mouse.
Now, she had a fair, upturned little nose, a reddish little mouth, and very long eyelashes. When she was asleep with her eyes closed, her eyelashes were long and curled, though not quite dense enough, and her hair had turned black. She changed every single day, becoming prettier and prettier. Her little face looked more and more like a miniature version of Father. The more she looked, the more her heart ached with affection.
Because she was so focused, Jiang Yu accidentally pricked her palm with her needle, causing a blood blister to form. She quickly sucked on it, not wanting to waste the blood.
Jiang Yu thought about Jiang Wan coming over yesterday. Nothing good ever happened whenever she encountered Jiang Wan. Last time, because Mother was having a difficult labor, she went to beg them for some fine grains, only to run into Jiang Wan. Jiang Wan said she would go get it for her, but instead of giving her the grains, Jiang Wan fainted, and she was inexplicably beaten up.
It was the same this time; clearly, it was Jiang Wan who came over to deliver things, and it resulted in Big Brother almost being beaten to death. Her brain wasn’t very sharp, but she had summarized two points. First, getting involved with Jiang Wan meant nothing good and only bad luck. Second, she always felt that whatever Jiang Wan forbade her from doing, she should do the opposite.
Jiang Yu sucked on her finger, thinking about what she could possibly do if she really became a servant in Prefecture City. She should at least get a set of new clothes, right? She heard that servants in Prefecture City households dressed very well. She didn’t know if she would get new shoes—probably not, as she was just a servant, and it was enough to look presentable on the surface.
As for serving people, she had never done that before. Working as a handyman at Landlord Liu’s place just meant doing odd jobs and running errands; she never had to get close to anyone. She heard that the young master would hit people when he had an episode, and she worried that if she fought back, she might accidentally kill the young master.
However, if the other side had strength in numbers and she couldn’t win, she would still end up getting beaten, just like when she went to the Jiang residence; every time, they used their numbers to bully her. Besides, she had never left home, and she was still afraid. Forget it; she couldn’t do something stupid just because she was angry at Jiang Wan.
A scene suddenly flashed through her mind: one day, she would be dressed in fine silks and satins, her embroidered shoes adorned with gold beads, her hair stuck with many shimmering gold hairpins, riding in an eight-bearer sedan chair, parading through the streets. Thinking of this image, she felt she was daydreaming and couldn’t help but grin and giggle to herself.
Jiang Mianmian woke up and saw her sister sucking on her finger, frowning one moment and giggling the next, all while continuing to suck on her finger… She was startled: had her sister also awakened an ability?
She habitually took her own finger to suck on, but honestly, sucking on a finger that had already been covered in her own saliva was really unhygienic. If only she could stand up, she would definitely wash her hands eight times before sucking on her fingers!
Just as she was thinking this, she seemed to hear familiar footsteps outside the courtyard. Heavy, step-by-step, and very steady. Mother was back, for sure.
Jiang Mianmian anxiously cried out, “Yi ya ya ya.” She wanted milk, she needed milk! Sure enough, a moment later, there was a knock at the door. Because only Jiang Yu and her little sister were home, she had locked the courtyard gate today. Hearing Mother’s voice outside, she ran to open the door.
The basket on Qin Luoxia’s back looked full of grass, with the blades poking out. It shouldn’t have been heavy, but when she set it down, it made a heavy, dull thud.
Jiang Mianmian cried even louder. She wanted milk and was incredibly anxious. Hearing her daughter’s cries, Qin Luoxia felt her breasts engorged, but she endured it to first change her clothes and wash up slightly before feeding her.
Jiang Mianmian clutched her “rice bowl” and swallowed recklessly, and only when she felt her little stomach was full did she have the strength to think.
Suddenly, she felt that the milk today seemed to have a fishy smell mixed in, with a very strong scent of blood. What had Mother been doing? Even if she were hunting, it shouldn’t have been this bloody, right?
The smell on Mother was similar to the smell on the senior student from the forensic medicine department next door. That senior student had eaten with them the other day and said she had just returned from an internship, having just dissected a fresh corpse…
Jiang Mianmian looked again at the basket Mother had set down by the entrance; bright red blood was seeping out, drop by drop!!!
