Chapter 24 - Value of the Dead

Dong Zhen’s shop that also served as his home consisted of two floors. According to Kang's hypothesis, the ground floor was used to welcome visitors and conduct business while the upper one was where the merchant's bedroom was located along with that of his personal guard. But, since it seemed strange that the slaves had been placed in plain sight, it was probable that there was also a basement.

While praying that his companions were there, Kang led the group to the back of the building. There, a closed door led to inside the house. It was from there that the two guards with the crates had come. Thankfully, it wasn’t locked, so they could get inside without problems.

Once inside, they looked around. They were in a kind of small corridor that served as a link with the back door.

In front of them, there was a door that led to the interior rooms. On the left instead, there was a small table with unlit lamps, and a little further up a staircase that descended downwards into what, at first sight, looked like a basement.

With silent steps, Sen went to the door in front of them and pulled out a small mirror. Then he silently opened the door as far as it took to insert the mirror. Through the reflection, he could see what was behind the door.

After looking sufficiently, he slowly closed the door and joined the others, communicating what he had discovered.

"There are two people inside, but they are just guards who are playing cards; the interior is instead a room to receive guests."

Listening to this, Kang smiled slightly.

"I was right. The fat man is on the other floor with his guard; otherwise, the guards on the ground floor wouldn’t dare to play during their turn. The group to relieve the guards present now will only arrive in the evening, so we still have some time. Let’s continue."

Everyone then headed towards the stairs leading to the basement, without having first taken a lamp each, which they lit with a fire striker. As the stairs creaked loudly, they had to walk slowly, taking one step at a time to avoid making loud noises.

When they came down, the sight they saw was somewhat disconcerting: there were many large metal cages, and in each of these, there were people who went from children to young adults, with the majority of them being women. Each of the confined people had worn-out clothes and lay on the ground with a defeated air as if they had resigned themselves to their fate.

While feeling angry inside, Kang began to inspect the cages one by one in search of his companions with his subordinates, hoping they were unharmed. Luckily, they had foreseen that there would be little light in the basement, otherwise searching in the dark without the aid of a lamp would have been very difficult.

In the meantime they were looking, Hei was attracted by a door that led to another room. Since he didn’t know the four abducted belonging Kang's group, he preferred to explore the basement as he couldn’t be useful in searching for them anyway.

When he pushed the door, he was greeted by a strong smell of blood mixed with pee and other recognizable scents. The room was completely dark and cold since no light source heated it.

Moving the lamp to direct the light, he noticed a blood-stained table with the corpse of a woman above it. Approaching, he examined the woman's body, seeing various signs of bruising. Since she didn’t emit a lousy scent, Hei sensed that it hadn’t been long since her death, at most one or two days, but since the temperature was low inside, it was difficult to determine if she hadn’t been here for longer.

‘Are you okay, Hei? Does the sight of this woman bother you?' Asked Bao Bei when she saw her son remaining thoughtful in front of the woman's body. It wasn’t as if he had no experience seeing a corpse, yet there seemed to be something different this time.

‘No, I'm fine. I was just asking myself something, that's all.’ Hei answered as he continued to stare at the woman.

‘Tell me. You know you can tell me everything.’

At that point, Hei was silent for a moment and then began to express his doubts.

‘You always said that we shouldn’t waste food, and when we kill any living being, we must honor it by not wasting their deaths. Furthermore, you have always said that the value of spirit beasts’ life is the same as humans.’

‘Yes, this is what I taught you from an early age.’ Bao Bei confirmed while she was waiting for what doubt her son had. Xing and Ye were also carefully listening because they could sense that their big brother was particularly serious.

Hei, therefore, formulated his question,

‘If this is true, why have we never eaten human flesh? Looking at this woman’s body left behind in this way, I wondered why to waste such a resource. At the village, I learned that ordinary people have to suffer and struggle so hard to live and yet at the same time they burn the bodies or bury them in wooden crates, and they then kill other living beings when it would have been enough to eat the person who had just died.’

‘Yeah, it's true. We, too, have asked ourselves several times the reason, right Xing?‘ Ye commented as Xing nodded her head while also adding to what his sister had said,

‘Long ago, you took the bandit’s leader body, and yet, even after all this time, you never gave us his flesh.’

Hearing her children say this, Bao Bei was struck. The fact that Ye and Xing were wondering about this wasn’t at the end so surprising, given they were spirit beast. But what struck her the most was that it was Hei the first to ask that question. Thinking about it, she forgot to discuss this during their stay in Leaf Village as, excluding the bandits’ attack, they had lived peacefully.

With a serene tone, she asked them.

‘If I died, would you eat my carcass? If Lei Lei and Lei Bai had died, would you have eaten them?’

Hearing this, Hei seems horrified by this idea as well as his two little sisters. Eating their mother? That action was something they had never thought of in their heads. Their mother was their world. How could they think of eating her?

The same applies to Lei Lei and Lei Bai. They were indeed human, but they had been kind towards them, becoming important people for the three of them.

Sensing their mood, Bao Bei continued, ‘The same goes for humans, it is unthinkable for them to eat their loved ones as well as strangers. In the human race, this taboo of not eating human flesh is firmly rooted. There are exceptions, but those that are discovered in doing so are considered monsters that must be annihilated and purified.

The reason I never made you eat human flesh is that, otherwise, they would have considered you like monsters, and I don't want that to happen. So, for whatever reason, you mustn’t eat human flesh, all right?’

‘Okay, mother, we will do as you wish.’ Her three children answered in unison while agreeing to their mother as they had sworn long ago to respect her rules.

However, Hei continued on the subject by proposing something else.

"What if I give the people I kill, the bad ones who harm good people, as a meal for animals and other spirit beasts? Thus, the latter won’t be forced to eat each other, and they will live longer. By avoiding wasting their bodies, those bad people will regain their value in their deaths by prolonging the life of other living creatures. It would be nice to live without having to extinguish other lives, but even if we can't do it, at least we can reduce the number of deaths, right?"

Watching his son smile innocently at this proposal, Bao Bei was stunned. Inside, she felt rather strange. She was proud of how Hei grew up, but at the same time, she couldn't help but wonder if it was good to have raised him that way. Had he been born into a human family, would he still have such thoughts?

Casting her insecurities away, Bao Bei gently stroked Hei's head and answered.

‘You can but not the whole bodies. If they are used to eating full human corpses, animals and spirit beasts could end up seeing humans as their only food. If you want to do it, then you have to process the bodies like you would with an animal's carcass.

Alternatively, you could always bury the corpses directly in the ground. From there, they will decompose and become energy for the soil and plants that will be the nourishment of other beings. What do you say?'

‘Alright, I will do so, mother. To start, can you take this woman's body with you? I would like to bury her, as you said. Among the seeds I took, there is a flower called rafflesia, the corpse flower. It takes on an odor similar to decaying meat, but if it is germinated inside a corpse, it can grow faster while absorbing it. Instead of being forgotten in this dark place, this woman will become light for other living beings.’

Having listened to her son's desire, Bao Bei proceeded to place the woman's body in her pocket dimension.

While she was doing this, Hei moved his lamp to the other parts of the room to see what else was there. Then, he noticed the presence of a cage, like those in the other room.

Inside, there was a person dressed in ragged clothes. She was sitting with her legs between the arms, and her hair was hiding her face. From her long dark blue hair and the slight build, Hei guessed she was a young girl.

She seemed to be sleeping because, even though Hei had entered the room, she hadn't noticed him. Near her feet, there were two bowls, one with water and another with some rice. A corner of the cage was instead used as a place to do her needs.

Noting this, Hei frowned. He had remembered the conditions of the water buffaloes. Those poor creatures were forced to remain in the stable without being able to go outside, except for work. They also had to live most of their lives locked up in the dark.

"It's okay. Now you can go outside." Hei walked over to the cage but noticed it was closed. Looking in the middle of the room, he saw a set of keys attached to the wall near the door that led to the previous room.

Taking the keys, he opened the cage, but no answer came from the girl. Seeing that she wasn’t moving, Hei went inside and knelt down, trying to shake her with his hands.

When she did this, the girl gave a slight jolt and raised her head just enough to let Hei catch a glimpse of her eyes.

Two sapphire blue pupils were looking straight at Hei. However, instead of having the brightness that suited a young girl, they had an opaque color, almost dead, as if there were no life inside those eyes. Her pale white complexion emphasized, even more, this feeling.

But apart from looking up, she had no other reactions in seeing Hei or that the cage that trapped her was open.

Since they didn't have much time, Hei decided to take her by lifting her with his two arms. Her weight was light as a feather, almost non-existent. Her apathetic face shifted slightly to Ye and Xing on Hei's body, who watched her with curiosity.

He didn’t know exactly why he had done so, but speaking of the value that a living being could have in its death, he realized that it would be sad to leave her in that dark place alone.

If she wanted, she could start to live again. Otherwise, if she was destined to die because she had stopped wanting to live, then she might as well do so by becoming the light of another being, rather than staying frozen there.

Returning to the other room, he saw that the others had succeeded in their intent and had freed their companions. Fortunately, the cages’ keys had been placed in the corner of the room.

In addition to the four kidnapped in their group, Kang had also freed the other prisoners. Logically speaking, it would have been better just to free his companions and leave the others there. After all, more people meant they were more likely to be discovered.

But Kang decided to save them. If they were able to do so, why not free them too?

Now, however, there was the problem of how to proceed with the plan. With all these people, they were more than twenty of them, excluding Hei and Kang’s group.

The original plan was to sneak their comrades into the hole once they were released. Meanwhile, Hei would use his secret card and eliminate the guard, Feng. After all, the buffaloes were unable to pass through that hole in the ground. The main entrance was, therefore, their only way to freedom.

But it would have been difficult for the guards not to notice more than twenty people rushing to the animal stable, considering that it was still daylight.

Even if Hei had created a diversion, there was the possibility that the guards would decide to take care of them first, since, for them, it was unthinkable that something could happen to their boss's bodyguard.

At this point, the only choice that remained was to cross the main entrance with the buffaloes, hoping that Hei's secret card could keep the other guards at bay.

Meanwhile, Hei was still holding the girl who was looking at the situation absently. She didn't seem to matter what was going on.

As he slowly put her down on the ground to ask Kang how they wanted to proceed, they suddenly heard footsteps going down the stairs leading to the basement.

With their heartbeats accelerating, everyone turned to the source from which the noise came. Soon two lamps, identical to those used by Hei and the others, were visible. The two in the adjoining room that were playing cards were the ones holding them.

Suspicious because the other two who had been sent to the weapons deposit hadn’t returned yet, they decided to take a look down to see if they were having fun with some slaves while they were on duty.

Obviously, the two guards weren't checking because they were loyal to the job, but they simply wanted to have fun too, and they found it unfair that those two were doing it secretly without having told them anything.

The sight they found before them, however, was different from what they expected. The people who should have been in their cages were all out and free to move. Out of the corner of their eyes, they also saw the special prisoner their leader had brought some time ago.

Immediately, Hei and the others lashed out fiercely against the two guards, taking advantage of the fact that they were still disoriented, aiming at their vital points.

Seeing that they were in a difficult situation, one of the guards managed to make a loud cry before being hit in the throat by Hei's spear that stuck him in the wall.

Witnessing such a bloody spectacle, some girls who had been captured gave a short cry, but they soon shut their mouths.

But the damage had already been done. Just the scream of the guard was sufficient to alert those present in the building. Soon, a bell could be heard ringing.

This was the signal that something was taking place nearby. So, all the guards had to join up with Dong Zhen to protect him until they made sure what was happening.

Listening to this, Kang bit his lips and said to Hei, "Hei! Use your secret card now! We need to get out of here right away!” So he started driving all the others out of the basement to the main entrance. There were only four guards there, and if they took them out quickly, they wouldn’t be surrounded by the others coming toward this location.