Chapter 363: Not A Good Idea
Old Chen looked away from the man ’pouring’ his heart out in front of them.
Yuche, on the other hand, didn’t.
He watched the man’s body when he answered, the way his shoulders curled inward and the way his twisted fingers pressed into the road hard enough to scrape skin from knuckle. Pain, shame, memory. All of it looked real.
And that bothered him more than a lie would have.
A lie could be cut open and exposed. The truth was a lot messier to deal with.
Rouxi crossed her arms. "And your arms?"
The man looked down at them like he had forgotten they were attached. "It caught me before I got out. Not all the way. I don’t remember much. Teeth. Dirt. Someone pulling me. Maybe I crawled. Maybe the ground threw me up. I woke outside with my hands like this."
His voice cracked on the last word and for a moment, no one spoke.
Yuche could feel Old Chen’s sympathy pushing toward the wall like a physical thing. The older man wanted to help. He wanted it with the stubborn decency of someone who had survived too much and still failed to learn when mercy became bait.
But Rouxi sighed.
It was a terrible sound.
Not pity. Not kindness. More like someone realizing that a problem had become useful enough to keep alive.
"You remember the way back?" she asked.
The man stared at her. "What?"
"The place," Rouxi said. "The hole. The thing that ate everyone. Can you find it again?"
All the color that remained in his face seemed to vanish at once.
"No," he whispered.
Rouxi looked unimpressed. "That was not a complicated question."
"I can’t go back there," the man sputtered before looking at Zhenlan, Chenghai, and Lingyun like they would support him.
Newsflash. They wouldn’t. The would never take an outsider’s side in public against Rouxi. That wasn’t how things worked.
"I didn’t ask if you wanted to," replied Rouxi, her smile sharp enough to cut someone.
His twisted fingers dug deeper into the road. "You don’t understand."
"I understand that something I should have killed is still alive," Rouxi purred, and now there was no sign of sleepiness left in her at all. "I understand that it eats people to heal. I understand that it controls zombies, hides underground, and learns fast enough to be irritating. I also understand that if it survived this long after the damage I did to it, then it has been eating enough to get stronger. And if it gets stronger, there is a definite possibility of it coming after me again."
The man said nothing.
Rouxi stepped closer to the wall, and the flowers opened just enough to follow the movement.
"I don’t like unfinished business," she continued. "Especially when the unfinished business has teeth and a personality disorder."
Lingyun’s mouth curved. "To be fair, pretty princess, that describes half the people you tolerate."
"Do you want to be useful or decorative?"
"Useful," Lingyun said immediately.
"Then stop helping."
"Yes, dear."
Yuche would have found the exchange amusing on another morning. Right now, he was watching Zhenlan.
The other man’s eyes had lowered again, not to the stranger’s marks this time, but to Rouxi. More specifically, to the place where the loose sleeve of Yuche’s shirt had slipped down enough to expose the underside of her arm when she folded it across her waist.
There was a mark there.
Small.
Almost nothing.
A faint curl beneath the skin, easy to dismiss as an old bruise or one of the many scars Rouxi collected and ignored. Yuche had seen naked enough to know every inch of it better than any man had a right to know, but even he had not noticed that mark before.
Or perhaps he had seen it and dismissed it because Rouxi was Rouxi, and Rouxi always had bruises, scratches, bite marks, burns, and proof that the world had tried to kill her and failed.
Zhenlan noticed Yuche looking.
Neither of them spoke.
Rouxi, unaware of the silent exchange, looked toward Old Chen. "Put him in the closest empty house near the wall."
Old Chen blinked. "You want him to stay?"
"I want him where my wall can kill him faster than he can make poor life choices."
The man lifted his head. Hope and terror collided across his face so violently that Yuche almost looked away.
Almost.
Rouxi pointed at him. "You do not come inside the wall. You do not touch the wall. You do not approach the workers unless someone gives permission. You do not wander, cough mysterious fluids on anything, bleed on anything useful, or die dramatically where I have to look at you before I’ve had food."
The man nodded quickly, then winced when the movement pulled at his shoulder. "I won’t. I swear."
"People swear a lot of things," Rouxi said. "Most of them are useless."
Old Chen cleared his throat carefully. "Food?"
Rouxi looked at him like he had asked if she planned to host the man for tea. Then she sighed again. "Instant noodles. Water. Nothing cooked by hand. Nothing shared. Put it down and back away."
Old Chen nodded at once.
The man’s eyes filled with tears, but that didn’t move Yuche at all.
Rouxi turned away from the wall as if the decision had already been made and the rest of them were simply expected to keep up. "He lives for now. If he remembers the way back, I get my Devourer. If he doesn’t, he is still close enough to the wall to become fertilizer before he becomes my problem."
"You are assuming he escaped," Zhenlan said quietly.
Rouxi paused and looked back over her shoulder. "He is standing here, isn’t he?"
"That proves he left," Zhenlan replied. "Not how."
The man flinched when Rouxi’s smile returned, sharp and bright enough to make the workers take half a step back.
"Then I guess we’ll find out," she said. "Either way, I’m getting my rematch."
She walked back toward the mansion after that, still barefoot in slippers, still wearing Yuche’s shirt, still moving like a woman who intended to crawl back into bed and dream about murder until breakfast improved her opinion of humanity.
Lingyun followed her first, fire fading from his fingers as he caught up to her side. Chenghai lingered only long enough to make sure Old Chen understood exactly how far the stranger was allowed to move. Then he turned too.
Yuche stayed by the wall.
So did Zhenlan.
Outside, Old Chen helped direct the workers without touching the injured man. The stranger bowed his head over his twisted arms as if the small mercy of noodles and water had broken something in him.
Yuche looked at the faint mark under Rouxi’s arm before her sleeve fell back into place and hid it.
Beside him, Zhenlan’s voice stayed low enough that no one else would hear.
"This isn’t a good idea."
Yuche watched the injured man lift his head just enough to stare after Rouxi’s retreating back.
"No," he said. "It’s not."