1 Death of the Wicked Woman

At the end of July, outside the northern city of Kyoto.

After a light rain, the fields of Partridge Village were awash with rain, and the roads paved with fine sand and stone were slightly muddy. Under the pavilion at the village entrance, there were five or six hooligans gathered together, doing nothing but idle in the countryside. In the middle of them was a woman who was wearing only a blouse, but not an inch of her lower body.

One of the hoodlums randomly rolled a few times and then pressed down on the woman's body. The entrance that was slippery to the point where it couldn't resist at all made the lackey's object go all the way to the bottom. The woman humphed twice, as if she wanted to struggle, but after receiving a slap from the lackey, she stopped moving.

** The smell once again filled the air after the rain.

The gangsters' wanton pleasure did not stop until the evening of the same day. After being satisfied, the gangsters agreed to come back another day to play. After they left, there was a piece of bread with mildew growing by the woman's side. After a long time, the woman picked up the biscuit on the ground and impatiently put it into her mouth, not caring in the slightest that her lower part was still bare and that there were still streams of white mist flowing out from between her legs.

After nightfall, a young man riding a horse came to the village entrance. After riding his horse into the village, he was escorted by the village chief to the outside of the pavilion.

The wild grass outside the pavilion was very dense and long, covering more than half of the woman's naked body. After eating the piece of bread, the woman laid there without moving.

The young master stood outside the underbrush for a long time, wanting to enter a few times, but gave up.

The old village head sighed and went back to the village.

"Yu Er is going to be wedded to become the Imperial Consort soon, so I'll send her to the capital. Father wants me to come see you, "the young man said to the woman in the underbrush after the Village Head had left." Father says that you are Yue Er's mother after all"

The woman lay in the grass without a sound.

"An Jinxiu," the young man suddenly became angry again and said fiercely to the woman, "Why would a woman like you be the one to give birth to us siblings?!" Why have you not died today?! "

The young man quickly turned around and left as if he was fleeing. He didn't even turn his head back. If possible, he would rather not have come here.

The rain began to fall again after the youth left. The woman he called An Jinxiu crawled out from the underbrush, her long hair falling down to her face so that people couldn't see it clearly. The only sound that came from her mouth was that of a wild dog crying.

Why isn't she dead?

The blood that dripped from her body mixed with the rain water flowed all over the ground. How many people in the world would care about the death of a crazy woman?

Therefore, An Jinxiu had been discovered late after her death. She had died in a abandoned house near the village entrance, and her body had been eaten by maggots and turned into white bones before being discovered by a few children who had run into the abandoned house.

The frightened children fled screaming, and soon the villagers came in and saw the bones in a pile of dead grass, and believed that the children were not lying.

After a moment of shock, a woman spat at the white bone and cursed, "This wicked woman is finally dead!"

By the time the old Village Chief arrived, the bones of An Jinxiu had already been scattered among a pile of withered grass. It looked somewhat desolate. Stop! " The old village chief repeatedly shouted to the villagers who wanted to set fire to An Jinxiu's corpse.

"Uncle, do we need to bury the corpse of such a person?" A young youngster stared at the old elder and asked.

"Ai!" The old Village Chief sighed, "A debt of death, buried."

"I don't want to bury this wicked woman!" The peasants shouted one after another.

The old elder's voice was suppressed by the villagers' curses. Looking at the bones in the grass and thinking of the woman, An Jinxiu, the old elder had a look of contempt on his face. Even though she was dead, the old Village Head didn't know whether this woman, An Jin, would be able to pay back the debt she owed after her death.

An Jin was the daughter of Grand Preceptor An, married to the current General Shangguan at the age of sixteen. However, she had delusions of fawning over the Fifth Prince and now His Majesty Bai Chengze. No one knew how many lovers An Jinxiu had had, nor did anyone know how many princes of the royal family she had taken part in, how many people she had harmed, and how many people her hands were stained with their blood. A dirty woman with red apricots; an abandoned woman with a husband and no children; a wicked woman who wanted to climb the ranks of dragons and bring down the phoenixes; and a woman who had caused the Xunyang clan to lose all face. These were all crimes committed for Bai Chengze after he ascended the throne. Since the founding of the dynasty, there had never been a woman who had suffered as much infamy as An Jin.

"She has been begging for food here for three years and has also gone insane for three years." The old elder waited for everyone to finish cursing before he suppressed the disgust in his heart and advised the villagers, "Is this considered a punishment?"

The peasants did not speak for a while. An Jin had been begging for food for three years, and they would often curse and beat this wicked woman up. It was not the first or second time they were having fun with this crazy woman, and there were even some lackey's who liked to play around in the wild.

"Are you all pitying her?" cried one of the peasants not long afterwards, "as the old saying goes, the poor man must have something to hate! This woman should have been struck by lightning when she was being loyal in the capital! "

A torch was thrown onto the white bones.

On the walls of the broken house hung a painting of a spider, in which the Grand Scholar, Guan Yin, looked at the flames with a smile that was not a smile.

An's wicked woman had died.

The news quickly spread through the streets and alleys of the Dynasty.

Within the imperial palace, the emperor was momentarily absent-minded. Ink dripped down from the tip of his brush, staining a piece of paper with the imperial edict.

The great general of the Wei Kingdom stood dumbstruck in his courtyard. The fragrant autumn was still reminiscent of the time when An Jin had married him. It was just that An Jin had died.

Over and over again, An Jinxiu watched her bones turn into ashes, and she even had the mood to watch the sunlight slip from the wooden window into the room. Under the mottled light and shadow, it seemed as if her entire life was being played out one by one in this flickering flame.

She fell in love with the Fifth Prince Bai Chengze, but married off to the illiterate Shangguan Yong. All of her sins started because she was unwilling, while her eldest sister could marry into the crown prince. Yet, she could only marry a despicable, unrecognizable soldier who had saved her father.

"I am unable to repay you for saving my life. Knowing that it is not easy for a benefactor to request a wife, I have used my daughter to repay this great kindness."

With a single sentence from Grand Preceptor An, her entire life was decided. It was laughable to think about it at the time, but now it was lamentable to think about it.

Fifth Prince Bai Chengze was unparalleled handsome, so what if he was both civil and martial? How many sweet words did he said come true? She had given him her heart, given him advice, plotted against him, stolen the military talisman from her husband's hands, helped him turn into a soldier and massacred the entire capital. So what if she helped him become the master of this world? Where was the position of the three thousand beauties of the imperial harem? Bai Chengze was the monarch that descended upon the world, and An Jinxiu was a wicked woman that disobeyed the laws of women.

Her husband, Shangguan Yong, did not know poetry, so what if he did not understand romance? Now that she thought about it, this man was the only one who had truly treated her with sincerity. As for that pair of children, forget it. An Jinxiu shook her head, praying that they would forget about her. Her life had been a huge mistake, and she couldn't blame anyone else.

After taking one last look at the human world, An Jinxiu turned around. The Yellow Springs Underworld was deathly silent. Who knew how many years a sinful girl like her would have to spend here? A few pieces of white paper money suddenly appeared at the foot of An Jin's feet. An Jinxiu turned around to look at the world again and saw Shangguan Yong.

Shangguan Yong lowered his head to burn the paper money. This woman, An Jinxiu, had left him with no peace when she was still alive, but when she was dead, he was still unable to find peace. He would never forget the beauty this woman had given him when he had married her, the look of impatience in her eyes when she looked at him, and the madness in her eyes when she was abandoned by the new emperor.

"If we hadn't been married, if you had been married to His Majesty in the first place, perhaps you wouldn't have ended up like this," Shangguan Yong told the burning fire. "I grew up poor and didn't have the money to study. "Ah Jin, in the next life, you will be a good person. Don't trust the wrong person anymore, and don't ever meet a husband like me that doesn't suit you."

The paper money was burnt to ashes and scattered in the wind.

In the end, Shangguan Yong threw a red bracelet into the fire as well, as if this was the only way he could truly destroy the marriage between him and An Jin, a woman whose appearance was like a flower but whose heart was like a scorpion's.

On the lookout platform, An Jin covered her face and cried.

"Why are you crying?" A woman's voice sounded as she asked.

"I did something wrong while I was still alive," cried An Jin.

"Then you regret it now?"

"I only just found one person's good after making a big mistake," An Jin's tears stained the front of her clothes. "Why do you think I'm so stupid? "

"Ai!" In the midst of all this, the woman who had spoken let out a long sigh.

An Jinxiu walked down the terrace as she muttered to herself, "I can't go back. …"

"You can go to the Bridge of Helplessness." The woman suddenly said to An Jin, "Just remember not to drink Grandma Meng's Elixir."

At the end of the bridge, the white-haired Grandma Meng let out a long sigh as she looked at An Jin. "Do you really not want to forget what happened in the past?"

An Jinxiu nodded.

"Let's go," Grandma Meng pointed to a path for Ah Jin.

An Jin's figure disappeared at the end of the bridge.

"Why did Bodhisattva make her suffer again?" Grandma Meng asked the person hidden in the midst of her lies.

No one answered Grandma Meng's words.

She didn't want to forget. Was it because she was worried, or because she was unwilling? Grandma Meng handed the bowl of soup to the ghost in front of her and said, "This trip will be a lifetime. Take care of yourself."

This was a lifetime, so what if this was the beginning of a new life?

However, when a Resurrection Lily floated over the bridge, blooming for a thousand years, and giving birth to a thousand years, Grandma Meng suddenly remembered that today was the day the Resurrection Lily had bloomed and fallen.