Chapter 21 Blood on the Ice
After that day, Xiao Yan forbade me to walk out.
I knew he would not be able to keep from calling me back to that Ice Cellar.
Back to his stage. Back as his only audience.
I was right.
On a rainy night he stood before me, soaked.
Lightning lit his pale face. I smelled a faint trace of blood.
He covered my eyes and hauled me onto his shoulder.
When the cloth slipped, I was in that Ice Cellar again.
This time the ice was covered in blood. Dragged. Struggling. Pleading.
Under the dim candles, it looked like a twisted ink painting.
Others had clearly been brought here to watch. He did not look satisfied.
He was The Emperor. All under heaven bowed to him. Their groveling did not seem to satisfy him.
Only one person in the world had never acknowledged him, and had always dismissed him.
Chasing her recognition seemed to be the fixation of his life.
He had already killed that person with his own hand.
Some people still looked like her. That seemed to be enough to soothe him.
He took my hand to the ice coffin.
"My work. Perfect, isn't it?"
I nodded slightly. He grew excited like a child and looked over his work again and again.
He looked over the ideal "mother" he had pieced together.
"A Yue." He started opening his heart to me. "Who said only a mother can make flesh and blood."
"A god can too."
From those words, it seemed to me he took himself for a creator, one who could call himself a god and look down on every living thing.
A god could not be without believers.
Lan Zhi might have counted as one, but she loved him too much.
Someone who looked like his mother, it seemed, was not supposed to love him that much.