"Do you not remember your sins? If not, permit me to recount them to you."

Releasing her hand from Ouyang Di's throat, Natsuki kicked her over onto her back. Ouyang Di reached her arms out to try to push herself up, but as soon as she did, Natsuki stomped down on her throat, trapping its flesh within the arch of her boot. With her face pinned to the ground, Ouyang Di could not free herself from Natsuki's hold.

"Four days after Chunxue entered the outer sect, Long Guoqiang, who had just joined the outer sect from his own family as well, picked a fight with him. You watched. You knew that Chunxue could not fight a Qi Condensation cultivator. You knew that Chunxue's wounds could not heal the way a cultivator's would. Yet you only watched. You gave your tacit approval to this beating." Natsuki loosened the pressure on Ouyang Di's neck ever so slightly, then kneeled down and whispered, "Do you remember?"

"What the... hell are you talking about?! You fucking psychopath! Once I've dispelled your spell, I'll kill you!" Ouyang Di hissed.

"If your mind does not recall, then I shall ask your bones instead. Do you remember? Long Guoqiang broke Chunxue's arm in this fashion."

Natsuki grasped Ouyang Di's left upper arm in one hand and pinned her shoulder down with her free foot. She wrenched the arm backwards until the humerus snapped two-thirds the way down its length. Where it should have been straight, it now turned at a painfully sharp oblique angle.

Ouyang Di grimaced, but she did not scream. Beneath that grimace there was, somehow, confidence. I could not imagine where she could find confidence in such a situation, but there is no trait more characteristic of a cultivator than undeserved arrogance.

"You do not remember? How about this? After that, he crushed Chunxue's sternum in this fashion."

Natsuki kicked Ouyang Di over, so she was facing the sky. Then she reached her arm back, and her hand seemed to disappear as she did, as if it were hidden by the refraction upon the surface of a lake. From the depths of that invisible lake she pulled out a normal-looking sword, yet in its sheath. She slammed the pommel of the sword into the upper center of Ouyang Di's chest, sending a cracking sound resonating across the courtyard. The pommel sank deep into her ribcage, so far that I could not see the grip anymore.

"And was it not you who then said— As long as the sword has not been unsheathed, there is no problem? Do you remember?"

I did. I remembered. It was an old memory, but one I had relived every day until I had killed Guoqiang. Yet Ouyang Di's expression remained dull and confused. She could not remember how she had enabled my suffering. That was how little I meant in her eyes.

She opened her mouth to speak, but no voice came out, only a slow gurgling sound, one that was at once familiar and strange to my ears, as it was usually from the inside of my head that I heard that sound.

"You do not remember? Then let us consider something more recent. Three years two months and fourteen days ago, there was a tournament organized for the outer sect disciples. Someone signed up Chunxue for the tournament. You knew that he had not placed his own name in the goblet. And yet you did nothing. You forced him to fight Chen Mantian in the first round. And this is what happened."

Natsuki unsheathed the dull-looking sword, then stabbed its tip through the space between Ouyang Di's right shoulder-socket and her ribs. As her flailing arm suddenly stopped moving, she coughed up a mouthful of blood, just as I had that day.

And then she smiled.

With her other arm she reached into her robes and pulled out a talisman, which she immediately tore between three fingers.

"You think I haven't figured out your tricks by now?" she laughed, blood leaking from her mouth as she did. "I don't know what kind of sealing technique you have, but I've figured out its conditions. I have called the other elders here. Five minutes. That is all you have, at best."

Natsuki shook her head and raised one hand, fingers splayed, to the sky.

"May sight be blinded by what it sees..."

Suddenly, the colors of the world shifted. Everything I could normally see was painted in colors I could not recognize, and among it all, I could see a substance, unfamiliar in shape, but bearing the familiar colors of the real world. Like a noxious gas it swam and expanded, left, down, up, right, mixing and unmixing, reds burning into blues and greens growing from purples. I looked around, and I saw more of this substance everywhere I cast my gaze. In fact, the courtyard was covered in it. It frothed around the base of the fountain like the mist at the base of the waterfall, and each of the statues of auspicious beasts lining the side of the courtyard discharged and absorbed this substance from its base, though none of its iridescent hues were alike.

"Qi?!" Ouyang Di shouted in disbelief. "Is that— qi?!"

Yes— It resembled qi, but there was so much more of it. It was everywhere, like the air itself. And in fact, there was one strand of it, a deep gold, rising like smoke from the talisman that she had just torn. No doubt that was the magic she was using to contact the sect.

"May the world be crushed under its own weight..."

A great circle exploded out of nothingness in the sky overhead. I could not identify the color of the sky, but I could see very well that the circle was black, pitch black. As soon as it appeared, it began pulling everything towards it with a powerful spinning force. The clouds shattered and the earth shuddered. Auspicious statues crumbled arm by leg and divine trees were uprooted from the dirt, and with them followed every wisp of the smokelike substance, all of it draining in a vortex upwards, into the sky, towards the great hole in the sky— and upon contact, disappearing beyond the veil of that black void. The magic from Ouyang Di's talisman, too, vanished into the void, and as the void swallowed everything up, a ghastly white flare began to shimmer at its edge.

Just as the shape of her eyes had once taken.

"From the wastes of death, may life rise."

I blinked, and the colors of the world were once again as they had been, though the hole in the sky did not disappear. Rather, it shuddered and began to congeal into the shape of—

the shape of a three-legged crow.

With a screeching caw that calmed the trembling skies, the crow dove down and perched itself upon Natsuki's shoulder.

"You... dispelled the qi?" Ouyang Di whispered, her tone utterly despairing. Only now did it seem that she understood the situation she was in.

"Let us continue reminiscing upon your sins. After Chunxue received this wound, he tried to forfeit the match. You did not recognize this forfeit. As a result..."

Pulling the sword out of Ouyang Di's shoulder, Natsuki stepped to the side for a moment. Instinctively, Ouyang Di tried to push herself up, and immediately, Natsuki stabbed the sword through Ouyang Di's hand and into the ground. With one broken arm and one arm pinned to the ground, Ouyang Di could not move.

Natsuki reached her hand towards the crow on her shoulder, who spit up another dull-looking sword from its gullet. Natsuki unsheathed the sword, then stabbed it right through Ouyang Di's femur.

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"—Grrrkh!"

Even Ouyang Di, experienced as she was, could not prevent herself from feeling pain.

She was, after all, human.

"Precisely because it is the strongest bone in the body, the human femur heals particularly slowly, even if you use medicinal pills to accelerate the process. You knew this. And yet you did nothing."

—Natsuki pulled the sword out of her leg, then stabbed it through the lower left side of her stomach, then lifted it once more and stabbed it through the elbow of the arm already pinned to the ground by another sword.

A hellish grimace wrapped itself over Ouyang Di's face.

"This is what happened to Chunxue. Ouyang Di, do you remember?"

I remembered. Of course I remembered. But—

"I don't remember!" Ouyang Di cried out, fear finally gripping her voice. "How could I remember something as unimportant as that?!"

Unimportant. Yes, of course it was unimportant. Would you remember the time that someone else had stepped on an anthill or shot a bird out of the sky in front of you? Of course not. Such happenings are too unimportant to remember. And to someone like her, the suffering of a mere civilian like me was no more interesting than the suffering of an ant. In her eyes, I had been no more than an ant!

"Then let us discuss something you could not possibly have forgotten. It must have been just about four months ago that Wang Wujiu went to you sect elders... and asked you for permission to take Chunxue's life."

Ouyang Di's eyes opened wide, and the last mote of tension holding together her limbs collapsed at once.

"How— how do you know about that?" she gasped.

"Who would not know? Or do you think Wang Wujiu was one to kill without having first confirmed the consequences? I cannot see this memory myself, but it is easy enough to guess at what occurred. To her request, you elders must have said something like—

Are we his keepers?"

The crow upon Natsuki's shoulder spit a decorated sword-hilt into her hand, and she lit a black flame where its blade was not.

It felt somehow reassuring that here, Natsuki would avenge the wrongs that had once been done to me.

And yet, to be honest, I was not happy.

It felt insufficient somehow that this justice, the vindication of my suffering, could only be carried out by turning to a higher power. In a better world, the powerless would find recourse in something other than power. I... wished that this world could be like that.

"Do you not know what you have done?! The voice of his blood cries unto me from the earth!"

In a blinding rage, Natsuki stabbed the sword through the side of Ouyang Di's neck, avoiding the spine but severing several critical blood vessels and cutting open her throat. She raised the sword and thrust it through the other side of her neck too. Blood, burning black, began pooling around the back of Ouyang Di's head, but this was, of course, not enough to kill her. So Natsuki raised the sword and stabbed it through the inner triangles of her legs, severing her femoral arteries, and then up through the hollows under her acromia, severing her subclavian arteries as well, so that great quantities of burning blood leaked from great wounds across her limbs— wounds that, guarded by the ever-burning black flame, would not close.

Ouyang Di opened her mouth to scream, but it was not her mouth that her voice came out from.

And I... I wished that this world were one in which power were not the sole arbiter of right... that those without power, too, could walk the world with their heads held high...

"You shall be cursed by the earth, that opened its maw to receive the blood spilled by your will!"

Natsuki held her sword aloft, and as the winter wind blew through its flames they softened from an impenetrable black to fluttering greens and reds, like the colors of a young wildfire. Then she thrust her sword through Ouyang Di's right palm. This time, blood did not leak from the wound. Instead, around the wound, Ouyang Di's flesh desiccated and shriveled, to the point where I could clearly make out each of the eight bones in her wrist.

...It reminded me of the poison that Wujiu had once used on me.

Through labored gasps, Ouyang Di cried out,

"Are you going to kill m—"

—but the desiccation crawled up her arm and wrapped around her throat, utterly silencing her voice.

And I... I wished that wrongdoing would be prevented rather than vindicated... that there would be no wrongs that the powerless would have to resort to gods to right...

"The earth shall never again grant you its strength! Its fruit shall never again ripen for you!"

Natsuki stood, then slammed her boot through the length of Ouyang Di's right arm,

crCaccRcrCACCKakRArRcakCAckKCK

—crushing it, as my arm had been crushed against the earth on that fateful night.

Ouyang Di trembled. I could see in her eyes that emotion that I knew very well— the fear of death. As Natsuki drew the tip of her sword down along Ouyang Di's forehead, cutting a thin burning line upon her skin, that single emotion overtook everything else in her expression— her anger, her pride, her disgust, her greed, even the sorrow for Jing Ke I doubted she had ever felt.

And I... I wished that—

I put my hand to my mouth. I knew what my wish was. I knew the words, the prayer I needed to offer to Natsuki. I knew. I knew! I knew!

Natsuki brought her sword down over Ouyang Di's forehead, and—

"Xia-jie!" I cried out, through what was no doubt a brilliantly wide smile on my face. "I know! I know what my wish is!"

The blade pierced the front of Ouyang Di's skull,

then stopped in place.

The blade's flame went out. She turned to me, wearing upon her countenance, just as ever, a brilliantly dull smile.

"That is good to hear, Xue'er."

She stepped to the side, then rammed her foot into Ouyang Di's ribcage, sending her flying into the wall of the courtyard with such force that a great dent opened up in the stone. As her body, barely moving, fell to the ground, Natsuki said, her voice just as elated,

"Get out of my sight, Ouyang Di. The next time I see you, I will kill you."

The black flames lapping at Ouyang Di's blood petered out, and the curse of desiccation receded. Her wounds closed up quickly, and as soon as they did, she clenched her fists and fled from the courtyard in a faltering beam of light, with only an expression of absolute, incontrovertible fear on her face.