Just a Wet Nurse, Just a Plaything? Everyone Wept After My Death - Chapter 70
Chapter 70
The swill cart, reeking of sour rot, finally dwindled into a hazy black speck amid the sweeping wind and snow before vanishing around the corner beyond the rear gate.
At that moment, Shen Yingyue felt as though something inside her had been ripped away with the departing cart.
It was her soul. Her very life.
Yet at the same time, an unprecedented sense of relief flooded the battered shell of her body.
Her one weakness was gone.
From this day forward, there was nothing left in this world that these people could use to control, threaten, or hurt Shen Yingyue.
She was no longer a mother forced to swallow every humiliation for her daughter’s sake.
She was now a soulless walking corpse, sustained by hatred alone.
“Ha… ha…”
Sprawled in the snow, Shen Yingyue stared at the raging flames devouring the entire woodshed and suddenly began to laugh.
At first, it was only a quiet chuckle. Then it grew louder and shriller, the sound of someone finally breaking after being pushed beyond all endurance, the madness of one who had nothing left to lose.
“Hahahahaha!”
“Burn! Burn it all! Burn every last filthy thing to ashes!”
She rocked with laughter before the blaze. Bloody tears welled from the corners of her eyes and mingled with the soot on her face, winding down her cheeks like two ghastly trails of blood.
“She’s lost her mind… That woman has gone mad…”
The servants and personal guards fighting the fire stared at the woman laughing wildly before the inferno. Their faces turned deathly pale, and not one of them dared take a step toward her.
Just then…
“Out of my damn way!”
A furious roar cut through the clamoring crowd.
Huo Xiao had arrived.
He had entertained guests in the front hall until late the night before. Still groggy from his hangover when he heard that a fire had broken out in the rear courtyard, he had not even stopped to put on his armor. Wearing only a black cloak, he strode over with a sword in hand.
“What happened? How did the woodshed suddenly catch fire?!”
Huo Xiao’s face was livid as he stared at the flames soaring into the sky. His birthday had only just passed, and now he was greeted by such a massive fire first thing in the morning. What rotten luck!
“G-General…”
The personal guard drenched in swill dropped to his knees with a thud when he saw his master. Trembling, he pointed at Shen Yingyue and accused her.
“It was Lady Shen! That madwoman started the fire!
“She… she didn’t just burn down the woodshed. She also…”
Huo Xiao whipped his head around, his gaze landing on Shen Yingyue where she lay in the snow.
At the sight of her, even Huo Xiao, a man who had carved his way through mountains of corpses and seas of blood, felt his heart lurch.
Not a trace remained of the delicate, gentle woman she had once been, the woman who used to lower her eyes and meekly obey him in his arms.
Her hair hung loose and wild. Her clothes had been burned black and torn to shreds, exposing skin covered in whip marks and blisters. Her once-fair face was now smeared with black soot and blood. Only her eyes stood out-
Bloodshot and scarlet, they shone with terrifying brightness in the firelight.
She stared fixedly at him, an eerie, spine-chilling smile curving her lips.
She looked like a vengeful spirit that had just crawled out of the eighteenth level of hell to claim his life.
“Shen Yingyue?”
Huo Xiao called her name instinctively, an almost imperceptible tremor in his voice.
“General… you’ve come?”
Shen Yingyue stopped laughing. Slowly raising her head, she spoke softly in a hoarse, broken voice:
“Have you come to watch the show? This fire… is it beautiful?”
“What madness has gotten into you?!”
Huo Xiao strode over, seized her by the collar, and hauled her off the ground.
“Why did you set the fire? Do you have a death wish?!”
“Live?”
Shen Yingyue stared at the face inches from her own. Once, it had inspired a glimmer of hope in her. Now, it only made her sick.
She tilted her head, her smile both innocent and cruel.
“Weren’t you going to sell my Nuannuan to some idiot as a child bride? Weren’t you going to break her arms and legs and make her beg in the streets?
“Rather than let her suffer like that…
“I thought it better to send her on her way myself. As her mother.”
Huo Xiao’s pupils contracted sharply. It was as though he could not understand what she was saying.
“What… What did you say?”
The personal guard beside him added with a stricken expression, “General! The child is gone! She was on the stone table just moments ago, but then she vanished! This woman said… she said she put the child…”
He pointed at the woodshed, already on the verge of collapsing in the flames, and could not bring himself to continue.
Huo Xiao whipped around to stare at the inferno, then turned sharply back to Shen Yingyue. His eyes were filled with horrified disbelief.
“You threw that child… into the fire?!”
“That’s right.”
Shen Yingyue smiled until tears streamed down her face. She leaned closer to Huo Xiao and spoke one word at a time, her voice almost as intimate as a lover’s whisper.
“I burned her.
“Burned her so completely that not even a sliver of bone remained.
“Huo Xiao, didn’t you call her an ill omen? Didn’t you hate the sight of her?
“Well, now she’s gone.
“No one will ever offend the Huo Family’s eyes again. No one will ever anger the Old Madam again.
“Are you satisfied now?
“Are you happy, Grand General Huo?!”
Boom!
Huo Xiao’s mind buzzed, then went utterly blank.
He had imagined that this woman might cry and make a scene, beg for mercy, or even try to take her own life.
But never in his wildest dreams had he imagined she could be this ruthless. She had burned her own daughter alive rather than let the child fall into the hands of human traffickers!
How desperate did a mother have to be to make such a choice?
“Madwoman… You madwoman!!”
As Huo Xiao stared at her hideously contorted smile, like that of a vengeful ghost, he felt bone-deep terror and dread for the first time in his life.
He shoved Shen Yingyue away.
She fell onto the snow like a withered leaf.
She did not get up. She simply lay there, staring into the towering flames as peal after peal of heart-wrenching, crazed laughter tore from her throat.
“I am mad… Hahahaha! You drove me mad!
“Huo Xiao! Liu Ruyan!
“Remember this!
“Today, this fire burned my Nuannuan to death.
“But one day… sooner or later, these flames will reach you! They will burn this filthy General’s Manor to the ground and leave nothing behind!!”
Her laughter echoed through the wind and snow for a long time without fading.
Huo Xiao stood rooted to the spot, staring at the deranged woman framed by the firelight and at the raging flames devouring everything in their path.
In that moment, he suddenly understood one thing.
The Shen Yingyue who had once yielded to him beneath his body, the Shen Yingyue who had endured every humiliation for the sake of her child…
The moment that fire was lit, she died completely.
