Chapter 127 - The Death of Ao Wen

Several days had passed since Ao Wen's confrontation with Long Ma. At the City Lord's manor, in the courtyard that had been assigned to her, Ao Wen struggled awake in the early morning light, desperate to claw her way free of a dream of being chased by a madman while the people she loved flung themselves onto traps to help her flee. Sometimes, the madman in her dream had been Long Ma, sometimes it had been Song Yufeng, but many times it was either vague and nebulous or the madman had a face she didn't recognize but instinctively feared. 

Gasping for air, Ao Wen tried to sit up in bed only to find an arm draped across her chest and the peaceful figure of Feng Xi starting to rouse in response to her sudden movements. "Wen, are you all right?" Feng Xi asked, her face full of concern. 

"I'm fine," Ao Wen said, catching her breath and wiping sweat from her brows. "Sorry Xi, it was just a bad dream."

"Tell me about it," Feng Xi said, pulling Ao Wen into a close embrace and running fingers through her hair. 

"It's nothing specific," Ao Wen said, shaking off the last remnants of the dream. "Just a dream of being hunted. By Long Ma, by Song Yufeng, by… who knows. It's just a dream, nothing special about it."

"I know what you need then," Feng Xi teased. "You need breakfast with your mother. You always feel better after she cooks for you. It's raining again but why don't we take a carriage to visit your home today. You can check on your father, and spend time with your mother, I'm sure she'd like that."

Moving slowly, Ao Wen and Feng Xi took their time to wash and dress themselves up before taking a carriage to visit Ao Wen's parents. Despite having several days to heal, many of the wounds Ao Wen suffered from Long Ma were deep even if they appeared small and the medicinal pastes Wu Lin had concocted for her had only been able to do so much to speed her healing. As long as Ao Wen moved slowly, nothing was too painful, but she still winced at several bumps in the road on the ride home. 

Once they arrived, the young women circled around to the back courtyard entrance, making their way to the small family kitchen that Ao Wen had used to cook for Feng Xi what felt like a lifetime ago. There, Hou Jia bustled around the small kitchen, chopping fresh ginger and adding it to a simmering pot of thin congee. Dark circles of poor sleep hung under her eyes like wounds and a stiffness to her movements suggested that what sleep she had received had been from a chair next to Ao Yang's bed rather than in a proper bed herself. When Feng Xi had mentioned that Hou Jia refused to remain in the City Lord's manor and wanted to bring Ao Yang home to heal Ao Wen had been worried she'd find something like this. 

"Mother, let me help you," Ao Wen said, stepping forward without thought for her own injuries. 

"Now you want to help?" Hou Jia said, moving to block Ao Wen, glaring at her daughter with crossed arms and a wooden spoon held firmly in hand. "After everything you've done, after all the suffering you've caused, now it's finally convenient for the vaunted Celestial Fairy to come help?" For days, Hou Jia had anticipated this moment. Inwardly, she'd almost feared it would never come, that Ao Wen would be wise enough to avoid her after all the harm she'd done. Every time she'd prepared Ao Yang's meals these past days, every time she'd listened to his soft whimpers of pain, she'd thought of how she'd confront the woman responsible for all this suffering. Now that she was finally here, she said she wanted to help? Could they afford more of her 'help'?

"Mother, I," Ao Wen started, confused by the sudden outburst and anger. She wished she'd woken sooner, wished she'd been able to stay awake to tend to her father these past days but now that she was here, what was happening? Had something more happened to her father? Surely someone would have told Feng Xi if that were the case so what was happening here? 

"Don't call me that," Hou Jia snapped, giving vent to all of the pent-up darkness that had settled in her heart since she'd been given Ao Yang's hand at the garden party. Hadn't that party been a great joke? A bunch of cultivators pretending that she was one of them, that she was just like them since they were all 'mothers.' They'd praised her for raising the monster that doomed her Ao Yang, what kind of cruel joke had that been? 

"Whoever you are, you're not my Wen'er. You look like her, you sound like her, but my daughter," she ranted, tears forming in her eyes as her words tumbled one after the other from trembling lips. "My daughter never came home from that cursed Awakening Ceremony. Instead, they brought home some conceited cultivator who shouts at powerful men, makes enemies of whoever she pleases, and lets the mortals around her suffer for her tantrums and pride. My Wen wouldn't do those things," she said, trembling in the midst of a storm of emotions. 

"Mother Hou," Feng Xi said, stepping up next to Ao Wen to defend her lover from the emotional outburst. Everything about Hou Jia felt twisted to her. It was like someone had unstrung one end of a zither and wrapped all the strings around the body of the instrument in a knot. Jagged chords clashed against each other in a self-created cacophony of suffering, each ragged string tugging at another one painfully and discordantly. How could she untangle this mess and help her understand what was happening with her daughter? If she could just find a way to explain, she was sure things could be worked through! 

"Fairy Feng shouldn't address me so," Hou Jia said, shaking her head and holding out a hand as though to ward off Feng Xi's approach. "Fairies, please, I'm a poor mortal woman with a crippled husband. I really can't offer hospitality. Please leave," she said, looking down towards the floor, unable to meet the hurt in the young women's eyes. She wanted them to hurt, didn't she? She wanted them to know a fraction of the agony she'd felt these past several days as she tended to her crippled and badly burned husband. She'd spent countless hours thinking about how she could strike back, to twist the knife deeper so they understood the pain she felt. Yet seeing that hurt in their eyes, somehow, it didn't give her the feeling of vindication she'd craved. Instead, it just made her feel more hollowed out. She'd thought that this would be her moment to show Ao Wen what it was like to be on the receiving end of a sharp tongue. Perhaps, if Ao Wen repented for her wrongs, there might still be a path for them but seeing only hurt in their eyes, she realized it had been wrong to think that this would be anything like she'd imagined. 

"At least let me check on Father," Ao Wen pleaded. "I'm still a healer and…" 

"Don't you dare!" Hou Jia snapped, head jerking back upright, eyes filled with fire and fury as she glared at Ao Wen. Of all the things she'd thought about the past several days, the way Ao Wen had burned Ao Yang alive in the name of 'healing' had dominated no small number of her darkest thoughts. Whenever she spoke to Alchemy Novice Wu about it he used phrases like 'never witnessed anything like it' and 'much harsher to recover from than proper antidotes.' He'd assured her that there had been no proper antidotes available but was that really true? Hadn't Long Ma intended for there to be a way to recover Ao Yang once he got his revenge on Ao Wen? But Ao Wen had killed Long Ma, costing them any hope of getting the antidote Long Ma surely had prepared. 

"You've already done more than enough to torture him," she accused sharply. "Estemed Alchemy Novice Wu Lin visits every day to tend to the wounds you inflicted on him in the name of 'healing.' He says it will be more than a month before he can wake up for more than a few minutes a day. He's barely able to take a meal and tea twice a day before he has to go back to sleep to escape the pain of what you did to him!" Hou Jia raged. She didn't understand. How could Ao Wen have done something like this to her own father? How could she inflict such horrifying wounds and then leave him in the care of a near stranger for days on end? It made no sense that her daughter would do such things but if this woman had stopped being her daughter… maybe this was all the care a cultivator had for mortals. 

"Wen did everything she could," Feng Xi began, trying to stem the tide of surging emotions flowing from Ao Wen's mother. "She didn't even tend her own wounds before tending to Master Ao…"

"Yet here she stands," Hou Jia said, bitterness and jealousy warring within her, overwhelming the emotions of relief that things hadn't been worse for her daughter. Would she feel better if she'd seen Ao Wen in the same condition as Ao Yang? If she'd come home missing a hand and burned to a cinder? She didn't know anymore. Nothing felt like she thought it would. Everything was wrong and it all hurt so much. She just wanted it to stop and somehow, seeing Ao Wen standing here just made it all confusing. Wasn't this her daughter hurting in front of her? Shouldn't she hug and comfort her? But she was also the person who caused all this, who she hated more than anyone in the world right now. How could both of those things be true at the same time?

"Go away," Hou Jia finally managed to say. She needed to make a clean break of things. Needed to send Ao Wen back to the world of cultivators and away from her where things would only get more painful. "Don't ever come back again. Whoever you've turned into, you're not my Ao Wen," Hou Jia said firmly, saying the lines she'd practiced in her mind so many times over the past few days. It didn't feel like she'd thought it would but she had to say it anyway. "When my A'Yang wakes, we'll set a memorial tablet for our lost daughter and mourn that we ever let her go to that ceremony, so please, get away from me and never come near us again. It hurts too much to see my daughter's face on a stranger."

"Xi," Ao Wen said numbly. "Let's go." Her mother was right. This disaster had all been her fault. If not for her Dragon Core, Long Ma would never have bothered her family. Her mother wasn't wrong about how much she'd changed either. She'd doubted so many times that she was still Ao Wen, still her parent's daughter. Now she knew. She'd given up too much of herself for what she'd gained in return. She had strength and knowledge and all of the things she'd gained with her old memories, but she wasn't Hou Jia's daughter anymore. Hearing her mother recognize that, hearing her say it aloud, it confirmed all of her worst fears. She really had lost herself. 

Reaching into her robes, Ao Wen untied the leather cord that had been around her neck since the day of the awakening ceremony and presented the jade carving of a leaping carp to Hou Jia. "Your husband carved this for your daughter. Keep it to remember her," she said, eyes misty. Turning away from her mother, Ao Wen pulled Feng Xi out of the door and all the way to the back alley before she collapsed to sit on the ground, tears blinding her as sobs shook her body. 

In the kitchen, Hou Jia clutched the jade pendant and stared out the door, suppressing every urge she had to chase after the two young women. She had to remind herself of the events of that day at the banquet, when Ao Wen had humiliated Long Ma in front of everyone, provoking the disaster that all but took her husband from her, and all the other things she'd done or not done since she returned home from that ceremony. Fighting with Aesthete Qing and humiliating him in public had done what? According to Alchemy Novice Wu, Aesthete Qing had helped make weapons for Long Ma to hunt her family with, just so he too could get his revenge on Ao Wen. Who knew what tragedies they'd face when Alchemist Wai Dan recovered from his wounds?

"It's better this way," she told herself firmly. "Anything else she does will only bring us more bad fortune. It's better that she stays away. She stopped being our daughter anyway. Better we all stop pretending that she still is," she said to the empty kitchen, trying not to remember the crushed look in Ao Wen's eyes as she left. This was for the best, wasn't it?