Chapter 1: Xiaoman Is Not a Little Monster
Tang Xiaoman, your brother drowned. Did you push him into the bathtub?” Tang Zheng pointed at the four-and-a-half-year-old girl, his gaze chilling and terrifying.
Xiaoman’s eyes widened in fright. “Daddy, it wasn’t me…”
In the cemetery of Changjing City, Xiaoman was forced to kneel before her grandparents’ tombstone.
Snowflakes landed on her small face. Dressed thinly, the little girl struggled to move her fingers, her knees aching against the cold stone slabs.
Tang Zheng’s ruler struck her frail back, its dull thud startling the crows perched nearby, his roar shaking snow from the pine branches.
“The Taoist was right! You are a cursed star! You caused your grandparents’ deaths, your mother’s death, and now your brother lies unconscious in the ICU… Are you planning to kill me and your aunt next, wipe out our entire family?”
“I didn’t…”
She’d heard at the hospital that her grandparents died in a car accident—it had nothing to do with her!
Servants whispered about it: her parents hadn’t divorced, but her aunt was pregnant with her father’s child, so her mother ran to the riverside in despair.
Mother disappeared at the river; Father said she was dead, and that very day brought home a heavily pregnant aunt, who soon gave birth to her brother. Xiaoman stood by the cradle watching him, but whenever her brother cried, the aunt jabbed her thigh with a needle.
Later, as her brother grew older, he fell while learning to walk by the river. The aunt shoved Xiaoman into the water, saying Mother missed her from beneath the river.
Xiaoman didn’t want Mother to be dead. The New Year was approaching, and she wished her parents could be together, eating the reunion dinner as a family.
She definitely hadn’t drowned her brother. During the pre-New Year cleaning, she’d helped the servants scrub the house, her little fingers turning red from the cold.
Why wouldn’t Father believe her? He was her only family left in this world!
Tang Zheng heard the crows overhead, sensing ill fortune, and his anger deepened.
“You’re nothing but a little monster! You resent your aunt marrying into the Tang family, so you let stray cats take your brother’s bottle, let stray dogs frighten him so he cries all night!”
“Daddy, Xiaoman didn’t—”
“Shut up!” Tang Zheng seized her hair and slammed her head against the grandparents’ shared tombstone.
Already dizzy with hunger, Xiaoman saw stars as her forehead split open, blood blurring her vision.
“If your brother—the Tang family’s heir—never wakes from the ICU, you’ll never come back to the Tang family!”
Her frail body pressed against the icy tombstone, smelling the moss and the musty scent of snow seeping into stone cracks, mingling with the metallic tang of blood.
“Xiaoman didn’t do anything wrong…”
Seeing no sign of remorse, Tang Zheng ignored her cries, raining blows down with his ruler.
He struck for who knows how long. Xiaoman curled in the corner of the tombstone, barely breathing, her chapped lips still moving: “It wasn’t me…”
A flock of crows flew overhead. Tang Zheng looked up just as bird droppings landed on his face.
“Damn it!” He waved the ruler, chasing the crows away.
The flock scattered, the bird droppings foul and pungent. He wiped his face with a tissue, then barked, “Kneel here and reflect! You jinx! Monster!”
He gazed at the motionless girl. He should have taken her to the river, let her join her mother in the water!
Tang Zheng despised both mother and daughter alike. He turned and left, driving away from the cemetery.
Would Xiaoman die? She didn’t want to die here by her grandparents—they never liked her when alive.
She didn’t want to die, but she had no strength left, not even to move her fingers.
Numb from the cold, the sky grew darker as time slipped by. In her haze, she felt the warmth of her mother’s embrace.
“Mommy, Daddy doesn’t want me anymore… Xiaoman misses you so much… Mommy, are you here to take me away?”
Her consciousness faded. Xiaoman seemed to see her mother smiling at her through the mist. Just as her fingertips touched the phantom image, her small body, cold and starving, couldn’t hold on any longer.
The crows landed from the sky, gathering around Xiaoman, chattering incessantly.
Xiaoman’s ears rang from her father’s blows; she couldn’t hear clearly, sounds drifting near and far.
[Hang on, Xiaoman, I’m calling the police!]
[The officers will come to rescue you!]
[There’s a martyrs’ cemetery next door—I saw a policeman visiting his comrade…]
At dusk, crows swept over the martyrs’ cemetery, the wind rustling through cypress and pine.
Zhou Lin was about to place a cigarette before his old comrade’s tombstone when Blade, his police dog, suddenly pricked up its ears, nostrils flaring, then darted out like an arrow.
Something was wrong!
With agile movements, Zhou Lin chased down the side slope, his combat boots crushing the snow beneath him.
Curled in the gap between tombstones lay a child, like a broken rag doll, blood crusted over half her face, the exposed skin bruised and unnaturally purple.
Zhou Lin knelt in the snow, removing his police cap with a gentleness akin to defusing a bomb. He opened his palm, revealing the worn police badge. “Little one, look, I’m a police officer.”
Xiaoman’s swollen eyelids trembled; she smelled gunpowder mixed with peppermint—not the cologne her father wore.
“Sir, I’m so cold…” she murmured, her bloody fingers gripping his sleeve insignia, “Xiaoman didn’t push her brother into the bathtub…”
Zhou Lin wrapped her in his insulated jacket, feeling how light she was in his arms.
The little girl was like an ice sculpture—how could he warm her up?
“Xiaoman, hang in there.” He brushed the frozen blood from her lashes, his voice hoarse even to himself. “I’m taking you to the hospital.”