Demon King's Repayment - chapter 296

The sound of a child playing in a yard came.

“It’s dark, don’t run blindly, be careful or you will be caught by a sprite,” the elder in the family tried to frighten him.

“Hehe, grandma, you are talking nonsense, there is no such a thing in this world,” the child was not afraid.

When Yuan Xiang was young, although most of the children could not see the demons walking around in the world, their hearts were still afraid of such names.

After all, those weird creatures that were different from human beings truly lived by their side.

But in more than ten years, children who had never seen sprites had gradually begun to forget those creatures and listened to them as legends from their parents and elders.

Yuan Xiang came to the home where she lived as a child.

The yard had expanded, and two brick houses had been added, with blue brick and white walls, gray and black tiles, and the festive couplet on the door frame had not been removed.

The parents and grandmother still lived in the old rammed-earth hut. In that newly built house that was made by selling a few daughters lived their son.

The concealed Yuan Xiang entered a dimly lit bedroom. On the bed of that room lay her grandmother who had been sick for many years.

When the old woman was young, she yelled at the gate for several hours. Yuan Xiang could hear her from the beginning to the end of the village.

She was almost dead, and could only lie in the bed sluggishly. Even family members couldn’t tell the difference accurately. She often called her grandson by her son’s name.

Yuan Xiang looked at her. That grandma, who had never liked girls, turned out a pack of caramel that had been hidden for a long time and handed it to her the day she left home.

“Grandma, I came to see you,” Yuan Xiang said softly.

The old woman opened her eyes and squinted for a long time.

“Ah Xiang, Ah Xiang is back,” the old woman opened her toothless mouth and said tremblingly.

…

When Father Yuan entered the house with the soup medicine, the elderly mother grabbed his arm, “Son, Ah Xiang is back.”

“Mother, you are confused again, Xiang’er is no longer in our house.”

“She’s back, she was still standing here just now.”

Father Yuan didn’t care. It was not a matter of a day or two for his mother to be abnormal. She often admitted the wrong person, remembered the wrong thing, and talked nonsense.

He put the piping hot medicine bowl on the table and was stunned. A neat pack of caramel and three dozen silver ingots were quietly placed on the table.

Father Yuan dropped the medicine bowl and chased outside the door. Outside the courtyard was a silent night, and a young girl stood quietly on the dim dirt road. Her eyes made him feel familiar and strange.

“Ah Xiang, are you Ah Xiang?” Father Yuan asked hesitantly.

A gust of evening breeze blew, and the fine dust was rolled up. Father Yuan rubbed his eyes and looked again. The figure of his daughter who had grown up in the dream seemed to be an illusion, disappearing without a trace, and nowhere to be found.

No one knew whether there was guilt in his heart, but there was no need to know.

After the sky was bright, everyone set out in the direction of Kunlun Mountain.

Yuan Xiang lay on the back of the wolf-shaped Nan He, sleeping soundly all the way.

“Why is Ah Xiang still sleeping today? Didn’t she sleep last night?” Wuyuan asked.

Nan He: “Shhh, she didn’t rest much last night.”

Qingyuan said with a smile, “She went to see her parents with you last night, right? I knew that the child’s heart is soft. Did she reconcile with her parents yesterday?”

“Xiang’er doesn’t need to reconcile with anyone. She just reconciled with herself,” Nan He said.

All the way to Kunlun, although the flood peak receded, the sky seemed to have leaked a hole, and the patter of rain kept falling. The world that had been ravaged by floods was devastated and victims were everywhere.

It was not uncommon for people to wail along the road, and sell children and women.

The prosperous and lively world of the past seemed to be just a fragile bubble phantom, washed away by a gentle flood, and no trace could be found.

“It’s just a few days of heavy rain. How did the fun human world become like this?” Wuyuan walked on the road, stepped on the mud, and looked at the skinny human children begging along the way. He was very uncomfortable. 

A little beggar grabbed his sleeve, looked at him pitifully with tears in his eyes, begging for some food.

Wuyuan thought for a while and took out his bag of dried fish, which was specially made by Ru Shi before going out.

“You’re so pitiful, let me give you some.”

The bag was just opened there, and the surrounding children clattered around. They were all of different ages, one more dirty than the other, and countless pairs of dark hands eagerly stretched out in front of Wuyuan to compete.

Suddenly, a child was squeezed down.

Wuyuan was squeezed back to his original shape in the chaos, meowing in anger. Fortunately, Yuan Xiang lifted his neck in time and brought him to the high roof.

The bag specially sewed by Ru Shi had a big hole, and the dried fish in it was gone. Wuyuan crouched on the roof with an aggrieved look and swept his tail.

Yuan Xiang grabbed him to comfort him, raised her head and asked Qingyuan, “Anything else we can do?”

Her time and experience in walking the world was far less than Qingyuan, and she had never encountered such a catastrophe in her life, so she consulted this elder who had lived for many years.

“In fact, we can do very limited things.” Qingyuan sat on Cheng Huang’s back and looked at the crowds underneath, “When the flood comes, the power of the Taoist may be able to play a little role. But after the flood recedes, in troubled times, most of the post-disaster reconstruction and resettlement work could only rely on the court and local officials. After all, there are too many people.”

They stood at a high position, overlooking the whole town. There were already countless workers near the river embankment carrying sandbags of wood in the mud, busy strengthening the embankment that had been soaked in the flood for a long time.