Master, Your Salted Fish Has Arrived - Chapter 59

After Shi Qianlü discovered Shi Yan was missing, his first reaction was calm—he did not immediately suspect foul play.

To him, Shi Yan had always been aimless: someone who lacked ambition, uninterested in cultivation, content to drift through life. Even after her memories were erased and she emerged blank-slate and sluggish, a certain innate laziness remained. She was obedient—useful in its way—and for two years after her memory loss, he had kept her isolated so she would depend only on him and the few left of the Shi household.

So when a full day passed without her return, when his secret divinations failed to locate her and the tracking spell he had bound to her was inexplicably broken, a cold realization settled in: this was not a simple disappearance.

He had arranged everything to hide her. After Sima Jiao extinguished most of the Shi family, Shi Qianlü had become both leader and tactician, using diversion after diversion—sending the remaining kin to scatter, staging fake leads—to keep Sima Jiao’s attention away from the child who had become his burden and his secret. For nearly ten years, his plans had worked. Then, with a single report, it all fell apart.

Shi Yan had been seen in Winter City—beside Sima Jiao.

The message hit Shi Qianlü like ice. The one man he had bent every scheme to avoid now stood at the center of his worst fears.

“Master,” Shi Zhenxu offered, voice low, trying to bridge the leader’s stunned silence, “perhaps Shi Yan went to Sima Jiao because of our influence—perhaps she’ll act against him. Even if she can only wound him, that would not be for nothing.”

Shi Qianlü wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe his years of secrecy had finally produced a weapon. But he also knew Shi Yan intimately—he had watched her for years. The truth he carried was harsher: she was not predictable, and he had delayed using her because he did not trust her to follow a script written by him.

“We must discover exactly what she’s doing in Winter City,” he said.

“And contact her?” Shi Zhenxu asked.

Shi Qianlü’s face thinned. “No. The initiative is no longer ours. If Sima Jiao has her at his side, he will have the power to turn her. Our influence will be gone. That weapon—our weapon—may no longer be useful.”

At the thought, a dark tide rose within him, and his qi quivered with the first whispers of demonic deviation.

Sima Jiao’s cruelty had already hollowed out the Shi family. Where once Shi Qianlü had dreamed of restoring the clan, rebuilding the Gengchen Immortal Mansion, and taking revenge, now he clung only to a smaller hope: preserve the bloodline, hide what remained, and wait for another day. He feared Sima Jiao would not even leave them that chance.

They did not linger. From Hexian City they moved south, retreating through towns until they found temporary refuge in the Demon Realm’s southern cities. Even then, agents of Winter City stalked their trail. The black snake—an ugly, cunning creature that had become the emblem of Sima Jiao’s reach—led a dozen General-level demon cultivators in pursuit. Had Shi Qianlü been careless, they would have been taken.

That serpent, oddly gentle with Shi Yan because of her master’s aura, had a savage streak for other Shi-affiliated souls. Over the years it had dispatched countless members of the clan; its nose for family auras was infallible. Failing to find Shi Qianlü in Hexian City, the hunters diverted toward Chilao’s three southern cities, rich with crimson cherry fruit and now heavy with Winter City’s presence.

Sima Jiao’s march toward unification had been relentless; the Demon Realm bent to his will. Most of his generals dreamed of sweeping across the worlds under his banner—but Sima Jiao’s current obsession was not territory. It was the amnesiac woman who sat at his side.

Shi Yan’s memory did not bother him. In fact, her thoughtless imaginations and strange mutterings delighted him. Unaware of the danger around her, she often spoke aloud or thought aloud in unguarded bursts, and Sima Jiao found the careless honesty amusing. When her emotions flared, he could hear her—what she cursed, what she praised—and he smiled.

Until he discovered the killings.

News came through a Zhi Hun clan general—two aspiring Demon Generals had been slain, and the report led back to Shi Yan. Sima Jiao’s reaction was instantaneous and volcanic. He had once forced Shi Yan to kill; the memory of her nightmares and tears had made him promise never to compel her again. The knowledge that she had been taught to kill—on her own—ignited a wrath that would not be soothed.

He burned the complaining general to ash.

The Zhi Hun clan, a proud and influential family in Winter City, had humiliated itself and paid dearly. Their master could only bow and beg, because the truth of the Demon Realm was raw and simple: if you could not defend yourself, you were expendable. But Sima Jiao’s protection of Shi Yan put her beyond their reach.

Shi Yan herself had never grasped the scale of his ferocity. To her, Sima Jiao often appeared like an unpredictable, sometimes endearing boy—capricious and strange. Only when she saw the ashes and the ruined dignity of the Zhi Hun clan did she begin to feel the shadow of his ruthlessness.

She had not intended to meddle. Yet one day, walking through the white forest, a group of Zhi Hun survivors—elderly, small children, wailing—fell before her, pleading for mercy. They looked human in such a way that pity softened something inside Shi Yan. She spoke a single request to Sima Jiao: "If you're not angry anymore, could you kill fewer of the Zhi Hun clan?"

He regarded her for a long moment. Then, with a strange gentleness, Sima Jiao stroked her hair. “If you don’t want to kill, then you don’t have to.”

Then he smiled, and in a voice that chilled and curdled, he added, “If you only want to vent on those two brothers who are already dead, I can resurrect them—and kill them again.”

Shi Yan blinked. Resurrect them to kill again? It sounded absurd.

But Sima Jiao had the means. The Shi family’s soul-transfer rebirth—the forbidden technique that could summon a dead person’s complete soul and remold it into a new body—had roots in the Sima clan’s secret arts. It required a compatible pregnant host and elaborate rituals, but Sima Jiao could arrange it.

When Shi Yan begged him to bring back her friend Hong Luo, he agreed without hesitation. The chosen host turned out to be a woman from the Zhi Hun clan—those who had once conspired against Shi Yan were now tasked with carrying the soul of one of her friends.

Shi Yan listened with the same innocent hope as she had when Hong Luo once joked she would be reborn a Demon Lord. “If rebirth is real,” Hong Luo had said with a laugh, “I’d never be as wasted as I am now.”

Sima Jiao watched Shi Yan smile and brushed a stray lock of hair from her face. “I once cared for you,” he murmured. “You don’t remember.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said simply. “As long as you’re here.”

For Sima Jiao, her amnesia was a lesson—an indictment of his own past indifference.