The Young Deity

Chapter 23

Ming Wen’s life in Xinghua Village had truly taken a turn for the better.

She could treat illnesses in people, and she could treat animals as well.

In the beginning, Sha Niu’s Mother could still hear those particularly sharp-tongued women in the village saying unpleasant things about Ming Wen.

It was as if they lived such bitter lives themselves that they only felt comfortable when they saw other women suffering just as much.

However, these women slowly changed their attitudes. When facing Ming Wen, they even took on a childlike, eager-to-please manner, their faces layered with smiles as they occasionally brought her vegetables. It wasn’t an act.

Sha Niu’s Mother didn’t quite understand. Did these people know too? Did they know that Ming Wen was the Immortal Lady?

Before she could figure out what was going on, Sha Niu came home.

As soon as Sha Niu returned, she hugged her mother.

“Mama… does your tummy still hurt…”

Sha Niu’s Mother was confused. “My tummy doesn’t hurt.”

Sha Niu had seen the Immortal Lady treating others today, and it had frightened her.

The only part she could understand was that those people were in so much pain because they were having babies, so she came back to ask if her mother’s stomach hurt.

After a few questions, Sha Niu’s Mother finally realized what kind of ailments the village women were seeking Ming Wen’s help for.

This truly wasn’t something Sha Niu’s Mother would have known about.

Sha Niu’s Mother had only ever had one child. At the time, she was actually being pressured to have several more, but then her husband had an accident and became unable to father children, so the matter was dropped.

Naturally, Sha Niu’s Mother didn’t understand the pain caused by childbirth injuries that some women in the village, who had given birth to seven or eight children, had to endure.

Those were things that were difficult to mention, things that couldn’t be spoken aloud.

These women couldn’t go to the town, as the town cost too much money. Originally, the village clinic was managed by the Village Chief’s youngest son, and naturally, they couldn’t seek out a young man for such issues.

But Ming Wen was different. They didn’t feel so many complicated emotions when facing her, and Ming Wen truly resolved their suffering. The women in the village spread the word privately, and naturally, everyone became even more respectful when facing Ming Wen.

Because of the respect and gratitude toward Ming Wen, even Li Qingqing and Sha Niu, who stayed by her side, were treated with kindness by everyone.

It was as if the entire village had changed.

Sha Niu’s Mother felt as though she were living in light, airy atmosphere every day.

All of this was brought about by Ming Wen. She would occasionally watch Ming Wen; just looking at her, without Ming Wen needing to say a word, was enough to make the gloom in her heart vanish.

Ming Wen had many ideas. They would even gather the village women together for meetings to spread knowledge about women’s health.

The village women couldn’t understand Mandarin, so for every sentence Ming Wen spoke, Sha Niu or Li Qingqing would repeat it in the local dialect.

Sha Niu’s Mother thought back to the annual sacrifices.

At those times, row upon row of people would kneel outside the Divine Temple on the cliff. Only one man from each household was qualified to kneel there.

The Village Chief would lead everyone in prostration, and finally, the Heavenly Master would go into the temple to cast divinations and ask for the divine will. The Heavenly Master would then interpret the omens sentence by sentence.

No one else was allowed to barge in on that day, or they would offend the Immortal Lady.

It was the same every year. Sha Niu’s Mother still remembered one year when she had a cold and failed to keep an eye on Sha Niu. That time, Sha Niu ran to the sacrifice site and was caught by the Village Chief and the others.

The Village Chief said Sha Niu had offended the Immortal Lady, and the Heavenly Master cast a divination to ask the Immortal Lady how to punish Sha Niu.

In the end, the result of the divination was that she needed to kneel outside the Divine Temple to atone for her sins.

Sha Niu knelt for an entire afternoon.

Sha Niu’s Mother had never thought about this matter in the past. Back then, she had accepted it all as a matter of course, as if the Immortal Lady truly were a deity who would be offended just because a child wandered into her temple.

But now, she looked at Ming Wen sitting in front of everyone.

The young deity was gentle and magnanimous. It was hard to imagine she would make a child kneel on a cliff for four or five hours just because that simple-minded child ran into her temple.

From this, it was clear that the so-called divine oracles from the Village Chief and his lot were merely what they thought themselves, not the Immortal Lady’s actual ideas.

The Immortal Lady herself was a very tolerant person.

As Sha Niu’s Mother thought of this, she remembered something else.

Regarding the year Sha Niu fell ill, she felt she must have been possessed back then. She had carried Sha Niu on her back up the mountain.

Her initial thought was that she must kneel before the Immortal Lady and beg her to let Sha Niu live.

She walked up and up like that.

The wind was very strong that day, and the snow hit the branches with a creaking sound. She thought of her life, her relatives back home, and thinking of these things, she felt that the heavens were unfair…

When she reached the Immortal Lady’s temple and looked at the deity sitting regally above, she realized the deity had once been a woman of Xinghua Village too. She had suffered the bitterness of being a woman.

And now she had become a deity with boundless power, sitting there, yet she did not protect a fellow woman like herself.

Rage made Sha Niu’s Mother lose her reason. By the time she came to her senses, she had already smashed the statue.

Perhaps because she had smashed the statue, her anger vanished, and fear of the divine once again took hold. She grabbed the child and fled.

After returning, she had been constantly worried. She worried the villagers would find out the statue had been smashed, worried she would be found out. What would happen then? Would they kill her as a sacrifice to the Immortal Lady?

However, it was as if the incident had never happened. The statue remained in the temple, perfectly intact.

Later, she even doubted if she had remembered correctly, wondering if she had ever smashed the statue at all.

But the one whose brain had been damaged by the high fever was Sha Niu, not her. She couldn’t have been mistaken about what happened that night, and besides, the large wound on her arm couldn’t be faked.

But why did the statue fix itself? And why did the Immortal Lady seem not to blame her? This was something Sha Niu’s Mother had never been able to figure out.

But now, as Sha Niu’s Mother sat there watching the young deity patiently ask the village women about their illnesses, she felt that everything made sense.

An Immortal Lady like Ming Wen indeed would not punish her just because she had smashed a statue.

Sha Niu’s Mother reached a new realization through her reflections. In the past, she had always felt that the Immortal Lady would inflict punishment over the smallest matters, but in reality, that was just what the Village Chief and the others said. It had never been the Immortal Lady’s true intention.

In fact, the Village Chief and his ilk had never seen the real Immortal Lady.

Whether she was Honggu or her current self, she was a tolerant and kind person.

Now, she had taken on a mortal form and returned to the human world. Even though she had suffered, she had not flown into a rage or punished everyone. It was as if she were observing from a close distance to see who was guilty and who was innocent.

This version of the Immortal Lady was different from what Sha Niu’s Mother had hoped for. Sometimes, Sha Niu’s Mother wished she would just kill everyone and be done with it, but this version of her felt more reassuring.

Sha Niu’s Mother’s heart was filled with hope. Sitting in the middle of the crowd, she gazed at the Immortal Lady with more devotion than she had ever felt during any past sacrifice.

Ming Wen looked up and felt a gaze upon her. She looked back and met Sha Niu’s Mother’s eyes, which were brimming with hope.

She gave a small, comforting smile.

That night, the wind picked up. Dark clouds filled the sky, obscuring the starlight and leaving all of Xinghua Village so pitch black that one could not see their own hand in front of their face.

In Ming Wen’s room, a single kerosene lamp flickered gently, its weak light barely holding on.

Soon, the lamp went out.

In the heavy darkness of the night, she remained silent for a long time, looking exactly like the Immortal Lady in the temple.

After a while, the young deity stepped down from the bed. She leaned down and pressed her ear against the ground.

A slight vibration came from the earth. She closed her eyes and cleared her mind of all distracting thoughts. The entire world began to grow quiet, and her heartbeat slowed until it seemed to beat in synchronization with the heart of the mountain itself.

From the distance came the long, drawn-out sound of the wind, seemingly traveling all the way from the cliffs, sounding like the response of some powerful deity sealed away here.

Soon, the sound coming from underground vanished.

Ming Wen had obtained the information she wanted.

She stood up and opened the door. The young deity walked out into the darkness.