The Gao family always kept their word. This time the treasures they had brought numbered several dozen in total. After Ying Bujie examined the wounds on the Ghost King’s body, eight lucky recipients of the reward were selected. The Gao family displayed eight rare treasures for them to choose from freely, and also distributed a round of participation prizes, leaving the extraordinary individuals who had come to take part exclaiming that they had underestimated the stakes. Some had eyes going red at the sight of the prizes, cursing themselves for not having landed a few more blows on the Ghost King.
Whether or not everyone’s resentment was simply too powerful, the researchers at the institute mentioned that for some unknown reason the Ghost King’s soul had been shaking continuously in his unconscious state throughout this period.
The prizes for the top eight had originally been seven ritual artifacts and one spirit-nurturing fruit. These days, while ritual artifacts were not easy to come by either, the Xuanmen division did have dedicated artifact forgers, and there was also the weapons research department. Difficult to obtain, yes, but with enough money it could be done. A spirit-nurturing fruit, however, a treasure born and nurtured by heaven and earth itself, was something truly beyond price, impossible to buy for any sum.
This particular spirit-nurturing fruit had been exchanged by Gao Shi using his own merit points at headquarters. But Gao Gusheng quietly tracked down Gao Shi and stuffed several more spirit-nurturing fruits into his pockets.
“Dad, we probably won’t be short of these going forward. How about we keep the ritual artifacts instead? I think that talisman formation looks really cool. Can we keep it?”
Gao Gusheng hugged one of the spirit-nurturing fruit trees and looked at Gao Shi with eager eyes.
The fruit tree being hugged by Gao Gusheng trembled with excitement, and in the blink of an eye, several spirit-nurturing fruits had sprouted and ripened on its branches.
The other potted tree, which had not received Gao Gusheng’s attention, quietly bore fruit in its pot in quiet sorrow. The fruit ripened and dropped to the ground, like tears falling from the tree.
Gao Shi thought it over and decided this made sense, so he kept three spirit-nurturing fruits. The prizes for the eight lucky recipients were changed to four spirit-nurturing fruits and four ritual artifacts, left to their free choosing.
After descending the mountain, headquarters invited Gao Gusheng in to have his constitution assessed, because the number of promising candidates with potential to become Spirit Founts who had appeared around Gao Gusheng was frankly excessive.
However, the available technical means were unable to detect anything unusual about Gao Gusheng’s constitution.
Gao Shi understood why. It was because Gao Gusheng was a spirit flower. Spirit flowers are born of nature, condensed from spiritual energy, and naturally draw spiritual energy toward themselves, filtering impure energy and converting it into spiritual energy.
Think of it as a human-sized air purifier.
Gao Gusheng was not a spirit-attracting constitution. He was a heaven-spirit constitution.
A spirit-attracting constitution can only draw spiritual energy toward itself. A heaven-spirit constitution can convert impure energy into spiritual energy. Because of this, the concentration of spiritual energy in his vicinity was slightly higher than elsewhere.
Due to his constitution being sealed, the conversion effect was extremely faint and instruments could not detect it. But accumulated over time, it had a gradual and subtle influence on the people and objects around him.
Just like these two fruit trees.
They held an innate fondness for Gao Gusheng and strained with every bit of their strength to remain by his side. They had not even hesitated to shorten their own lifespans to bear fruit to please him. That they had not died even now was entirely thanks to Gao Gusheng’s spirit flower constitution.
Upon learning this, Gao Gusheng thought the Gao family might as well open a flower cultivation business. With him around, every plant would surely thrive.
As the main group withdrew from the Eastern Mountain Range, the trafficker villages in Dongshan were also rounded up and taken into custody.
With the traffickers imprisoned, another problem came to light: the psychological rehabilitation of the abducted women, and the question of what would become of the children these women had borne.
In the Eastern Mountain Range, trafficking had been going on for a very long time. Because the terrain was remote and complex, and only local people knew the paths, women abducted into the mountains had only two roads available to them: death, or remaining in the mountains forever.
What lay hidden in that forest was the remains of generation after generation of abducted girls. There were almost no locally born women in the village. The local girls were in the well water, in the river water, in the dark and damp soil, in the bellies of wild animals, but not in the arms of their mothers.
This village did not consider women to be people. They would force women to bear child after child until a boy was produced. Once a boy was born, they considered the purpose fulfilled. The woman would be bound to that village for the rest of her life. Only then would the chains and restraints be removed, letting her come out to wash clothes, cook, work the land, care for the children, serve as the household’s domestic servant, and serve as the man’s tool for release at night.
Some girls resisted to the death and ended up buried deep in the earth.
Some girls, the moment their children were born, strangled them, refusing to let them come into this filthy world.
Some girls were forced to bear child after child, becoming the shared wife of a household full of bachelor men, giving birth one after another until they lost their minds, and died in a dirty, reeking pigsty.
Some girls went numb in order to survive, watching with cold eyes as one abducted woman after another was brought in as new cargo, watching them go mad or wither and die.
And some girls were absorbed into the system in order to survive. They oppressed the newly abducted brides just as the men of the household did, forcing them to bear child after child until a boy was produced. They strangled their own granddaughters just as their mothers-in-law had once strangled their daughters.
Just like the old woman Gao Shi had once encountered, who buried her own granddaughter in the earth.
That old woman had been abused by her father from childhood. She had managed with great difficulty to escape the village, only to be abducted into the mountains through a single act of kindness toward a stranger. Year after year, she became one with the mountains. She forgot who she had once been. She forgot the shackles she had once longed to break free of. She began participating with the villagers in abducting women. Because she presented the image of a harmless old woman, she gained the trust of her targets with ease. She became one of the most effective members of the operation, stripping one vibrant woman after another of her will.
She had spent half her life fixated on having children, but in this life had only produced one son. That son was idle and sickly. Almost every family in the village had a proper brick house by now, while hers was still a thatched hut, and she could not accept it.
At first she placed her hopes on her daughter-in-law producing a grandson, but pregnancy after pregnancy yielded only girls. Her heart hardened with resentment. She decided she would buy another bride and have the new daughter-in-law give her a boy.
She carried the granddaughter away. The sound of her daughter-in-law’s heartbroken screaming came from inside the room. She felt a surge of satisfaction.
Whether it was the pleasure of reducing another vibrant life to numbness, or some echo of her own past self, she felt that now, at last, she was the one who held power over someone else’s fate.
After her arrest, this old woman went mad. Night after night she dreamed of the granddaughters she had strangled with her own hands, and the daughter strangled by her own mother-in-law, crawling and crying toward her. Those tiny children, their skin not yet fully unfurled, red and wrinkled, eyes closed, crawling over her.
…
Among the women in this village, some who were rescued were already middle-aged: women in their forties and fifties, who would go home to face parents in their seventies and eighties, to face the unfamiliar eyes of siblings they had never met, to face children who no longer recognized them, to face the awkwardness of a husband who had remarried, to face neighbours whose pity and curiosity became pointing fingers.
“So that is the girl who was trafficked. How sad. Her whole life is ruined.”
“What is the problem with touching you? After being taken to a place like that, you have been passed around plenty. What are you putting on airs for?”
But fortunately, the families of most of these women had never given up searching for them. The girl who had clutched her student ID so tightly was held by her parents, who had spent five years searching without rest, and brought home. Her white-haired mother and father, that pair who loved her so deeply, would brush the dust from a precious treasure, and piece that shattered heart back together again.
Beyond these women, there were also the children who had grown up in this village.
These children had been raised crooked from the start. They had grown up in an environment where girls were regarded as livestock, no different from the pigs, cattle, dogs, and horses kept on the property. They had absorbed from birth the belief that girls were beneath them.
Some children had participated in abductions from as young as five or six. They would pretend to be lost, crying and seeking help from women nearby. These gentle, kind-hearted women never thought to be on guard against a child who looked barely old enough to walk.
In the midst of a woman’s screams and cries for help, in the midst of a woman’s warnings to run away, in the midst of a woman’s look of disbelief, these children would take the sweets from the adults’ hands and put them happily in their mouths.
A woman’s screams and crying sounded no different to them than a pig’s wailing at slaughter time.
A child begins as a sheet of pure white paper. But some people scrawl all over it as they please, staining it in the colours of crime.
These children could not all simply be condemned without distinction, especially those whose understanding was already formed but who had not yet committed crimes themselves. They needed to be taught: taught what respect meant, what decency and conscience meant.
Specialist work requires specialist hands.
Within the scope of what was possible, the Gao family took in a total of six infants still in swaddling clothes through the welfare homes under their name. It was to be believed that the kind-hearted director would raise these children well.
In addition, the Gao family established a charitable foundation dedicated to providing assistance to women who had been trafficked and were in need of support.
Some of the members of this foundation were the very women who had themselves once been abducted and found, upon returning home, that they no longer had a home to return to.
Sometimes being needed is itself a form of need. In the process of helping more women, these women found their own redemption.
And so this massive operation finally drew to a close. The trafficking network dismantled in this sweep shocked the entire nation. Over a hundred families were reunited in laughter and in tears.
The production crew of Xiao Yusheng’s film also gained a certain notoriety from the incident, especially the fact that the filming location had itself been a trafficker village, which sparked enormous discussion online.
Some found the situation deeply ironic. Others had been worried sick for the actresses in the production crew. Still others concluded that this new film was bound to be extraordinarily true to life.
Xiao Yusheng seized the opportunity to educate the public about common trafficking methods and promote his film at the same time. Riding on this wave, his film gained considerable renown, and many people had already begun to look forward to it.
The film business left Gao Gusheng quite displeased. Gao Shi, however, was unconcerned. According to plan, he would be dealing with this Xiao Yusheng before long anyway. The private investigator he had dispatched had already turned up some leads.
For instance, Xiao Yusheng seemed to harbour an almost obsessive pursuit of perfection. He would watch his own films over and over, reviewing where the filming had fallen short.
In the beginning, he had once had a falling-out with a director, precisely because the director felt a particular scene was already good enough, while Xiao Yusheng insisted on reshooting it. Every take consumed film stock, manpower, money, and time. The director wanted to pursue excellence, but doing it the way Xiao Yusheng demanded made it impossible to give the investors an account of themselves.
Sam Williams On TYMIMA Chapter 152