Chapter Fourteen Empty City in the Belly
The pain began from the deepest part of her lower abdomen, like an extremely blunt, icy blade slowly twisting and cutting.
A Meng leaned back in the rattan chair at the back of the medicine shop, both hands pressing tightly against her lower abdomen. It was no longer a mere void, but a decayed empty city that had been used repeatedly.
It was filled with others’ pain, sins, tears, flesh and blood, and memories that could never be digested.
They churned, swelled, and fermented inside her body, like a group of fetuses smothered alive, struggling, gnawing, and crying in the darkness.
Every backlash brought a violent spasm of pain to her lower abdomen.
The pain was not sharp, but sticky, heavy, and persistent.
It was like an extremely fine, barbed needle starting from the depths of her womb, crawling upward inch by inch, wrapping around her intestines, stomach, and lungs, finally stopping at her heart, making every breath carry a rotten, sweet stench.
She suddenly understood that this pain had never been random.
It was the curse of her eternal inability to “give birth.”
The moment Yan Luo had fed her the Wangchuan water back then, he had already hollowed out her womb with his own hands.
She should have been reborn in the mortal world, married, had children, and lived an ordinary woman’s life.
But he kept her by the River of the Dead, forcing her to forever ladle soup for others, never again able to nurture life of her own.
Now, every portion of pain she collected in the mortal realm had turned into clumps of sticky flesh and blood, piling up inside her empty abdomen.
They grew, rotted, and festered slowly inside her like unformed fetuses, never to be born and never to be expelled.
The Song Dynasty famine where people ate their own children surfaced vividly once more.
She saw those mothers’ lower abdomens spasm with the same pain when they boiled their children into soup.
When they drank their own children’s flesh and blood, their bellies felt like a collapsing empty city, the agony making them wish for death.
And now, Meng Po herself was enduring the same punishment.
She pressed her lower abdomen, fingertips digging so hard they nearly pierced the flesh, yet she could only feel a patch of cold, lifeless skin.
She felt an extremely deep hole there, slowly expanding, sucking her entire being inward.
“Did you… keep me here back then just to make me suffer like this forever?” she whispered, her voice tinged with weary self-mockery.
The shop door was pushed open.
Yan Luo walked in, his tall figure casting a heavy shadow.
At a glance he saw A Meng’s face, pale almost to transparency, and her posture with hands pressed tightly to her abdomen.
His Adam’s apple bobbed, his voice low and hoarse, almost unrecognizable:
“Hurting again?”
A Meng looked up at him.
In that moment, a faint, almost despairing softness appeared in her eyes.
“Every time I help someone forget their pain, it hurts here.” She spoke softly, hand still on her abdomen. “Like something growing inside, yet never able to be born. When you fed me the Wangchuan water back then, did you already know it would be like this?”
Yan Luo did not answer, only slowly walked up to her and knelt down.
This ruler of life and death, the King of the Underworld, now knelt before a woman, reaching out to cover the back of her hand pressed against her abdomen.
His palm was cold, yet carried a temperature he was desperately suppressing.
“I…” His voice was hoarse. “I only wanted to keep you by my side. I was afraid that after you reincarnated, I would never see you again. I thought… as long as you forgot the pain of the mortal world, you could stay with me forever.”
A Meng looked at him and suddenly gave a soft laugh, filled with endless desolation and loneliness.
“So you turned me into an empty city.”
She said softly, “An empty city that can never give birth, only filled with others’ pain.”
The pain in her abdomen reached its peak at that moment.
She suddenly bent forward, pressing her forehead against Yan Luo’s shoulder, cold sweat sliding down the side of her neck.
Yan Luo’s arms immediately encircled her, pulling her fully into his embrace. His chin rested on the top of her hair, his voice so low it was barely audible:
“I’m sorry… A Meng.”
This apology was two thousand years late.
And inside A Meng’s abdomen, that empty city continued to collapse and expand, slowly swallowing more sticky, rotting pain.
The bottles in the shop no longer merely trembled this time.
They began emitting faint cracking sounds, like the cries of newborn infants.
(Chapter Fourteen End)
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Postscript: After one or two weeks of continuous heavy rain, people feel like they’re going moldy!