Chapter Five Blood and Ink
The bell of the River of Forgetfulness Tea Pharmacy rang at 3:17 a.m.
This time the sound was extremely light, yet carried a sticky, fingernail-scraping-glass kind of harshness.
Ah Meng sat in the wicker chair and did not look up immediately.
She had just been gently stroking the tip of her finger against that extremely pale golden vial—her own.
The smoke inside the bottle was especially restless tonight, like a trapped, rotting mass of viscera slowly pressing and twisting against the glass wall.
She finally lifted her eyes.
The woman who entered was about forty-two, wearing a well-tailored off-white trench coat over a black turtleneck sweater. Her hair was neatly pinned up, and a delicate platinum necklace rested on her neck.
She looked like a typical successful woman—elegant, capable, with a hint of aloof distance.
Yet her eyes betrayed everything: two bottomless pools of dead water, calm on the surface, but beneath roiling with an unbearable stench of blood.
Ah Meng could smell it.
"Sit," she said flatly, pushing a clean black soup bowl to the edge of the counter.
The woman did not sit right away. She stood in the center of the shop, her gaze slowly sweeping over the wooden shelves that reached the ceiling, over the bottles glowing in shades of gray-blue, dusty pink, and dark gold, before finally stopping on Ah Meng's face.
"Can this place really make someone forget anything?" Her voice was low and steady, yet slightly hoarse, as if she had spent years suppressing screams deep in her throat.
"Yes," Ah Meng replied curtly. "But there is a price."
The woman finally sat down.
She placed an exquisite leather bag on her lap, her fingertips unconsciously rubbing the clasp.
"My name is Qi Qiao," she said. "Perhaps you've heard of it."
Ah Meng said nothing.
Of course she had.
Qi Qiao, the most celebrated female writer of her generation, known for her icy, almost self-dissecting prose.
Her debut novel 《Sinking》 had sparked enormous discussion; some called it the cruelest piece of women's writing of the era, others said it was a blood-written book that tore the soul open for readers to see.
No one knew that the most viscous, bloodiest chapter in that book had actually happened.
Qi Qiao drew a deep breath, her voice so low it was nearly inaudible:
"I have a twin sister named Qi Sheng. She was born seven minutes before me. When we were children… we shared a single shadow."
She paused for a long time, as if slowly driving a very blunt knife into her own chest.
"Twenty-three years ago, I pushed her into the sea with my own hands. That night the fog was thick. I watched her head sink into the black water, rise again, and finally disappear completely. I stood on the shore still wearing the white dress we had bought together; the hem was soaked heavy and sticky by the seawater, like it was wrapped in blood that had not yet coagulated."
The bottles in the shop suddenly trembled all at once.
Several gray-black bottles developed fine cracks on their surfaces, as if something inside was clawing at them.
Qi Qiao continued, her voice growing flatter yet thicker, like squeezing out thick pus and blood drop by drop:
"She had always been better than me. Her writing sharper, her emotions more sincere; even our mother’s final gaze toward her was gentler than toward me. I hated her. I hated her so much I wanted to peel off her skin and wrap it around myself. That night we argued by the sea. She said she would tell everyone—that for years I had copied her drafts, stolen her inspiration, and even… during our mother’s final stage of cancer, deliberately delayed her painkillers."
Her fingers dug into her knees, leaving white marks, her knuckles pale and bluish.
"I gave her one push. Just one. When she fell, she still called out 'Sister.' Her voice was soft and gentle, like when we shared a bed as children and she called for me during a fever."
Qi Qiao looked up and stared straight at Ah Meng.
There were no tears in those eyes, only boundless, hollow darkness.
"All these years I have lived by writing about her death. I have written her into every book, making readers pity me, worship me, even see me as a symbol of women’s awakening. Yet every time I wake in the middle of the night, I feel as though her seawater still clings to me. That water is cold and sticky; it never dries, seeping into my skin, into my bones, into every word I write. I want… to dig it out."
Ah Meng was silent for a long time before speaking:
"Once you dig it out, you will no longer be Qi Qiao. You will become a woman who has even forgotten that she once killed someone."
Qi Qiao smiled; the smile looked worse than crying, like a torn piece of paper clumsily glued back together.
"Wouldn’t that… be wonderful?"
She took a small vial from her bag—things she had collected from herself over the years: a long strand of black hair, a fingernail clipping, and a few drops of already-dried blood. She placed them on the table.
"Is this enough?"
Ah Meng glanced at them and nodded.
"Enough."
Qi Qiao picked up the bowl of soup.
Her hand was terrifyingly steady, as if she had rehearsed this countless times.
She tilted her head back and drank. A thin line of black liquid trickled from the corner of her mouth, like an indelible trace of blood.
The change came in perfect silence.
Her body stiffened slightly, then she slumped back against the chair as if the most important bone had been pulled from her.
The eyes that had once been filled with hatred and pain quickly turned hollow, like two drained wells.
She blinked, gazing around blankly.
"…Why am I here?"
Ah Meng placed a new bottle in front of her.
The bottle emitted an extremely deep, nearly black red glow. Inside swirled a viscous fog like blood mixed with ink, constantly churning and entwining, resembling two women’s corpses forever inseparable at the bottom of a cold sea.
"You only came to buy a calming tonic," Ah Meng said calmly. "You can go home now."
Qi Qiao stood up, her movements somewhat stiff.
She picked up her bag, glanced at the bottle, showed no reaction, and merely nodded politely.
"Thank you."
She pushed the door open and left.
When the bell rang, her silhouette was no different from that of an ordinary middle-aged woman—elegant, weary, yet without that marrow-deep pain.
The shop returned to deathly silence.
Ah Meng placed the new bottle on the highest shelf.
The moment it was set down, the surrounding bottles all shifted slightly backward, as if in fear.
The blood-ink fog inside the bottle roiled violently, almost bursting through the glass, emitting an extremely low sound like a woman crying beneath the sea.
Ah Meng sat in the wicker chair and closed her eyes.
Suddenly she felt tired.
Very tired.
It was not physical exhaustion, but the sticky, unhealable emptiness left after the soul had been repeatedly hollowed out.
She recalled Qi Qiao’s last words before drinking the soup—
"Wouldn’t that… be wonderful?"
Yes.
After forgetting, it truly is wonderful.
No hatred, no guilt, no scent of seawater that can never be washed away.
Only a light, beautiful, hollow shell continuing to live elegantly in this city.
Ah Meng pressed her hand against her lower abdomen.
It was still empty, cold as a room that would never be lived in again.
She gave a short, dry laugh, like a snapped dead twig.
"It doesn’t matter."
She spoke to the silent bottles filling the room. "After all… we’re all the same."
Rain began to fall again outside the window.
This time it was denser and heavier than any previous night, as if it would slowly drown the entire city of Taipei, along with every hollowed-out soul, rotting them until they dissolved into an unrecognizable pool of black water.
And deep within the shelves, Ah Meng’s own golden vial shone brighter than ever that night.
The smoke inside slowly swirled, as if weeping silently in despair.
(End of Chapter Five)
****Any Plagiarism Will Be Prosecuted****
Postscript: It’s rare to have such sunny days these past few days, yet I keep writing these gloomy stories. It seems my sunny days… have long since disappeared.