yellow weasel

The wind didn't merely blow in Blackwater Village; it screamed. It came howling down from the Great Khingan range, a razor-edged gale carrying the sting of ice and the sharp, resinous scent of pine. It whipped through the crooked alleys of the village like a whip cracking against bare skin. It was the depths of the 29th year of the Guangxu Emperor's reign, and the worst winter anyone could recall. Snowdrifts taller than a grown man blocked the roads, transforming the small hamlet on the northeast frontier into a frozen island, isolated from the world. In the center of this frozen purgatory stood the estate of Zhao Baipi. To the villagers, he wasn't a man; he was a force of nature, more brutal than the blizzard outside. "Baipi"—The Flayer—wasn't his birth name. It was a title, earned through decades of merciless extraction. If a family defaulted on rent, Zhao didn't just seize their land; he took their dignity, their livestock, and sometimes, their children. He was a tall, cadaverously thin man with a face like a hatchet blade, deep-set eyes that gleamed with perpetual calculation, and fingers that twitched incessantly, as if forever counting invisible coins on an abacus. On this particular evening, as the sky turned a bruised purple, Zhao sat in his opulent study. The room was stifling, warmed by a massive kang (a heated brick platform) and several braziers of glowing charcoal. The air hung heavy with the perfume of expensive sandalwood and the sour tang of stale ink. Before him lay a ledger, its pages thick with names inscribed in harsh, black strokes. "The interest on Old Sun's debt is due tonight," Zhao muttered to his servant, a hunchbacked man named Li Fu. "Take two of the boys. Break his legs if he doesn't pay. Or take his daughter, Yingzi. She's of age now, and I hear the brothels in Harbin pay well for fresh country girls with pretty faces." Li Fu nodded, his face a mask of indifference. He was a tool, much like the iron clubs the other servants carried. Old Man Sun, known formally as Sun Daniu, was a tenant farmer who rented five acres of rocky soil from Zhao. A year prior, a freak hailstorm had obliterated his crops. To purchase seed for the spring, he had borrowed twenty silver taels from Zhao Baipi at an interest rate that compounded monthly—a mathematical trap designed never to be repaid. When Li Fu and the thugs arrived at the Sun family's hovel, they found a scene of desperate poverty. The roof was patched with rotting straw, and the wind whistled through the cracks like a chorus of ghosts. Old Man Sun was coughing blood, his body wasted by hunger and a winter sickness that had settled deep in his lungs. His wife was attempting to boil a handful of tree bark for soup. Their daughter, Yingzi, a girl of sixteen with eyes like frightened deer, stood protectively in front of her parents. "We don't have it, Master Li," Old Man Sun wheezed, struggling to rise. "Have mercy. The harvest failed... please, just until spring..." "Mercy?" Li Fu sneered. He stepped forward and shoved the old man back onto the frozen dirt floor. "Master Zhao has no mercy for those who break contracts. You signed in blood. Now pay in flesh." The thugs began to ransack the hut. They found nothing of value except a single, scrawny chicken. One of them grabbed it, twisting its neck with a sickening, wet snap. Another reached for Yingzi. "No!" Old Man Sun screamed. A spark of desperate defiance ignited in his chest. He lunged forward, grabbing a rusty hoe. In a wild arc, it connected with the thigh of one of the thugs, drawing a spray of crimson blood. The atmosphere in the room shifted instantly. This was rebellion. Li Fu's face darkened. He pulled out a heavy wooden club and brought it down on Old Man Sun's skull with a dull, meaty thud. The old man crumpled without a sound, his life extinguished like a candle in the wind. "You killed him!" Yingzi shrieked, throwing herself onto her father's cooling body. "He brought it on himself," Li Fu said coldly. He nodded to the other thug, who grabbed Yingzi by her long braid and dragged her out into the biting snow, kicking and screaming. Her mother followed, wailing, but was shoved back into a snowdrift, where she lay sobbing. That night, as the wind howled its mournful song, the spirit of Old Man Sun rose from his broken body. He did not pass into the afterlife. His rage and the injustice of his death were too immense. He stood in the snow outside Zhao Baipi's imposing estate, his form translucent and glowing with a cold, spectral blue light. He pointed a bony finger at the heavy iron gates and let out a curse that chilled the very marrow of the earth: "Zhao Baipi! You will not die a clean death! You will suffer! You will be reduced to less than a beast! May the Yellow Immortal hear my plea and grant me justice!" Inside the house, Zhao Baipi was counting his silver. He felt a sudden, inexplicable chill, despite the oppressive heat of the braziers. He looked up, convinced he saw a blue shadow flitting across the courtyard. He shook his head, dismissing it as fatigue. He had more pressing matters to attend to—like the fluctuating price of soybeans in the spring market. But unknown to Zhao, the curse had been heard. High up in the mountains, in a cave concealed behind a frozen waterfall, a pair of golden eyes snapped open. They belonged to a creature that had walked this earth for three hundred years. It was a weasel spirit, revered and feared in local folklore as the Yellow Immortal, or Huang Daxian. He stretched his sleek, golden-brown body and yawned, revealing rows of needle-sharp teeth. He picked up a small, intricate abacus carved from human bone and clicked the beads once. The sound was like a death knell. "Three hundred years of cultivation," the spirit murmured to itself, its voice sounding like dry leaves rustling on a tombstone. "And finally, a soul vile enough to test the limits of karma. Zhao Baipi... your account is long overdue." The spirit rose onto its hind legs, transforming into a short, elderly man with a long, wispy beard and a mischievous, predatory glint in his eye. He was Huang Laosan—Third Brother Huang. And he possessed a special set of tools for dealing with men like Zhao Baipi. From a hidden silk pouch, he withdrew three beans. They were not ordinary legumes. They were forged from solidified moonlight and the distilled essence of the earth. They were the instruments of cosmic balance. He chuckled, a sound like the tinkling of tiny, icy bells. "Let's see if this 'Flayer' can handle the weight of his own greed." With a flick of his wrist, the three beans glowed with a soft, ethereal light and vanished from his hand, shooting through the blizzard like tiny stars, hurtling straight for the bedroom window of the richest, most hated man in Blackwater Village.