The yaoguai appeared in our village without warning. She had taken on the shape of a beautiful woman. Silky black hair framed her porcelain white face. Her red dress complemented the autumn leaves. I always believed that yaoguai were creatures made up to scare unruly kids. At that moment, how I wished it to be fake.

My brain could not adjust to what my eyes saw. White threads shot out of the yaoguai’s claws. They wrapped around the villagers, reeling them to the yaoguai one by one. Jasmine, who always smiled as she shared pastries with me in the fields… Goudan, who never hesitated to carry my kindling… the baby boy whose naming ceremony was to be next week…

An incoherent cry sprang from my throat. I launched myself at the yaoguai to save the infant. White threads bound me immediately, and my body slammed against the ground. Through tears, I watched her throat move up and down, chewing and swallowing his tiny heart. Some tried to run, others tried to fight, but they could not escape. As the bodies fell, the smell of blood, of excrement, rose up in drifts.

Finally, the yaoguai turned to me.

I expected her to rip out my heart too, but instead, she pulled out a pouch from her bosom.

She held it to the sunlight, squinting at it, her lips moving soundlessly. Then she turned to the bodies of the villagers. Under her rapid fingers, it stretched like dumpling dough. She arranged and rearranged the jiggling masses, checked the pouch several times, and then pinned the flesh into the ground with sticks.

A sharp pain slowly gnawed its way through the numbness in my chest.

“Why?” I seethed.

The yaoguai ignored me.

“You motherfucking piece of donkey ass shit-eating butthole cunt whore slut retard psycho crazy go to hell, burn in hell, rot in hell!” I struggled on the ground, shouting every curseword I knew.

The yaoguai hissed. She grabbed me by the neck, choking me with her threads. I took one last look at the forest where I foraged for wood, the fields where I plowed and tilled. My teeth began to chatter. I gritted them tightly. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of seeing me afraid.

Suddenly, there was a loud bang. The yaoguai turned. I followed her gaze, and that was when I saw him.

He was the most handsome man I had ever seen. It wasn’t saying much, given that I had only seen 60 or so men in my life, counting the old grandpas and babies in diapers. But I was sure that even if I met all the males in the world, he would still be the most handsome of them all. The man was dressed in all white, except for a purple amulet with a crack down the center. There was straightness to his posture that differed from the hunched farmers I had known all my life.

His eyes skipped to me, and my heart skipped a beat as I stared into those black whirlpools.

“You are a god!” The yaoguai’s voice interrupted my thoughts.

God? He was a god? I drew a sharp breath.

I knew gods. In the spring, we made offerings to the God of Rain. During summer, we made offerings to the God of Pests; in the fall, the God of Harvest, during winter, the God of Fire. There were also the Goddess of Mercy, the kitchen gods, and many other dieties that protected mortals. I had thought that it all belonged to the superstitions of the old, but here was a god, right in front of me.

The god did not answer. His eyes flickered to my neck that throbbed against the tips of the yaoguai’s claws. Then he looked at the bodies. My eyes traveled to the bodies again. And that was when I realized they formed words. The hairs on my arms stood up.

“Eighty-One Years,” the god read aloud the words formed by the villagers’ bodies.

“Oh venerable and compassionate god, are you here to check my work? I’m almost done, as you can see,” the yaoguai said.

“Who instructed you to do this?” The god demanded in a sharper voice.

The yaoguai heard the change in his tone as well. She tensed, and the white threads around my neck cut painfully into my flesh.

“Are you here to claim my glory then? I alone shall be rewarded!” The yaoguai shrieked.

“You are mistaken,” the god said.

“I made a mistake?”

The god did not reply.

“Can you enlighten me, gracious god?” the yaoguai asked, looking up at him. “You can have this girl. We will split the reward 50/50.”

I stared at the god, my heart pounding. Our eyes met again.

“I’m not interested,” he said.

My nails dug into my palms. With my face and figure, how could he not be interested? Hell, when I strolled down the fields in a dress, all the boys would look.

“However, I am curious about the reward,” he continued.

I would have spat on him if I weren’t being choked. I felt like pork at a meat stand as they bartered like hawkers at the market. The god’s words snuffed the flame of hope inside me. I needed to save myself.

“Whatever you like,” the yaoguai replied.

The god’s eyes narrowed.

“I don’t mean to be flippant, your… holiness,” the yaoguai said hurridly. “A god said if I killed the humans in this village and arranged their bodies in the shape of ‘eighty one years ago’, I may ask anything of him that I desire.”

I craned my neck to stare at her, half-strangling myself. But I disbelieved my ears. A god ordered this? A god? We were just farmers, why would a god seek to kill us? She had to be lying.

Crunch. The god had taken a step forward.

The yaoguai flinched.

“Tell me every detail,” the god said. His cloak whipped about him in snapping folds.

I heard the yaoguai gulp.

“Yes… yes…” she stammered. “It began when some humans set fire to my nest. I was just a normal spider back then, not a yao. My mother shoved me into a crevice, so I was spared. But I watched my family burn in flames.”

She closed her eyes, and a tear seeped from under her eyelid.

“I ventured into the world alone, battling coldness and hunger. On the verge of death, I met a snake. Instead of eating me, it slithered past. I found that strange. So I crawled after it and saw…”

She paused before continuing.

“ Lions, goats, predators, prey… all standing around, eating little white balls that were scattered on the ground. I didn’t know what it was, but I was so hungry that I ate one too, then another, then another. These things—”

“Shidan, food of the gods. When animals ingest them, they transcend into yao,” the god murmured.

“Yes! I became faster, stronger, and could shapeshift. From a snake that had been there the longest, I learned that these… shidan dropped from the sky in a pouch.”

She stopped abruptly.

“Being a spider, I know a pattern when I see one, and the embroidery on the pouch were actually instructions. I forced a human to read it. It… it said to… to…to killed the other animals and arranged them in the shapes on the pouch.”

She shuddered.

“When I finished, a figure descended from the clouds.”

The god leaned in.

“Who?” He demanded.

“Yfghgdash… Oh, I can’t say!” The yaoguai cried, her chest rising and falling rapidly. “But he is a god and can revive my family.”

There was silence, and then the god said, “No one can reverse death, not even gods.”

His voice echoed in the wind.

The yaoguai shook like a leaf. The threads pulling against my neck stretched and loosened. She didn’t notice.

“But he said he could,” she whispered.

“He said you may ask anything of him that you desire, but did he say he would grant it?” the god asked.

I could feel the yaoguai quickening breaths on the back of my head. My eyes flickered from trees to bushes to rocks… anywhere that I could run to and hide.

“What happened to your family was tragic,” the god was saying. “Nevertheless, you took innocent lives for your own gain. Justice—”

“Justice?” The yaoguai screeched. “Was there justice when humans killed my family? Where was justice when they set our nest on fire? You are all liars—”

I sank my elbow into the yaoguai’s gut, and the threads fell from my neck. I scrambled forward, but the yaoguai lunged at me. I felt a searing pain on my chest. Something silver flashed before my eyes. I saw the yaoguai’s head separate from her body.

I stared at the yaoguai’s head, watching her mouth open. She did not scream out in pain but stared at me.

“81 years,” she whispered at me. Her lips twisted in a mysterious smile as she dissolved to dust.

Swift as a leopard, the god was beside me. I found myself in his arms as blood dripped from his sword.

“You could have died,” he hissed.

“You didn’t—”

I shut up as his finger pressed the wound on my chest. Blood rushed to my face. I was keenly aware of his skin rubbing against mine.

When he released me, my wound no longer hurt. In fact, my wound no longer existed.

The god walked around the bodies, and dozens of graves appeared in the ground.

“Please bring my people back to life,” I begged.

He stared at me the way the healer had when my ox was mauled by a wolf and I asked him to heal it.

“I can fix injustice. I cannot reverse fate,” he said quietly.

His words were like a donkey-kick to my gut. Sweat beaded on my forehead and creeped down my face. No, there had to be a way for the villagers to come back. I just had to persuade him.

I remembered how the butcher’s wife said she wrung a new piece of jewelry out of her stingy husband every month: first, weep; two, throw a tantrum; and three, threaten suicide.

I took a deep breath and decided to give it a try.

Tears easily flowed down my face. A sob escaped my lips. I saw the god take a step towards me. I let out another wail. This time, a handkerchief flew from his sleeve and smothered my face. It mopped up every single drop of tear I managed to squeeze out.

I ripped off the damned thing and skip to step two.

“You touched my skin! You felt my body! Now you have to marry me!” I threw myself on the ground, pounding the soil with my fists. “BUT if you bring the villagers back to life, I’ll overlook your defilement of me.”

“Marry you?” The god repeated.

I nodded, and my face heated up. He wasn’t getting a bad deal. He might be a looker, but I was one too.

“I already have a wife,” he said softly. The corners of his lips curved upwards.

His rejection sent my heart into spasms of pain. I pretended not to care and stared back at him with my chin held high.

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. If you want to be compensated, how about…” He leaned down until I could see the lashes on his eyes. “You defile me back?”

An artery in me must have exploded. I should have refused, but before I knew it, my hand reached for that firm chest…

Instead, I grasped air.

I blinked. His figure was already a dot in the distance.

“You lying inbred stack of meat! You dog shit horse shit donkey diarrhea! You…” I panted, trying to remember that really bad word Auntie Wang called her son.

A soft chuckle floated back.

“Go to the nearest town, there is an old couple who has been praying for a daughter. Take their name.”

“But I need to avenge my people!” I shouted.

“Your happiness is the best revenge.” His voice echoed.

“Wait! What does ‘eighty-one years’ mean? Who plotted this?”

What answered me this time was the wind.

Emptiness filled my heart as I realized that I was alone. The god had buried the villagers with a flick of his fingers, but the ground was still red from their blood. Slowly, I got up. As I did, something fell to my feet.

A pouch. The yaoguai’s pouch. I picked it up.

The world spun as I pulled out what lay inside.

Blood roared in my ears. My heart pounded like the hooves of wild horses. I stood there, staring at the content of the pouch, until a gust of cold air startled me.

I realized why the yaoguai lunged at me. I understood why she smiled. I knew what I had to do.

With shaking hands, I tucked the pouch inside my sleeve and sprinted towards the nearest tree. My head slammed against the trunk. As life drained from my body, I took a last look at the village and let the darkness swallow me.