“Alright, alright. I won’t laugh at you anymore. Don’t leave , my dear.”
Lu Juren sat back down with Luo Juanhua pulling onto his sleeves.
It was a bit cramped with two people lying in a single chair, but they didn’t mind it.
“Husband, I never regretted marrying you. You might be a wimp at tis, but you are very kind.”
Lu Juren said nothing as his wife opened up to him.
“If anyone else got rich, they would’ve imdiately gone and gotten themselves a mistress, but you are different. When I first gave birth to Xiu’er, I rember how your father had been very upset since she was a girl, but I also rember how happy you looked. You looked just like a monkey dancing in joy.”
She suddenly rembered sothing when she said that. She lifted her head and revealed a sly expression.
“Hey, did he say that he would hand down the theater to you after his death? Maybe there’s so paper or docunt that details that.”
Lu Juren coughed out of surprise and turned around. “Why are you bringing my father into the equation?”
“Tsk. You have to be very careful with matters like these. Your brother might look careless and stupid on the outside, but he’s actually quite calculative. I just don’t want others to take advantage of your kindness.”
Lu Juren sat up and was confused.
Luo Juanhua thought he didn’t understand her and explained, “Wait, stop running away every ti I’m trying to talk to you about these things. Do you expect us to go beg for food when we are old if we don’t have the theater?”
Lu Juren replied, “No, it’s not about that. Listen, why did they stop performing?”
Luo Juanhua craned her neck and was confused by what she heard too. Rather than hearing the sound of a performance, she heard what seed to be a commotion instead.
She asked, “What’s going on? Is there trouble with the perforrs?”
“Take Xiu’er and don’t leave this place. Let go and take a look,” Lu Juren said.
Lu Juren walked towards the door. Just as he placed his hand on the wooden door, soone kicked the entire door open. A group of people charged into the room. So of them had a white cloth wrapped around their head, while others had black cloth wrapped over their shoulders.
The first person to enter the room was a beggar with sores on his face. Lu Zhuangyuan had seen him at the entrance of the market.
The beggar swung the cleaver and slashed at Lu Juren’s chest, laughing happily when he heard Lu Juren’s painful cries.
“To think that you know how to feel pain! You, who were born in opulence?! Do you know how painful being hungry was? Do you know what true suffering is? Do you know how it feels to be humiliated by others? If the Heavens were unjust towards us, then we shall change the Heavens today! I shall let you feel what being poor feels like!”
Lu Juren endured the pain and pushed the old beggar away. His usual cowardly self was gone.
He looked at the group of people and imdiately shouted at Luo Juanhua, “Juan’er! Run!”
Lu Juren tried to block the people but was hit in the head by a hamr.
Iron was harder than bone. Lu Juren didn’t stand a chance.
His head imdiately caved in, and he slumped onto the ground.
“Junren!” Luo Juanhua shouted in despair and rushed over to Lu Juren’s corpse. She completely ignored the people from the Dharma Sect.
One of the old ladies ran out from the group and stabbed Luo Juanhua’s neck with a pair of scissors.
The old lady’s eyes were filled with hatred as she spat, “How dare you enjoy your wealth while others suffer?! We are all won, so why are you in bliss while I have to suffer?!”
Luo Juanhua’s eyes glazed over as she died. The old lady then carried her bloodied scissors as she walked towards the crying Xiu’er.
She almost killed Xiu’er, but the old beggar pushed her away. He carried Xiu’er in his arms.
The old beggar exclaid, “What are you doing?! The child is still young! Are you crazy?! How could you try to kill such a young child?!”
“Get lost!”
“No!”
As they were bickering, the others started rummaging around the rooms.
The two of them saw what the others were doing and imdiately stopped. They quickly rummaged around too for fear that the others would take all of the valuables.
But it wasn’t long before the group left the place with frustration. There weren’t a lot of valuables in the theater.
“I know where their house is! Follow !” soone shouted.
Hearing this, everyone followed the person who had spoken.
One of the gangsters with tattoos on his arms even threw a torch and burned down the theater.
The old beggar was carrying Xiu’er as he tailed the group. He wasn’t physically fit to begin with, and he was even slower now since he was carrying Xiu’er.
He wanted to place Xiu’er down, but he decided against it when he saw how chaotic everything around him was.
Just then, he heard soone shouting from the front.
“Monster!”
“He’s a monster!”
“Don’t be scared! God Yu’er is strong! We are not afraid of monsters! Go!! Kill him!”
Before the beggar could figure out what was happening, he saw the people in front exploding into a mist of blood.
All of them were cut down like grass in a field.
He finally saw what the monster was.
It was a Daoist wearing red robes with black tentacles sprouting out of his body. He wore a bronze coin veil and had only one remaining eye, which, curiously, had two pupils. Each of the tentacles was holding a weapon. It was no wonder others called him a monster.
The old beggar couldn’t do anything but raise his cleaver. He put the child down so that he could kill the monster, but just as he placed Xiu’er onto the ground, the old beggar split apart.
Li Huowang suddenly realized the crying child in the pool of blood was Xiu’er. He never thought this was how he would et the Lu family again.
Xiu’er was crying as she pulled on Li Huowang’s sleeve and pointed at the theater. Li Huowang held her with one tentacle and imdiately rushed towards the theater.
Soon, he saw the signage of the theater belonging to the Lu family.
The sign that had been wrapped in gold and silver was now enveloped by flas.
Staring at the collapsing building, Li Huowang steeled himself and ran into the burning theater.
The stage itself was burning too. An old man was standing on the collapsing stage. He was crying and laughing hysterically as he loudly sang lines from the show.
Beside him were the corpses of his son and daughter-in-law.
“The bright moon rises early to the east as I think of my mother back at ho! Accompanying you, I feel like a sheep accompanying a tiger! While I have fulfilled my loyalty to you, I have failed to be filial to my family! As the star shifts and the Big Dipper soars through the Heavens, I sit restlessly without being able to sleep as the second section of the night passes.
“I have never let the people of Gu County down, so why am I being summoned with the gold dallion? I listen to the bell tolling on the tower signaling the third section of the night, while my eyes dared not shift from the sight of the moon illuminating the hall.”[1]
The deaths of his son and daughter-in-law had driven Lu Zhuangyuan mad.
1. A song that expresses the conflict of trying to balance being loyal to one’s superior and being filial to their family. Gold dallion refers to the ssage of the highest urgency, aning that any ssage with the gold dallion would be delivered the fastest. A famous story involving it is how General Yue Fei was recalled by the emperor with twelve golden dallions. ☜
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