I also had them bring the bandits and villagers who are guarding this house, the ones I had incapacitated at the gate earlier, and added them to the collection in front of the assembled group.
Broken limbs and shattered dantians do not prevent suffering. They simply change its shape.
For a long moment nothing happened.
Then one woman stood up. She was thin, trembling but moved slowly and carefully .She picked up a stick, walked to one of the village men who had kept watch at the gate, and began thrashing his lower parts and legs.
Repeatedly and furiously, again and again.
The others watched her for a moment.
Slowly some of them stood each one taking a tool of their choice and went to their targets and started taking their revenge.
I watched from the side and said nothing.
The caravan members also did not leave. Not a single one. They stood where they were and bore witness and I respected them for it.
When someone was brought close to the edge of death, I asked the caravan group to bring them to me, I used the healing pills from the overseer's storage bag, and for the severe cases I used the low concentrated vitality potions to pull them back to life.
The revenge of the survivors concentrated itself mostly on the villagers, the gang members and the bandit leader rather than the overseer who was at the center of it.
Perhaps because the villagers and these bandits had been the face of cruelty they faced every day than the distant horror of the overseer.
I understood that.
One of the survivor women approached me as I was finishing a treatment. She was one of the steadier ones, among the victims.
"Sir," she said. "Some of the people who worked here are not present here, probably in the village at the foot of the mountain, they take shifts."
I looked at her. Then I looked at the caravan group.
"I need volunteers to bring them back," I said. "Preferably people who can move quickly and capture them."
Almost the entire caravan stepped forward. Mostly the female members came to the front. I accepted their gesture and let the female cultivators to take charge and one male to assist them.
I looked at the victim woman and two others who had come to stand beside her. "Go with them. Point out who worked here or any sort of connection to this place that breaches the morality. You do not have to do anything else they will do the rest."
They nodded and left.
"Drag them here, as you come back through the village," I added, raising my voice slightly so the caravan members could hear, "Let the villagers see what is happening and where it is going. I want them to understand where the food on their table has been coming from."
The group moved off down the hill road.
I sat down on the grass, took out a cloth, and began cleaning my hands. The afternoon light was long and flat across the hillside and the fire had burned down to steady coals and somewhere beyond the tree line a bird had decided the quiet was safe enough and had started up again.
I looked at the victims and perpetrators on the grass in front of me and felt the emptiness inside my chest that had once held five years of cold weight.
Thinking about the promise I have made to the dead Xiaomen and that horrific scene five years ago.
Xiaomen, finally I was able to punish these people that caused your death.
I closed my eyes, and I could see her laughing face running through the fields in my mind. I can hear hear her sweet clear voice "Yuanyuan~, Why so serious, laugh a little, hehe."
I will xiaomen. I will.
After sometime the caravan people and victims who went down the hill to capture other perpetrators came back.
Behind them, the offenders were injured, tied at the wrists and ankles with rough rope were dragged along the mountain path.
The mountain path did its own quiet work on those being dragged, the stones and roots finding every point of weakness along the way.
The survivor women walked alongside them, kept beating these criminals with stick in between.
The villagers saw what was happening and moved to block it.
Wei Changbo's people drew their swords without being asked.
The sound of steel leaving scabbards on a quiet hillside carries. The villagers stepped back. Their mouths kept moving. Their feet made the smarter decision.
Behind them their families cried out, voices climbing over each other, hands reaching, pulling at sleeves.
When they stopped in front of our group, caravan people threw them in front of me and made the criminals kneel.
I did not waver, the villagers kept some distance and started accusing us for being inhumane and cruel
The moment a person sets aside their humanity and becomes something worse than a beast, they forfeit the right to be treated as anything above it. Sympathy and mercy belong to those who have kept something called morality to themselves worth saving. These men had made their choice long before today.
I looked at one of Wei Changbo standing nearby.
"Explain to them," I said. " Why we are here. What have they done. All of it."
He stepped forward and spoke clearly and did not spare them a single detail.
The villagers listened. Some looked at the ground. Some looked at the offenders being dragged past and then quickly looked elsewhere. That told me everything about who had known about this and what they had chosen not to see.
When the explanation finished, several of them were still pressing forward, grief louder than shame, and I felt something cold and deliberate settle over me.
I released my cultivation pressure.
Not at its true measure. I set it low and let it press outward like a physical weight descending from the sky itself.
Every villager went to their knees. Including the children.
The crying stopped as though a hand had closed around it.
They can't even breathe under my pressure, where do they have luxury to shout or cry.
"What you are feeling at this moment," I said, "is not even a fraction. Not a single fragment of what these women experienced for five years. Chained in that room. Waiting, Wondering if anyone was ever going to come and save them."
I let the pressure hold for another breath.
"So you will kneel. You will watch. You will not make a sound. That is, if you wish it to be your last words before death."
Silence settled over the hillside like snow.
The pressure lifted.
They stayed kneeling regardless.
The sounds of justice being carried out continued across the mountain path and the villagers watched every moment of it with their heads bowed and their mouths closed.
As the afternoon wore out, I moved among the survivor women, checking the ones whose hands trembled from exhaustion rather than feeling.
For those I mixed small quantities of qi nourishing pill powder into water as their energy drinks and passed them along quietly.
Not enough to push a mortal body beyond its natural limits. Enough to let them see it through to the end.
They had earned that much and considerably more.
The light shifted. Afternoon became evening, evening became dark, and I did not suggest that anything should be shortened or concluded before the women themselves were ready.
Wei Changbo had his people light torches along the perimeter without being asked. He caught my eye once across the firelight, nodded once, and returned to his post.
By the time darkness had fully run in the sky, the bandit leader and his subordinates along with the villagers who were guilty of crime had been made thoroughly, completely answered for. Their bodies were beyond recognition. All of them were subjected to castration. and much more before it.
The survivor women had been particularly precise in their punishments that only years of accumulated powerlessness and torture can make a person like that.
What remained in the dirt spoke clearly of deliberate intention. Every wound, every mark, every removal was a sentence in the karma book, these men had written themselves throughout five years of choices.
The overseer had been made to watch all of it.
Every time his eyes moved toward closing I sent a spiritual needle similar to the size of a peanut into his mind space, to pierce his soul causing agony and his body would seize against the ground every time, his voice producing sounds that had long since stopped being words.
He saw everything until the victims stopped what they were doing.
----
After sometime.
I turned to face the women standing before me.
They were in better condition than before. Not whole. But better. The reason of exhaustion on their faces had changed.
"Did the anger inside you subside?" I asked.
Some nodded. Some shook their heads.
I nodded at both answers equally.
"Mine has not fully either," I said. "That is honest." I looked across each face in the line. "But we cannot spend what remains of our lives on this hillside. We cannot give them that much of what we still have left. Precious time. Right."
A long quiet moment passed over the group.
Then one by one they nodded.
I looked at Wei Changbo.
"The chains from the house," I said. "Bring them."
He sent three people up the hill without a word. They returned with the iron chains dragging them across their floor, the links made sounds as they crashed into each other.
I made a circle using my sickle on the ground.
"Bring the remaining criminals forward. Into the circle I marked. Kneel them and seal their leg acupoints so their position holds."
His people moved. The offenders were brought to the marked ground and arranged by force into kneeling, the sealed acupoints making the posture permanent regardless of whatever remained of their will. The same chains went on them last, the iron cold and heavy and familiar to everyone present for different reasons.
Several of the survivor women straightened when they saw the chains go on.
I noticed.
"Oil," I said.
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