Ryo stared at Fu Yang, fury twisting his face as he ground his teeth. He thought the boy beside him had gone mad. What the hell is he saying—frogs? He's really crazy.
I should first get out of here", he told himself, clenching his fists and forcing calm. Then, swallowing his fear, he blurted, "Oh frogs, yes, yes — I have seen many frogs. If you untie me, I will give you many frogs."
Fu Yang watched him for a heartbeat and sighed like a man disappointed at slow business. The next moment, with a cold, mechanical motion, he snapped one of Ryo's fingers. Araw! Ryo's howl split the room. He screamed in a high, ragged pitch; his face went ashen, eyes glazing with shock and pain.
"Have you seen three little frogs here which do not move? Or have you heard of them from that pervert?" Fu Yang asked again, voice flat and small as a knife. "I believe you are really close to that pervert."
"Aaaaah! Please, I don't know anything, please—" Ryo begged, throat raw.
Fu Yang's answer was practiced and pitiless. He broke Ryo's fingers one after another, each snap a dry punctuation in the cramped room. He paused between breaks with deliberate brevity so the boy would not lose consciousness—he knew exactly when to stop, how to balance pain and wakefulness. Ryo's cries filled the air, climbing into hoarse, pleading shrieks that meant nothing to the child at his side.
Time became a smear of noise and red. Fu Yang stared directly into Ryo's eyes and felt nothing for the twelve-year-old. Whether Ryo actually knew the full truth about the spiritual frogs mattered less than whether he could be made to remember details he had seen.
The boy might not be a secret-keeper, but perhaps he had observed a thing or two, overheard a phrase, noticed a door. For Fu Yang, torment was a tool; memory could be pried loose with calibrated cruelty.
Half an hour passed like that. Ryo's voice thinned until it was only a rasp: "Aaaa aaaaa aaaaah… Please, please…." He offered broken sounds, fragments of sentences, begging to be spared. Then, after stammered pleas and flashes of useless defiance, something slipped from him that was useful — a single detail that set Fu Yang's plan spinning into place. The exact words are small and quick and belong to the boy's shaking mouth, but they were enough.
When that precious scrap of information fell into Fu Yang's hands, he showed no mercy. With the same detached efficiency he'd used to break bones, he snapped Ryo's neck. The boy slumped as if the air itself had been cut away; silence came like a wet cloth thrown over a scream. Fu Yang sat for a long breath, eyes level, taking one last look at the lifeless face before rising. He left the room, the single fact he'd extracted ringing in his head: Shin Tian frequented a place close to the ground.
Back in the present,
Fu Yang rose slowly from where he had been crouched and took one final, cold look at Ryo's corpse. He descended to the first floor, slipping out of the bamboo building with a new gait—he wore different footwear now, shoes far too big for his small feet, chosen to hide his steps and mislead any tracking. A small, humorless chuckle escaped him. "Heh heh heh… Shin Tian," he muttered under his breath, the words wrapped in promise and hunger. "This time I will make sure you beg for death. But until I allow it, you will not get it."
A cold wind breathed through the trees, pushing the last of the festival's smoke into a reddening sky. Evening had thickened into late night. Fu Yang shrugged, a single quiet motion, and said aloud as if reassuring himself, "It was tiring, but this hard work gave me a great reward." He slipped a spiritual frog from his pocket and cradled it for a moment, small and limp, then smiled — a slow curve that didn't reach his eyes.
"Mmm… but I need to hide these spiritual frogs first. The best place is—" He glanced toward the dark, forbidding forest and set off without hesitation.
He walked until the village noises were distant and the trees closed around him. When he reached a deserted hollow, he stopped at a small cave he remembered from a past life.
The place was familiar: then, he had hidden things in shallow holes and been followed; thieves had dug up his caches and stolen his goods. He would not repeat that mistake.
Inside the mouth of the cave he stacked a neat pile of wood and then, with deliberate cunning, slipped stones into the cave's small, deep holes instead of placing the frogs into them.
Three stones per hole, tossed casually so that anyone who dug would find only weight and rock. He left the stones untied — an invitation to would-be searchers — but he also relied on the cave's weakness: its instability. Disturb the hidden holes recklessly, and the cave might collapse. That hazard was a trap he set for anyone who were after the frogs and careless enough to dig.
He stepped outside the cave and, with Shin Tian's oversized soles still muffling his prints, made a small, deep mark behind it — a sign only he would read. Then he retraced his steps to the bamboo building, though not all the frogs were yet hidden.
"Mmmm… the best place to hide something is in plain sight," he mused, eyes gleaming. He climbed an old tree a short distance from the taravan and found the familiar deep cavity at the top of the trunk. With precise fingers he dropped three frogs into the tree's dark throat; the trunk swallowed them soundlessly.
Satisfaction softened his expression. Now the first phase of my plan is done. Time to start phase two, he thought, feeling the taste of the next step already on his tongue.
He returned to the Bamboo taravan one last time and set the building alight. Flames took quickly to the dry walls; the fire licked and roared, breaking the quiet of the night with sudden, hungry light.
Fu Yang did not watch the taravan burn for long. He turned and ran into the wood, the two hours of violence and cunning closing behind him like a chapter flipped shut.