White Hair in Filthy Straw

They walked down the long row of cages toward the back of the warehouse. The smell grew worse as they went—unwashed bodies, sickness, rot. The cages grew smaller and darker. And at the very end of the row, in an inconspicuous corner where the light barely reached, Li Yuguo stopped.

His breathing quickened.

In the last cage, on a bed of filthy straw, a girl lay curled on her side.

She looked about fifteen or sixteen years old. She was so thin that her bones showed through her skin—the knobs of her spine, the wings of her shoulder blades, the sharp points of her knees drawn up against her chest. She wore a single ragged shift, stiff with dried blood and filth. Her bare arms and legs were covered in welts and half-healed cuts and bruises gone yellow and black. She was breathing, but only just; her ribs rose and fell in short, shallow, rattling breaths.

And her hair was white.

Not gray. Not the pale blonde of the western barbarians. White—pure, clean, gleaming white, like fresh snow on a mountain peak, spilling across the filthy straw in a long tangled fall. Even matted with blood and dirt, it seemed to hold a faint, cold light of its own.

Hardly anyone would have noticed her. Buried at the back of the warehouse, half dead, covered in blood. Just one more sick seedling in a cage.

But Li Yuguo noticed.

His heart was pounding so hard he could hear it.

Because he was the GM of this world. He had designed her. And he knew exactly who she was.

The descendant of the ancient Frost Queen.

In this world there were not only humans. There were demons and beastfolk and spirits and things stranger than any of them—and among all the demon races, there were a few bloodlines so rare and so ancient that they had passed into legend. The Frost Queen had been one of them. A demon sovereign of ice and snow who had ruled the far north a thousand years ago, whose breath could freeze a river in midsummer. Her line had all but vanished. All but one.

This girl.

Of course, no one could recognize the future Queen of Frost in her now. She had no fighting power. Her bloodline had not yet awakened. She was just a starving, bleeding girl in a cage.

But one day, she would be terrifying.

Isn't this how it goes? Li Yuguo thought, with a bitter little smile. The protagonist comes out of nowhere to a different world, and the first thing that falls into his lap is a hidden treasure in a cage.

Only this time, it was not the protagonist standing here.

---

"Have you made up your mind, young master?" Zhou Papi said behind him. "If you're not satisfied, you can always come back tomorrow, when the new batch—"

Li Yuguo wrinkled his nose and pointed at the cage with deep disgust.

"What is this sloppy thing?"

"Ah—this…" The shopkeeper's face fell. "This is a refugee girl. We found her lost in the wasteland out past the border. I thought she was a healthy little thing when we picked her up, but…" He spread his hands helplessly. "Now look at her. She's dying. I'm afraid she won't last half a year, even if she lasts a month. I wanted to get rid of her cheap, but the problem is, nobody wants to buy a sick seedling like this. She's a money-losing piece of goods."

Li Yuguo tilted his head, as if considering something deep.

"You know," he said slowly, "if it got around among the common people that a slave had died here, in your caravan… I'm afraid that would have a big impact on your future business. People would talk. They'd say Zhouji sells sick goods. Rotten goods."

"This…" Zhou Papi went pale.

"And the official inspections have been very strict lately." Li Yuguo shook his head sorrowfully. "If you try to get rid of her privately—kill her, dump her somewhere—you'll get into trouble for that, too. Because if the officials see you killing a slave inside the city walls, they're very likely to confiscate your whole property."

The shopkeeper was panicking now. Sweat ran down from under his silk cap. "Then—then what should I do?"

"Hey." Li Yuguo grinned at him. "You're asking the right person."

He tapped his own chest.

"I'm the son-in-law of the Nalan City Lord's household. If I take a slave to use as a living target—well, I'd have the approval of my wife, wouldn't I? Nobody would say a word. So—" he waved a hand at the cage— "I can help you dispose of this money-losing goods."

Every word of it was bait. He was Liu Mang, underneath. And Liu Mang found the slave trade disgusting—had found it disgusting even when he was writing it. But this was not the moment to say so.

The shopkeeper's face lit up with overwhelming relief.

"If the young master could help me deal with this troublesome matter—then—then in future, whenever you need to buy slaves, I'll give you a discount! A big discount!"

"Don't worry about all that." Li Yuguo waggled his eyebrows and smiled a very vulgar smile. "We're old friends, aren't we? We help each other."

Zhou Papi quickly glanced around, then drew a small cloth bag out of his sleeve—Li Yuguo could hear the clink of silver in it, perhaps twenty taels—and pressed it into his hands.

"Thank you, sir, for solving this trouble for me. This is a little token of my care for the young master." He lowered his voice. "Only—please don't tell anyone that I sold a sick seedling slave here…"

"I've always said it, Zhou Papi," said Li Yuguo, taking the money bag rudely and weighing it in his palm, "you're the cutest of them all. And there's nothing I like better than a clever man like you."

They shook hands warmly. To anyone watching, they would have looked exactly the same: two greasy scoundrels doing a greasy deal.

---

And so Li Yuguo got the descendant of the Frost Queen—the future Queen of Frost herself—for nothing. Not only for nothing. He had been paid twenty taels to take her.

In the original story, it had been very different.

When Ye Qiong found her, Zhou Papi had squeezed him for every coin he had. Ye Qiong had paid a fortune he could not afford for a dying girl nobody wanted, because he could not bear to see her suffer. That was the kind of protagonist Liu Mang had written: a good man, kind and upright to the bone. A Liuxia Hui, untouched and unmoved by any woman, no matter how she smiled at him.

Liu Mang had leaned into that too hard. He had given Ye Qiong a setting that was almost a kind of incompetence—a straight man of steel so oblivious that even when the most beautiful women in the world threw themselves at him, he did not notice. So oblivious that by the time the finale came and the world ended, he had never even kissed the heroine on the mouth.

That was why so many readers had sent Liu Mang razor blades in the mail.

Well, Li Yuguo thought, at least the razor blades were deserved.

---

He had the cage opened, and lifted the girl out himself.

She weighed almost nothing. She was cold and limp and filthy, and when he set her on her feet in the sunlight, she swayed and nearly fell, and he had to steady her by the shoulders. She was limping badly. One ankle was swollen and purple.

"Master," she said.

Her voice was a dry, cracked whisper. It was completely flat. Her eyes, under the matted white hair, were a pale, washed-out blue, like ice on a winter pond, and there was no light in them at all.

"Do you really want to use me as a living target?"

She did not sound afraid. She sounded like someone asking about the weather.

Li Yuguo did not answer. Instead, he led her away from the caravan, out of the shopkeeper's sight, into the shade of a wall—and reached into his sleeve and took out a pill.

On the way to the market that morning, they had passed a small caravan of medicine sellers from the east, and Li Yuguo had stopped. He had eighty thousand taels in the bracelet on his wrist, and he had never had any intention of keeping them there. He had spent ten thousand on the spot—on a great heap of pills. Spirit Gathering Pills, Qi Nourishing Pills, healing pills, blood-replenishing pills, and a dozen other miscellaneous medicines whose names he only half recognized.

They were not high-quality pills. For truly fine elixirs, the kind that could save a dying cultivator or push a man through a bottleneck, you had to go to a great sect like the True Yuan Sect, and pay through the nose. But for wounds like these, they would do.

"Take it," he said.

The girl looked at the pill in his palm.

Something passed over her face. A small, sad, crooked smile.

"So I'm a test slave," she murmured. "To try out medicines…"

She took the pill from his hand without hesitation and put it in her mouth and swallowed it, with the expression of someone who had long ago stopped hoping for anything, and was only waiting to see what kind of pain would come next.

And then her mouth fell open.

"I—" She stared down at her own arm. "My… my injuries…"

They were closing. Before their eyes. The welts across her forearm were fading, the angry red flattening and paling to pink. The cuts on her legs were knitting shut, the edges drawing together and sealing over with fresh new skin. The purple swelling in her ankle was going down. A faint flush of color was creeping back into her gray cheeks.

Of course, it was only the outer wounds. Li Yuguo knew that. The deeper damage—the months of starvation, the beatings, the sickness in her lungs—those would take far longer to heal. They had accumulated over time, and they would only leave her over time.

But it was a start.

The girl stood in the shade of the wall and stared at her own healing body, and could not close her mouth.

"Let's go," said Li Yuguo.

She looked up at him. "Go?"

"Later, we'll go home together," he said.

The word home went through her like a blade.

He saw it happen. Her whole thin body trembled, once, violently, from head to foot. Her pale ice-blue eyes went suddenly wet—filling, brimming over, the tears spilling down her dirty cheeks in two clean tracks. She pressed her lips together hard. Then she ducked her head and hurried after him as he turned away, limping a little less than before, keeping close at his heels as if she were afraid he might vanish.

"What's your name?" he asked, without looking back.

"I don't have a name."

"Now you do."

She stopped. "…Huh?"

He glanced back at her over his shoulder—at the long white hair, at the ice-blue eyes, at the small thin face that would one day, if he did this right, make the whole north kneel.

"Your name is Jun Xue," he said. "I'm giving it to you."

Jun Xue. Sovereign Snow.

The girl's whole body shook. Her hands came up and clasped together in front of her chest, and her wet eyes shone.

"Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you, thank you, young master!"

---

And at that moment, a young man with a sword stepped out into the lane in front of them.

He was tall—a little over six feet, Li Yuguo guessed—and his body was lean and well-proportioned, long in the leg and broad in the shoulder, with the easy, balanced stance of someone who had been trained to fight since he could walk. He wore the pale gray robe of a sect disciple, travel-stained and dusty. His face was straight and strong, with sharp sword-like eyebrows and bright, fierce eyes beneath them. His skin was the color of wheat.

He planted himself squarely in Li Yuguo's path, and his hand went to the hilt of the sword at his hip.

"Bastard," he said. "Let go of that girl!"

Li Yuguo stared at him.

"Who are you?"

The young man let out a short, scornful laugh, and slapped his own chest with his free hand.

"Me? Hmph! I never change my name when I travel, and I never hide my surname! My surname is Ye, and my given name is Qiong! My nickname is Little Flower Cat! People call me a pear blossom pressing down a crabapple—beloved by all who see me, the flower that makes other flowers bloom, the most handsome martial artist in history!" He lifted his chin. "And the future Martial Emperor!"