In my hometown, Gaomi Township in the northeast, there was once a strange legend. It was a story about a woman – she didn’t speak, but only appeared at night on the battlefield, making a pot of black soup with the bones of the dead. Legend has it that people who drink this soup can survive, and some people say that those who drink this soup will never sleep again, and dream of the dead knocking on the door every night.
Many years later, when I saw Xiadie, it was as if I saw that woman. She is neither a human nor a god, but a monster caught in the cracks – she saves people and curses people; she is like a flower and a thorny steel needle. She stands in the gap of the battle, feeding her own strength with the lives of others, wandering between death and life, like a human but not a human.
1. Her flowers do not grow in spring, but are flowers of wronged souls that bloom from corpses
Her underworld is not a bright place, but a silent shadow, a battlefield where the war has not stopped. If you stand in her netherworld, you can smell the breath of grass and trees, but that is not the fragrance of the fields, but the fishy and rotten smell of blood soaked in the soil.
Her skill is called “New Buds”, but that is not the tender buds of spring, but a breath of resentment struggling under the ice on a winter night. Every time she swings the dead dragon in her hand, she is not saving anything, but chewing death, using the scars of her teammates in exchange for her own temporary strength.
In her world, life is an exchange. When you are in pain, I will be strong; when you are dying, I will roar. This kind of power is not love, but devouring; not protection, but trading.
2. Her silence is a torn protest
She doesn’t speak, or speaks very little. She doesn’t argue, explain, or pity. She just looks, and her eyes seem to pierce through the skin and reach the bone marrow. Many people say that she is indifferent, but I can read a tear in her eyes.
It is a look that knows that the world is unfair, but no longer resists. Just like my grandmother, who was sent to the landlord as a child bride by the village when she was young, she never cried or laughed. She just lived, like a tree root pressed underground by a stone, no one saw it, but it was always absorbing blood and water.
Xiadie is also such a woman. She knows that this world will not stop the war for anyone, and will not lower the threshold of pain for anyone. So she no longer explains anything, she just accuses everything with silence.
3. She is not an auxiliary, but an exchanger with a death contract
Everyone says she is an “auxiliary” and a “healer”, but I say she is not. She is a contractor and a creditor. She makes a contract with every battle: if you want to win, you must bleed, and I am responsible for refining that blood into a knife and stabbing it into the enemy’s heart.
In her skills, you can’t see sympathy, you can only see calculations. How much blood you lose, how much my output increases; the more you are dying, the angrier my dead dragon is. This is not care, but tactics, an equivalent exchange written in blood.
I even suspect that she has long forgotten the names of her teammates. What she remembers may only be everyone’s blood type and life value curve – just like the pig dealers in my hometown, they look at the pigs not by their eyes or ears, but by whether they are fat and worth selling.
4. Her beauty is not gentle, but the cruelty of flowers that makes people afraid
The butterfly is beautiful, but that kind of beauty is like the Bodhisattva who refuses to speak in the temple, cold, alienated, and makes people kneel down but dare not approach. There is a kind of “you deserve it” atmosphere on her. If you fall, she will not help you, but will use your fall as a catalyst for her next skill.
Her flowers are black, boiled from the ashes of corpses. If you look closely at the petals of the “new stamens”, you may find that the face of a victim is printed on them. Is that her memory? No, it is her trophy.
Like the old hunter I heard in Gaomi that year: There is a kind of flower that blooms only at night and only sucks the blood of the corpses of wild beasts. That flower never faces the sun, only death.
I think that is probably the prototype of the butterfly.
V. She is not a hero in the traditional sense, but the shadow standing behind the hero
Look at those heroes who are praised, they charge into battle, shouting slogans. And she stands behind them, like a shadow, motionless, waiting for them to fall. She does not fight for glory, nor for fame. She is the kind of person that no one remembers – but if it weren’t for her, the hero would have died three or five times.
She doesn’t fight because she knows that fighting is useless. What she has is the dirtiest kind of power: greatness that requires the pain of her companions to complete. This kind of power cannot be praised, but can only be used.
Just like the women who were responsible for digging wells in the old society, they were never admired, but without them, the wells would dry up forever.
Epilogue
So you ask me, is Xiadie a flower demon or a blood-drinking god? I say, she is neither a demon nor a god, she is a monster kneaded by humans with war and calculation.
She is both fragile and powerful; both silent and cruel; both saving people and killing people. She is a role that we are most reluctant to admit but cannot give up – using other people’s lives to complete our victory.
I dreamed at night that she was sitting by a black pot, in which there were boiling blood and petals. She was stirring and singing a nursery rhyme in a low voice. The nursery rhyme said:
“Those who fight are not afraid of death, but they are afraid that no one will help them.”
And Xiadie is the one who helps them.