It had been six months since the split. I still couldn’t believe that now I was living in a luxurious, enormous underground mansion. My right arm had been cured completely in one day without any infection, and I knew that I had borrowed favors. Favors were always limited, and I had used too many favors so far.


    The mute and deaf servant brought clothes to my room and gestured for me to try them all. I had always dreamed of colorful, silky five-panel dresses, and now I could try them all every day. Big Sis had once lent me her dress, elaborated mainly by azure silk and pine needles. I tended to ask for it forever until I heard her talking to the old hag. It was the last gift from her mother, who died just six months after she was born. I sighed. My mother used to wear plenty of fancy gowns almost every morning, but none of them was hers. She swung around, following the rhymes of melody. Her smile attracted butterflies, and her dimples were told to capture every man’s soul. She was the Flower Seller – the most beautiful harlot ever. That was all about her. The money she received was never hers; the houses she was offered were never hers, the praises she heard were never hers. Only me, her daughter, was hers. In the evening, we cuddled each other in our makeshift thatched house, letting the wind shatter our bare skin. Then, at the hottest noon in the summer, she died. She died without any illnesses, injuries, or drugs. Her heart just simply stopped.


    I wandered nonstop till my feet trampled on tiny thorns. I knew I had reached the forest and leaned again against a large oak tree. A girl who appeared to be not much older than me emerged. She wore noble clothes, a four-panel dress, but it had wrinkled up, like she had not changed it for days. She looked at me and offered her hand. I never realized I was shaking until she steadied me to stand up. She blinked and asked something. I did not remember exactly what she said, but I remembered I had burst out crying in her arms and guided her to my makeshift house, where my mother’s lifeless body was still there. Then, she helped me to bury my mother. Since then, I followed her and completed errands for the Ph?m family in exchange for meals and a safe place to sleep. Her name was Tr?n Di?u Van, she told me. I called her Big Sis. I never knew her real name, but I did not push her either. Everyone had their secrets. I also never told her about the favors. Despite all the secrets, we had spent almost ten years together and had been apart for more than six months. I missed her terribly.


    Knock! Knock! Knock!


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    The servant knocked the back of her palm on the table to snap me out of my endless thoughts. I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote. It was embarrassingly painful to write with my left hand.


    "I will be ready with half a stick of incense,” I wrote, “you inform Great Master that I will be in the hall soon.”


    The servant read carefully, then nodded and left. I suddenly remembered Lord Ph?m''s illiterate servants in the house where Big Sis and I used to live. That man was a psychopath, but he seemed to treat his inferiors quite well. However, the agony was that he seemed to see me not as one of his inferiors but as one of his debtors.


    I put on the new dress and went to the Crystal Hall. The old hag had told the story about the demon of night wanted to keep the stars for himself, so he buried the starry night to his underground castle. According to this story, that demon must be thousands years old, but the man standing before me was just about the age of Big Sis.


    “Great Master,” I bowed.


    “Poison.” He stretched his arm, and I put the vial of newly concocted poison in his palm. Growing up in the brothel meant having a great knowledge of killing others without leaving traces.


    “Good,” he said. “Tomorrow, come to the Mane and see.” Then, he left without any other word.


    I swallowed my sighs. The old hag’s speech rang in my tone.


    “The woman who died young. Found herself in the tree. Even her lover wrote a song. She would never be free.”


    I recalled Big Sis’s puppy eyes when she heard about the story. I tried to sleep that night without success. The more I thought about that tale, the more vivid my mother''s face emerged in my mind. She had asked many favors for the one she loved – the one that was not my father, she said surely. She never told me about the bargains, making me think that heaven and earth could fulfill everyone’s wishes regardless of how hard they were. For many years, I asked myself whether the woman in the red cotton tree tale was my mother. For many years, the worries had been drowning me day by day.


    A few days before Big Sis made a tombstone for my mother’s small grave, I dreamt of her. The day she returned to our thatched house without cuddling her daughter. Her eyes were reddened by long hours of crying, I assumed. “He’s a stranger now, he’s a stranger now.” She repeatedly said that sentence as a mantra. I knew that man’s name “Hoàng Di?m Th?,” whose name I was name after. My name was Hoàng Di?m Th?y, my mother’s surname was Ma, and my father’s one was definitely not Hoàng.


    I asked for a favor right after that dream, that the Great Master saved me in the day the earth split. In exchange, I needed to concoct poison and watched him killing people with my works. I hoped Big Sis would find me, but for the most part, I didn’t. One of us must be survived.