# Chapter 16: The Sparrow's Price
Hello everyone, it's me again! How are you all doing? I hope you've been holding on tight, because today we're walking together through Chapter 16 of "Honey in The Wound free digital audiobook" — and let me warn you, this chapter cuts deep. It's a chapter of empires built on poison, of women sharpening themselves into weapons, and of men drowning in the very darkness they once swore to fight. So pour yourself something warm, settle in, and let's walk through it side by side.
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We open in the shadow of Feng-nüshi's iron rule. The Phoenix has tightened her talons around every throat in Xijing. Her toilets have never sparkled brighter, and the women who scrub them have never been poorer. At the quivering stations, girls are barked at to describe even the slightest change in a guest's facial expression — and hesitation is punished with toilet cleaning and docked wages.
The kitchen staff are not spared either. Ever since Feng-nüshi hurled a scalding teapot at a girl's head for handing the wrong aged oolong to an important guest, the laughter has drained from the kitchen. No more amorous glances, no more jests rising above the clatter of woks. Voices now dare only to whisper when joking with the cook on market runs — those brief excursions are the only breaths of freedom left. And even then, only the cook is permitted to speak with vendors. The kitchen staff wonder if their tongues might wither from disuse.
Then Young-Ja is summoned to see Feng-nüshi outside her usual office hours. Her heart races — has she committed some offense? Or is her mistress finally deeming her ready to become a server? Either way, Young-Ja knows she must perform. Every moment in Feng-nüshi's presence is a potential opportunity.
Since learning of Yong-Woo's endeavors, Young-Ja has thrown herself into greeting duties, trying to pry from guests any detail that might aid his resistance or soothe Feng-nüshi's months-long rage. Militaries, occupation, war — these were lofty yet inevitable features of a world she had never quite understood. These forces had destroyed her life with such unthinking ease; she had not imagined someone like her could ever contribute to their obstruction. But now, so close to the everyday men and women who somehow stood against this power, Young-Ja longs to do something — anything — to help. To make Yong-Woo proud. To honor the extinguished lives of her parents and siblings.
As her understanding of the stakes at Fenghuang grows, so does her frustration. She is impatient for her reports to be deemed worthy of an extra coin, to be deployed in important subterfuge — but Feng-nüshi remains unimpressed. So Young-Ja works harder to smile, bow, and charm the guests at the door, hoping they might let down their guard and cede some indiscretion she can use. Meiyu, too, welcomes this development, happy that her friend finally shares her aspirations to become a server.
"Remember to stand up straight and look Feng-nüshi in the eye," Meiyu warns as she brushes Young-Ja's hair. "I heard she'll suspect you if you're afraid to make eye contact." She squeezes her friend's shoulders and sends her up the stairs. "Put in a good word for me too!"
Young-Ja tries not to cough when she steps into Feng-nüshi's smoke-filled room. The old mistress looks more severe than ever, cheeks hollowing as she inhales through her long silver pipe. The beak of her cane glints in her gnarled hand through the smoky plumes. Feng-nüshi does not budge, but her eyes follow Young-Ja as she approaches the desk — then tosses a folded note to the girl.
"Take this to Tayiji and return with his reply in time for the evening service. Speak to no one else."
Young-Ja is dismissed with a flick of her mistress's wrist before she can convey the subtle observations she had made that day.
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The streets of Xinjing appear dreary in the cold winter's light, but Young-Ja is too submerged in thought to mind the passing scenery. What business does Feng-nüshi have with Tayiji? Does her mistress require more medicine? Has Yong-Woo stopped by again with his resistance fighters in the night — has she missed them? She longs to see him, to tell him she can do what he brought her here to do. While she waits for him, she will prove to Feng-nüshi that she can rise to any occasion. She quickens her pace toward the blue-roofed mansion peeking above the row of buildings ahead.
Young-Ja pulls the iron ring of the front door and knocks in haste. The door creaks open to a striking woman in a blue qipao with gray streaks in her tight black bun. She sits atop a stool as she welcomes Young-Ja into the atrium, asking what type of experience the young maiden seeks.
"The eight-jiao room? One yuan? Or maybe the lady is seeking the sophisticated two-yuan experience..." The woman crosses her long legs and leans forward, propping her elbows on her knees and resting her chin on her hand. She smiles with brightly painted lips as Young-Ja takes a step back, stuttering that she is there with a message for Tayiji from Fenghuang.
"Just teasing, little kkachi. Come in," she says, getting up and opening the inner door. The woman whistles lightly to beckon over another worker. "Our cute little guest wants to see Tayiji. Why don't you take her up?"
Young-Ja blushes and follows the other worker into the main chamber. Recalling the last time she entered this space, she steels herself for what she is about to confront. The lanterns overhead burn somewhat brighter than in her memory, but an even thicker, sugary haze hangs in the air, like clouds dimming the sun. Respectably dressed men are still sprawled about at her feet, though they move now, somewhat quelling her suspicion that they were all corpses. They seem to belong neither to the world of the living nor the dead as they take languid drags from their pipes, ignoring Young-Ja when she passes through their cloying trails of smoke. While she pays mind not to step on anyone, the daytime setting pulls her eyes toward something else: beautiful women lounging or drifting about attending to their guests. She recognizes some as Tayiji's glamorous companions from the teahouse.
Young-Ja's guide leads her up the winding stairs and into another corridor. She stops to knock on an ornate carved door flanked by large calligraphy scrolls.
"Enter," says Tayiji.
The woman opens the door and ushers Young-Ja in before gliding away. Young-Ja steps into a dim room filled with mounds of plush pillows and bedding. Her eyes land on Tayiji sprawled out in the middle of the room. He lies with his head thrown back on a pile of silken material, a loose shirt tossed over his torso and naked women lazing around him. Without opening his eyes he gestures to a low table at the side of the room.
"Just place the tea there—" Tayiji stops as he raises his head to see a blushing Young-Ja averting her eyes. He smiles and rises from the tangle of long legs.
"I thought you were someone else," he says, switching into Korean. "I'm sorry for having been indecent before you." He grabs a crumpled changshan from the floor and pulls it on over his small body. Young-Ja stares at her feet and flushes red.
"It's okay," she mumbles. "I'm sorry for barging in unannounced."
Tayiji smiles, stroking his thin mustache with his thumb. "It's always my pleasure to see you. Now, what brings you here? Sick of the old woman and want to come work for me instead?"
She hands him the note from Feng-nüshi and waits as he reads.
"So, the Phoenix needs my sparrows." Tayiji folds up the message and places its corner in the small flame of a nearby candle. The fire creeps across the edge of the paper to devour it into glowing ash. Young-Ja stares at Tayiji's impassive freckled face, struggling to discern his mood.
"You can run back and let your mistress know I accept her price."
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And here, dear listeners, the story pulls back the curtain on the man himself. Tayiji of the Sparrows made it his business to know. In his forty years on Earth, forty generations of sparrows had served him, bringing him information that he used to protect himself and transform into riches.
Born Ilha — Manchu for "flower" — Tayiji entered the world with a crown of fragrant hair. Noses gravitated to his head's pleasant scent, which grew famous in his village for clearing sinuses. Women made their husbands smell his head to silence their deafening snoring. The elderly sought good-luck whiffs to breathe in a new day. His sweetness was so inviting it drew sparrows and bees to circle him as they would a true flower. Tayiji learned early on he did not much like bees after one stung him and caused his fat baby hand to swell to twice its usual size. When none of the villagers' usual remedies for insect stings worked, the sparrows rose to his cries. They plunged into a nearby mountain spring rumored to be the home of a great healing spirit and shook the water drops from their feathers onto his hand to rid it of poison. The sparrows then swatted the bees away until only songbirds remained to tend to their plump little flower.
Tayiji's sparrows were a garrulous bunch. Day and night they chirped to him, eager to share what they and their brood had seen. They told him tales from thousands of miles away should he be curious, traveling on the songs of millions of sparrows scattered across the world. They sang of an iceberg that felled the world's largest ship. They sang of the Giriama rebellion in Kenya, of holy baths in the Yamuna River, of Zapatista fighters in Mexico, all to keep young Tayiji engrossed.
As the boy grew older, however, his focus turned away from his birds and toward the concealment of his changing body under heavy layers of clothing. As Tayiji's attention shifted, so too did the sparrows'. The birds stopped chirping stories from afar and instead warned of much nearer perils at home — of the glint of ill intent in his father's gaze. But sweet Tayiji was too concerned with suppressing his growing bosom and hips to listen.
The sparrows tended to their flower despite his disregard. They stayed by his side when his father tried to enter Tayiji's bed one night, screeching in large bursts to alert him of the danger. Waking to the call of his sparrows, he scratched and bit his father until his teeth drew blood. When his father cried out in pain, Tayiji dealt a swift kick to his testicles to keep him from retaliation. He then fled his home and shed the name given to him by his wretched father, living nameless on the streets of a city far from his village. He cut his long hair, bound his breasts, and learned to pick pockets to stay alive. His birds were content to flit around spotting targets for him to rob, warning him of any approaching police.
And so he became the most elusive thief in all of Changchun, until a roaming street gang noticed his encroachment on their turf. The older boys followed the sparrows and beat a sleeping Tayiji until he could not see through the puffing of bruised flesh around his eyes.
Unable to rely on sleight of hand in such an injured state, the temporarily blinded Tayiji listened to the sounds of his sparrows to scrounge for food. In attempts to keep their brother alive, the birds told him about a rich old poppy farmer who lived in a blue-roofed mansion and paid any swift young boy from the street to run errands. They led the boy to the old man, who shut him out for his pitiful physical state, saying that he was in the business of making money, not helping any passing beggar. Eager to prove the old man wrong, Tayiji lifted a package off another boy, made his delivery, and returned to the blue-roofed mansion with the account of the successful run.
As he healed, the old man put him to work shuttling small packages of refined opium to households across Changchun. Young Tayiji did not understand the implications of his work at first, but the old man provided him with hot meals and gentle pats on the head, making the boy want to please him. The old man noticed that the short, freckled youth with the birds was skilled at evading the police and returned quicker than any other delivery boy. He thus favored the child, lavishing him with greater rewards and more consequential tasks. In a nod to the singing sparrows that trailed him like a procession of royal attendants, the old man took to calling him tàizǐ, "crown prince," and treated him as his son. Tayiji gave himself the same name in Manchu and was known as such ever since.
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When the Japanese invaded northeast China, they seized the region's poppy fields and poisoned its people with opium habits, draining the addicted populace of their money to fund their occupation. All across Manchukuo, government licenses were required to produce, sell, or purchase opium, shutting out local peddlers who did not conduct business within the state's laws. Opium revenue started to flow in from across the land, but officials seemed unable to take hold of the market in Xinjing, the center of their own operations. The Kantō-gun raided several opium dens in the city, believing withheld profits to be the reason for Xinjing's low revenue. There was no shortage of opium users in the city, but none seemed to frequent government-sanctioned parlors.
The old poppy farmer managed to hide his production and refinement labs from the Japanese in hard-to-reach mountain passages outside Xinjing. But his grip on the city came from his massive underground network of opium delivery, upheld by Tayiji and his sparrows. People had no need to go to state-run opium dens when the sparrows could anticipate their urges and call on Tayiji to deliver their fix. The Japanese, in turn, targeted Chinese warlords and opium-den owners until one clever bureaucrat among them noticed the flight patterns of the sparrows. Orders to kill and trap the brown songbirds spread throughout the city until the police were brought to the flutter above the blue-roofed mansion.
When they realized that the old man was their only means to access his profitable local network, their enthusiasm for slaying him waned. Instead, they gave him an ultimatum: pay a hefty tithe to the empire or burn with his house. The poppy farmer, grown too old and complacent to fight, agreed to pay. Tayiji resented the shift but saw wisdom in keeping his enemies close.
With his dying breath, the old man left his adopted son full run of his blue-roofed opium empire. Tayiji continued to supply most of Xinjing but also turned his attention to the moneyed elite of Manchukuo — the wealthy Chinese and Japanese from whom there were more funds to be gleaned. Rich men were perfect targets: they sought indulgence but were arrogant enough to believe their bodies would not cede control to their vices. Business boomed as he transformed his home into a luxury opium den staffed by beautiful yanhua that attracted wealthy clientele. For some time he fell into his own traps of decadence, discovering that he had quite the appetite for consuming the feminine beauty he had not wanted for his own body. For years he lived in his castle of women, smoke, and silk, keeping tabs on the Japanese with his sparrows to maintain this stasis of opulence.
While their brother fell to vice, his sparrows remained industrious, fluttering about watching China transform under occupation. The sparrows sang to Tayiji of Japan's ruthless labor practices as they plundered the land. The occupiers built factories where young men and women lost limbs to machines. They pushed underfed workers into caves to mine iron and coal. They shipped the crop yield to Japan, shrinking Chinese stomachs. But such birdsong did not rouse the wet-lipped Tayiji from his euphoric daze.
One frost-bitten morning in 1934, the birds brought Tayiji news of his birth father, a man he had tried not to think of over the decades since he had left his people. The sparrows told him of a large fortress northeast from Xinjing where Japanese soldiers held men and women captive. The prisoners were sometimes petty criminals, but for many, their only sin was being visibly poor. His father, dirty and passed out from drink on the streets of Harbin, had been taken into this prison. The birds told Tayiji of horrible things done there in the name of science. People were bled empty to see how organs changed in the moment of death. They were injected with the plague to test new vaccines. They were sliced open alive, feeling the drag of blades carve across their bones. The birds admitted they could not tell which mutilated corpse was his father's but that he had been buried somewhere on the fortress grounds.
This image haunted Tayiji for days. He had no love for his birth father, but the ghastly accounts of these Japanese experiments shook him out of his daily indulgences. He had never been one to think much about whether the choices he made were virtuous so long as they made him feel good. But he had observed throughout his life that a consistently good man was almost always an exception, that given the chance to flourish, the evil or weakness lurking within could override any man's humanity. He did not think there was much he alone could do, but he began to use his birds to identify soldiers who might be susceptible to the enticements of opium. Soldiers who may have seen or done things in the name of the emperor they might prefer to forget. One by one, he lured these men to his orbit with his knowledge of their secrets and neutralized them with the scourge of addiction until they wasted away into the void, leaving nothing but their coin for him to take. Tayiji had since made it a sport to hunt for these weak-link soldiers, finding perverse pleasure in inviting them to tea, inviting them to his home, and inviting them to their downfall passed to them in a pipe.
Now Feng-nüshi requested the help of his sparrows to protect her own empire against Japanese sanction. His sparrows served no master but he, though he would instruct them to keep watch on Fenghuang for any threats. Feng-nüshi allowed him into her teahouse but made a show of keeping her distance to protect the irreproachable moral reputation of her establishment. His money was good at Fenghuang, but not much else. Nonetheless, Tayiji's love of the teahouse and its offerings was genuine. He did not wish to see it felled by its own fumbled jabs at powerful men who could retaliate. Feng-nüshi had great disdain for being beholden to anyone, let alone any man; she would pay him handsomely for his troubles.
What he had not expected was for her to offer Young-Ja, or any other Fenghuang girl of his choosing, as part of that payment. Feng-nüshi must have been truly spooked to risk sacrificing something so dear for his help. His sparrows had kept him informed of Feng-nüshi's and Bailong's little poison bandit brigade, though in a time of war, small raids would get them nowhere. The cheong-induced shame or guilt of low-level Manchukuoan bureaucrats could not stop marching armies from decimating China.
Tayiji had been intrigued by the round-faced Joseon girl since he had first seen her in Fenghuang. She did not have particularly striking features; perhaps it was her plainness that made her stand out to him from among the beauties of the teahouse. He had at first thought her naïve for putting herself at risk for a woman she did not know, though he appreciated the clumsy valor. But over time, it was her lack of obsequiousness, her reluctance to curry favor with the guests that made Tayiji want to crack her secrets for himself. Even now he did not want to let little Young-Ja leave his den so soon; he enjoyed watching the unguarded reactions to his teasing blossom on her little round face. He eventually sent her on her way, for with Feng-nüshi's blessing, he would wait to claim her into his house — should she so wish it.
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And now the story turns to a man breaking.
Baek Yong-Woo could not bear to return to Fenghuang. He lay in the dark staring at the ceiling of a small hut for days, hiding in a village northwest of Xinjing. He knew it was imperative to get his house in order and root out whatever had led to the ambush. Every hour that passed without action was an hour lost to failure. But the doubt that had plagued him for months had become so heavy, he felt he could no longer lift his body to feed himself, let alone continue his pursuits. The small missions he had supported for the last decade against Japan had barely made a dent in the occupation of Joseon and China. He had sweated and bled until he lost everything — his home, his love, his hope. Even his appetite and sleep now eluded him. How much more would he have to sacrifice for freedom? In the past, Yong-Woo had been able to persist for the sheer numbers of people who relied on him. But his group was dwindling to death and desertion. New recruits were harder to come by and were often young and inexperienced.
A part of Yong-Woo wished to go south to aid the efforts of his comrades closer to the battlefield. But he could not leave the capital unmonitored with so few men. He continued his subtle espionage and worked to establish a new safehouse for his associates in this remote village. When he got word that his fellow Joseon comrade Go Nam-Choon was alive after fleeing the battlefront of Japan's war against China, he welcomed him with open arms, eager to learn of his cell's activities in the south.
When Nam-Choon arrived at Yong-Woo's hideout, he did not speak for two days and lost himself in drink and sleep. As he came to, he informed Yong-Woo that he had lost most of his men as Japanese aggression continued to rage. Nam-Choon confessed, however, that the horror of losing his men was nothing compared to what he had seen in Nanjing.
There the Japanese had massacred the city, razing it to the ground until nothing remained of its humanity. Thousands of women and children lay slaughtered, having been unable to evacuate before the Japanese arrived. Nam-Choon had been caught in a rush of people fleeing a spray of bullets, losing his footing and consciousness under the stomping of the terrified masses. When he opened his eyes again, he was in a tangle of corpses, awakened by the sounds of soldiers laughing and bayoneting any signs of movement among the dead. Feeling someone squirm beneath him, Nam-Choon willed them to stop moving until he found his fingers had wrapped around the person's throat to still them. Anything to ward off the attention of the soldiers. Night fell hours later as he lay above a man he had slain to save himself. In the cover of the dark, he crawled out of the mound of rotting bodies and into a nearby cluster of trees where he could continue to hide. Nam-Choon ran past thousands of desecrated women's bodies littering the ground, with missing limbs and stalks of bamboo shoved into their perforated wombs. Spilled blood congealed on the streets of Nanjing, slowing his tread as if in a cursed marsh risen from hell. A row of severed heads had been placed along the side of the road, lining the path of destruction. All sound ended. There were no birds, no insects, no life — the stream of running water could not be heard. He could not fathom what evil had curated the stage before him. He no longer thought he could fight it. He did not know what extant being on Earth could defeat this malevolence he would not have imagined in a thousand years.
Yong-Woo's ears rang. Nam-Choon had drunk himself back into a daze. Bouts of incoherent shouting punctuated his snoring, keeping Yong-Woo from succumbing to his own night terrors. They were mere men. What did they know? What could they do?
He pulled out the brown bottle Young-Ja had brought him on his last night in Fenghuang. It had sat heavy in his pack for weeks and he wondered if a small taste might help him rest. With his mind in disarray and bereft of sleep, he would be of no help to anyone. With some aided slumber he would be able to reset his troubled thoughts and shoulder his duties in the light of the new day. He pulled a syringe from his medicine pack and extracted what felt like a negligible dose of liquid from the bottle. The needle slid into taut skin. Coolness surged through his veins, muting the heartbeat and screaming throbbing in his ears.
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And so we arrive at 1939 — Xinjing, Manchukuo, Empire of Japan.
Feng-nüshi's enduring snake hunt had yet to locate a nest, but it was not without consequence. Her claws hooked into every corner she saw, drawing blood from even those who committed no sin. Despite the chaos of the ongoing war in China, more girls than ever had left the teahouse within the last year seeking their fortunes where fingers might be less at risk of detachment. It was in this shortfall of women that Young-Ja and Meiyu, at seventeen years of age, became the youngest yet to be tapped for the role of server. Meiyu was ecstatic; Young-Ja, determined.
The older servers taught Young-Ja to mute her walk so that she might approach tables before men had the chance to lower their voices. They taught her to smile and keep her eyes downcast so men never saw in them traces of comprehension. Young-Ja absorbed every correction to her bearing in preparation for the main tearoom.
But with each table she served, each group of men she infiltrated, she could not deny the swell of disappointment in her chest. She found that even the meanest-looking soldiers largely engaged in vapid conversation, guffawing over crude jokes or complaining about military rations. Officials did not pick apart their superiors' strategic decisions but instead grumbled about their horrible breath and haughty demeanors. Her most recent table had discussed at length one officer's long-suffering issues with constipation, his fellow officers each chiming in with their preferred remedies.
Was this what she had feared for so long? To think that they were just ordinary men whose laughter came so cheaply. Utterly unremarkable men with stained shirts and food in their teeth. Realizing that such small men had murdered her parents and siblings, Young-Ja stoked a new vigor in pursuit of their downfall. She may not—
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**Reader's Impressions & Star Rating:**
What a chapter. This is where "Honey in The Wound" truly earns its title — the sweetness of revenge laced with the poison of empire, the honey of survival smeared over wounds that will never fully heal. I was completely absorbed by Tayiji's backstory; the sparrows, the fragrant-haired child who became a kingpin, the horror of his father's fate at Unit 731-style experiments — it's haunting and beautifully rendered. The transition from Young-Ja's naive determination to her chilling realization about the "ordinary men" who destroyed her family is masterful. And Yong-Woo's descent — that final image of the needle sliding into taut skin — broke something in me. This is storytelling at its finest: brutal, tender, and unflinching.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.9 / 5 Stars
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**Next Chapter Prediction:**
The seeds are planted for a collision course. Yong-Woo has just taken his first dose of opium — the very substance Tayiji weaponizes against his enemies. Will this be his undoing, or will it fuel a desperate new strategy? Young-Ja is now a fully-fledged server, her eyes and ears trained on the enemy, but her disappointment at their ordinariness suggests she may underestimate the quiet dangers of the tearoom. And Tayiji waits in his den of silk and smoke, patient as a spider. I predict that Young-Ja will soon be called upon to deliver another message — or perhaps to become a permanent "gift" to Tayiji. Meanwhile, Nam-Choon's trauma from Nanjing may push him toward reckless action, and Feng-nüshi's snake hunt may finally strike a target that matters. The war outside is bleeding into the teahouse, and I suspect the next chapter will see the first true casualty of Feng-nüshi's desperate gambit.
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