Early the next morning, Fan Changyu left Changning in Auntie Zhao’s care and set off, carrying her remaining 300-plus wen and a silver hairpin tucked into her chest.

The hairpin was a gift her parents had bought her for her coming of age ceremony, costing them fully over two taels of silver (1 tael of silver ≈ 1,000 wen).

Jiji Ceremony (及笄/jíjī): The Han Chinese coming-of-age ceremony for 15-year-old girls, where their hair is pinned up to mark adulthood and marriageability.

Pawning this hairpin should raise enough to cover the price of buying a pig.

She stepped into the pawnshop, but to her surprise, after squinting and examining the hairpin for a long while, the shopkeeper merely held up three fingers: “300 wen.”

Fan Changyu almost choked on her breath. Her eyes widened. “This hairpin is solid silver. It’s only worth 300 wen?”

The shopkeeper replied, “Silver as it may be, it lacks weight, and the style is outdated. I know times are tough for your family, so tell you what: Shu will give you 500 wen. Not a wen more.”

“One tael. I won’t pawn it for a penny less.”

The shopkeeper set the hairpin down on the counter with a clack. “Then you’d best take it back.”

Fan Changyu had been counting on pawning this hairpin to buy a pig. She hadn’t expected this black-hearted shopkeeper to drive such an outrageous bargain. Refusing to waste another word on him, she picked up her hairpin and turned to leave.

The shopkeeper hadn’t anticipated the girl’s stubborn streak—when she said no room for bargaining, she truly meant it. Left with no choice, he called out, “Hey… come back, come back! One tael it is. Consider it Shu taking pity on you and buying this hairpin at a loss. It’s early morning, so making this deal with you counts as opening shop…”

Kāizhāng (开张): In Chinese culture, making the very first sale of the day is considered a crucial omen for good luck and steady business for the rest of the day. Shopkeepers will often make concessions on the first customer just to guarantee a completed deal.

Stepping out of the pawnshop, Fan Changyu had an extra tael of silver in her purse.

To gauge the market prices for cooked meats, she first took a stroll down the street where prepared food was sold.

Today happened to be market day. Although it was still early, the market was already bustling with activity. Many farmers from the countryside had brought mountain goods to sell, planning to use the earnings to buy New Year’s goods to bring home.

Fan Changyu took a loop around and found that the shops selling cooked meat primarily featured roast chicken and roast goose. As for braised pork, the bestsellers were head meat and pig ears, while offal sold the least.

Seeing Fan Changyu eyeing the food displayed outside her shop, a plump older woman called out, “Guniang, looking to buy some roast chicken?”

Fan Changyu asked, “How much for the pig head meat?”

“Guniang has got a good eye!” the plump woman replied. “This pig head meat was braised just last night, simmered the whole night through, so it’s wildly fragrant! Five wen per liang. How much would you like?

1 Jin (斤)/500 grams = 10 Liang (两), so 1 liang ≈ 50 grams.

That meant 50 wen per jin. However, vendors often intentionally quoted a higher price to leave room for bargaining.

Testing the waters, Fan Changyu deliberately said, “That’s so expensive…”

The plump woman immediately countered, “It’s almost New Year’s, what meat on this market hasn’t gone up in price? Mine is about the most reasonably priced you’ll find! Guniang, if you really want to buy, I’ll let you have two liang ( ≈ 100 grams) for 9 wen.”

Fan Changyu guessed that this was likely the usual selling price, which worked out to roughly 45 wen per jin for braised pig head meat.

Using this same strategy, she went to various other cooked meat shops to check the prices of braised pig ears and braised offal. Braised pig ears were the most expensive at 60 wen per jin, though given that a single pig only yields two ears, it made sense that scarcity drove up the price.

By contrast, braised offal was nowhere near as valuable, selling for just 20 wen per jin.

Pig offal was never something many people ate anyway. The wealthy disdained it, while the poor didn’t know how to prepare it properly, leaving behind a strong, unpleasant odor if handled wrong.

Butcher shops didn’t even bother selling the stuff. If you really wanted to buy it, less than 10 wen could get you a whole bucketful to haul home.

Having gotten a good sense of the market, Fan Changyu left the cooked-food street. Right beside it was the raw meat market, and just beyond that lay the livestock market.

The meat market was even livelier than the cooked-meat street. Fan Changyu’s family owned a pork shop in a prime location here. Right now, every other butcher shop was wide open, their cutting boards and iron hooks laden with pork. Only her shop remained tightly shut, the space before its doors already claimed by other street vendors.

Looking at it, Fan Changyu felt a pang in her heart. She paused and stared at her closed butcher shop for a moment, quietly telling herself that she would reopen it very soon.

Turning around, she tucked her money close and headed for the livestock market.

The livestock market was far more chaotic. Pigs, sheep, cattle, and horses were all being hawked here. One careless step, and you’d land right in a pile of droppings from who-knows-what animal. The stench was just as bad.

Most of the sellers were middle-aged men dressed in coarse short tunics, a few pigs or sheep tethered beside them. When bargaining, they shouted in local trade jargon that outsiders could hardly decipher.

A pretty young woman like her popping up in a place like this naturally drew a lot of eyes.

A few livestock dealers called out, asking what she was looking to buy, but Fan Changyu ignored them completely. Having tagged along with her father to buy pigs in the past, she knew better than to expect a good deal from a livestock dealer.

Since today was market day, there was no shortage of rural farmers who had raised pigs of their own. Unwilling to sell them cheap to middleman traders, they had driven the livestock to market themselves, setting prices far lower than any dealer would offer.

Yet Fan Changyu scanned the area without spotting a single pig to her liking. Over his decade and more of butchering, her father had learned a cardinal rule: when picking a pig, look for a round rump and a short, thick tail. Pigs built like that had thick skin and rich fat, yielding top-tier meat once slaughtered.

Just as Fan Changyu was about to wander elsewhere, she caught sight of a lean, dark-skinned old man tucked away in a corner.

Beside the old man’s feet stood a well-fattened pig with ropes harnessed around its front legs and neck, seemingly waiting to be sold. However, the pig was caked in grime. Since it was still early and few buyers had arrived at the livestock market yet, almost no one approached him to ask for a price.

The old man stared earnestly at the passing crowd, yet didn’t dare call out—he looked like a man of few words.

Fan Changyu stepped forward and asked, “Laobo, how much are you selling this pig for?”

Having someone finally ask about the price made the old man rather nervous. He stammered, “My family is waiting on money from this pig to get through the New Year. The livestock dealers went out to the countryside buying pigs and offered only 10 wen per jin. That’s why these old bones of mine had to drive the pig to town myself. If Guniang wants to buy, just give me 12 wen per jin.”

Fan Changyu hadn’t expected the dealers to drive prices down so ruthlessly when buying in the countryside. The brokers earlier in the market were asking 18 or 19 wen per jin for live pigs, and it took a backbreaking effort just to bargain them down to 15.

The price the old man quoted was truly a windfall from heaven.

Luckily, there weren’t many people in the livestock market yet, or the pig would have been snapped up long ago. Fan Changyu blurted out, “I’ll take it!”

The livestock market had large balance scales specifically for weighing animals. When the pig was placed on the scale, it weighed a whopping 90 jin. Fan Changyu handed the old man one tael of silver (1 tael = 1000 wen) plus 80 wen, then began driving the pig back toward her home in the western district.

The meat market was already open for business. If she slaughtered the pig and took it to sell now, she would only catch the tail end of the morning trade—not only would buyers be scarce, but she’d also be forced to accept lower prices.

It made more sense to go home today, make thorough preparations, and slaughter the pig early tomorrow morning before bringing it back to sell.

Leaving the market and herding a pig down the road made her quite an eye-catching sight, drawing frequent glances from passersby.

Luckily, Fan Changyu was thick-skinned. Whenever she ran into familiar acquaintances who asked what she was up to, she used the chance to openly pitch her business, telling them that this pig was set for the slaughterhouse tomorrow and reminding them to drop by her shop to support her.

As luck would have it, she ran into a restaurant cook who used to buy meat from her father regularly, heading back with his ingredients. Hearing that her family’s butcher shop would reopen tomorrow, and seeing how well-fattened the pig she was driving home looked, he reserved 20 jin on the spot and handed over 200 wen as a deposit.

By the time Fan Changyu made it back, her cheeks were glowing with excitement. The alley was narrow. As she herded the pig with a bamboo stick, her calls and the pig’s grunts echoed down the entire lane.

A gyrfalcon with near snow-white plumage launched itself from the direction of her roof and soared into the high sky. Fan Changyu glanced up at it, feeling somewhat puzzled.

In winter, snow covered everything, and while it was common enough in the countryside to see falcons swoop down to steal farmers’ chickens or rabbits, no one in town raised such livestock. What was that falcon doing perching near her house?

The houses lining both sides of this narrow alley were packed closely together—two-story structures built years ago under a unified government project.

At that moment, in a loft at the end of the lane, a man sat propped up on the bed near the window. Though draped in a faded, dusty old padded coat, he could hardly conceal his refined, aristocratic air. By the charcoal brazier near the foot of the bed lay an extinguished, slender stick of charcoal.

The inner garment he originally wore was set beside the bed, missing a torn corner.

The window stood half-open, letting in gusts of cold wind that ruffled the man’s lapels and long hair.

With a countenance like clear moonlight on fresh snow, who else could this be but the man Fan Changyu had rescued?

The clamor echoing through the alley drew his gaze outward. A comely girl with bright eyes and a smiling face was walking down the narrow, snow-thawed lane. She wore the same apricot, front-buttoned short jacket he had seen her in last night, appearing like a single beam of warm light suddenly illuminating a quiet, ancient scroll.

However, the creature she was herding forward with a bamboo stick was… a pig?

The squeals of the swine reconfirmed its identity.

The man’s expression grew subtle and complex.

He had seen well-read, elegant daughters of noble families, as well as brave, heroic women raised in military clans. But a young woman herding a pig was truly a first in his lifetime.

The girl had already arrived at the doorstep, drifting out of sight from the window. Yet he could hear her younger sister’s joyful exclamation as she rushed out to greet her: “Ah Jie, where did such a big pig come from ah?”

The girl’s voice rang out with a smile, brimming with vitality: “I bought it, of course!”

The noise outside grew livelier, sounding as though the older woman next door had also hurried over to help herd the pig.

The man didn’t listen any further to the clamor outside. Closing his eyes, he rested. He needed to recover from his injuries as quickly as possible.

Fan Changyu was completely unaware of any of this. After herding the pig into the side shed behind her house and locking it in, she picked up the bucket of pig offal the Chen family had gifted her yesterday for slaughtering their pig, then went to the well outside the alley to draw water and scrub it clean once more.

Pork is best sold fresh on the day of slaughter, so the pig she brought back had to be kept for tomorrow morning. That wouldn’t leave enough time to braise its meat, but she could get this bucket of offal braised tonight. Rather than selling it on its own tomorrow, she would use it as a free promotional incentive for anyone buying her pork.

For every jin of fresh pork someone bought from her, she would throw in one liang of braised offal for free.

Walking around the market today, Fan Changyu had seen a great deal of cooked-food shops. A large number of shops meant plenty of buyers, but it also meant customers had plenty of options.

If she jumped blindly into selling cooked meat, people wouldn’t necessarily be willing to spend their hard-earned money to sample her braised dishes, especially given the cost.

Fan Changyu mulled it over. Offal was cheap, making it the perfect free bonus to draw in customers. People might hesitate to spend money buying the stuff outright, but if it was offered for free, plenty of folks would jump at the chance.

That way, when her butcher shop reopened, she could attract people to buy her fresh pork while simultaneously drum up publicity for her future braised-meat business.

Once they tasted the free braised offal, they would know whether her family’s master stock was any good. That way, when she officially launched her braised meat business down the line, those who enjoyed the flavor would naturally return as paying customers.

制卤 (Zhì Lǔ): Master Stock / Spice Pouch is a perpetual, seasoned Chinese cooking liquid flavored with soy sauce, sugar, rice wine, and aromatic spices. It is reused over time to poach or braise meats like chicken, duck, and pork, growing richer and more complex with each use.

After finishing scrubbing the pig offal, Fan Changyu headed back home, rolled up her sleeves, and started a fire. She filled the wok with water, gathered a miscellany of spices, packed them into a clean cloth pouch, and tossed it into the pot along with ginger and garlic to brew the braised master stock.

Her family’s kitchen was fully stocked with supplies. Her mother had been a particular woman who was meticulous about food. Back when the household was well-to-do, stocking these ingredients had been no trouble at all.

Fan Changyu had learned many dishes from her mother, though her performance with most had been unexceptional. Only when it came to braised dishes did she excel—likely because she had been fond of gnawing on braised pig trotters ever since she was little, leading her to master the craft exceptionally well.

As she wielded her knife to slice up the offal, her habits from butchering and chopping bones carried over. Her movements were bold, sweeping, and forceful. Whenever the cleaver slammed down heavily onto the chopping board, the sheer ferocity of her stance was enough to make even a thief turn tail and run for his life.

An hour later, a rich, mouthwatering aroma of braised meat drifted from the Fan family kitchen. Neighbors throughout the alley sniffed the air from inside their homes, wondering whose household was stewing meat that smelled so heavenly.

As the fragrance wafted upward, it hit the loft particularly hard, given how tightly packed the Fan and Zhao houses were. Upstairs, the man felt his throat tighten as he swallowed hard, then closed his eyes deeply.

His body was simply too weak. Since sustaining his injuries, he had yet to eat a single proper meal.