Fan Changyu had not walked far from the bridal chamber holding two thick quilts when her intuition sensed something amiss. Lifting her head to sweep a glance past the courtyard wall, two massive black shapes instantly shrank back down below the wall.

Fan Changyu: “……”

Fan Da and his wife, even if they were turned to ashes, she would still recognize them.

Did those two hear about her taking in a live-in husband, and, fearing she had merely found a random outsider to put on an act and dupe them, came specifically in the dead of night to scale her courtyard wall and eavesdrop?

Outside the Fan family courtyard wall at this moment, Fan Da and his tiger-backed, bear-waisted wife, Liu Shi, were each clinging to a wooden ladder, keeping their heads lowered below the wall to converse in hushed tones.

虎背熊腰 (Hǔ bèi xióng yāo): An idiom used to describe a broad-shouldered, stout, and powerfully built physique.

“Look, didn’t I say that girl just found a random person for a fake matrilocal marriage to scare us off? Splitting rooms on the very night of the wedding! What on earth were you panicking for!” Liu Shi snapped fiercely at her husband.

At the thought that grabbing this house and land was once again within reach, Fan Da could hardly conceal the excitement in his expression, saying, “Let’s watch a bit longer! Watch a bit longer!”

When the pair furtively peeked half their heads over the wall again, they saw Fan Changyu—after carrying the thick quilts into the neighboring room—come back out, fetch a basin of water from the kitchen, and return to the bridal chamber, as though she had merely gone to the room next door just to put away a quilt.

Fan Da and his wife could not help but exchange glances.

Could it be that they had guessed wrong?

After Fan Changyu carried a basin of hot water into the new bridal chamber once again without knocking, her eyes met the ice-like gaze cast by the man sitting bare-chested at the table. She signaled toward the courtyard with her eyes and said, half embarrassed and half helpless, “My eldest uncle and aunt probably think I just randomly took in a man for a fake matrilocal marriage to dupe them. They are eavesdropping outside at the corner of the wall.”

Xie Zheng withdrew his gaze and slumped back onto the round table.

He had just applied his medicine. Bone-rattling, excruciating pain coursed through his nerves from the places where his flesh was torn, driving cold sweat all over his forehead, back, waist, and abdomen. At this moment, nearly all his energy was spent on enduring the agony, leaving him in no mood to care whether Fan Changyu stayed or left.

His back was tense, sweat-soaked strands of hair clung messily to his forehead, and sweat beads hung even from his eyelids. Clenching his teeth tight, he resembled a wild wolf that had endured repeated severe beatings yet resolutely refused to be tamed.

Fan Changyu was looking at the entire injuries all over his body for the very first time. Without the gauze covering them, some of the originally split-fleshed wounds had formed blood scabs, while others were torn open into a bloody, mangled mess. Aside from these, many old scars were faintly visible across his body.

Fan Changyu could not help but think of her own father again. Her father had also borne many such old scars on his body. It seemed that being an armed escort was truly a trade where one staked their very life.

Setting down the water basin, she walked over and asked with a furrowed brow, “Is there anything I can do to help you?”

The person leaning half-slumped over the table did not lift his head. His pale fingertips pinched a bottle of medicinal powder and passed it back: “Sprinkle all the remaining powder onto the few wounds on my back.”

He had always been cautious. The medicine brought by the gyrfalcon had long since been transferred by him into the medicine bottle bought by that old man.

Fan Changyu took the medicine bottle and did as instructed, but almost at that very instant, the muscles of his back twisted even tighter, hard as rock. Perhaps finding the pain truly unbearable, he turned his head and directly bit into the pile of clothes resting on the table.

She cast a glance at those blood-stained and sweat-soaked gauze strips on the floor, then went to the cabinet to fetch a bolt of plain white silk.

This was leftover fabric bought to hold the funeral after her parents passed away. She used a pair of scissors to cut it into long strips, making it convenient to bandage his wounds in a moment.

After a short while, the tense muscles all over Xie Zheng’s body finally relaxed by a few degrees. He spat out the garments held in his mouth and slowly lifted his eyes to look toward Fan Changyu.

“Feeling a bit better?” Seeing this, Fan Changyu hurriedly set down the scissors in her hand.

Xie Zheng was deeply averse to letting others witness him tending to his injuries. At those moments, he was like a frail wild dog whose life anyone could take at will.

Yet no matter how disheveled or wretched he appeared, the woman before his eyes had already seen it all.

With a long-standing habit broken, his mind reflexively recoiled, and he merely offered a cold, detached word of thanks.

Fan Changyu glanced at the injuries on his body and generously chose not to hold it against him.

Perhaps it was simply because the pain was so severe that he was in a foul mood.

Xie Zheng picked up the garments on the table to slip them back on. The sensation of blood and sweat plastered across his back was far from pleasant, but his refined upbringing made it impossible for him to remain untroubled while improperly dressed in front of a woman.

Seeing this, Fan Changyu hurriedly stopped him: “You’ve broken out in sweat and still have quite a bit of blood stain on you. Wipe down first, and later I will fetch you a set of my father’s clothes.”

It was just as well that she had brought in a basin of water earlier. Though originally meant for him to wash up, it came in handy right at this moment.

While Xie Zheng could wipe his front himself, his back still required Fan Changyu’s assistance. She wiped far more meticulously than his own brief, careless rubs. The wrung-out cloth carefully avoided his wounds, wiping away the bloodstains and the brown residue left from the earlier applied medicine little by little.

Her knuckles occasionally brushed against his back by accident—far from soft or delicate, yet distinctly different from his own callous-covered hands. It felt as though tiny currents of electricity were spreading out from every spot her knuckles grazed.

A tingling sensation he had never experienced before made Xie Zheng subconsciously knit his brows.

Seeing his reaction, Fan Changyu paused her movement: “Did I touch a wound?”

He pressed his lips tight, his expression growing ever colder: “No.”

By the time she finished wiping his back, the basin of water had already turned murky with blood and medicine stains. Fan Changyu retrieved the silk strips she had cut and began wrapping them around him. This time, her fingertips inevitably came into contact with more of his skin and muscle. Perhaps because he had just applied the medicine and broken into a sweat, the heat of his body felt hotter than at any time before.

With Fan Changyu standing and him seated, whenever she bent her head to loop the fabric around, strands of her long hair cascaded downward, lightly brushing across his shoulder and neck.

Tingling, itching, numbing.

Xie Zheng’s brow almost knitted into the shape of the character “川”, as he imperceptibly shifted aside to avoid her.

“All done.” Unaware of his strange behavior, Fan Changyu straightened her back after tying off the knot. Having busied herself for so long, a fine layer of sweat had also broken out on her own forehead.

She went to the wooden chest to rummage out an old set of clothes her father used to wear and handed it to him, before taking the basin of water outside to pour it out.

The red lanterns hanging beneath the eaves swayed gently in the cold wind. Outside the wall, the two bear-like black hulks instantly shrank back below the top of the wall the moment they caught sight of her coming out, believing themselves to be hidden well.

Fan Changyu cooperatively pretended not to notice as well, shouting out in rebuke: “Which family’s stray cat has come to my house to steal meat again!”

Holding the water basin, she walked over and scooped two more large ladles of cold water from the water vat to mix in, before hurling the contents over the courtyard wall with full force. “If I catch it next time, see if I don’t teach that beast a lesson!”

Outside the wall, Fan Da and his wife were drenched from head to toe, shivering violently with cold, yet not even daring to breathe out loud for fear of being discovered.

Not until the footsteps inside the courtyard receded into the distance did Fan Da—shivering all the while—vigorously spit out “Pei, pei!” the water he had accidentally swallowed, asking with a screwed-up face: “What kind of water did that wench throw out? What’s this smell?”

Liu Shi wiped away the water drenching her face with her sleeve and took a sniff: “A heavy stench of blood, and a whiff of sweat.”

The couple froze for a moment, and immediately began spitting “Pei, pei!” even more frantically. “Dammit to hell, isn’t that their bathwater!”

The soaked padded jackets grew even colder when the frigid wind blew against them, the chill penetrating deep into their bones until their teeth chattered.

As for whether they managed to overhear anything by the foot of the wall that night—that was another matter. After they returned, Fan Da and his wife came down with severe colds and were bedridden for several days, but that was beside the point.

Afraid that something else might go wrong, Fan Changyu thought it over again and again before deciding to sleep on a makeshift bed on the floor of the bridal chamber. Xie Zheng did not say much about it.

Fan Changyu fell asleep quickly. While Xie Zheng was still resting with his eyes closed, her breathing had already become slow and steady.

It was a folk custom for the wedding candles to burn throughout the entire night on the night of the wedding. Since Fan Changyu needed to keep up appearances for outsiders, she did not extinguish the candle either.

The wedding candle, which had been burning steadily all this while, suddenly sputtered at the wick with a soft crackle. Only then did Xie Zheng slightly turn his head and glance toward the makeshift bed on the floor.

Warm candlelight spread across the floor. The woman lay curled up beneath several thick quilts, her black hair spilling across the pillow. In the dim, yellow candlelight, the skin of her face took on the warm, lustrous hue of fine jade.

Xie Zheng withdrew his gaze and slowly lowered his eyes.

When she was awake, she carried with her the coarse, uncultured air of the common streets, so much so that even her otherwise fine features could easily be overlooked.

But when she was asleep, she was rather pleasing to the eye.

Realizing he was actually dwelling on whether she was good-looking or not, Xie Zheng abruptly opened his eyes, his brows knitting together fiercely.

Whether her looks were fair or foul—what did it have to do with him?

He only needed to wait until his injuries improved a bit more, and he could leave this place. Whether his path would ever cross with this woman again in the future was hard to say.

He put a stop to his thoughts, turned onto his side to face the inner edge of the bed, and closed his eyes once more.

·•—–٠✤٠—–•·

Fan Changyu had her own set routine, waking up naturally once the hour arrived.

She sat up and crawled out of bed, only to stare blankly in a daze for quite a while upon discovering she was sleeping on the floor, with Changning nowhere at her side, and a man lying on the bed just a few steps away.

Then, remembering she had gotten married yesterday, she let out a sudden breath of relief.

Outside, the sky was just beginning to turn grey with dawn, while inside the room, a short stump of the wedding candle was still burning, with mottled teardrops of melted wax piled beneath the candlestick.

Fan Changyu got up quietly. Having slept in her clothes last night, she was spared the awkwardness and trouble of dressing. After packing away the quilts from her floor bed, she stepped out of the room.

The wind and snow from last night had not ceased. As the night passed, a thick layer of accumulated snow covered the courtyard this morning, and the tops of the walls as well as the withered branches outside were all wrapped in white.

Fan Changyu rubbed her hands against the biting cold, going first under the eaves to grab firewood and light the hearth. She hung a kettle over the flame to warm a pot of water for washing up, then picked up a broom to sweep the snow in the courtyard into neat piles.

Hearth and Hanging Kettle (火塘子 / 吊罐 - Huǒ táng zi / Diào guàn): A traditional rural heating setup where a fire pit (huǒ táng) is dug into the floor or built near the wall, with an iron or clay pot (diào guàn) suspended above on a hook for heating water or cooking meals continuously.

Upon hearing the sound of Changning’s crying coming from the room next door, she hurried over to carry her younger sister back.

Changning was usually very obedient, but ever since their parents passed away, if she woke up without seeing Fan Changyu in sight, she would burst into tears for a short while.

Fan Changyu coaxed her sister until she calmed down, had her sit on a wooden stool while fetching a comb to braid her hair.

Whether it was because of her weak health since childhood, Changning’s hair was not thick and jet-black like her own. On the contrary, it was fine, soft, and yellowish. With so many stray hairs sticking out, even tying them into two little topknot buns proved to be quite a chore.

Fan Changyu was still rather unskilled at it, to the point that the buns on top of Changning’s head were uniquely different every day.

After Fan Changyu finished combing her younger sister’s hair and sent her off to wash her face, little Changning felt her left bun, then felt her right bun, sensing that something was not quite right. Carrying her washcloth over to the water basin, she caught her reflection in the water, only to discover that today’s buns were exceptionally crooked today.

She nudged her buns and said, “Ah Jie, the hair is tied crooked.”

Fan Changyu coughed dryly twice: “I still have to make a trip to the county yamen after eating later, so there’s no time to comb it over for you. Can you make do with it for today?”

Little Changning was very easy to coax and immediately raised no further demands.

When Fan Changyu fetched fresh water and brought it into the room, she found that the person inside seemed to have been awake for quite some time, sitting propped up against the headboard, fully dressed and neat.

Her conversation with her younger sister had likely been overheard by him for the most part, leaving Fan Changyu feeling quite embarrassed.

She placed the washbasin onto the round stool by the bed and handed him a clean cotton cloth, bringing up the promises she had made when persuading him into this fake matrilocal marriage: “I will go to the county yamen shortly to transfer the deeds for the house and land. While I’m there, I’ll help you get a replacement household registration, and bring back a physician for you as well.”

Hearing this, Xie Zheng replied instead, “There is no need to fetch a physician. As for the injuries on my body, resting and recuperating on my own will suffice.”

The wounds on his body had already been dressed with golden-wound salve. All he needed now was peaceful rest to let the flesh knit together again.

Fan Changyu scratched her head and asked, “Then is there anything you’re short of? I can buy it for you.”

The other party shook his head once more, which only made Fan Changyu feel all the more awkward.

This differs from what was promised earlier, making it feel quite as if she were taking advantage of the fake matrilocal marriage.

She figured that after heading into the county seat later and settling the official business at the yamen, she might as well buy him some tonics on her way back so he could properly nourish his body.

After hastily finishing a simple breakfast, Fan Changyu headed out. Since her younger sister was no longer the only one left at home, she chose not to drop her off at Auntie Zhao’s place this time, merely instructing Changning before leaving that if anything happened, she could go next door to seek Auntie Zhao’s help.

Little did she expect that the moment her front foot stepped out, the small-time thug keeping watch near the alley immediately ran to the gambling house to tip them off.

Thug / Local hoodlum (小混混 - Xiǎo hùnhùn): Low-level street loafers or gang minions often employed by local illegal establishments, such as gambling dens or pawnshops, to run errands, track debts, and spy on locals.

When the sound of banging on the door echoed loudly, Xie Zheng had only lazily flipped through two pages of a book he had casually picked up from the corner of the room. Between his listless brows hid a touch of utterly bored impatience. His mood was truly far from good.