Pursuit of Jade
Chapter 23
At the county yamen.
Fan Changyu had been detained in a temporary interrogation room at the county yamen. The doors and windows were tightly shut, and even the tables, chairs, and stools inside seemed to exude a thread of chill.
After sitting there for a long while, the cold began to creep up through the soles of her shoes, despite the two thick insoles inside them. Both her feet were nearly numb with cold.
Fan Changyu rubbed her hands together, blew into her palms, and stamped her feet lightly, trying to coax some warmth back into her body.
Two yamen runners on duty stood guard outside the interrogation room. Fan Changyu had tried speaking to them through the door, but it was obvious that the two men were not among Head Constable Wang’s people. They did not even bother answering her.
Waiting was agonizing. At last, the door to the interrogation room opened, and daylight flooded into the pitch-dark room. The yamen runner standing at the door said, “You can go.”
Fan Changyu assumed Head Constable Wang had returned from searching her home and proven her innocence. Her heart immediately eased, and she stepped out of the interrogation room.
When she saw Head Constable Wang, he was in the middle of issuing orders with scorched head and battered forehead to the yamen runners beneath him. Only then did Fan Changyu notice that even the ordinary runners responsible for serving tea and water had been issued swords, as though everyone in the county yamen was prepared to leave at a moment’s notice.
The moment Head Constable Wang saw Fan Changyu, he nodded to signal to the few runners that they could leave. His brows were knitted so tightly they almost formed the character “川”.
“Someone else just came to report a case. Besides Fan Da being brutally murdered today, several other households have also met with foul play. The wounds from swords and blades on their bodies are identical to those on Fan Da. The culprits should be the same group of people. But yours is the only household they went to afterward. I don’t know whether they managed to get something out of Fan Da, but when I took my men to your home to investigate, there were bodies lying all over the courtyard…”
The moment Fan Changyu heard the last sentence, her mind gave a sudden buzz, as though her ears had begun ringing. She could still see Head Constable Wang’s mouth moving, opening and closing, but she could no longer make out a word he was saying.
It took quite some time before she managed to steady herself. “My sister…”
Only after the words left her mouth did she realize how hoarse her voice had become. Her hands and feet were ice-cold as well.
Head Constable Wang hurriedly said, “We didn’t find the bodies of your husband or your younger sister. We searched both inside and outside the house. I don’t know whether those villains carried them off or whether they managed to escape. I’ve already ordered the yamen runners to search for them. But the snow is coming down heavily, and it’s covered up a great many tracks. We haven’t received any word yet.”
The breath Fan Changyu had been holding eased only halfway. She immediately strode toward the county yamen’s exit. “I’ll go look for them too.”
Her parents were already gone. She could not let anything happen to her younger sister as well!
Yan Zheng was injured, but he was a trained fighter. His injuries had been so severe before, yet he had still been able to deal with Jin Laosan and his men. If the people lying dead in her own courtyard had been killed by him—
Then he must have taken Changning and fled.
The wounds on his body could not sustain him for long. She had to find them before they did him in.
The wind swept fine snow through the forest, carrying the stench of blood far beyond the pines.
A flash of swordlight—
A mouthful of hot blood burst from a man’s throat, splattering across the frost- and snow-laden trunk of a pine. The man who had been gripping a saber toppled stiffly into the snow. Thick blood clung to the tree trunk before slowly dripping down, each drop striking the snow beneath and leaving one faint reddish hollow after another.
Xie Zheng did not even spare the man a proper glance. With a slight flick of his wrist, he shook every bead of blood from his long sword.
Within ten meters of his feet, corpses lay everywhere.
Little Changning and the gyrfalcon were huddled together. Whether from fright or cold, the child’s face had gone bluish-white. She was so terrified that she could not even cry anymore.
Xie Zheng sheathed his sword and walked back. Seeing her like this, he frowned. He bent down and touched the back of the child’s hand with his knuckles. Just as he expected—it was cold as ice.
He glanced down at the padded jacket he was wearing. It was already thoroughly soaked with blood, and it offered little warmth anyway. His gaze then fell on the man he had slit the throat of a short distance away.
That man’s clothes looked clean enough.
Xie Zheng walked over and used his sword to pry open the leather coat the dead man was wearing. With a kick, he sent the corpse rolling away like a sack. Another upward flick of his sword, and the leather coat landed in his hand.
He had taken this sword from one of the masked men. It was fairly comfortable to use, so he had kept it.
Xie Zheng tossed the leather coat to Little Changning. His blood-streaked face was even paler than the snow beneath their feet. Then, seemingly drained of all strength, he leaned back against a snow-covered pine. His eyes drooped halfway shut, his exhaustion unmistakable, yet his voice remained as cold as ever.
“Put it on. Stay alive and wait for your sister to come find you.”
In the distance, footsteps were drawing closer from several directions, converging on the pine forest. There were several groups. He did not know whether they belonged to the same people as these masked men or to some other faction.
Xie Zheng had no intention of going any farther.
He was severely exhausted, and with a child in tow, he would not be able to get very far.
He decided to remain where they were and rest for a while. If he could recover a little of his strength, perhaps he could hold out for longer.
“Zheng’er, is the osmanthus cake good?”
The daylight and pine trees before his eyes blurred into afterimages. In his daze, he seemed to hear the warm, gentle voice of that graceful woman, smiling as she spoke.
Xie Zheng’s eyelids trembled.
Little Changning saw him covered in blood, leaning against the pine with his eyes closed. Afraid that he had died, she called out to him in a hoarse, choked voice, “Jiefu…”
“Quiet.”
His consciousness returned. Xie Zheng frowned, his eyelids unbearably heavy, his limbs feeling as though they had been filled with lead.
The sensation was not unfamiliar. The last time he had escaped the Wei family’s death warriors, he had felt exactly the same way, losing consciousness and collapsing headfirst into the snow.
He forced his eyes open. His hand, the cloth wrappings around it long since dyed red with blood, seized the blade of his sword and dragged his palm firmly down along it.
The two edges of the sword carved deep wounds into his palm. Blood once again soaked through the cloth wrappings, spilling from his clenched fist and scattering across the snow like fallen plum blossoms.
The sharp pain finally cleared his mind a little further.
The sound of hurried footsteps drew closer. When a sword blade flashing with cold light thrust straight toward the child, Xie Zheng twisted his sword-bearing hand around to block it.
Clang!
The two blades scraped against each other, even sending sparks flying.
Xie Zheng’s gaze turned fierce. When his long sword slid all the way down to the hilt, he reversed his grip and slashed a savage gash across the masked man’s shoulder and arm, then kicked him more than ten feet away.
“Get behind the tree.” He issued the command coldly. Even the whites of his eyes had taken on faint streaks of red, making him look like a lone wolf driven to the very end of the road.
A dozen or more masked men stared at the corpses of their fallen companions scattered across the ground, evidently shaken by what they saw. They exchanged a glance, then surged forward together, swords raised, to attack Xie Zheng. Every strike was vicious, aimed straight for his vital points.
Little Changning hid behind the tree. Although Xie Zheng had scolded her repeatedly and forbidden her to cry, seeing what was happening, she still could not stop the tears from falling one after another. Almost instinctively, she pulled the whistle hidden beneath her collar and blew it with all her might.
This whistle had been made for Little Changning by her elder sister long ago. Once, while playing hide-and-seek with the children in the alley, she had accidentally fallen into a dry well. She had cried until her voice went hoarse, yet no one had found her.
When her family finally came looking for her, she had already cried herself hoarse again and could not call out to them.
After that, her elder sister made her a whistle and told her that if she ever found herself in danger again, she was to take it out and blow it. That way, her family would be able to find her.
During the journey fleeing for their lives with her brother-in-law, she had been so frightened that she blew it once. But it had brought the bad men straight to them, and Brother-in-law had scolded her for it. After that, she had not dared to blow it again.
But now that the situation was so urgent, how could Little Changning possibly worry about his warning?
The shrill whistle rang through the entire pine forest, like the cry of a blood-weeping fledgling.
One of the masked men spotted Changning and started toward her with his saber in hand. Changning scrambled to her feet and tried to run, but the leather coat she was wrapped in was far too long. She had barely taken a few steps before she tripped and fell.
The masked man raised his saber and was about to bring it down when, from somewhere, a gray falcon suddenly shot out and slammed straight into him. Its iron-hook-like talons failed to catch his neck, but they tore his face to shreds all the same, ripping away the black cloth covering it.
From the dense woods in the distance came the faint sound of barking, rising and falling in waves. There seemed to be more than one dog, and they were barking viciously. The birds roosting in that part of the forest were startled into flight all at once, filling the snowy sky with a dark, surging mass.
Changning’s eyes lit up. She hurriedly puffed out her cheeks and blew several more times on her bamboo whistle.
The masked man knocked the gray falcon aside with a sweep of his sword and was just about to seize Changning when the sound of something cutting through the air came from behind him. Almost purely by instinct, he arched backward, narrowly avoiding the cleaver hurtling viciously toward his head.
Most of the black-iron blade buried itself in the trunk of a nearby conifer. The tree shuddered, sending the snow gathered on its pinecones rustling down in a sudden cascade, obscuring their vision in an instant.
And in that very instant, the masked man felt a chill in his chest.
As the blade was pulled free, blood gushed from the wound in his chest.
The masked man had killed plenty of people in his time, yet when he saw how much blood was pouring from the gash in his chest, he still froze for a moment in disbelief.
What a vicious blade technique.
A wound like this could drain the blood from a man’s body in the shortest possible time.
Through the curtain of falling snow, he struggled to raise his eyes. His gaze settled on the black-iron killing weapon before him, blood still dripping from its edge.
A pig-slaughtering knife?
Further up, his pupils had already grown unfocused, too clouded to make out the other person’s features.
But there was no mistaking it: she was a woman.
The masked man knelt limply in the snow and let his head droop. So much blood had poured from him that it had melted away most of the snow beneath his body—almost twice the amount of blood lost by any of the other masked men who had died here.
This was the first time Fan Changyu had ever killed someone with the pig-slaughtering knife in her hand. Acting on instinct, she had used the same technique she used when slaughtering pigs, doing nothing but drawing out as much blood as possible.
Overwhelming tension and the desperate urge to protect had sent all the blood in her body rushing to her head. Her fingertips were numb and burning hot, and she had not even had the chance to feel anything else about having killed a person.
The moment Changning saw her elder sister, her lips immediately crumpled as she wanted to cry, but the situation was simply too urgent.
Fan Changyu could see that Yan Zheng was badly wounded and unable to hold his own, another bloody gash having been torn across his arm. Without even having time to say a word to her younger sister, she yanked the bone-chopping cleaver free from the tree trunk and hurled it at one of the masked men.
But the man was pulled aside by one of his companions and dodged it.
And right behind him was Xie Zheng.
The cleaver flew straight toward Xie Zheng, scaring Fan Changyu’s heart right up into her throat.
Fortunately, Xie Zheng’s reactions were astonishingly quick. He immediately tilted his head aside, and the heavy cleaver sank deep into the trunk of the pine behind him.
When he looked over at her, Fan Changyu’s expression turned a little sheepish.
As the snow piled on the tree came cascading down, she had no time to think any further. She repeated her earlier trick, closing the distance in an instant, and once again used her pig-slaughtering technique to stab several of the masked men in succession.
Xie Zheng, meanwhile, slit their throats with his sword.
Clumps of snow mingled with blood splattered onto the ground, one mass of fresh blood after another.
Once all the snow had fallen from the tree, Fan Changyu’s eyes met Xie Zheng’s.
She awkwardly explained, “I was trying to throw it at that masked man just now.”
Xie Zheng said nothing.
More than half of the dozen or so masked men had already been taken down. Xie Zheng finally had a little room to catch his breath. He stood leaning on his sword, disheveled strands of hair falling around his face. His complexion was as pale as snow, with a trace of blood at the corner of his mouth. He looked so weak that he might collapse at any moment, yet somehow the remaining masked men, waiting for an opening, did not dare make a single rash move.
The barking was already close.
Three or four hunting dogs burst from the dense woods, baring their vicious teeth as they snarled and barked furiously at the masked men.
Fan Changyu had borrowed these hunting dogs from a hunter in town. It was thanks to them that she had been able to follow the scent of blood and find her way to the pine forest outside the city.
When she heard Changning’s whistle, she had abandoned the dogs and hurried here ahead of them.
Fan Changyu threatened the others, “The county office’s soldiers will be here soon!”
The masked men exchanged glances. They seemed to have reached the same conclusion: if they continued fighting, they would gain nothing against Fan Changyu and Xie Zheng. They quickly turned to retreat.
“Take one alive,” Xie Zheng said.
Almost the instant he finished speaking, Fan Changyu charged after them.
These men were dressed like bandits. They had killed Fan Da and then broken into her home. For all she knew, they were the same people who had murdered her mother.
Fan Changyu untied the coil of rope hanging from her waist. As she ran, she swiftly formed it into a loop and hurled it at the last masked man.
The loop caught around his neck. Fan Changyu planted her feet and hauled backward with all her strength, and the noose instantly tightened.
The masked man desperately clawed at the rope around his neck, but Fan Changyu dragged him backward through the snow like a limp sack of rags.
A strange look crossed Xie Zheng’s face when he saw this.
Fan Changyu braced one foot against a snow-covered pine and hauled on the rope with all her might, dragging the man back as though she were pulling a dead pig.
“This kind of rope loop is commonly used to catch wild horses or wild cattle,” she explained. “Once it catches them, they’re almost impossible to escape from. The harder they struggle, the tighter the loop gets.”
It was fortunate that Head Constable Wang had been worried she might run into danger while joining the search and had asked the yamen runners to give her a set of constable’s weapons.
A constable’s standard equipment was really nothing more than a knife and a coil of rope.
The knife was for self-defense; the rope was for tying up prisoners.
The yamen knife wasn’t nearly as comfortable in her hand as her own pig-slaughtering knife, but she didn’t want to reject Head Constable Wang’s kindness, so she had taken the coil of rope instead.
Xie Zheng was silent for a moment.
It was a life-or-death situation, yet somehow, whenever she opened her mouth, the tense atmosphere seemed to relax several degrees.
Seeing their companion captured, the remaining masked men exchanged a brief glance. One of them suddenly picked up his sword and hurled it straight at their captured companion.
The masked man caught by Fan Changyu’s rope was killed on the spot, blood spraying everywhere.
Fan Changyu cursed furiously, immediately abandoning the rope and charging after them with her pig-slaughtering knife in hand.
Xie Zheng coughed up a mouthful of blood. Worried that she would be no match for them, he wanted to give chase despite his own grievous injuries. But the instant he lifted his foot, it came down on something hard beneath the snow.
He moved his black boot aside and looked down.
It was a waist token.
The moment he saw the emblem engraved upon it, his phoenix eyes turned razor-sharp.
He picked up the waist token and slipped it into his robes. When he looked toward the few masked men Fan Changyu had caught up with, there was no longer the slightest difference in his eyes between them and dead men.
The masked men were being chased and bitten by three or four hunting dogs, while Fan Changyu—an absolute freak of nature when it came to strength—was relentlessly pursuing them as well. For a time, they were hard-pressed on all sides.
But they soon discovered Fan Changyu’s weakness.
Most of the time, she relied on sheer strength and speed. She had far too little real combat experience fighting with her life on the line. When several of them surrounded and attacked her, she could no longer defend against every blow, and before long, she had sustained several wounds.
The cuts left by their swords burned fiercely, slowing her attacks by several beats. She was already doing her best to learn how to block, but this small amount of progress was nowhere near enough to let her contend with several seasoned fighters at once.
When she saw another masked man bring his sword down toward her wrist, Fan Changyu grew anxious as well. Unfortunately, her move had already run its course, and there was no way she could dodge.
If her wrist were injured, at best she would lose her grip on her weapon. At worst, she could lose the use of her entire hand.
She gritted her teeth, intending to go down fighting.
At the critical moment, a large, knuckled hand reached from behind and closed around the hand holding her knife.
Compared to the warmth of the back of her hand, his was cold as a sheet of lake ice.
She had no idea what subtle force he used, but with a twist of her wrist, he guided her hand around. The blade of her pig-slaughtering knife instantly turned upward, and from below, she hacked viciously into the masked man’s elbow.
The blade then continued upward with brutal force, scraping along the bone and tearing through flesh until it reached the tendons and soft cartilage beneath his armpit, where Xie Zheng gave it a hard upward jerk.
The sword in the masked man’s hand flew free.
His entire arm, bloody and limp, dropped uselessly at his side as he let out a heart-rending scream.
Fan Changyu was no stranger to scraping flesh from bone, yet even she felt her scalp prickle when she thought back to the way she had wielded her blade just now. Unable to resist, she glanced back, but all she could see was half of the man’s pale jaw. His hand still held hers, guiding her through another move and blocking the deadly strikes of the remaining masked men.
His strength was less about forcing her movements and more like guiding her, teaching her how to evade her opponents’ attacks. And whenever she struck, Fan Changyu did not hold back her own brute strength in the slightest.
Her one weakness had thus disappeared.
The few masked men facing them were suddenly unable to keep up.
Fan Changyu truly did possess some natural talent for martial arts. While memorizing the moves Xie Zheng guided her through, she could still seize every opening to land a kick on one of the masked men.
One of them was kicked so hard by Fan Changyu that he went flying backward and slammed into a snow-covered pine. The entire tree shuddered, and a sheet of icicles came crashing down with a thunderous roar, sending snow spraying everywhere.
At the same time, the man behind her guided her hand through a flourish of the blade, sending the pig-slaughtering knife straight into another masked man’s chest.
Fan Changyu distinctly felt the wound in his palm split open. Warm blood welled out, soaking the back of her hand where their palms were pressed together, yet his palm remained cold.
As she watched the chaotic flashes of swordlight before her, something in her chest seemed to tremble along with the pine tree as its curtain of icicles came crashing down.
“Don’t get distracted.” His cool, hoarse voice sounded beside her ear. Because he was guiding her grip on the knife, the two of them were standing unusually close. Fan Changyu could almost feel his breath against her ear, carrying only the faintest trace of warmth.
Her entire ear grew inexplicably numb.
She resisted the urge to rub it and focused all her attention on her movements.
When the blood-stained pig-slaughtering knife finally came to rest against the neck of the last masked man, Fan Changyu was at last able to catch her breath.
She had noticed earlier that this man was probably the leader of the group. The masked man she had caught with her rope had been the one he had killed with a single stroke of his sword.
Fan Changyu pressed the blade of her knife a little harder against his neck, drawing a thin line of blood, and demanded coldly, “Who are you people? What grudge do you have against my Fan family?”
The man did not look at her.
His eyes remained fixed on Xie Zheng standing behind her, as though he were desperately trying to identify him. When Xie Zheng raised his eyes and met his gaze, the man finally seemed to recognize him. His pupils contracted violently, and a look of ashen despair spread across his face. Then, without warning, he grabbed the pig-slaughtering knife pressed against his neck.
Fan Changyu and Xie Zheng were standing so close together that she failed to realize he had been looking at Xie Zheng. Seeing him make a move, she was startled, assuming he was trying to seize the knife. She immediately pressed the blade down harder, trying to keep him under control. She never expected him to grip her knife and drive it toward his own throat.
A splash of blood stained the snow, already trampled into a chaotic mess.
The masked man collapsed with his throat cut.
Fan Changyu stared at the scene, too shocked to speak for a long while.
She looked down at the pig-slaughtering knife in her hand, its bloody sheen not yet dry, and murmured, “Why would he…”
He would rather cut his own throat than say another word. Just who were these people?
Could they be enemies her father had made years ago while traveling the roads as a caravan escort?
Fan Changyu looked at the dead leader, then thought of her parents’ deaths, and felt as though her thoughts had become a tangled skein of thread.
Xie Zheng had frowned when he saw the masked man take his own life as well. But with injuries this severe, forcing himself to hold out for this long had already been his absolute limit. The moment the crisis was over and that sheer force of will was no longer keeping him upright, his vision spun almost instantly.
He finally coughed up the mouthful of blood he had been forcing back in his throat, and at last, he could no longer support himself on the sword in his hand.
Fan Changyu heard the movement behind her and turned around.
Xie Zheng had already collapsed into the snow. His face and lips were almost the same color—deathly white. She immediately forgot everything else and rushed over to check his injuries. Not only had his old wounds split open again, he had sustained numerous new ones as well.
The thought that he had once again been dragged to the brink of death because of her family only deepened the guilt weighing on Fan Changyu’s heart.
She had brought no medicine with her. Thinking that these men dressed like bandits ought to have some on them, she searched the dead leader’s body. Sure enough, she found a small bottle of medicinal powder.
Because she could not be sure whether the medicine was meant to stop bleeding, she first sprinkled a little onto the leader’s wound, which was still spilling warm blood. Only after she saw the blood clot did she feel safe enough to use it on Xie Zheng.
The moment the potent medicine touched his wounded flesh, the searing pain, like the burning heat of a blade or fire, brought Xie Zheng back to a faint degree of consciousness. Yet he was still utterly weak, unable even to open his eyes.
After giving him a simple bandage, Fan Changyu hoisted him onto her back and headed back to fetch Changning.
She had shallow cuts all along her arms from her earlier fight with the masked men. They were not serious injuries, but now that she was exerting herself, a fine, spreading pain flared through them, dense and fiery.
Fan Changyu wanted to say something to distract herself from the pain, so she spoke to the person on her back in half-jest, “This is the second time I’ve carried you back from the snow.”
The person on her back did not respond. He seemed to have passed out.
The pain brought a thin sheen of sweat to Fan Changyu’s temples. In a low voice, she said, “Thank you.”
Thank you for saving Changning for me.
If she lost her younger sister, she would have no family left in this world. She truly did not know what she would do with herself after that.
The wind and snow raged around them as she carried him through the snow, leaving a trail of deep footprints behind.
Little Changning was waiting beneath the conifer from earlier, holding the gyrfalcon in her arms. When she saw Fan Changyu returning with Xie Zheng on her back, she hurried forward on little feet.
“Ah Jie.”
Fan Changyu already had someone on her back and could not carry her younger sister as well. A bead of sweat slipped from her temple, running over the scraped skin on her face and making it sting fiercely. She looked Changning up and down.
“Ningniang, are you hurt anywhere?”
Changning shook her head. But when she saw that the man on her sister’s back was unconscious, her eyes immediately reddened, and she choked out, “Jiefu got hurt protecting Ningniang…”
The blood that had spilled from his palm when he had guided her through those moves was still on her hand. It felt scorching hot, as though her skin had been seared by fire.
A trace of bitterness welled up in Fan Changyu’s heart. “Don’t cry. We’ll take him home and find a physician.”
She always seemed so calm, so steady.
But whenever Changning heard her elder sister speak like that, she felt safe. There was nothing left for her to fear.
When their parents had died, she had cried so hard that she became ill, barely able to catch her breath. It had been her elder sister who held her beside the bed and said:
“Don’t be afraid. You still have Ah Jie”
Little Changning looked at the back bent beneath her sister’s burden. She clumsily wiped her eyes with her sleeve, then hugged the gyrfalcon and followed in Fan Changyu’s footsteps through the snow, each step sinking deep, then shallow, into the uneven ground.
“This is the second time I’ve carried you back from the snow.”
“Thank you.”
In his muddled consciousness, Xie Zheng heard someone speaking to him. He knew the voice well, but for the moment, he could not remember whose it was.
His eyelids were unbearably heavy. His mind had all but dissolved into a muddled paste, leaving him unable to think. His entire body seemed to be sinking heavily through an endless darkness, a deep, bone-chilling cold worming its way into every crevice of his bones.
Resisting the force pulling him downward was simply too difficult.
The moment he let himself go with it, everything seemed to become easier.
“Zheng’er.”
Someone else was calling him.
He could no longer clearly remember the face or voice of that gentle woman. Yet every time she appeared in his dreams, he somehow knew it was her.
Why had she come into his dream?
Hadn’t she abandoned him?
Xie Zheng did not want to answer her. Yet his gaze was drawn helplessly toward the scene before him.
The woman stood in the rear garden of the Marquis Residence, smiling as she held a child’s hand and watched the heroic-looking man practicing his martial forms in the courtyard.
“Zheng’er’s father is a great hero who stands tall between Heaven and earth. One day, Zheng’er must become a man just like your father.”
Xie Zheng saw the woman gazing at him with a warm, smiling expression, and only then realized with a start that he had somehow become that child.
He still said nothing, merely staring at the woman’s face—so vivid and clear within the dream, yet once he awoke, leaving behind nothing but a blurred outline in his memory.
He missed her.
But she had died too young—so young that he could no longer even remember what she looked like.
The man practicing martial forms in the courtyard was gone. In his place was a coffin, sent back from the battlefield in Jinzhou.
The woman, dressed in plain mourning clothes, threw herself before the coffin and wept as though her heart were being torn apart. An entire roomful of maids and old serving women could not hold her back.
The scene shifted. She was wearing new clothes now, sitting before a bronze mirror as she drew in her brows. Her dark brows, shaped like distant mountains, were gently furrowed. It was an extraordinarily beautiful face, yet anyone could see that she was unhappy.
She murmured, “How could he break his promise? He said he would come back and do my eyebrows for me.”
She sounded like a young maiden who had arranged to meet the man she loved, only for him to break his word and leave her waiting.
She saw him and smiled, beckoning him over. Xie Zheng did not move. A little boy of about four, his hair bound beneath a tiny golden crown, ran past him. She handed the child a plate of osmanthus cakes, her voice as gentle as ever: “Zheng’er, are the osmanthus cakes good?”
At last, he spoke. Almost as though he hated her, he said, “It doesn’t taste good.”
The woman seemed not to hear him at all. She lifted the little boy onto her lap, and her gentle voice grew distant, “Zheng’er must grow up to become a great hero who stands tall between Heaven and earth, just like your father.”
“Good boy. Go outside and eat your osmanthus cakes.”
Then she applied her makeup, put on the most beautiful clothes she owned, left only her brows unadorned, and used a strip of white silk to hang herself from the roof beam.
Her general had broken his promise and never returned to do her brows for her, so she had gone to seek him out herself.
The servants burst the door open, and a chorus of sobs filled the room. Standing in the doorway, the child saw nothing but half of a beautiful skirt hanging suspended in the air.
Once again, Xie Zheng struggled awake from the nightmare, his entire body drenched in cold sweat.
A bitter medicinal taste that made the root of his tongue go numb filled his mouth. The first thing he saw was a patched bed curtain, with someone standing beside the bed, silhouetted against the light.
Xie Zheng turned his head and saw Fan Changyu staring at him, her expression a mixture of shock and bewilderment. She was holding a bowl of medicine in one hand, but the medicinal spoon that had been in her other hand was nowhere to be seen.
Xie Zheng lowered his gaze. On the floor lay the spoon, shattered into pieces of porcelain.
Fan Changyu muttered, “The medicine definitely doesn’t taste good…”
Xie Zheng: “……”
His breathing, which had been considerably more labored than usual after the nightmare, suddenly eased. Even the unpleasant emotions still clinging to him from the dream were miraculously pressed down by her words.
He frowned and gave the woman sitting beside the bed a complicated look. Then, forcing himself upright, he held out a pale, slender hand toward her. “Give it to me.”
Even looking pale and sickly, his face was extraordinarily handsome.
Fan Changyu froze for a moment before realizing that he wanted the bowl of medicine in her hands.
She glanced at the bandages wrapped around his hand and kindly reminded him, “That hand of yours has two deep cuts from the sword, and the web between your thumb and forefinger is torn too. The physician said you can’t put any force on it for now.”
Only after he switched to his other hand did Fan Changyu hand him the bowl.
Xie Zheng downed the entire bowl of foul-smelling medicine in one gulp, then returned the bowl to her.
Fan Changyu remembered how, when she had forced medicine down his throat while he was only half-conscious, he had ground out through clenched teeth, “It doesn’t taste good.”
She had always thought this man was taciturn and uncomplaining. Who would have thought he was actually afraid of bitter medicine?
She rummaged through her sleeve pouch and pulled out a piece of malt candy she had been saving to soothe Changning. “Have a piece of candy. It won’t taste so bitter.”
Xie Zheng had taken medicine so many times that this was the only time she had ever given him candy. Even a fool could guess why. His expression immediately darkened. He closed his eyes, “No need.”
But in the very next instant, someone seized him by the chin and, with a deft application of force, forced his mouth open. The piece of malt candy was promptly popped inside.
“You!” He glared furiously at her.
Fan Changyu smiled brightly as she returned to her seat farther away. “Sweet, right? There’s nothing embarrassing about being afraid of bitter things. Honestly, you’re such a stubborn person for no reason!”
Perhaps it was because the window behind her let in the faint warmth of the winter sun. Whatever the reason, her smile looked especially bright and warm.
—At least, far warmer than the smile of the woman in his dream whose features he could no longer remember clearly.
The faint sweetness of the malt candy melted between his lips and teeth, driving away the bitter taste lingering on his tongue. It was as though sunlight had finally broken through a bleak place overgrown with mottled, damp moss.
Xie Zheng suddenly fell silent. He turned his head away and pressed his lips tightly together, saying nothing more.
He had not eaten sweets in a very long time. Not since that woman had coaxed him to take a plate of osmanthus cakes outside to finish, only for him to return and find that she had already used a strip of white silk to depart this world.
All these years, he had kept a deep-seated resentment and self-loathing buried within him.
If only he had not taken that plate of osmanthus cakes outside to eat… If only he had stayed by her side. Perhaps then she would not have been willing to leave him.
He hated osmanthus cakes. He hated sweets. Over time, the people around him simply stopped serving them to him.
Fan Changyu noticed his low spirits, though she had no idea why, so she merely reminded him, “Your injuries this time are no less serious than the last. The physician repeatedly stressed that you must rest properly. At the very least, until your wounds have healed, you can’t lift anything heavy. Quite a few people died at our home, and the authorities are investigating the case, so we can’t go back there for the time being. Stay here at Zhao Daniang’s loft and recover for now.”
Xie Zheng had realized the moment he woke up that he was back in the loft where he had previously recovered from his injuries. At her words, he merely gave a slight nod.
Fan Changyu paused, then added, “Thank you for protecting Changning.”
Her voice overlapped with the one Xie Zheng had heard in the haze of his consciousness earlier. Only then was he certain that it had not been a hallucination.
She had seemed to say something else at the time.
“This is the second time I’ve carried you back from the snow.”
The first time he had been injured, Xie Zheng had been completely unconscious. This time, although his mind had been clouded, he had retained a faint thread of awareness.
He could feel just how slender the back carrying him was.
And so, now that he was looking at Fan Changyu again, seeing her thin shoulders and the edge of the bandages peeking faintly from beneath her sleeve, he felt as though a wad of damp cotton had lodged in his chest—stifling him, heavy with a clammy ache.
She had been injured too when she carried him back.
He moved his pale, cracked lips and said, “You saved me first.”
That was all he said. He seemed, on some subconscious level, unwilling to draw too clear a line between the debts they owed each other.
When those people had broken down the door, he had assumed that the man surnamed Zhao had exposed himself and brought assassins down upon them. But apart from wanting to kill him and the child, those men had practically turned the Fan household upside down in their search. They had clearly been looking for something.
Thinking of the waist token he had picked up from the snow, Xie Zheng’s gaze darkened further.
He asked, “Have the authorities found anything?”
Fan Changyu shook her head and told him that several other households had suffered the same calamity that day.
With Fan Da’s death now clearly having nothing to do with her, the county office had successfully transferred all the houses and land deeds left by her parents into her name.
She was flush with money now. That was probably the only thing worth feeling relieved about at the moment. At least she would not have to pull on the lapels and expose the elbows to afford a physician for Yan Zheng.
Hearing that other people in the county had also been attacked, Xie Zheng furrowed his brows and thought for a moment before suddenly asking, “Did those people who were killed, like Fan Da, have anything in common?”
Fan Changyu thought about it and shook her head. “There were seven households in total. The dead included men and women, the elderly and children. There doesn’t seem to be anything they had in common.”
Xie Zheng remained silent for a moment, his brows tightly drawn.
Those people had searched seven households in total, yet in the end had singled out the Fan household. Clearly, they had initially been searching far and wide for something. Only after they had gotten what they wanted out of Fan Da had they come after Fan Changyu and her sister.
Reasoning backward from what he knew of the Fan household, Xie Zheng ventured a possibility: “Did any of those families have someone who had once gone elsewhere to make a living, then later returned to Lin’an Town?”
Fan Changyu thought that if that were truly the case, then there was a good chance these people really had come seeking revenge against her parents. What she could not understand was why they still refused to let the matter rest when her parents were already dead.
“I’ll ask Head Constable Wang about it later,” she said.
Only after Fan Changyu left the loft did Xie Zheng forced himself upright. From the bloodstained clothes piled on the little stool beside the bed, he pulled out the waist token he had picked up from the snow.
He held it in his hand for a while, frowning as he examined it, then closed his fingers around it.
That waist token belonged to the Wei family’s death warriors.
Heaven, Earth, Black, and Yellow.
The ones who had come this time were Black-ranked death warriors.
But these people had not come to kill him. They had not even realized he was hiding here. Their leader had only recognized him at the very last moment.
Then why had he reacted like that upon recognizing Xie Zheng, taking his own life on the spot?
The mystery before him was growing larger and larger. The only thing that seemed capable of revealing the truth was the true identity of that woman’s parents.
Her martial arts were already so formidable. Her father could hardly have been an ordinary man. Perhaps he, too, had not died at the hands of common bandits, but at the hands of death warriors disguised as bandits.
And was there some hidden meaning behind the surnameless name on her mother’s spirit tablet as well?
Xie Zheng pressed his fingers to his brow. He was tempted to send word to his former subordinates and have them secretly investigate the origins of that woman’s parents.
Then the corner of his eye caught the gyrfalcon. Its wing was wrapped in bandages, and it was sprawled on the floorboards, greedily devouring a bowl of finely chopped pork.
Fan Changyu had chopped the meat herself. After the gyrfalcon had saved Changning, its meals had been upgraded from pork offal to fresh minced meat.
It had rolled around in the snow several times, and its feathers had finally turned white again. At that moment, it opened its beak wide and had just managed to pick up a large chunk of meat when it looked up and found Xie Zheng staring at it.
The gyrfalcon’s beady eyes met its master’s. They stared at each other in silence for a moment. In the end, the piece of meat dangling from its beak went plop back into the bowl, and it looked at him with an expression of utter foolish innocence.
Xie Zheng coldly looked away.
Forget it. The Wei family’s hawks and hounds had already noticed this place. He could hardly expect to use this idiot of a bird to deliver a message anymore.
If that merchant surnamed Zhao really had come to seek refuge with him, however, he could make use of the shops under the man’s name to send a letter out without anyone being the wiser.
There were only a few days left until the New Year. He had instructed him to exchange the banknotes for 200,000 shi of grain before the New Year. A reply should arrive before long.
The malt candy in his mouth had completely melted away, leaving only a faint sweetness on the tip of his tongue.
Only then did he glance out the window. He had finished the candy, but the person who had given it to him still had not returned.
Fan Changyu went to the county yamen and relayed Xie Zheng’s line of reasoning to Head Constable Wang. After hearing her out, however, Head Constable Wang merely fell silent and shook his head, “The case has already been closed.”
Fan Changyu stared at him in surprise. “They haven’t even found the mastermind. How can the case already be closed?”
Head Constable Wang said, “The people who died in the pine forest were the culprits. They were bandits from Qingfeng Stronghold. Bandits robbing and killing people for profit around the New Year is nothing out of the ordinary.”
How could they possibly be bandits? Fan Changyu thought. Those people had clearly come prepared.
She was about to argue, but when she caught the look in Head Constable Wang’s eyes, every word that had risen to her lips was swallowed back down.
It was not difficult for her to guess why the county yamen was so eager to close the case.
The New Year was just around the corner. With so many murders suddenly occurring, never mind the outcry from the people, the county magistrate would have a hard time answering to the prefecture government as well. They needed to come up with a reason to close the case as quickly as possible.
As it happened, those masked men had been dressed like bandits. Now that they were all dead and there was no one left to contradict the story, saying that bandits had committed the murders for money was naturally the most convenient explanation.
All the county magistrate had to do was put up a notice warning that bandits had been running rampant lately and urging the people of the town to be more careful when going out. That would be enough to placate the populace.
Then he could turn around and write a memorial requesting that the prefecture send troops to suppress the bandits. Any other responsibility could be neatly pushed aside.
After all, the bandit problem at Qingfeng Stronghold had gone unresolved for years. It was already one of Jizhou’s most deep-rooted troubles.
Head Constable Wang was only a low-ranking officer. With the county magistrate pressing him to close the case, what could he possibly say?
Fan Changyu left the county yamen in a somewhat heavy mood. When Head Constable Wang walked her to the door, he said, “Why don’t you sell off the pigsty and land you own out in the countryside and go somewhere else for a while? I have a feeling your father must have offended someone back when he was working as an armed escort.”
Fan Changyu knew he meant well. She thanked him and said she would go home and give it some serious thought, but for a moment, her mind was left blank.
Leave?
She had lived in Lin’an Town for more than a decade. From a stone at the eastern end of town to a tree at the western end, she knew it all by heart.
If she stayed, she might still have a chance to uncover the truth behind her parents’ deaths. But if another assassination attempt came, there was no guarantee that she and her younger sister would survive.
Leaving her home and venturing out into the world did not frighten her. It was only that her parents were buried here. Her and Changning’s roots were buried here too, and she knew she would find it hard to leave.
Once she stepped out of the county yamen, the turmoil in Fan Changyu’s mind had already settled. She looked up at the vast sky after the snowfall and slowly exhaled a breath of stale air.
As long as the green hills remain, there will be no shortage of firewood.
Once Yan Zheng’s injuries had improved, she would tell him about leaving Qingshui County. If he was not afraid of having old enemies come after him again and was willing to leave with her, she would take him along. If he had other plans, they could simply write out a divorce agreement, and she would give him some traveling money. Then the two of them could consider their debts settled.
After returning to town, Fan Changyu went to the butcher shop and began packing up some things. The period after the New Year was the best time to transfer ownership of a shop, so since she had decided to leave, she would first sell the shop, along with the pigsty and farmland she owned in the countryside.
She intended to keep the house. If she ever came back someday, at least she would still have somewhere to return to. It was the place where she and her parents had lived for more than a decade, and Fan Changyu could not bear to sell it.
She was making a racket as she packed things up in the shop. Passersby assumed the Fan family butcher shop had reopened. Seeing that there was nothing on the chopping block, some even poked their heads inside to ask when it would open again.
Afraid of creating unnecessary complications, Fan Changyu did not announce that she planned to transfer the shop just yet. She simply told them she intended to reopen after the New Year.
As she was sorting things out, someone knocked on the shop door. Without even looking up, Fan Changyu said, “We’re not doing business today.”
An elderly voice came from the doorway. “Not even this old man’s business?”
Fan Changyu looked up and saw that it was Chef Li from Yixiang Restaurant. She said apologetically, “Sorry, Li Shifu. Some things have happened at home recently, so I don’t plan on opening the shop again before the end of the year.”
Hearing this, Chef Li waved his hand. “It’s our proprietor who wants to meet you.”
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