A brief silence fell over the room, yet she felt it was anything but truly calm.
Struggling to sit up from the bed, then shifting onto that wooden chair, Wu Xiaoliu pushed her out of the room.
What met her eyes was red earth and low, fresh yellow-green scrubby bushes.
This was terrain unique to Bijiang — this land that Xiao Zhun had yearned to set foot on his entire life, and now it was spreading beneath her very feet.
She felt a wave of emotion. Then she thought of every step of hardship that had brought her here, and the dull ache of the wounds on her feet — and tears actually pricked the corners of her eyes.
Suddenly, her gaze swept across the dark, massed crowd, and a conspicuous spot of white, like a grain of rice stuck in her field of vision, forced its way into her line of sight.
The tears that had been about to fall — in that instant — froze in place mid-eye.
“Hao Bai?!”
The “grain of white rice” evidently heard her. He made a shifty attempt to shrink further back into the crowd, which only made him more conspicuous.
She nearly leaped up from the wheelchair in excitement. The hand at her side from Wu Xiaoliu pressed her firmly back down.
Several people standing in the front row below had heard clearly. A big-bearded man was first to speak: “Fortress Chief, do you know that eastern physician?”
“The Fortress Chief just woke up and her head is still muddled—”
Xiao Nanhui reached up and shoved Wu Xiaoliu’s pudgy face to one side: “Of course I know him. He owes me a horse he never returned. I’ve got that debt memorized very clearly.”
Hearing this, the big-bearded man and several other men rose to their feet. “So that’s how it is. Fortress Chief, leave it to us — within half a day, we’ll bring you even his grandfather’s chamber pot.”
The men said this and burst into laughter.
Xiao Nanhui did not find it funny. Hao Bai did not find it funny either. But those several burly men were already making their way toward him, so he had no choice but to cast a pleading look at the woman in the wheelchair.
Xiao Nanhui dropped her head and looked at the two bows on her feet, then exhaled: “All right. He did save my life after all, more or less.”
The not-so-distant Hao Bai seemed to have heard, and raised his head with hope rekindled, his posture visibly straightening.
In the next second, the woman’s slow, drawling voice drifted over.
“Strip him and bring him to my room.”
---
Xiao Nanhui had never anticipated that the people of this stronghold would be so decisively swift at stripping someone. By the time Hao Bai was dumped, bare as the day he was born, into her room, barely a quarter of an hour had passed since she had given the order.
My, the previous Fortress Chief had certainly not spared them from such tasks.
“You — you woman! We’ve known each other at any rate — I treated your legs out of the goodness of my heart, and you humiliate me like this! Is this how a decent person behaves?! I am a physician. I have never been treated this way in my entire life. If you truly intend to do something indecent to me, I — I — I would rather be dead!”
The person on the bed had been rambling nonstop since being thrown in. Fortunately he was speaking in the eastern Lingdong official dialect, which those Southern Qiang people couldn’t follow.
Xiao Nanhui dug a finger in her ear and picked out a bit of sand.
She didn’t want it this way either, but being attended to by several men was the custom in Bijiang strongholds like this. If she wanted to pass herself off as Pan Mei’er’s younger sister, she had best not deviate too conspicuously from the norm. Better to target someone she knew than someone she didn’t.
Hao Bai had both hands and feet bound behind his back, positioned in an extremely humiliating posture. Right now, consumed by rage, all this talking had left him short of breath, and he looked quite pitiable.
After another while, the footsteps of the few people outside the door finally receded. Xiao Nanhui signaled Wu Xiaoliu to untie the rope from Hao Bai’s body, then tossed him a set of indigo coarse-cloth clothing. Throughout the whole process, she didn’t glance in the direction of the bed even once.
He was putting on the appearance of a virtuous girl who had been dishonored. If in the future he truly turned up at the Marquis Mansion and was spotted by Dujuan, she might genuinely end up having to marry a wandering physician.
“Your white clothing is too conspicuous. This area doesn’t have dyeing techniques that good — it’s obvious at a glance you’ve come from outside.”
Hao Bai had already rapidly pulled the clothing on and was huddled with lingering fear in one corner of the bed.
Xiao Nanhui heard the sound and turned to face him, finding it somewhat amusing, and also genuinely puzzled: “What possessed you to leave Wancheng and come here?”
“It was because—” Hao Bai’s words cut off mid-sentence, and he went suddenly silent as a chicken whose throat had been seized.
The face and words of a certain person flashed through his mind.
A month prior he had been preparing to go to Tiancheng. The matter of the imperial seal had caused no small stir within his family, and the clan elders had asked him to go personally and verify several things. Yet before he could take a single step out of Wancheng, the very person he’d been looking for had come looking for him.
Ever since learning that person’s identity, he had found it utterly impossible to continue pretending ignorance. The entire family had been in a state of tense anxiety. So when that person merely asked him to serve as a traveling physician, he had released a breath of relief and agreed without much thought.
Ha. After spending those few days with that person, he really should have known it wouldn’t be that simple.
Sure enough, they had traveled west, and the further they went the more outrageous it became. By the time he registered what was happening, they had already reached the border between Tongcheng and Suyan.
The recent events — even as slow as he was — he was aware of in broad strokes. He simply hadn’t imagined that person would actually come in person to investigate. Every night as he shut his eyes in anxious uncertainty, he would recall certain rumors that circulated among common people.
Daughters take after their fathers; sons take after their mothers.
The birth mother had been said to be a madwoman. Perhaps that person’s temperament had taken after her somewhat.
It wasn’t unusual for there to be a few eccentric people in a world this vast. But why of all people did it have to be that particular person?
He privately felt some anguish over it, yet hadn’t anticipated that there was even more anguish to come.
He had originally been stationed with the others thirty li outside Sanmu Pass. That day he was suddenly summoned, and that person told him to go alone, deep into Bijiang, to a particular stronghold.
“Is the person you mentioned in mortal danger?” He remembered asking exactly this.
“Not for the moment.”
“The Qu clan has no talent. We only treat those at death’s door.”
He was a proud man too, wasn’t he? He couldn’t be summoned and dismissed like a wandering street physician. And besides, Bijiang was terribly dangerous.
“Though she is not in mortal danger — she is your friend.”