“No — no, I have to go find those silver notes myself.”
“You’re injured this badly, you can barely get out of bed, and you’re still thinking about going to find silver notes?” Zhang Zhixu shook his head.
“How can that be.” Chen Baoxiang murmured. “I don’t feel much pain at all — how serious can it be?”
“That’s because I used medicine worth half a scroll of the pharmacopoeia on your bleeding and pain.” He said, without amusement. “Anyone would stop feeling pain after that.”
Half a scroll?
Chen Baoxiang recalled the long list of medicinal ingredients the Great Immortal had once recited to her. Her eyelids, which had been about to fall shut with weakness, snapped back open in fright: “How much silver must that have cost?”
“Not much — the Zhang family’s young master can afford it.” He pressed, with an amused air, to cover her eyes. “Sleep.”
“My silver notes……”
“When you wake, I’ll give you two ingots of gold.”
The Great Immortal truly was a kind person — but was that not simply taking Zhang Zhixu’s money to give to her on the sly again?
Before consciousness faded, Chen Baoxiang murmured: “We owe the Zhang family’s young master so terribly much……”
“It doesn’t matter.” Zhang Zhixu turned to look out the window, and said softly: “What you’ve given him is not a small thing either.”
Greedy as she was, dramatic as she could be, prone to flattering the powerful and climbing toward wealth — but she was also kind, and vivid, and she ate with joy.
Though her good qualities were small, they were still good qualities. And though her faults were large — well, in time, in time, perhaps they could be changed.
With that quietly unreasonable partiality settling in him, Zhang Zhixu rose and went out.
He had been gravely ill and caused his parents months of worry. By rights, he ought to go and ask their forgiveness today.
But the moment he stepped into the main room, before he could even bow in greeting, his mother seized his arm.
“My son.” Gong Lan’s eyes lit with a keen and eager gleam. “That young woman — what is her name, where does she live, what does her family do?”
Hmm?
Zhang Zhixu was puzzled: “Why does Mother ask?”
Gong Lan raised her sleeve to her lips with a delicate air: “I simply see that you seem rather fond of her, and wish to know a little more.”
Fond of her?
Zhang Zhixu laughed and shook his head: “Mother misunderstands. She is merely a friend.”
How could what he felt toward Chen Baoxiang be anything as simple as romantic feeling? It was only that, having shared the same body, there was a particular and unusual bond between them.
Chen Baoxiang was the same way toward him.
Given her appalling taste in people — in her eyes, he was probably not half as appealing a prospect as Pei Ruheng.
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