Chapter 16.1

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After stepping out with the laundry basket, Fan Changyu sighed. He must have seen the booklet. Since he’d chosen to keep it, she decided to pretend the whole thing never happened.

With daylight still left, she headed to the marketplace and bought two plump pigs along with a chicken. The chicken had an important mission before it became a pot of nourishing soup—she planned to use it to lure that pesky gyrfalcon.

Her father may have been a butcher, but he was also a skilled hunter. She had even joined him on hunts in the mountains to catch wild boars and rabbits, so she knew a thing or two about setting traps.

Fan Changyu thought about setting a trap in the yard but worried that her sister, Changning, might accidentally hurt herself. After some thought, she climbed up to the attic and onto the roof, where she tied the old hen securely in place. She then set up some of her father’s trap tools around it, satisfied with her work before heading back down.

One pig would be saved for slaughter the next day, while the other would be butchered today to make cured meat. As the name suggests, cured meat (là ròu) is usually made during the twelfth lunar month. Although winter temperatures allow fresh meat to last longer, it would still spoil once the weather warmed up. Turning it into cured meat meant it could last well into the following year.

The academy teachers often received tuition not just in silver but also in the form of cured meat, which was considered an equivalent. Many scholars would even buy a piece of cured meat to gift their teachers as part of their New Year’s greetings and would bring more in spring as payment.

Back then, Song’s mother would come to buy cured meat from her father each year, using the money she earned from embroidery work and washing clothes to pay for Song Yan’s tuition. Now, Fan Changyu couldn’t help but wonder if her frequent appearances were also intended to play up her hardships in front of her parents.

In those days, Song’s mother’s hands would be covered in chilblains as soon as winter arrived. Her clothes had more patches than original fabric, and, to save on lamp oil, she often sewed late at night in dim light, using only the faintest glow from a tiny wick barely peeking above the oil. Over time, this strained her eyesight so much that she could barely see at night.

The Song family’s story—an orphaned mother and her bright son, who was determined to fulfill his late father’s unfulfilled dream of passing the imperial exams—had softened her parents’ hearts. Hearing that Song Yan’s father had spent his whole life failing the exams, and that Song Yan was a gifted child, her parents couldn’t bear to see them struggle. They had willingly gifted cured meat for his tuition.

Now, as she thought about the Song family, Fan Changyu could only wish that fate would see to it that Song Yan failed his exams spectacularly. With this thought fueling her, she went to the backyard to start heating water for butchering the pig.

The shrill squeals of the pig echoed into the south room, where Xie Zheng’s brush left a stray streak of ink across his paper. Sighing, he crumpled the page and tossed it into the nearby brazier, then leaned back, rubbing his temples in frustration.

As his head throbbed from the noise, the door suddenly opened. A little figure clung to the door frame, peeking her head around with bright, mischievous eyes. “Brother-in-law, do you want to come watch the pig slaughter?”

Her big, round eyes sparkled. “Sister is amazing at it!”

Previously, Fan Changyu had always slaughtered pigs before dawn, long before anyone was awake. Since his knee injury from a fall during his escape was still healing, Xie Zheng rarely ventured out and had never actually witnessed her at work. But today, the prolonged squeals from the backyard—two pigs crying out at once, no less—were loud enough to shake the roof.

After a brief moment of consideration, Xie Zheng nodded, took up his crutch, and stood—not exactly to watch the slaughter as Changning had hoped, but rather to end the commotion swiftly, perhaps with one clean stroke.

Walking through the main hall, he reached the small door connecting the kitchen to the backyard, which was open. He took in the scene with one glance: there was Fan Changyu, one foot firmly planted on a pig’s back, holding a thick rope, securing the struggling pig’s limbs and tying it to a solid-looking stone bench.

Changning, beaming with pride, looked up at him and said, “Isn’t my sister amazing?”

Xie Zheng didn’t respond, his attention drawn to the scene. The pig’s shrieks grew sharper as he approached, and the animal’s fierce struggles made it clear that it was putting up quite a fight.

Xie Zheng had seen pigs butchered in the army’s mess, but it usually took several strong men to hold down a single, hefty pig. The woman before him, while clearly no delicate flower, was still just one person. How could she possibly handle it better than those brawny men?

He frowned slightly, intending to step in and offer some help, but just then, he saw her land a solid slap on the pig’s head, commanding, “Settle down!”

The slap was loud enough to startle even him, and the pig’s squealing immediately softened, its struggling diminishing noticeably. A flicker of genuine surprise crossed Xie Zheng’s otherwise indifferent eyes. Did she… just knock it out? He couldn’t quite believe it.

In that instant, the impression he had of her was wildly swinging between a woman weeping over a past love and one who could subdue a pig with a single slap. His brows furrowed in bafflement.

Fan Changyu, finishing up her task of tying the pig securely to the stone bench, turned around to find Xie Zheng and her sister peeking through the door.

“Ningniang,” she said immediately, “how many times have I told you, children aren’t supposed to watch pig slaughtering!”

Changning, feeling dejected, pulled her head back behind the door, leaving only the tops of her little pigtails visible.

Fan Changyu noticed Xie Zheng’s lingering look of surprise. She was dressed in her practical, pig-slaughtering attire, and after wrestling with the pig, her loose strands of hair fell messily around her face, giving her a rough yet capable and spirited appearance.

She was too busy to dwell on any awkwardness from earlier, so after a brief pause, she said to Xie Zheng, “If you’re not in a hurry to go back, could you keep an eye on the fire at the stove?”

The large pot was heating water, soon to be used for scalding the pig’s hair. Xie Zheng cast a glance at the makeshift outdoor stove and, uncharacteristically obliging, walked over to tend to the fire.

Fan Changyu found a wooden basin for catching blood, then took up her bloodletting knife. With practiced precision, she delivered a single swift cut. As the blood poured out, a few drops inevitably splattered onto her, but her gaze remained steady and sharp, focused on the cut with the intensity of a predator surveying its subdued prey.

After a moment, the intensity in Fan Changyu’s expression faded, the fierce energy she exuded slowly dissipating. When she looked up, she noticed the man by the stove watching her with an unreadable expression.

His gaze, usually cool and detached, now held a hint of something deeper, like a mysterious well whose depths could not be seen.

Fan Changyu put away her knife, along with the fierceness in her stance, and asked with a hint of curiosity, “Did I scare you?”

Xie Zheng added a log to the fire, his refined features flickering in and out of the firelight. He seemed to find her question amusing, and a lazy smirk tugged at his lips. “Not quite.”

Fan Changyu dragged the slaughtered pig closer to him and glanced at him. “You’d better head inside. Once I pour the boiling water over the pig hair, the smell will be pretty strong.”

Xie Zheng remained seated, unmoved, and replied calmly, “I’ve smelled worse.”

The stench of decay on a battlefield.