In the end, the boar was simply too ugly to hold anyone’s affection for long. Gao Xining’s interest quickly shifted from Shen Diao to Gou Zi, and she officially announced the ranking: from this day forward, Gou Zi was the elder, Shen Diao was second, and Li Diudiu was third.

Li Diudiu protested loudly. He was a perfectly decent person—why was Shen Diao ranked ahead of him?

“Did you catch these specifically to give to me?”

Gao Xining crouched down to look at Gou Zi, who maintained his perpetually aloof composure. She wanted to put her finger through the cage to pet him but didn’t quite dare—the creature’s beak was like an iron hook; one grab and it would tear the skin right off.

“That’s right.”

Li Diudiu said: “There wasn’t much worth seeing out there—the mountain just had a lot of small animals.”

Gao Xining asked: “With so many small animals on the mountain, why did you pick a wild boar and a hunting falcon to give me?”

Li Diudiu wasn’t sure how to answer, vaguely sensing that a wrong response here could be dangerous. He certainly couldn’t say: *I felt a pig and a falcon matched your air.*

“Mainly because they’re rare.”

After a moment Li Diudiu finally found something reasonably appropriate to say. He looked at her with absolute seriousness: “This pig is the one and only son of the wild boar king—one of a kind, you could say rare. This falcon is the only one of its kind in all of Yanshan—also rare.”

He met Gao Xining’s eyes. In this moment, the con-man nature cultivated through years of wandering the jianghu with his master fully awakened.

“In this world, only the rarest things are worthy of the rarest person.”

He used the word “rare” twice, but Gao Xining instinctively heard the second “rare” (珍稀, *zhēnxī*) as “cherish” (珍惜, *zhēnxī*). Her pretty face colored faintly—followed immediately by a flick of her finger against his forehead.

“How dare you tease this matchmaker?”

Gao Xining glared at him.

Li Diudiu grinned, but he didn’t feel it was any kind of teasing at all. A scoundrel never thinks his teasing counts as teasing.

“Though, to be fair—it was nicely said.”

Gao Xining let out a small laugh of her own: “Since you went to so much trouble bringing back such gifts, I’d better step up my game. Oh, right—Jiabei came by a couple days ago. She said the whole thing before was her fault, that she wasn’t able to stand beside you and face it together. She wants me to pass along an apology, and if there’s an opportunity, she’d like to say it to you in person as well.”

Li Diudiu shook his head: “Please, please don’t—if her father comes for me again, I’d be at a complete loss.”

Gao Xining said: “Why would you be at a loss? Didn’t you scare him off last time?”

Li Diudiu said earnestly: “Matchmaker, do you really think there’s anything in this world that can scare off a father trying to protect his daughter? Besides—I genuinely wouldn’t raise a hand against a father trying to protect his daughter.”

Gao Xining paused, then went quiet. That unguarded remark of Li Diudiu’s had reached something buried deep inside her—a fear she’d kept hidden for a very long time.

Yes—it wasn’t grief, and it wasn’t regret. It was fear. Her memories of her parents had grown blurry, and she knew they would keep growing blurrier. One day she would no longer be able to remember what her mother and father looked like.

And so whenever she thought of this, she would try with all her might—even desperately—to recall their faces. But she could not stop what was happening: those two faces kept receding regardless, like people walking further and further away until they finally disappear from sight.

Li Diudiu had gone to get a drink of water while talking. When he came back, he saw Gao Xining staring blankly ahead—and in the very first glance, he saw the fear in her eyes.

Every time her parents were mentioned, her grandfather Headmaster Gao would look at her thinking what he saw was sadness.

“I’m the same as you, actually.”

Li Diudiu handed Gao Xining the water and sat down beside her. He stirred the charcoal in the stove and talked as he worked.

“You’re gradually losing the memory. I never had one to begin with.”

Li Diudiu said: “But we can’t let that define us. Because there are still people who are here—you have your grandfather, and I have my master. To spend every day in grief and fear over the ones who are gone is a kind of letting down of the ones who remain.”

Gao Xining smiled suddenly, and patted Li Diudiu on the shoulder: “Look how lucky you are—you met someone as wonderful as me, and while you’re still young, no less, I’m already working on your lifelong happiness.”

Li Diudiu said: “And what can I do for you in return?”

Gao Xining was still smiling, but it was a smile held over the fear from a moment ago.

“What could you possibly do? You can hardly be my father.”

Li Diudiu said: “Actually, that’s not impossible. How about this—from now on, you call me Dad, and I’ll call you Big Brother.”

Gao Xining raised a hand—and Li Diudiu immediately hunched his neck in.

But Gao Xining didn’t bring it down. The hand stopped mid-air, as if she’d suddenly thought of something.

“What’s wrong?”

Li Diudiu asked.

Gao Xining’s hand slowly came back down. She looked at the fire and said: “You can’t go looking for someone like me to be your wife. She’d want to hit you all the time, and that isn’t good. A man has to have some dignity—he can’t be beaten by a girl every day.”

Li Diudiu said: “It’s not like you’re my wife anyway… Besides, what do you mean ‘a girl’? You’re basically one of the guys.”

The scoundrel, in that moment, was firmly offline.

Gao Xining rolled her eyes at him and said: “Fine, then I can beat you all I want—but your wife can’t.”

Li Diudiu said: “How ridiculous—if I had a wife, do you think she’d let another woman beat me? She’d fight you for it.”

Gao Xining felt this was genuinely a difficult problem that needed solving urgently. She needed someone who could handle both Li Diudiu and his future wife—which seemed like a very tall order.

“Jiabei is actually quite wonderful. She’s gentle and soft-natured—she definitely wouldn’t bully you. If you married her someday, I could bully both you and her…”

Gao Xining snapped her fingers with a flourish, as if she’d discovered something magnificent.

“Problem solved, isn’t it?”

Li Diudiu looked at Gao Xining’s lovely profile and thought: such a pretty girl, not even in her teens yet, and already a matchmaker. And honestly a little foolish. How pitiful.

“Right.”

Gao Xining stood up: “I need to go home. And I can’t take Shen Diao and Gou Zi back with me—if I did, my grandfather would scold me to death. So leave them here for now, and you take care of them. When you’re not home, I’ll come look after them.”

Li Diudiu nodded: “No problem.”

Gao Xining gave a sound of agreement: “Since you’re being so cooperative, I’ll let you be the eldest. Gou Zi is second, Shen Diao is third.”

Li Diudiu thought it over—this ranking actually made more sense. He was the eldest, second was a bird, and third was a pig. And second in particular—Gou Zi being second was oddly fitting.

It was now quite late. Ruoling had already urged them several times. Gao Xining had no choice but to go home. The room remained warm, but after Gao Xining left, Li Diudiu felt it had become distinctly quieter.

He cut some meat to feed Gou Zi, then mixed some leftover dried rations for Shen Diao. The treatment really wasn’t equal—did a wild boar not eat meat?

Li Diudiu felt it was because the boar was too ugly. It didn’t deserve it.

Tch. What a face-obsessed snob!

Since he’d already told Gao Xining, the next morning Li Diudiu packed his things and prepared to go home. He was, after all, a man with his own home in Jizhou now.

Gao Xining had said that over the new year period, he could leave Gou Zi and Shen Diao at his quarters—she wasn’t going anywhere either, and with nothing to do, she could come by every day to feed them.

Before leaving the Academy, Li Diudiu went out to buy some meat and grain, then came back to leave everything prepared for Gao Xining. By the time he returned, she was already waiting in his little courtyard.

They talked for a while, and then Li Diudiu said his farewells and left the Academy to find his master. Gao Xining watched his retreating figure, and the longer she watched, the more she found herself thinking—strange, he’s actually a little handsome, isn’t he?

On the way, Li Diudiu stopped by the Yunzhai Teahouse to see Proprietor Sun and Proprietor Sun’s wife, and told them he’d be coming to the teahouse every afternoon from now until the Academy’s recess ended.

Proprietor Sun had half a mind to question him about his absence all this time, but a single look from Proprietor Sun’s wife made him shut his mouth obediently.

She said: from now on, he’s like the child’s godfather, and like my little brother. If you say one wrong thing, once the baby is born I’ll take the child and go live with my brother and have nothing more to do with you.

This didn’t particularly frighten Proprietor Sun, but it sent Li Diudiu fleeing in panic, scrambling away as fast as his legs would carry him.

On the way home, Li Diudiu bought many things—plus the new year goods Proprietor Sun’s wife had given him—and shouldered an enormous bundle all the way back. He didn’t feel the weight at all. Instead, he felt a joy and happiness he’d never known before.

More than ten years—and finally, a home to celebrate the new year in. There were no words for what that felt like.

Just as he was turning into the alley where his home was, he spotted a convoy of vehicles passing by. At first glance it looked like an ordinary merchant caravan, but something about it nagged at Li Diudiu.

Setting aside the unusual size of the caravan, the bearing of the guards was all wrong. Merchant escort guards being vigilant was normal—but these guards weren’t merely vigilant. Every one of them had an aggressive look in their eyes.

Everything they looked at, they seemed to want to seize and claim for themselves. That kind of look had absolutely no business being in the eyes of a merchant’s guard.

The eyes of a man who preferred to steer clear of trouble and the eyes of a man who preferred to seek it out—how could they ever look the same?

But this had nothing to do with Li Diudiu. So he glanced twice and turned into the mouth of the alley.

The caravan’s guards paid him no mind either—just another passerby—and their eyes drifted back to the splendor and prosperity of Jizhou.

Inside one of the carriages, Yanshan Camp’s Fifth Leader Tian Zhanyuan looked at his ever-ailing wife and gently patted her hand.

“Don’t worry. Jizhou has plenty of good physicians. We’ll just look around, get a few prescriptions, and then head back to the stronghold for the new year. It’s about ten or twenty days—should be plenty of time.”

His wife had been taken by force—she’d once been the daughter of a prosperous family. She had long since resigned herself to her fate. Tian Zhanyuan treated her decently enough, and that gave her some small comfort in her bleak circumstances.

Her constitution had always been delicate. The initial shock of what had happened to her, and the daily weight of living under the same roof as her family’s enemy—it would have been strange if she hadn’t fallen ill.

So when she heard his words, she simply nodded. All these years, her husband’s tenderness still carried a note of revulsion in her eyes.

But what choice did she have?

The convoy stopped outside an inn not far from Li Diudiu’s home. Their advance men had already made arrangements. With the new year coming, the inn had little business, and they’d taken the whole place. The innkeeper was thrilled.

The story they gave was that the proprietor’s wife had fallen ill on the journey. The proprietor, not wanting to put her through more traveling, had decided to stay in Jizhou for the new year and leave once she’d recovered.

Nothing unusual about that. The innkeeper, pleasantly surprised to land such a large booking so close to the new year, wasn’t going to ask too many questions.

Once Tian Zhanyuan had settled in, he came out from his room, gathered a few of his lieutenants, lowered his voice, and gave them their instructions. They replied in the affirmative and went off in different directions to carry out their orders.

Just one li away, Li Diudiu had no idea that someone had already begun spreading a net across Jizhou to catch him.