Perhaps it was because she had been away from Lingxi for too long — this homecoming stirred in Xiao Nanhui many memories that had lain sleeping in the depths of her mind.

She dreamed a very long, very long dream.

The first half of her life in the dream was spent struggling in a haze of sand and murk, made up mostly of scattered fragments from her childhood.

As the dream went on, her vision finally cleared a little — yet she found she didn’t know where she was. Looking at the courtyard and its arrangement, it was clearly the courtyard that had been hers during her time at the Quecheng Marquis Mansion. She was terribly hungry, and her mouth was dry and bitter. She picked up the teapot from the table, but when she poured it, out came sand. So she walked out of the courtyard.

Uncle Chen, Dujuan, Bolao, Xiao Zhun — not a single one was there. Not one answered her in that vast courtyard. She passed through one moon gate after another until she suddenly came upon an isolated rice vat standing in one of the courtyards ahead. She walked up and looked inside — and found it held not a single grain of rice.

At that moment, a throng of people came pouring out from all sides, surrounding her. She looked closely and saw, at their head, none other than Sun Taishou himself.

Sun Taishou stood steady and composed, his voice thundering like a great bell: “You wretched little thief — you’ve come to steal from my home! Beat her to death!”

Xiao Nanhui desperately wanted to explain that she had not stolen his rice. But just as she was about to speak, she found she had no voice. The people around her raised their clubs and closed in. She tried to fight back, but when she stretched out her fists, she saw they were a child’s hands.

A pair of small hands, thin and yellowed, covered in filthy mud.

The figures around her towered enormous in comparison. A great club was about to come crashing down on her head — when suddenly, a flash of moonlit white swept across.

She looked up in a daze and saw a figure radiating a luminous glow, robes of immaculate white, eyes gentle and smiling — like a celestial being descended from the nine heavens above.

The celestial being smiled at her, flicked a sleeve, and all the surrounding figures vanished.

Xiao Nanhui wanted to open her mouth and ask whether they had met somewhere before. But when she tried to speak, she still had no voice — she could only open and close her mouth soundlessly.

Seeing the celestial being about to turn and leave, she panicked and reached out, grabbing hold of his clothing.

The celestial being slowly turned back and suddenly spoke — but the voice was a man’s.

“Xiao Nanhui. Stop grabbing. Get your hand off.”

Xiao Nanhui was startled — and suddenly she had a voice again.

She heard herself give a faint, soft sound, and then she woke.

What met her eyes was a simple ceiling of high, slender Chinese poplar beams. The sparse thatch hadn’t managed to block the sunlight, and a few slanted beams fell directly onto her legs. That one glance took her attention away entirely, and the dreamscape just now receded at speed — she couldn’t hold onto any of it. Only a strange, lingering feeling remained.

She tried to move her ankles. Two lumps bound up like rice dumplings in white cloth swayed in response, each topped with a bow.

What kind of quack doctor did this handiwork? Absolutely dreadful—

Before she could finish the thought, sounds came from the direction of the door. Her hand moved instinctively toward her back, but found nothing there. She hastily lay back down.

Her eyes had only just closed when the person’s feet stepped into the room. Apparently it wasn’t just one person — there was a faint background noise too, like a wooden barrel rolling across the ground.

A voice familiar enough to deserve a slap rang out at the doorway: “Done?”

“Yes — finished just this morning, I’m delivering it fresh. Has she woken?”

No one replied. Xiao Nanhui could only hear those footsteps moving closer to the bed. She struggled to keep her eyelids from twitching, and slowed her breathing.

The person seemed to have stopped beside the bed. After a rustling sound, Xiao Nanhui felt her hand being pulled out from under the covers. She was still wondering at this when a sharp, sudden pain shot through her finger.

“Ah!” She let out a cry and shot upright on the bed, unable to hold herself back.

What greeted her eyes was Wu Xiaoliu’s pudgy face — foolish-looking yet sharp beneath the surface. Those small eyes were glinting with a gleam of delight, like a groundhog that had spotted a turnip.

“You’re awake!”

Xiao Nanhui raised her hand and looked at it. There, standing upright in her thumb, was a thick sewing needle. She felt a surge of righteous fury.

“Why were you stabbing me?! Checking whether I was dead yet?”

“The doctor said to do it. He said to stab once every day to know whether the person has woken up or not.”

She hurriedly stretched out all ten fingers to examine them. Sure enough, three or four needle marks were already there. She pulled the needle out and tossed it aside: “Where did you find this doctor? Are his previous patients still alive?”

“Alive, alive — they’re all waiting outside for you right now!”

And without even glancing at Xiao Nanhui’s expression, Wu Xiaoliu threw back his head and called out in a loud voice: “Heaven be praised! The gods have shown their mercy! Fortress Chief Pan has awoken!”

Before Xiao Nanhui could react, the door was kicked open from outside with a bang, and an enormous crowd of men and women, young and old, stood massed beyond it.

Three or four Southern Qiang men with thick, unkempt beards wore complex expressions as they dropped to one knee in unison, calling out in the Southern Qiang tongue.

“Heaven be praised!”

The crowd followed — a wave of them falling to their knees — and voices of every pitch and every regional dialect mixed together in a thunderous, chaotic din.

Xiao Nanhui was startled by this spectacle. She gave Wu Xiaoliu a shove and lowered her voice: “Hey — explain yourself. Who is the Fortress Chief?”

Wu Xiaoliu didn’t look up: “You.”

She was momentarily dumbfounded. “Where is this?”

Wu Xiaoliu raised his pudgy face halfway and winked at her with exaggerated, meaningful expression: “Fortress Chief Pan, how can you be so confused? This is your stronghold.”

Ah, right. She had nearly forgotten — she had originally set out to come to this stronghold of Pan Mei’er’s.

Xiao Nanhui’s throat felt slightly tight. She switched to the eastern Lingdong official dialect and said: “You told them I was Pan Mei’er?”

Wu Xiaoliu stood back up, his stout frame blocking the curious gazes peering in from outside the door.

“How could I say that? I said you were Pan Yao’er — Pan Mei’er’s own younger sister.” He paused, then added one more remark for good measure, as if he had a death wish: “Isn’t that what you said yourself?”

Xiao Nanhui nearly choked and fell back onto the bed. Wu Xiaoliu paid her no mind, got up smartly, walked to one side, and pushed over a wooden chair fitted with wooden wheels.

“The people of the stronghold are all waiting for you to speak.”

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.”

His ears perked up.

His friend? What friends did he have in Lingxi? Hmph — trying to fool him. Not a chance!

In the next second, that person’s voice suddenly drew closer.

“Qu Mo — agree now, and it is an act of merit. If you refuse, it becomes atonement for your transgressions. Either way, you are going. Do you understand?”

Those words drifted past his ear, light as could be, yet he felt as though a female ghost had breathed on the back of his neck.

“Hao Bai?”

The woman’s faintly impatient voice pulled his thoughts back to the present. But when he thought of all that had happened, he couldn’t manage a pleasant expression even if he tried.

“What?!”

“You were saying, because of what — what happened?”

Because I was threatened!

His lips quivered, his teeth ground together with a suppressed fury, and Hao Bai’s unpowdered face took on a somewhat greenish cast. After a long pause, he spoke: “I was out practicing medicine. I happened to be passing through.”

Xiao Nanhui still looked uncertain: “But didn’t you send a letter to my mansion saying you were planning to go to Quecheng this month—”

“What business is it of yours?! I want to come here, so I come here! I want to go wherever I want!”

Hao Bai let out a furious shout — though with his clothing in disarray, his fierceness fell somewhat flat, and he looked rather like a sharp-tongued young bride throwing a tantrum.

Xiao Nanhui was taken aback by this doctor’s wild shifts in mood. She figured it was simply that the Bijiang water and soil disagreed with his constitution, making the person before her somewhat out of sorts. She blinked: “I didn’t mean anything by it. Why are you getting so worked up?”

A brief silence settled over the room. Wu Xiaoliu sauntered past the two of them in a leisurely manner, walked straight to the window, lifted the crude hemp-cloth makeshift curtain, and looked expressionlessly between the two of them: “If you don’t feel it’s exciting enough, you can always get louder.”

Xiao Nanhui smiled sheepishly.

She had gotten a little carried away. This was Bijiang — houses here were open on all four sides, and walls were thin as paper.

With that thought, she wheeled herself over to the bedside, lifted her feet, bundled up like two rice dumplings, and held them up in front of Hao Bai’s face.

“When can my legs recover?”

Hao Bai had finished fastening the last tie on his clothing and jumped down from the bed. He had no intention of turning around to look at those two “white rice dumplings” with their bows.

“Three months.”

“Three months?!” Xiao Nanhui nearly leaped up from the wheelchair.

Three months in a wheelchair — how was she supposed to do any undercover work at all?!

“Three months is already considered a fast recovery. One side of your anklebone is broken, yes, but the tendons and sinew in both legs were almost entirely destroyed. There is no second person in this world who could reattach your tendons as well as I have.”

And there was certainly no second person who would be willing to use two bone-setting needles on her.

Two of them! One in each foot. Just thinking about it made his heart ache.

“Quack.”

Hao Bai erupted entirely. He turned to storm off in a flurry of sleeves — but the moment he swung them, the woman reached out and grabbed hold.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

Hao Bai said nothing, struggling desperately. But no matter how hard he pulled, his sleeve didn’t budge by a single fraction.

“If you truly want to leave, I won’t stop you. But can you actually get out?”

“Don’t try to frighten me.”

She gave him a cool sideways glance, and spoke mildly: “Medical skill is primitive in this part of Bijiang. If someone in the stronghold falls ill or is injured, they can only depend on a shaman’s rituals. People dying of nothing more than a minor chill is not uncommon here at all. Never mind a physician — even an herb-picker who wanders in can end up with broken legs, kept here. It’s known to happen.”

Hao Bai refused to give up: “Aren’t they calling you the Fortress Chief? If you give the word, would they dare not release me?”

Xiao Nanhui gave a light sigh: “I haven’t even settled properly into my position as Fortress Chief yet. I’m afraid I can’t guarantee your safety right now. And you know — if the truth were exposed and it came to real blades and real weapons, all I’d be able to do is sit in this chair and gesture around.”

Hao Bai’s eyes went blank, and he sat down on the ground.

He had thought he’d completed his task — that his days in this godforsaken wilderness would finally come to an end. Who could have imagined—

“So then — neither of us should look down on the other. The days ahead of us are still long.”