They would be leaving soon. Yun Ye quietly returned to Yongzhou. Little Lingdang would give birth in the next few days, and no matter what, Yun Ye had to see the child born before leaving. This was his firm insistence.
Li Anlan returned with the whole family. The Old Madam was in high spirits, showing no signs of discomfort. Xinyue had also become somewhat more charming—could the mountains and waters of Guilin really be so nurturing? On the other hand, the usually healthy Na Rimu had constant problems. Upon seeing her husband, she threw herself at him crying, saying she would never leave Chang’an again in this lifetime, because two large bumps had appeared on her head and several ulcers had grown in her mouth, causing her excruciating pain.
Yun Mu, Xiao Ya, and the four directions girls—Dongnan, Xixi, Beibei—were all perfectly fine. Xiao Wu was even more robust and could kick a cow to death. Hypatia appeared somewhat haggard. Having traveled throughout Lingnan without meeting any of her countrymen, not even having a chance to exchange greetings, left her melancholy and sorrowful. Homesickness was a disease that could only be cured by fellow countrymen, but sadly, Lingnan had no such medicine.
As soon as Xiao Ya returned, she discovered there was an additional long-legged beauty in the household. Thinking it was a new sister-in-law her brother had secretly married, she wanted to make things difficult for her, but discovered this woman was quite extraordinary. She could actually hit fish in the water with stones, and very accurately at that. Watching her stand by the pond and throw two stones, two enormous river fish floated to the surface. This made Xiao Ya completely won over—even Shishi didn’t have this skill.
“Husband, after several months apart, you’ve actually learned to collect beautiful women. But looking at her features, she’s clearly still a virgin. Could it be you’ve held back until now, needing to wait for your concubine’s consent before taking her into the household?”
Yun Ye paid no attention to these strange words. After several months, a living person was about to be suffocated to death. He was particular about such matters and didn’t have Li Tai’s good appetite. Lingdang couldn’t be used, and he had finally waited for Xinyue and the others to return. Naturally, at night his eyes glowed green. Xinyue’s little quips couldn’t affect the Marquis’s enthusiasm at all.
High spirits were a good thing, but this kind of enthusiasm was relative. Similarly, here were also three women who were very interested in him. When Yun Ye’s limbs went soft and weak, only then did he regret marrying somewhat too many wives. But this was fate—he accepted it.
Di Renjie had also returned. Xiao Wu just stuck to him all day. She couldn’t get along with others. Watching the two of them chatting and laughing as they wandered about, Yun Ye shook his head. Good things take time! One had no heart to marry, the other had no heart to wed. Only Heaven knew what the future would hold. Di Renjie liked the delicate Pang Shir from the academy, but after his master told him about Pang Shir’s origins and her parents’ situation, even if Pang Shir grew into a celestial beauty, she held not the slightest attraction for him anymore.
If he couldn’t find someone suitable, he’d just settle for Xiao Wu. Little did he know Xiao Wu had the same thinking. Among all the men in the world, in her view, only her master was somewhat outstanding, and next came Di Renjie. As she gradually grew older, she also realized her feelings for her master weren’t quite right.
In the deep of night when no one was around, she listed out all the reasons why she admired her master, finally made it into a chart, and compared it with charts of others’ paths to love. She discovered hers was different from others’—gratitude actually exceeded admiration. This wasn’t right! Love shouldn’t be like this. She then made another chart comparing others’ feelings toward their fathers with her feelings toward her master. Only then did she breathe a sigh of relief. These two charts had great similarity. It seemed she had been seeing her master as a father figure. This was right—this was how it should be.
To research her emotional path, she went so far as to initiate a survey at the Women’s Academy. Under her skillful questioning, those poor classmates inadvertently exposed their true thoughts, including the proud Gao Yang.
After Xiao Wu compiled those survey results into a book, she discovered that she had unknowingly acquired her first trump card. If she wanted to deal with someone in the future, such survey results would be very useful—she could prescribe the right medicine for the illness.
As Yun Ye’s disciple, divergent thinking naturally came with the territory. Since women were like this, shouldn’t men be the same? Using Di Renjie to practice proved unsuccessful, because after she asked three questions, Di Renjie’s answers became problematic. They seemed proper and conventional, but upon synthesis, she discovered this fellow actually hadn’t said anything. All the answers were ambiguous. Responses without uniqueness couldn’t be traced back to their source. If the first sentence had two answers, the second would have four, and continuing this way, Di Renjie’s survey chart could encompass the entire spectrum of human nature. What difference was this from having nothing?
When Xiao Wu went the next day in a rage to settle accounts with Di Renjie, he immediately gave her a thick stack of survey results at the first opportunity—all from those stinking male students. Since he was sensible, Xiao Wu’s anger subsided.
After a summer of work, Xiao Wu had already accumulated a whole chest of survey reports. To determine the accuracy of her reports, she deliberately selected people from all walks of life. After summarizing them, she discovered she could find many interesting things in these survey reports. So this was how “controlling divine calculations and testing the inconstant” worked!
Xiao Wu felt she had already pushed open a very mysterious door. The more she delved into it, the more she discovered how boring those people outside were. She could actually predict a person’s reaction to new events based on existing conditions. The more knowledge-poor a person was, the easier they were to figure out.
When Yun Ye returned from Yuezhou and saw Xiao Wu’s room filled with two large chests of survey reports, plus the questions Xiao Wu asked him, he felt waves of dizziness. He sternly warned Xiao Wu that this matter must not be spread outside—one careless mistake could bring fatal disaster. This thing should be part of imperial studies.
A prodigy was a prodigy. No matter how she changed, she couldn’t change her prodigious nature. Watching Di Renjie smilingly accompany Xiao Wu in games, Yun Ye felt that no matter what, he had to facilitate this match. Otherwise, marrying Xiao Wu to anyone else would be harming them. Trying to play tricks in Xiao Wu’s palm was too difficult. Just thinking about Xiao Wu’s increasingly enormous database gave Yun Ye a terrible headache. This girl had specifically asked him for quite a bit of money to collect and categorize all this data. Only Heaven knew what she ultimately wanted to do.
To add to Xiao Wu’s burden and make her temporarily abandon her research into human nature, he assigned her the task Sun Simiao had entrusted—that is, organizing sea medicines. With increasingly frequent exchanges between East and West, Sun Simiao had discovered that many spices could actually cure illnesses. This was also an important task for his trip to Lingnan this time.
So-called sea medicines were medicinal materials that came from overseas foreign countries.
Distinguishing which were sea medicines in medical texts actually had patterns. For quite a few varieties, one could make a preliminary judgment just by looking at the medicine name. First, if the medicine name was prefixed with “Hu” or “Fan” and similar characters, like Hu Huanglian, Fan Mubir, Fan Xiaye and such, they should all have experienced crossing oceans. Second, if the medicine name contained the character for “fragrance,” then this fellow might also have overseas connections—even if it had already spread throughout the country, one should consider whether their ancestors had immigrant status.
This was because a large portion of sea medicines, before being incorporated into China’s medical system, had all been used as spices.
When laborers carrying hemp sacks walked carefully down the gangplank under directions in stiff Chinese, a rich fragrance immediately spread throughout the harbor. This somewhat eerie fragrance, mixed with the fishy smell of sea wind, departed from Guangzhou or Quanzhou and quickly entered the heart of the empire.
Love of fragrance was human nature. China’s history of using natural spices was also very long. The Book of Songs mentioned quite a few fragrant plants, and the Songs of Chu was famous for its metaphor of “beautiful people and fragrant herbs.”
But the climate of the Central Plains was temperate and cool, not very suitable for the growth of aromatic plants. Moreover, the fragrant woods and herbs produced, such as orchid, cassia, angelica, turmeric and the like, mostly had fragrance that wasn’t very strong. Although they conformed to the Chinese aesthetic of subtle and elegant refinement, they were inevitably somewhat monotonous, so exotic spices found a market. At the latest by the Qin and Han dynasties, spices were being imported, such as pepper, agarwood, sandalwood, storax, rosemary and others. Aside from some used for flavoring, most were initially used as incense.
The Great Tang had now become prosperous, and demand for spices was great. Food needed additives to become more delicious. Women needed to use them to perfume their clothes to win more favor. Even ministers presenting memorials in court needed to hold clove tongue fragrance in their mouths—otherwise, before finishing their reasoning, people would already be knocked down by bad breath.
Being a pirate was important, but opening financial sources was even more important. Yun Ye had never expected to sustain things long-term through robbery. Trade required a reciprocal process. Only exporting without importing wasn’t necessarily a good thing. He himself had no goods, and Lingnan didn’t produce any good merchandise. Things like paper, Yun Ye didn’t plan to export.
Calculating back and forth, to go out and swindle money, the only thing he could do was to take spices from Southeast Asian islands and pull off an empty-handed swindle. Years ago, Yun Ye had said that place was covered with spices, but people throughout Chang’an stubbornly didn’t believe it. Who would believe that spices more valuable than gold would grow wild all over the hillsides like weeds? Yun Ye said it a couple more times and even drew eye-rolls. Zhangsun Chong had said: If you’re going to lie, at least use a plausible excuse!
Now it was plausible, because this old man was going himself. He would use spices from the peninsula to exchange for treasures with those desert peoples, use spices to exchange for wealth from the wealthy households of the Great Tang. Only by possessing vast wealth could he plug the damaged currency market after the contest between Li Er and Li Chengqian.
From how Li Chengqian had immediately targeted the money houses, he had treated them as his sharp weapon. If things reached a point of irreconcilable hostility, regardless of whether Li Chengqian was willing or not, his subordinates would collapse the money houses in a final desperate gamble. If the money houses collapsed, there would be no room for reconciliation between father and son.
Amid the anxious waiting of the whole family, Yun Ye’s sixth child came crying into the world. The little girl wailed loudly as soon as she was born. Yun Ye looked at the thin clouds high in the sky, thought about the spices on the great sea, and spontaneously named his child Yun Xiang.