Li Wu urged his horse closer to the long train of refugees. They steered clear of the column’s head, which was made up of able-bodied young men, and instead cautiously approached the tail end, where women and children were more prevalent.

As they drew near, countless hungry gazes flickered to life on the hollow, numbed faces around them, drawn without exception to the large yellow horse beneath them.

Shen Zhuxi even spotted a child of seven or eight swallowing hard at the sight of the horse, unable to tear his eyes away.

Li Wu swept his gaze through the crowd and finally fixed upon a wizened old man whose face was the color of dried clay. The man could barely walk himself, yet he had not abandoned his gaunt, skeletal wife; the two leaned on each other as they trudged across the boundless wasteland.

Li Wu rode his horse closer to the pair and, sitting tall in the saddle, asked: “Elder, where have you come from, and where are you headed?”

The old man raised his head to look at them. Perhaps it was the appearance and clothing of the two that led him to conclude they were not bad people, for the wariness on his face eased slightly.

“We’ve come from Liangzhou. Word is that Huguang has no shortage of grain, so we’re making for Huguang to ride out the famine.”

“Elder, you came from Liangzhou — did you pass through Jinzhou and Xiangzhou?” Shen Zhuxi could not hold back the question.

It was exactly what Li Wu had wanted to ask. He reined in his horse and waited for the old man’s answer.

The old man’s gaze passed briefly over both their faces, and with a knowing look, he said: “You have family in those two places, I take it?”

Li Wu said: “That’s right.”

“It’s all in chaos — everywhere, chaos.” The old man shook his head with a sigh, and a flash of bleak sorrow crossed his deeply furrowed face. “Jinzhou has risen in rebellion; no one is allowed to enter or leave. Xiangzhou erupted in unrest and has already been suppressed by troops dispatched by the Military Commissioner of Wuying. When we passed through Xiangzhou, the base of the Xiangyang city walls was piled high with the bodies of civilians. Some had been dragged off by jackals and wild dogs; others had been hauled away by people… When my wife and I passed through Xiangyang, our legs went weak beneath us.”

The situation in Xiangyang was this terrible — a hundred times worse than Shen Zhuxi had anticipated.

She had only heard it described secondhand, yet her heart leapt into her throat. She could not imagine what it had been like to live through it. Had Sui Rui, who had remained in Xiangyang, managed to escape unharmed?

Shen Zhuxi dared not think too deeply.

Jiu Niang was in Yutou County in Jinzhou; Sui Rui was in Xiangyang in Xiangzhou. And then there were all the townspeople back in Yutou — the innkeeper at Heliu Hall who loved to take advantage of others, the sly and scheming pawnshop owner, Doctor Tang whose sharp tongue concealed a warm heart, and the matchlessly skilled Ding Sanniang… Were all those people all right?

Shen Zhuxi longed to sprout wings and fly back this instant to check on them all, but reason told her that even if she could fly back on the spot, it would do nothing to help the situation as it stood.

The only thing she could do was take care of herself on this journey of escape, and not make things any harder for Li Wu than they already were.

Shen Zhuxi was still worrying over the familiar faces she had left behind in Jinzhou and Xiangzhou when Li Wu suddenly changed expression. With a flash of movement, he drew the long blade at his waist.

The razor-sharp gleam of the blade reflected the stiff, terrified face of a child. The boy who had been salivating over the yellow horse had, at some point, crept silently around to the back of the animal and was stretching out a grimy hand toward Shen Zhuxi’s cloth purse.

Shen Zhuxi’s face drained of color in fright. She clutched her purse shut at once.

Her phoenix plaque was inside it!

“You touch it once, and I’ll chop that hand right off.” Li Wu’s face was expressionless, his voice cold as steel.

The small-faced, sallow child buckled under the blade’s menace. Reluctantly, he withdrew his hand and scurried back into the crowd with a sulky look. A man in plain clothing pulled the boy against his side, and father and son both fixed the two riders with looks of desperate longing and bitter resentment.

Li Wu swept a cold gaze over the others in the crowd who were beginning to stir with similar intentions, then tugged the reins to turn the horse around. He pressed his knees firmly against the horse’s flanks: “Hiya!”

The yellow horse broke into a gallop.

Shen Zhuxi was jolted so hard she crashed headfirst into Li Wu’s chest.

That evening, they took shelter again in a mountain cave. The yellow horse was tethered outside, its hooves pawing restlessly at the snow underfoot, pausing now and then to lower its head and nibble at the withered grass it had scraped up.

After Shen Zhuxi had spread out their sleeping place for the night, she turned around to find Li Wu sitting on a flat rock, brow furrowed in concentration, a slender twig in hand as he sketched and wrote across the dirt.

She walked over and looked. “Are you drawing a map?”

This time it was Li Wu’s turn to be surprised. He raised his head. “You can read it?”

“Of course I can. I saw plenty of territorial maps in the Imperial Study. You’ve written ‘Jin’ here, and to the right of it the character with ‘jun’ on top and ‘fang’ on the bottom, and further right you wrote ‘Xiang’ — but you forgot how to write ‘Xiang’ properly, didn’t you?” Shen Zhuxi took the twig from him and used her foot to wipe out the boxed-in character she pointed to, then wrote the correct ‘Xiang’ character in its place.

“So this here is Liangzhou.” Shen Zhuxi wiped out the character to the left of ‘Jin’ once more and wrote ‘Liang’ in its place.

“What’s to the left of Liangzhou?” Li Wu asked.

“To the left of Liangzhou is Wuzhou, to the left of Wuzhou is Dangzhou, further left from Dangzhou is Diezhou, and beyond Diezhou lies Tubo.”

Shen Zhuxi filled in all the prefectures she had named, then beyond Diezhou she circled a large region and wrote in the name Tubo.

Then it was Li Wu’s turn to take back the twig. He circled all the drawings on the ground together.

He said: “This drought-driven famine has struck nearly all of Da Yan. It’s fortunate we left when we did. If we were still in Xiangyang right now, there would be no leaving at all.”

Shen Zhuxi found herself genuinely admiring Li Wu’s decisiveness at that moment.

Had they not left Xiangyang when they did, there was every chance things would have turned dire.

“Can you draw out the full map of Da Yan?” Li Wu asked.

“Draw out the full map?” Shen Zhuxi was somewhat taken aback. She thought for a moment, then said: “A rough sketch like this I can do right now. But if you want to add the passes and terrain, it would take me at least four or five days.”

Li Wu stared at her. “You have this skill and you didn’t say so sooner?”

“You never asked me!” Shen Zhuxi put on an expression of pure innocence.

“Once we reach Huzhou, draw it out for me.” Li Wu said.

Shen Zhuxi hesitated briefly, then agreed. After all, Li Wu would eventually be helping Da Yan fight the rebel forces — giving him a map could hardly do any harm.

“Let me see your inner thighs.” Li Wu reached toward her legs.

“They’ve healed!” Shen Zhuxi, her face red, swatted his hand away.

“There you go talking nonsense again.” Li Wu’s expression was thoroughly unconvinced.

“They really have healed. Today there was only a little redness — none of the raw, bleeding skin like before.” Shen Zhuxi smiled with deliberate nonchalance and said: “My skin has toughened up just like yours now. Tomorrow you can let the horse run a bit faster.”

“Run faster? So your backside can get torn to shreds all over again?” Li Wu said with evident irritation. He rose from the flat rock, tossed the twig into the fire, and said: “I’m going out to find something to eat nearby. You wait here, and don’t go wandering off.”

Every single time, he made a point of telling her not to wander off. Shen Zhuxi, who had a guilty conscience from her past escapades, did not dare complain about his nagging. She called out loudly: “I know!”

Only then did Li Wu pick up the cowhide water bladder and walk out of the cave — but he had barely taken two steps before he turned around and pulled a dagger from inside his leather boot, tossing it over.

“Keep this on you for protection.”

Shen Zhuxi eyed the dagger lying on the ground — it had come from inside his boot and might well carry foot odor — and was just about to ask if there were any other options, but Li Wu had already truly walked out of the cave.

She had no choice but to wait for the dagger to air out for a while before carefully picking it up and hiding it in the folds of her wide robe.

She waited and waited, poking idly at the burning campfire with sticks she picked up off the ground. By the time the moon had climbed to the tops of the trees and her restlessness had grown into something close to dread, Li Wu finally returned.

He dropped three lumps of plant tubers — their kind unrecognizable — and gave the wild greens in his hand a shake to scatter the water droplets before passing the water bladder to Shen Zhuxi.

“Drink. Leave a little for cooking the greens in a moment.”

Shen Zhuxi was desperately thirsty, but she did not drink right away. She looked up at Li Wu and asked: “What about you?”

“I drank from the stream over there. Go ahead, drink.” Li Wu said. “I was trying to spear a fish on the way back —”

The moment Shen Zhuxi heard the word “fish,” her ears pricked up on instinct.

Li Wu shook his head. “No luck. The water was cleaner than the bottom of my cooking pot. Not a thing — the little devils had cleaned it all out long ago.”

Shen Zhuxi looked back in disappointment at the strangely shaped plant tubers, wondering what on earth they would taste like.

To conserve their drinking water, she took only a few sips to moisten her parched throat, then returned the water bladder to Li Wu.

Li Wu poured roughly half of what remained in the bladder into the small crude pot fashioned from a pile of rocks. Flames licked up through the gaps between the stones, tonguing the blackened underside of the pot. Li Wu sat back down on the flat rock, took the dagger back from Shen Zhuxi, removed the sheath, and with a few swift strokes peeled away the coarse outer skin of the unidentified plant tubers.

Shen Zhuxi watched the dagger that had been pulled from his boot, opening her mouth to say something several times, then thinking better of it.

…Never mind.

Having anything to eat at all was something to be thankful for. Li Wu — that insufferable man — had gone to considerable trouble to find this food. She would not pick and choose at a time like this.

The sliced, green-tinged tubers and the wild greens went into the pot together, and before long a faint fragrance drifted through the cave. The three tubers and the handful of greens had looked like a fair amount going in, but they shrank to less than half their volume in the cooking, and what was eventually ladled out of the pot was not even enough to fill a small ceramic bowl.

“Eat.” Li Wu held the bowl out to her.

“What about you?” Shen Zhuxi asked again.

“I already ate.”

“When did you eat?”

“I found a bird’s nest on the way back and ate seven or eight eggs raw.” Li Wu raised an eyebrow. “I was afraid you’d scold me, so I didn’t say anything.”

“Really?” Shen Zhuxi asked skeptically.

“If you don’t believe me, come feel my stomach.” Li Wu lifted his shirt without a hint of self-consciousness and said with complete ease: “I’m stuffed right now — I just want a few sips of broth to settle it all down.”

The moment his taut abdominal muscles were bared to view, Shen Zhuxi hastily averted her gaze.

There was absolutely no way she could be expected to actually touch him.

Li Wu’s expression was too sincere for her to disbelieve him. If he had already eaten raw bird eggs, the thin, flavorless broth in that pot truly held little appeal.

She took the ceramic bowl and examined its contents carefully.

A faint fragrance, vaguely reminiscent of boiled greens, drifted in and out at the edge of her nostrils. Shen Zhuxi summoned a flicker of hope for this soup that contained not a drop of oil or a grain of salt — but the moment it touched her tongue, it was as though she had been struck by lightning. The thick, sticky consistency and faint fishy taste made Shen Zhuxi feel, for one horrible instant, that she was drinking snot.

She very nearly vomited on the spot.

But Li Wu was sitting beside her, watching her closely.

So she endured it. Not only did she endure it, she held her breath, squeezed her eyes shut, and gritted her teeth until every last drop was gone.

As she scraped the bowl clean, Shen Zhuxi relied entirely on sheer willpower to keep the hot liquid from surging back up her throat.

Li Wu did not ask how it tasted, because when he poured the remaining dregs into the bowl and drank them down himself, he too was frowning. Yet neither of them wasted so much as a single drop of the broth.

Shen Zhuxi suddenly thought of the bowl of beef noodles Li Wu had cooked not so long ago.

It had only been a few months, yet thinking back on it now, it felt as distant as a lifetime ago.

When would this famine ever end?

Why were the local government offices everywhere utterly without response?

Did the lives of ordinary people truly mean nothing to them at all?

Whether it was the Da Yan court or the pretender’s regime now in power, did their entire reason for existing amount to nothing more than collecting taxes from the people, while offering them not a shred of protection or shelter in return?

Shen Zhuxi sank into despondency, unable to comprehend when or where this vast and bloated organization — one that fed itself on the lifeblood of all the people under heaven — had first begun to rot.

Why was Da Yan’s court this way? And why was the pretender’s regime exactly the same?

“Stop thinking so much. A person’s troubles are all of their own making.”

Li Wu sprawled carelessly back onto the bedroll, clasped his hands behind his head, and said in a lazy, unhurried tone:

“When there’s a flood, you move the water vat. When there’s an enemy, I’ll deal with him myself. As long as you’re still breathing, everything will be all right.”

As long as you’re still breathing, everything will be all right.

Shen Zhuxi repeated the words silently to herself, and for no reason she could name, she believed him completely.

Everything will be all right.