It was still fairly early in the afternoon, and the cart hadn’t been pushed back yet — Hutao and Ernü were presumably still minding it at the intersection. Nie Yunzhu had come back ahead of them to burn some camphor wood into ash, and was genuinely startled to see Ning Yi arrive.

Preparing preserved eggs required more than twenty days, and when they’d first started planning this business, they had actually prepared a fairly large batch in advance. Of course, since Nie Yunzhu herself hadn’t been entirely confident, most of the additional quantity had really been added at Ning Yi’s insistence — and yet, as it turned out, even that hadn’t been enough.

She had roughly explained to Ning Yi the possibility of the preserved eggs falling into short supply, and he’d offered a few thoughts in response — nothing especially clever, just the usual matter of increasing supply while cutting back on waste. The solutions to such problems were never particularly remarkable in themselves. On the supply side, they could simply set a delivery limit for each restaurant, though that would require some coordination and a few kind words all around. On the demand side, there was no shortcut — they simply had to work faster. Nie Yunzhu had been remarkably busy these past few days, though naturally she couldn’t go into all that during their brief morning chats — she mostly just reported her progress with obvious delight.

Ning Yi had earlier told her to use camphor-wood ash for curing the eggs, and these days she gathered camphor wood each day to burn it down. Today’s batch of wood had been a bit damp, and without meaning to, she’d filled the entire kitchen with smoke. Ning Yi went in to help her deal with it, and after a good while together they finally managed to clear the smoke, pulling some of the damp firewood out of the stove and letting a smaller fire burn slowly. As Ning Yi sat in front of the stove watching the fire, Nie Yunzhu washed her face and hands nearby, then brought over a damp cloth for him to wipe his face. As she handed it to him, her cheeks felt faintly warm, her wrist trembling ever so slightly — though no one but herself would likely have noticed.

The household rarely entertained guests, and so the only cloths on hand belonged to herself and Hutao; it hardly seemed right to use Hutao’s for him, so she used her own instead. The gesture felt a touch overly intimate, somehow, her heart fluttering like a small mouse trapped inside her chest as she watched him wipe his face casually and hand it back to her. She made idle conversation to cover the moment. “Liheng… where were you coming from just now?”

“Just came from Old Qin’s place.” Ning Yi tossed another piece of wood into the fire. “There was that bet with Kang Xian, actually — just showing off a little bit just now. Quite satisfying, honestly.”

“Well, that’s good then.” Hearing him mention it, Nie Yunzhu felt a small flicker of pleasure herself — she’d originally worried they might fail to meet the terms of the bet and cause him to lose face, and hadn’t expected things to come together so quickly. “This morning, another restaurant asked for a delivery of preserved eggs too — that makes six now…”

“That fast…” Ning Yi thought about it. “Though I imagine the restaurants in that area that could actually afford them are probably about tapped out by now — maintaining this level going forward should be about right…”

If they weren’t looking to expand further, and were simply treating this as something fun rather than a serious business venture, supplying these several restaurants was likely already close to the limit of what Nie Yunzhu and Hutao could manage. Whether to expand beyond that was really her decision to make; Ning Yi had no wish to weigh in on it. Nie Yunzhu thought about it, crouched down beside him, and smiled.

“It’s happened so quickly, honestly Yunzhu could hardly keep up — truthfully, just a few days ago, I was still worried I might end up making you lose that bet.”

“Ha, the bet was a small thing really, just a joke between friends — though of course, winning is always nicer, ha ha.”

“That elderly gentleman is actually the emperor’s uncle by marriage, you know. Last month when I delivered preserved eggs there, the residence was enormous — a princess’s estate, no less. Actually, when you introduced him before the New Year, I wondered if that might be who he was, but I never expected it to actually be true. You really are remarkable, Liheng — to be on such easy, joking terms with someone of that standing.”

This wasn’t mere flattery on her part. However one looked at it, a man of Kang Xian’s standing ought to have been someone Liheng treated with the deference due an elder. She had seen plenty of such age gaps before, where meetings between generations always followed the proper forms of respect between elder and junior, teacher and student — even when the elder was warm and kind, that warmth was still simply the warmth an elder shows toward the young. But she had never before seen anyone quite like Liheng, who seemed to treat everyone with the same easy familiarity, regardless of standing. And thinking about it this way, wasn’t she herself much the same, in his eyes?

“We got to know each other over a game of chess — I suppose there wasn’t much calculation involved on either side.” Ning Yi poked at the flames. “Both of them are reasonable, sensible old men too — I respect their learning, their perspective, and that’s enough… hm, so you already knew who he was before I introduced him?”

“Of course I’d heard of him. Even before you introduced him, I’d probably seen him once or twice before… maybe even twice. There was a performance at Egret Isle one year, and Lord Kang attended, though there were so many people there, I couldn’t possibly remember them all.” She thought back over those memories, then laughed softly. “And besides, with so many young talented scholars in attendance that day, Hutao and the other girls I knew were all far more interested in watching them. There was talk among the important officials at the head table too, of course, but though Lord Kang is certainly learned, he’s the emperor’s uncle by marriage, and already quite elderly besides — it’s only natural he wouldn’t remember such details. I imagine Lord Kang doesn’t remember Yunzhu at all either…”

“Oh ho.” Ning Yi grinned mischievously. “So you were all too busy remembering the handsome young scholars, then…”

If anyone else had teased her about this, Nie Yunzhu might have felt uncomfortable, but she felt nothing of the sort now, simply smiling. “That’s right. When a woman performs, of course she pays attention to the talented young men in the crowd. Hee, back then Yunzhu was mostly interested in remembering the wealthy ones — though of course, it was even better if their poetry and learning caught my eye too. I worked hard to stay in their good graces, always calculating how much closer I was to redeeming myself…”

She trailed off at this point, then said, “Liheng, you know Li Pin, Li Dexin, don’t you?”

“I do — mentioned him before, actually. We’re at the same academy now.”

“What about Cao Guan?”

“Heard the name.”

“And… Gu Hong, Gu Yanzhen?”

As she said this name, she watched Ning Yi’s expression carefully. He thought about it. “That one I haven’t heard of… who is he?”

“No one in particular — just another scholar.” She smiled down at the ground. “Not someone who matters.”

There were things Nie Yunzhu simply didn’t tell Ning Yi — in truth, it wasn’t really something suitable to bring up with him at all.

Gu Yanzhen had come to find her at the stall several times over the past few days, saying things to her with evident sincerity, but for her, it had proven genuinely troubling. Small complications kept arising because of it, too — Gu Yanzhen had apparently learned from Hutao that she still hadn’t married, and over these past few days, he had actually been helping expand the preserved-egg business himself. That restaurant from this morning hadn’t been nearby, as Ning Yi had assumed, but somewhat further away — Gu Yanzhen had used his own connections to ask a friend to look out for the stall.

Naturally, she couldn’t bring herself to explain any of this. The business was growing on its own now, and she had no idea how to gracefully decline his goodwill without offending him. Gu Yanzhen, for his part, simply believed: “You want to sell preserved eggs, so I’ll help you” — with no idea that she was already nearly overwhelmed as it was. And on Liheng’s side, all he’d said was “these few restaurants should be enough,” which touched her, but left her with no way to ask him how to rein things back in. She had privately suspected the market’s expansion might have something to do with Liheng, but clearly that wasn’t the case at all — and there was no good way to tell him that another man was now helping behind the scenes, a man she’d known from her days at the pleasure house, no less…

Some feelings, particularly when it came to how she felt about Liheng, were probably best left unspoken. In any case… growing the business further was still, in itself, a good thing. Being this busy meant they’d probably need to hire help soon — perhaps some of Ernü’s family could lend a hand… Ah, she’d never expected things to reach this point. What she’d originally hoped for, perhaps, was simply that fulfilling kind of life spent tending a little cart, earning just enough to get by, day by day…

Since she said nothing of this, there was naturally no way for Ning Yi to know. As far as he was concerned, this preserved-egg business had already reached a natural saturation point for Nie Yunzhu, and he’d already told Li Pin as much, letting him know his friends no longer needed to keep up the little performance. Li Pin had asked him a couple of days earlier: “What exactly is your relationship with that preserved-egg vendor, Liheng?” Ning Yi had simply answered that she was a friend, and Li Pin hadn’t pressed further, sensing nothing particularly amiss.

Meanwhile, a couple of days earlier, Gu Yanzhen had gone to ask Li Pin about the very same matter. At the time, Gu Yanzhen’s thoughts had been in turmoil, his manner rather intense, and Li Pin — having by then realized that the owner of the preserved-egg stall was the very woman Gu Yanzhen had once been fond of — had chosen not to mention Ning Yi’s name at all. Li Pin was a careful, thoughtful man; Ning Yi was, after all, a live-in son-in-law of the Su household, and there was no way he could have anything improper going on with this Miss Yunzhu — but whether true or not, letting word of such a thing spread was never a good idea, since rumor and reality carried the same danger either way. So he simply said it was a friend’s idle bit of fun, and mentioned that Miss Yunzhu might not yet be married, prompting Gu Yanzhen to confirm this with Hutao afterward — after which he let the matter rest.

In truth, as far as Ning Yi was concerned, the whole preserved-egg business with Nie Yunzhu was really a minor affair, occupying little more than the time spent chatting during his morning runs. It wasn’t the center of his daily life by any means.

He spent his mornings teaching the children, and in the afternoons, he’d rented a small place near Yushan Academy where — aside from his occasional, and rather infrequent, visits to Old Qin’s or Nie Yunzhu’s — he pursued a bit of chemical research. He currently possessed a handful of classical-language texts on chemical matters, which recorded observations of various phenomena; though they bore no relation to modern chemical theory, they at least offered some direction for his earliest investigations.

Besides texts like the Dream Pool Essays, he had built some basic iron racks, used ceramic bottles in place of test tubes, relied on an oil lamp for heating, and gathered various metal, wooden, and ceramic containers, along with whatever chemical raw materials he could find. In truth, the Wu Dynasty already had various workshops engaged in businesses involving chemical reactions of one kind or another, but his current setup probably resembled alchemy far more than it resembled any actual workshop technique.

His knowledge of chemistry from his past life had largely faded with time, and since he’d once dabbled across a fairly wide range of industries, he could still recall certain reaction relationships, though none of it formed anything like a coherent system anymore — like a fragmented tech tree from some half-forgotten video game. The classical texts could jog loose a few scattered memories here and there, better than nothing at least. He needed a simple starting point, and for now could only combine things somewhat randomly and observe the results — placing rusted iron into corrosive water and heating it, for instance, removing the rust, then jotting the observation down in a small notebook. He could recall a handful of scattered theoretical fragments too — that iron rusting involved oxidation, for instance, he knew that much — but as for what the reverse process might be called, that was entirely gone from memory, the chemical formulas long forgotten. For now, whenever some chemical concept surfaced in his memory, he simply wrote it down in the notebook and slowly worked from there.

His approach to chemistry began first with strong acids like sulfuric and nitric acid, since their reactions were vigorous and easy to observe — though, of course, the most important thing was caution, to avoid getting himself hurt in the process. There were a few more advanced techniques he already had a good handle on — gunpowder, for one, he could produce if needed, and industrial alcohol, or high-proof spirits, were within reach too, since distillation was, after all, a fairly simple process. At some point he intended to build an alcohol lamp, though he could no longer quite recall why an alcohol lamp was supposedly better than an oil lamp — something about it being smokeless, probably… He had a rough sense of the outline of many larger chemical industries too, though the supporting techniques simply weren’t there yet. Some processes were fairly crude by comparison — primitive steelmaking, for instance, was relatively simple; reckless and inefficient by modern standards, perhaps, but perfectly serviceable here. He remembered the rough idea well enough, and could return to it later if the need arose.

This early stage of exploring chemical reactions was, admittedly, rather tedious — more often than not, he had no idea what exactly he’d produced. Xiao Chan often tagged along, and while he ran his experiments in the room, she would wander idly back and forth beneath the eaves outside, occasionally asking him: “Young Master, are you trying to make some kind of elixir of immortality?” The little girl sometimes imagined that her young master might suddenly fly off somewhere, and as she sat beneath the eaves with her chin propped on her hand, swinging her skirt back and forth while perched on the railing, she’d think about this, listening to her young master casually telling stories from things called Journey to the West or Investiture of the Gods, feeling a mixture of worry and wistful anticipation.

Of course, most of the time, her young master struck her as reliable and grounded — but for a young girl, that sort of thing was exactly what romance looked like. And so, in her idle moments, listening to her young master’s voice, she’d let her mind wander a little — if her young master really did suddenly fly away, she resolved she would cry and cry for the longest time… but if her young master were willing to take her along too… a small flicker of happiness would rise in her chest. Then she’d think, well, he’d have to take the young mistress along too, of course… She’d sit there, sometimes wistful, sometimes smiling to herself, occasionally sneaking a glance at the door, telling herself not to keep thinking about such things, before quietly slipping inside, appearing before her young master with an innocent, endearing look. “Young Master, is there anything Xiao Chan can help with?”

“Go on outside.” The man, wearing a cloth mask over his face, was busy weighing out some strange powder.

“Oh…”

Xiao Chan slunk back outside, dejected. Under the bright spring sunshine, with swallows darting about and the grass growing lush, the little maid sat hugging her knees by the eaves, gazing upward, lost in her own small worries, an inexplicable loneliness settling over her amid the scattered wildflowers blooming in the courtyard.

Inside the room, Ning Yi glanced over at the window nearby and frowned slightly — he’d told her before to be careful. Though his chemical setup wasn’t especially sophisticated yet, there were still corrosive or mildly toxic substances in the room, and however clever and capable the little girl normally was, this was one area she still couldn’t be allowed to touch. He then continued recounting whatever mythological tales he could remember, and before long the little girl brightened up again. “Young Master, Young Master, yesterday Xiao Chan heard a story at the restaurant with the young mistress too…”

And then she launched into an excited, chattering account of it. Before long Ning Yi emerged from the room, and Xiao Chan’s mood lifted further still, the two of them chatting away as they walked home along the road, just as they always did. Whenever her young master was shut away in that room, he seemed just a touch distant, and every so often, remembering this, she’d turn back in the fading light of dusk to make a silly face at the offending building.

Aside from Xiao Chan, Ning Yi’s social life, for the most part, revolved around Su Tan’er. Given the era they lived in, the way the two of them interacted with each other was, in fact, rather peculiar…