TWWDS - Chapter 7

Chapter 7

After the rental documents were successfully signed, Zhong Wenjiu beamed as she bowed to her newly minted client and thanked her for supporting her business. She then called over several servants to carry out the furniture that remained usable and arrange it properly for Chao Qingxiu.

The office attendant did not return to the county magistrate's office. On his own initiative, he made several trips outside to ask shops he knew to send over various daily necessities, including bedding.

Chao Qingxiu had only recently transmigrated and was not yet familiar with the local speech. Until now, she had paid attention only to food prices. Only today did she come to a deep appreciation of the fact that food in Great Xia was actually quite affordable. Clothing, however, was another matter, and its prices stretched her purse.

Genuine coarse hemp cloth cost about four to five hundred cash a bolt. Silk cloth, which Chao Qingxiu had judged to be "a bit like hemp cloth," cost two strings a bolt and came in just enough for an adult to make a complete outfit.

To obtain new clothes, Chao Qingxiu could buy the fabric and make them herself, though that would only result in wasted material, or she could hire an embroiderer to sew them for her.

If she had no special requirements for the embroidery, an outfit could be finished in three to five days, with labor costs ranging from two to five hundred cash.

Alternatively, she could buy ready-made clothes. A secondhand silk garment cost between five and seven hundred cash, while a complete outfit would run from two to three strings.

Quilts and other bedding cost even more. Chao Qingxiu bought a quilt intended for spring and summer, at first assuming it was a cotton quilt, one filled with cotton. She later learned that cotton was not yet in widespread use; the filling actually used in bedding was kapok and reed fluff.

Even at the regular-customer rate, a silk-faced quilt weighing two catties cost three strings.

In the end, the clothes, bedding, and other necessities she needed to furnish the house had cost her fifteen strings.

The cloth shopkeeper was very courteous. Seeing how much she had bought, the shopkeeper added two bolts of slightly flawed hemp cloth, some scraps of fabric, a small packet of loose bird feathers, and sewing tools, including needles, thread, and a thimble.

To save money, Chao Qingxiu ultimately did not buy a hair crown. Fortunately, Great Xia was an age well known for its endless succession of martial masters. Certain trends from the martial world gradually began to influence ordinary people. Those who practiced martial arts came to prefer binding their hair with ribbons, and by now many scholars arranged their hair the same way.

After all, compared with an expensive hair crown, even a ribbon of silk brocade covered in embroidered designs was not quite so likely to send one's blood pressure soaring.

So Chao Qingxiu simply cut two lengths of cloth to tie back her hair.

The office attendant helped explain the local situation. "There are still some shops in the city bearing the Buer House mark. They are long-established businesses from the north. It is a pity there are none on the streets nearby. Their clothes and fabrics are good, so you can have a look next time you go."

Chao Qingxiu replied, "When I have time, I ought to go and look around."

Because the office attendant was a familiar face in the city and the surrounding shopkeepers all knew him, Chao Qingxiu did not have to settle every bill at once. She could wait until the bounty for capturing the murderer came through, then deliver the outstanding payment.

Besides bedding, settling in here meant buying pots, bowls, ladles, basins, and other household ware. Chao Qingxiu chose to buy everything at once. Even with a discount, it cost her five strings.

One hundred taels was no small sum. An ordinary household could get through a month on two strings if it was frugal, but when Chao Qingxiu did the arithmetic, she found that merely establishing a foothold in the city had already consumed more than half...

Chao Qingxiu spent the whole day arranging the house. She went through the inventory of Mingsi Hall and, with great difficulty, managed to assemble four intact chairs, which she placed in the central hall. The others were missing either legs or backs and would have to be repaired before they could be used.

As for the wooden bed, it had already fallen apart. Zhong Wenjiu had someone nail it back together and carry it into the bedroom.

Perhaps out of consideration for Han Sihe, the rental agency provided excellent after-sales service. They cleaned several of the main rooms and repapered the windows before taking their leave.

At dusk, a waiter from Cai's Eatery knocked on Chao Qingxiu's door. Smiling, the waiter bowed to the lady of the house and said, "Deputy Magistrate Han heard that Miss Chao was celebrating her housewarming, so she ordered us to bring a tableful of dishes. She said it would not be convenient to disturb you today, and that she would visit you in person another day."

Chao Qingxiu tucked five or six copper coins into the waiter's hand as a tip and politely replied, "Deputy Magistrate Han has already worked so hard on my behalf today, and now she has gone to further expense on my account. Please convey my thanks to her."

She spoke in the manner of the people of the time. Though her speech still sounded somewhat out of place, the waiter and those with them heard the clear, melodious cadence of her words and saw how her expression relaxed as she spoke, with no trace of awkwardness. They therefore assumed that she had only recently arrived in Gaofang Prefecture from elsewhere and that her habits and customs differed from those of the locals.

Han Sihe was accustomed to handling all manner of affairs and was quite adept at anticipating what others might need. The spread she had sent was suitably understated: three small plates of cold dressed vegetables, four kinds of dim sum and fruit arranged in a brocade box, one bowl of stewed seasonal vegetables, half a roast chicken, a serving of fish soup, and a plate of steamed buns. Every portion was small, just enough for one person.

Once the dishes had been delivered, the waiters took their leave. The vessels in which they had brought the food were ordinary pottery and wooden boxes, worth a little more than modern takeaway containers. The customer did not have to return them and, if she liked the appearance of any, could simply keep it. A small "Cai" was printed on the outside of each vessel to show that it came from Cai's.

Great Xia's level of technology was not high, but its food industry was remarkably developed. Both within and beyond Gaofang Prefecture, mansions and mountain villas served private house cuisine. Around Mingsi Hall, the takeaway trade had always flourished. Cai's Eatery was moderately expensive, with several older establishments, such as Wang's and Lin's, priced above it. Han Sihe had chosen Cai's because it was not too showy.

After the attendant had set out the meal, they took their leave. From outside came the sound of the door closing, neither firmly nor softly, followed by footsteps gradually fading away. The entire estate sank once more into boundless silence.

Exhausted, Chao Qingxiu sat in the empty room and finished her dinner in silence. Then she laid down her chopsticks and stared quietly at the flame in the oil lamp.

She had signed a lease and begun to settle in, yet an intense sense of drifting, of being far from home, welled up within her.

The evening breeze passed through, making the light inside flicker between brightness and darkness. Several flying insects circled the flame. Chao Qingxiu picked up the ceramic oil lamp, retrieved the round bronze mirror she had bought that day from the bedroom, and fastened a secondhand dagger purchased from a junk shop at her waist. Only then did she set off unhurriedly for the back garden.

As a source of light, the oil lamp was, generously speaking, ordinary, and it did not even compare with some especially poor-quality flashlights. Fortunately, Chao Qingxiu was lucky. It had rained for the previous two days, but today the sky was rare in its clarity, cloudless from horizon to horizon. A bright moon hung high overhead, spilling frosty radiance across the ground and greatly easing the difficulty of seeing.

Chao Qingxiu knew exactly what she was doing. The moment she stepped outside, she headed straight for the back garden. Earlier that day, when she had seen the Silent Stele, she had felt an inexplicable doubt. Only after returning indoors and thinking it over for a while had the answer suddenly become clear to her.

If Chao Qingxiu was right, the inscription on the back of the stele was an every-other-line character riddle, with one character concealed in each of the first, third, fifth, and seventh short lines.

For example, the opening line said to take a "moon" from the character for "friend"; one "moon" remained, plainly giving the character for "moon."

The riddle was not difficult. The estate had stood vacant for so long that someone else might already have solved it. Yet the second line was an entirely ordinary sentence, included in the riddle chiefly as a decoy, its main purpose being to disrupt the thinking of anyone who did not understand.

As for the later third line, "A crow skims a square well," Chao Qingxiu saw a square mouth crossed by a vertical stroke representing the bird's swift flight, making the character for "middle."

"Raise your head and no longer see the blue sky" meant taking the upper portion from the character for "blue-green," leaving the character for "stone."

The seventh line, "Look at yourself and hurt yourself," stumped Chao Qingxiu for quite a while. Fortunately, the ample literary repertoire she had gathered before transmigrating let her see it in time. The line was hardly a character riddle at all, but a simple allusion drawn from a situation.

Under what circumstances could a person "look at oneself and hurt oneself"?

Chao Qingxiu considered. There were two possibilities: either lower one's head and look at one's shadow on the ground, or raise it and look at the bronze mirror nearby.

There were few enough possibilities that she could easily test every one. Considering the jagged form of the stele, she thought the latter was more likely.

If so, the four characters would be "moon," "middle," "stone," and "mirror."

Perhaps she was merely overthinking it. Even so, Chao Qingxiu wanted to gamble on her luck, and it was for that reason that she had resolved to rent Mingsi Hall, which was far too spacious for her.

After signing the lease, Chao Qingxiu took advantage of her furniture shopping to buy a bronze mirror sized exactly to fit the recess in the stele, then patiently waited for the moon to reach the zenith.

The moonlight was refracted by the bronze mirror into a straight line, which eventually fell upon a patch of dense wild grass a short distance away.

Chao Qingxiu felt that whoever had set the riddle had plainly failed to consider how changes in the environment might affect whether it still worked.

She laboriously pushed aside the weeds in the garden and followed the track of the reflected light until it led to the courtyard wall.

A faint beam of light happened to fall across one of the bricks in the wall.

Chao Qingxiu had not expected that before she could repair the house, she would first have to undertake some demolition. She wrapped her hand in a grass rope to increase her grip, thrust the dagger into the mortar joint, braced her right foot against the wall, and heaved the brick outward. After a long struggle, she finally pried it free.

Under the bright moonlight, an oil-paper parcel covered in dirt came clearly into view behind the brick.

Chao Qingxiu stared steadily at the scene before her.

There was no one near. Chao Qingxiu carefully set the parcel aside, then stacked the loosened brick back in its original place. Only when everything had been restored did she turn and go back inside.

Back in her room, she opened the oil-paper parcel under the lamp and found three documents and two booklets written in minuscule, cramped script.

The three documents were the house deed, the land deed, and a gang agreement bearing the seal of the Wulin Alliance.

Chao Qingxiu thought that since the martial world and the Wulin Alliance both existed here, it was hardly strange for someone establishing a gang to register their identity with the Alliance.

The covers of the other two booklets bore the titles "Qingxin Formula" and "Qinglian Seed."

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