She was taken to a residential district located in the center of the capital. Generally speaking, the further north you went in the capital, the better the neighborhood, and this area was lined with middle-class homes.
Among them stood a single dilapidated house. It had once been a reasonably large home, but its roof tiles were chipped and faded, and the earthen walls had crumbled in places, exposing the bamboo framework beneath.
A man Maomao had seen several times before stood at the entrance. He was the one who kept watch over Zhao Yu, and he pretended, for appearances' sake, not to know Maomao.
Maomao entered the run-down house.
(Oh?!)
The house had been left to rot on the outside, but the interior was surprisingly well-kept. That, however, was not what caught her attention.
The walls had been whitewashed, and painted over the hardened plaster was a mural.
A Peach Garden sprawled across the entire wall. And rather than the three warriors who should have been biting into the peaches, it was a beautiful woman who appeared there.
She had a face as round and lovely as a peach, hair as black as jet beads, and lips glistening like ripe cherries, revealing a glimpse of white teeth.
A celestial maiden from the Peach Blossom Spring had been captured right there on the wall.
Maomao had heard he was skilled at painting beautiful women, but she hadn't expected anything this magnificent.
Maomao stared at the wall. The painted surface had a peculiar sheen to it. It was a slightly different type of painting from what she was accustomed to.
Just as she leaned in for a closer look, heavy footsteps thundered toward her.
"Hey, Freckles! What do you think you're doing? Hurry up and come look!"
Zhao Yu came rushing over, his face deathly pale.
(No, no—)
It was a bad habit of Maomao's: the moment something caught her interest, her attention would drift toward it entirely. She was pulled along by Zhao Yu toward the back of the house. The room appeared to be a sitting area, though all around it lay colorful powders that looked like pigments, eggshells for some reason, and a white powder resembling lime plaster along with the trowels used to mix it.
In the center of the room, a long couch had been placed, and a man lay sprawled across it. Another man sat beside him, watching with a worried expression.
The man on the couch was thin and unkempt, with a scraggly beard, his complexion having gone beyond pale blue to an almost ghostly white. Only his fingertips were stained with what appeared to be paint. The man standing beside him was neatly dressed, but his hands were just as grimy and discolored as those of the man lying down.
"Take a look at the master, will you?"
He was young to be called "master," but this must be the up-and-coming painter she had heard about. Beside the couch sat a bucket filled with vomit.
Maomao examined the man. His limbs were twitching. She opened his eyes to check his pupils and took his pulse.
From what she could see, it looked like some kind of food poisoning.
"What are the symptoms?"
"She kept throwing up and had diarrhea."
"Then she was in a lot of pain and seemed cold, so I laid her down to rest."
The man standing behind Chouyu added to what he'd said.
"And who's this?"
"The master's coworker! More importantly, hurry, hurry!"
Even if told to hurry, there was only so much Maomao could do. Without knowing what kind of poison was involved, she had no idea what to prescribe.
However, if the man was suffering from repeated diarrhea and vomiting, there was definitely something his body was running short of.
"Chouyu. Get me water, salt, and sugar. If there's none in this house, go get some from somewhere else."
Maomao tossed a coin purse from inside her robe to Chouyu. Chouyu said "Got it" and ran out of the house.
"I'll borrow the kitchen."
Maomao headed toward the back.
She peered into the water barrel to check whether the water had gone bad. Ideally she'd boil it, but there probably wasn't time for that.
"Is this well water?"
"I bought it from the water shop yesterday, so it should be fine."
If it was purchased water, it was probably safe. She considered it unlikely that the diarrhea came from drinking untreated well water — assuming it was properly sourced water, that is. As far as Maomao could tell from scooping some up and tasting it, it had no strange smell or flavor.
The house looked run-down on the outside, but they seemed well-off enough to buy water.
Maomao regarded the man who shared her trade.
"Can you explain what might have caused this?"
"Ah."
Despite being flustered, the man brought a chair over for Maomao.
And then, in bits and pieces, he began to speak.
"She has this awful habit of eating food that's gone bad without a care. I think that's probably the cause."
Just as she'd suspected — it was food poisoning.
"
Anmitsu
"There was some left, so he ate it. It looked like it had gone bad, so we didn't eat any, but he said it'd be fine if you cooked it, so he just ate it."
Of course it had gone bad.
Cooking spoiled food doesn't make it good again. Some of the toxins produced by spoilage persist no matter what you do.
"Seriously, what are we gonna do? Even if we started the piece now, we'd never finish in time."
The man touched the large board mounted on the wall.
It had been painted white, with the faint outline of a woman sketched on it. He would presumably continue layering colors from here on. As the hues became more vivid, the portrait of the woman would surely start to look almost alive.
"And here he was, saying he'd have it done within ten days."
*(Ten days?)*
Was there some kind of deadline?
"I'm back!"
Zhao Yu had returned.
Maomao took the salt and sugar that Zhao Yu had brought.
She added them to the water she'd prepared, stirred it up, then pulled some cotton from among her carry-on things and soaked it.
She had the man suck on the dampened cotton to moisten his mouth, doing it over and over to keep his fluids up.
It was hard to say whether his body needed warming or cooling. Either way, in his current filthy state—still wearing the same clothes—he couldn't absorb any sweat. She got a cotton robe that could wick away perspiration and changed him into it.
Keeping him on the long chair was a hassle too, so she arranged a proper bed and prepared medicine for his stomach cramps.
In the midst of all this, he threw up two more times, but there was nothing left to bring up—just the sour smell of gastric acid filling the room.
Thanks to repeatedly wiping away his sweat and giving him fluids, perhaps, by nightfall he had calmed down and the convulsions had stopped.
By that point, Maomao, Zhao Yu, and the man from the same trade were all completely wiped out. The house had nothing but art supplies—even setting up a single decent bed meant having to ask the neighbors for help.
The exhausted Maomao and Zhao Yu had slumped into chairs brought from another room. The long chair the homeowner had been using was now free, but honestly, it was in a state where it wouldn't be usable without a thorough cleaning.
"Freckles. Is he gonna pull through?"
"Probably."
She couldn't say for certain. He would likely regain consciousness before long. But for a while, he'd need to stay still and eat nothing but easily digestible food.
Rice porridge.
But even to make that, they'd need to get their hands on some proper rice—what they had was no good. And they didn't even have a decent pot.
"I'll go get the rice and the clay pot from my place."
The man who could read the room left the house. Tired as he already was, what a hassle. Was he really that close with the owner of this place?
"So what does the master of this house usually eat?"
As Maomao muttered to herself, Zhao Yu answered.
"The old man either always buys food from street stalls or gets handouts from the neighbors, it seems. Today's was
sweet buns,
I think."
"Hmm, so what they ate this time was the same thing?"
When Maomao asked, Zhao Yu's face contorted spectacularly.
"What's wrong?"
"No, it's just that I remembered what I ate today. Me and that pretty boy both ate those sweet buns with the old man. They were so bad I threw up right away. But I thought something was off from the start."
As for what was off—the old man supposedly looked at the sweet buns sitting on the table and said, "Did I have these at home?" That alone was unsettling enough, yet he still offered them to the man who'd come to visit and to Zhao Yu.
"Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful when he offers us whatever he's got on hand, but a lot of it is stuff you're not sure you should be eating."
Zhao Yu was exasperated too. He'd heard that artists tended to be oddballs, and it seemed to be true.
Maomao propped her elbows on the armrests and rested her chin in her hands.
"Can't believe you actually put that in your mouth."
"Well, the pretty boy said he'd eat too, and they looked delicious!"
Zhao Yu was always ready to eat, so he'd put just about anything edible in his mouth.
"But the filling must have gone bad, because it was insanely bitter."
"...Bitter?"
"Yeah, it was so awful I threw up. The pretty boy was puking too."
(Bitter, even though they looked appetizing?)
Maomao crossed her arms and tilted her head.
"Hey—was it bitter? Not sour?"
"Bitter. Wouldn't have called it sour."
"So, did the filling have any weird smell or anything?"
"If it did, I probably wouldn't have eaten it."
Zhao Yu had taken off his shoes and was swinging his feet back and forth. He'd opened the window to air out the room, but it was still muggy. It had grown dark outside, so he lit the—
oil lamp
lying nearby. Between the paints and this, the teacher must have had a thing for foreign goods. It was a rare piece of lighting around here, but since it ran on fish oil, the smell was one he'd gotten used to. Lately, Maomao kept trying to lick the oil, which was a pain.
"Did the filling inside have any strings pulling out of it? Was it sticky?"
"Sticky? Now that you mention it..."
It seemed something had rung a bell.
"It did feel a little slimy, maybe. I spat it out right away because it was bitter, so I'm not entirely sure. Big brother said it was going bad and told me to spit it out fast. After that I rinsed my mouth out right away and didn't swallow any of it."
Maomao tilted her head, puzzled.
"So what did you do with the rest?"
"I threw it away. There's a trash bin outside, so I dumped it in there. The teacher got all mad, saying it was wasteful."
The moment she heard that, Maomao grabbed the oil lamp and headed outside. She went to check the wooden box set out there.
The box, giving off a foul stench, still contained food waste. Right on top sat two half-eaten stuffed pastries. Good—she'd caught it before they'd been collected for pig feed.
"Whoa! What are you doing?! That's disgusting!"
Zhao Yu said this when he saw Maomao rummaging through the food waste. She paid him no mind, picking up the soiled pastry with her bare hands and breaking it open. Ground pork mixed with several kinds of vegetables had been kneaded into it. Then she pulled it apart to examine what was hidden inside.
"...Freckles. Stop smiling while you rummage through garbage. It's seriously creepy."
She apparently hadn't realized she'd been smiling.
When Maomao smiles, that's what it means.
"So the teacher baked and ate these?"
"Yep. He's definitely taste-blind. There's no way the bitterness would go away just from baking, but he kept going on about how delicious it was."
Her conviction deepened further.
"Hey, that brother of yours—what was he here for today?"
"...Probably to stop the teacher, I'd think. The teacher kept saying he'd set off on a journey as soon as his next job was done."
Zhao Yu bowed his head, looking somewhat disappointed.
"A journey?"
"Apparently he used to study painting in the west a long time ago. He said he saw a beautiful woman there he couldn't forget, so now he only paints pictures of women."
(The west?)
Come to think of it, between the oil lamps and the paints, there were indeed many things with a foreign air about them.
"He keeps saying there's no way a woman he saw twenty years ago would still be around, but he says he absolutely has to find her."
Twenty years was a long time. No beauty could escape the ravages of aging. If such a person still existed, she would have to be either a celestial maiden or a demon.
"Wh-what are you doing?!"
Speak of the devil — the man who had gone to fetch rice and a pot returned.
In the dark, Maomao was a mess covered in food scraps, which was alarming enough. On top of that, half her face was grinning.
Still holding food scraps in both hands, Maomao smiled at the man.
Then she looked at Zhao Yu.
"Zhao Yu, you should head home now. Someone ought to be coming to pick you up soon."
It was easy to guess that Yukei, who was so considerate in all sorts of ways, would send someone once it got dark. If Yukei was busy, he would ask someone else.
"What's with the sudden order?"
"You must be tired by now. Get some sleep until whoever's coming to get you shows up."
"...You're the one with the freckles who should wash her hands."
He didn't argue back. That meant he was sleepy.
Yawning, he went inside.
"What were you doing?"
The man who had retreated looked at Maomao. No, he was looking at the food scraps in both her hands.
"Could we talk after I've washed my hands?"
Maomao set down the food scraps and headed for the well.
Maomao and the man sat on chairs in the kitchen.
In the next room, Zhao Yu and the teacher were asleep.
"So, what did you want to talk about?"
"Are you knowledgeable about poisonous mushrooms?"
"…Where did that come from out of nowhere?"
The man's gaze averted from Maomao.
There were several things she found strange.
When people hear something has gone bad, they usually associate it with sourness. Certainly there might be things that develop a bitter taste as they rot, but could you definitively say that meant they had "gone bad"?
Why was the teacher unfaced by something so bitter it made you want to spit it out?
And first of all, where did the an-pei come from?
"Did you know? Some mushrooms are bitter when raw, but the bitterness disappears once they're heated. What's more, they're poisonous mushrooms that frequently cause food poisoning this time of year."
It was a mushroom often mistaken for an edible variety. The surface was slightly slimy. This matched Zhao Yu's testimony, and indeed, the an-pei had contained what appeared to be exactly such mushrooms.
If they had been bought from a street stall, there would already be an uproar throughout the neighborhood.
If they had been received from a neighbor, she would have heard talk of someone collapsing from stomach pains or something similar. If anything like that had happened, they would have informed this household too.
That left…
"Who brought the an-pei?"
Maomao looked at the paintings adorning the walls everywhere. They were all beautiful women like celestial maidens. Each one probably had someone as a
model,
and you could see individuality in each one.
The teacher's current work deadline was approaching. He had said he would travel westward once it was finished. This man had been trying to stop him.
They were in the same line of work, but this man hardly gave off the air of a so-called artist.
"What are you trying to say? It's just food poisoning."
"Yes, food poisoning. Caused by mushrooms."
The an-pei wasn't spoiled. The poison had simply been in it from the start.
"…It was a stronger poison than I expected."
The man was an honest sort. That statement could well be taken as an admission.
Maomao felt somewhat relieved at that. She had been worried he might fly off the handle. Though she had assumed that if anything happened to her, someone monitoring Zhao Yu would surely step in.
"These paintings here are all wonderful."
Maomao narrowed her eyes at the mural. An unrelated thought drifted through her mind—if one of those legendary beauties were placed among these figures, she would blend right in without looking out of place.
"There are even merchants lining up to buy his work, so I imagine the commission pays quite handsomely once a painting is finished."
"If he can't finish it, then that's that—they won't let it leave the premises."
"If you're planning a journey to the West, you'll need capital, of course, but more than anything, you need a companion you can trust."
"Yeah, I've been working on this deal for six months now. If I'd missed this window, who knows how many months it would've been before the next one."
What the man had wanted was to give the Master food poisoning. That would cause him to miss his deadline.
The journey west—that was what he'd wanted to wipe off the table.
"Ugh, this is the absolute worst. I honestly thought I was going to die."
He clutched his head while saying, "Please don't die on me."
"Wasn't there a more... restrained poison you could have used?"
"Restrained poison" was an odd way to put it, but that was indeed what Maomao was thinking.
"That man's stomach is tougher than iron."
His philosophy that anything was edible as long as it was cooked had apparently forged him a stomach of steel.
That was why he'd gone out of his way to involve Zhao Yu—to make it look like food poisoning. If a third party witnessed that the bean-paste bun had gone bad, and then the Master got sick, anyone would assume it was just a case of food poisoning and nothing more.
Maomao was speechless.
"In that case, couldn't you have just talked to him about it?"
"I've tried talking to him about it. More times than I can count."
The man called himself a painter, but in reality, he was little more than the Master's assistant. He mixed pigments, procured painting materials, and scouted out merchants willing to buy the paintings.
"I'm basically just his gofer. Without that guy, I couldn't do a damn thing."
"Is that so?"
It was true that the Master was a talented painter, but he was missing something essential as a human being. Someone like that would wither and die before long if left on their own.
This was precisely why a supporting figure like this man was so important.
"But since I talk to merchants all the time, I pick up on all sorts of things."
There was unusual activity brewing in the West. It was still only at the stage of premonitions. But if the rumors were true, it would be better to keep one's head down for now.
"And then he comes out with, 'Well, if that's the case, I need to leave now before it's too late!'"
His determination to head west hadn't changed at all, and he'd been steadily making preparations — even though he was someone who couldn't even put together a proper meal.
The man slowly rose from his chair. Then he moved into the adjoining room. Maomao followed him.
In the darkened room stood a large board. A white cloth was draped over it.
"He kept saying he was going to finish this painting this time."
The man pulled the cloth away.
"...This is..."
"Apparently it's the fairy he saw in the west."
(Here? Now?)
A cold sweat began to trickle down Maomao's back.
She had wanted to put this matter behind her, but it seemed everything was connected after all.
"
Saō
. He said he saw a shrine maiden there."
Painted there was a beautiful woman with white hair and red eyes.