Day Forty-Five.
An additional shipment of medicinal herbs arrives, but it isn't enough.
Day Forty-Eight.
The work of sterilizing strainers comes around.
Day Fifty-Two.
"What should I do…"
Rahan
Her brother was troubled. A large map was spread across the desk in the medical office.
"What shall we do, I wonder…"
The quack doctor was troubled too. Someone had to get the work done, so—
Maomao
—set her mortar and herbs to the side.
"Why is Rahan here?"
The general consensus would be that outsiders shouldn't linger in a medical office, but she could understand why he'd come. This was probably the place with the least stifling atmosphere of anywhere around.
"Well, I told him he could stay…"
"Miss, Rahan's exhausted. You ought to take proper care of him."
The quack doctor seemed to think that Rahan's name was "Rahan-nii," but nobody could be bothered to correct him.
As for Rahan himself, perhaps between the exhaustion of consecutive days he lacked the energy to correct it, hadn't noticed, or had simply gotten used to it.
(He really is the most deserving of recognition.)
By any normal measure of the damage, he was a man who had potentially saved tens of thousands of lives, yet he was completely oblivious to it.
"By the way, what are you looking at?"
Maomao peered at the map. Looking more closely, she could see quite detailed annotations. The types of soil and climate were carefully documented by region.
"This is the map I filled in during my locust extermination journey. I took the trouble to note things like field characteristics, but I only managed to fill in about half of it."
(What to do… This person is useful.)
And so, it was the short end of the stick — being used up and having all the good parts taken away.
Maomao thought she at least ought to earn some recognition for this particular affair.
"So, you looked at the map — what's giving you trouble?"
"Crops. We can't keep getting handouts from the central government forever, right? I'm thinking about reserves, trying to figure out what we can grow fastest."
"What about potatoes?"
"Can't put out something when you don't even know if it'll grow. That's years of experimentation."
"What about regular wheat? Couldn't you just clear the fields where nothing harvested and plant it there?"
"We'll grow wheat, sure. But only in the fields we originally planned for it. Wheat reduces yields if you plant it in the same soil year after year."
"Oh."
Right, Maomao nodded to herself.
"Crop... rotation? Harvest?"
The quack doctor didn't understand, as usual, but he was there at least.
"Legumes would work, but the problem is the harvest season comes late. Can't be helped, I suppose."
Rahan's older brother seemed to have an entire cultivation calendar stored in his head.
"The biggest problem is seeds."
"Seeds? You mean like planting seeds?"
"Right. When you've got nothing left to eat, there's no way you're saving seeds for next year. If it comes to that, it's game over, right?"
Indeed — if you lost even the means to grow things, there was nothing to be done.
"So, I've been thinking about fields for early-harvesting crops and fields for growing wheat seed."
It had turned into quite the large-scale discussion, and what was alarming was that the man was speaking as though he intended to overhaul every field in the neighborhood.
"Ultimately, you've got to factor in yield, population, and soil quality too. I'm not too fond of calculations, but..."
"If Rahan were here, the math would go a lot faster."
"Don't bring up that annoying glasses-wearing kid."
A blunt reply from Rahan's older brother. Compared to his resourceful younger brother, he always drew the short straw — so it couldn't be helped.
"What about the younger brother?"
"Then you're the younger sister, right?"
It seemed like the exchange would turn into a pointless argument, so she said nothing and pretended the question had never been asked.
"Come to think of it, he hasn't sent a single letter, has he?"
"A letter? Didn't one come the other day?"
"That was only from the old man. Rahan is quite the letter-writer, so I was expecting more to show up."
If letters were reaching Maomao, it stood to reason that Rahan's older brother would receive them too.
Incidentally, the quack doctor had finally realized that Rahan's older brother was not Rahan himself, but rather Rahan's older brother. Even so, he didn't bother asking for his name.
"..."
"What's the matter?"
"It's nothing."
Suddenly, Maomao recalled the letter she had received a few days ago. At the time, she hadn't thought much of it and let it pass—but—
"Please wait a moment."
"Hm? Oh, sure."
Maomao headed to her room on the second floor. When she entered, she found a small flower arrangement. All the girlish furniture had been removed long ago, but occasionally the quack doctor would leave flowers like this.
"This is it."
Maomao brought back the box containing the letter.
"What's that?"
"It's a letter from Rahan."
"...He's not using some kind of fancy paper, is he?"
"I thought it needed to withstand the long journey."
Maomao stared intently at Rahan's letter. It was paper reinforced with oilpaper pasted on the back. The ones who had come together—
Yao
and
Yan Yan
—also used the same paper for their letters.
Chapter — Part 4
"Hey, what does this letter mean?"
Brother Rahan had a dangerous look on his face.
He was pointing to the passage that read: *"Yao and the others are still at my place — what should I do about it?"*
"So it goes like this and that."
Maomao gave a succinct account of Yao's situation.
At this point, what sort of face must Brother Rahan have been making? His eyebrows were drawn upward, his eyes bulging, his nostrils flaring, and he was baring his teeth like a wild beast. On top of that, his hair was standing straight up as if reaching for the heavens.
"Eeek!"
The quack doctor cowered.
Even Maomao was genuinely surprised. She hadn't known the normally even-keeled Brother Rahan could produce such a furious expression. If you carved his current likeness into wood, it would make a perfect demon statue.
"…That bastard…sending me off to the middle of nowhere while he stays with young unmarried women — two of them, no less…"
Yan Yan was there as well, so nothing could possibly happen, but telling that to Brother Rahan in his current state would be like pouring water on a hot stone.
"But something about this passage seems off, doesn't it?"
"Oh? What part?"
Even his speech patterns had changed. For someone from the Luo household, Rahan actually had a reasonably decent face, but right now it was twisted beyond recognition.
"If it said 'again' instead of 'still,' that would make sense. Those two did go back to the dormitory once, you know."
"But right now — they're there, aren't they?"
"Brother Rahan, please don't get that close to me with that face on."
"Don't you dare say the name Rahan!"
"Ahh, fine, fine."
It seemed his brother's romantic entanglements were a sore spot.
Suppose Yao and the others had returned to Rahan's place because of something to do with Yao's uncle — that was conceivable. But would Rahan, of all people, mix up "again" and "still"?
*(Something's bugging me.)*
Maomao studied Rahan's letter more carefully. The oil paper was firmly stuck to the letter, and it didn't look like it would come off. No, wait —.
*(As if someone had tried to peel it off?)*
The four corners of the oil paper bore faint marks, as though they had been peeled up at some point.
*(Peeled up and re-stuck?)*
Maomao checked the other two letters as well.
If something had been tampered with in Rahan's letter, it was highly likely that the other two had been handled in the same way.
Upon closer inspection of the text, the ink had bled. The oil paper must have been applied afterward, causing the writing on the front side to smear.
Three letters. She felt like something similar had happened before.
If Yao and Enen had put their heads together, there had to be a connection.
*(Like invisible ink, or — no.)*
The oil paper was pasted over the letters, so setting them on fire would simply burn them to ash. The oil paper must have been applied deliberately, to let the recipient check the contents and conclude they were safe. In that case, the oil paper was nothing more than a bluff.
Maomao stared intently at the letter.
Rahan's older brother stared at it too.
The quack doctor, who wanted to get inside for the time being, pretended to think as well.
"…Is this really something Rahan sent?"
"Why do you ask? It's his handwriting, so please accept the sad reality."
"That's not what I mean! You know how obsessed he is with numbers, right?"
"Yes."
She knew all too well.
"This letter — it's sloppy, isn't it?"
Rahan's older brother spread the letter open.
"I don't see anything particularly odd about it."
"No, it is odd. When he writes letters, he only ever uses paper in a ratio of roughly five vertical to eight horizontal."
"I wouldn't know about things like that."
Rahan would probably call it a beautiful ratio.
Unfortunately, Maomao had little interest in Rahan's letters.
"Maybe he just ran out of paper?"
"No, you don't understand that freak's obsession with bizarre numbers. When I slightly nicked my bangs once, I didn't think much of it, but while I was sleeping, he went and trimmed them evenly on his own. Because the difference was the width of a fingernail, he chopped away until I had almost no hair left. You think you can understand how I felt? He was five years old at the time."
"You've had nothing but pleasant experiences with your brother."
Brother, or rather, family in general.
"He's Rahan, after all. There has to be some reason for this."
Rahan's older brother stared intently at the letter.
Maomao looked at the other two letters as well. Yao's was considerably longer than Rahan's, but still much more manageable than Yanlan's. Yanlan's was not only long but written in characters the size of rice grains, and she had no desire to read any more of it.
Rahan's and Yao's writing was just the right size and easy to read.
Maomao suddenly tried overlaying Rahan's letter on top of Yao's. The vertical lengths matched. The horizontal length was exactly three times.
Both wrote uniformly sized characters, so when overlaid they roughly aligned. The only exceptions were spots where Yao's emotions had crept in, where the sizing differed somewhat.
"This is..."
"What is it?"
At Rokuseikan in the pleasure district, it was not uncommon for imperial examination candidates or those who had passed to visit. The thing people said was grueling about that world was the copying exercises—sitting in tiny cubby-hole-like seats for several days on end. She recalled that writing: you had to reproduce the model text in characters that were just as uniformly beautiful.
"Vertical and horizontal."
It wasn't just the size of the characters—the number of characters per vertical column was also precisely matched. And then Maomao searched for the phrase "not yet" that had caught her attention.
"Stone, coal, search."
She looked for Yao's text that would overlap with Rahan's message containing "not yet." Since Yao's letter was three times the length of Rahan's, she shifted it. Words floated to the surface.
"Coal?"
"Yes, coal. It's what they call burning stone. Depending on how it's used, it can serve as medicine, but I hear the harmful effects are also considerable."
Maomao's adoptive father Luomen knew that medicine was simultaneously poison. Since he used medicines that were as harmless as possible, coal was not something Maomao was very familiar with.
"And what does this coal matter for?"
"I'm not quite sure myself. But just to be safe, shall I report it?"
As long as it was merely a coincidence, that would be fine—thinking this, Maomao placed the letters back in the box.