(I'm so tired.)
Once again, Maomao reflected that dealing with people she wasn't accustomed to was exhausting.
She had just delivered the fox-eyed man, dead drunk, to the nap room and was now staggering her way back.
Jinshi and Gaoshun had other matters to attend to, so they parted ways with her and went off with different officials. Among them was the official who had come along for the sashimi incident.
His name turned out to be
Mashan.
She had already met him several times but had only just committed it to memory.
The man was unsociable, but he was competent at his work, which made things easy. If he didn't feel like talking, Maomao had no need to force conversation either.
She thought again that they were simply incompatible—there were things she could never accept, no matter what.
Having met that man again, Maomao reflected.
Even if he harbored no ill intent whatsoever.
As she shuffled along, Maomao spotted a glamorous procession. A large
umbrella
was being held by a lady-in-waiting, and at the center of the group stood Consort Loulan, resplendent in gorgeous attire.
"..."
She heard a click of the tongue beside her. Mashan was staring at the group through narrowed eyes, looking thoroughly displeased.
As Maomao watched, wondering what to make of it, she noticed a plump official standing on the far side. He was flanked by two men who appeared to be deputies, with several more followers behind them. Among them was a face that looked somehow familiar.
(That is...?)
Two court ladies were mixed in. One of them had been part of the group that had previously picked a fight with Maomao—a tall court lady who hadn't particularly spoken up herself but had hung back.
Maomao's gaze flickered their way for a moment, but there was probably no need to worry about it. If she was a court lady serving in the palace, it wouldn't be unusual for her to belong to some faction or other.
When Loulan spotted the plump man, she began chatting with him warmly, daintily covering her mouth with a round fan.
Maomao thought it seemed rather too familiar for a conversation held in front of so many attendants, but—
"Those scheming parent and child."
—upon hearing that dark mutter, she understood perfectly. So that was the father of Consort Loulan, the woman who had muscled her way into the rear palace.
According to rumors, he was a senior minister from the previous emperor's reign — the kind of thorn in the side that the current emperor, a man who valued merit above all else, would find intolerable.
Even so, Maomao glanced at Bashin.
True, she was the only one within earshot, but she wished he would stop running down high-ranking officials. If anyone else had overheard, they might have assumed those words were being tossed around in casual conversation with her.
*(Still so green.)*
Maomao thought to herself as she studied the young man, who was not so different in age from her.
*(Even so,)*
she still couldn't shake the feeling that he reminded her of someone.
That night, instead of returning to the rear palace, Maomao ended up going to Jinshi's residence.
"I thought you might still hold a grudge."
Jinshi had already returned and was waiting for her.
"What do you mean?"
Maomao was
eating the congee Suiren
had prepared. It was poor manners to speak while eating, but
regaining the nutrition she had lost at the Crystal Palace
took priority. Seeing how gaunt Maomao had become in such a short time, Suiren had been preparing not just congee but dish after dish.
This place, too, was like the Jade Palace — the attendants placed no restrictions on her work.
Jinshi folded his arms and gingerly opened his mouth.
"I—"
"Don't say it!!"
Jinshi pulled a sour face, as if to say, *See? You do hate me after all.*
Resentment and hatred might sound similar, but they were quite different things, Maomao thought.
"I don't resent you. If anything, I'm here thanks to your accurate guess."
"Accur—"
Jinshi gave her a look of exasperation, as if to ask whether she couldn't have worded that any better.
"Even so—"
It was the truth, so there was nothing to be done about it.
"I don't know what you were imagining, but without a prostitute's consent, a child—"
"—will not—"
"—be conceived."
All the prostitutes kept taking contraceptive herbs or abortifacient medicines.
Even if, despite that, a child was conceived, there were countless ways to induce a miscarriage in the early stages.
A child was born only because the woman had the will to bear it.
"Rather—"
"—was it not—"
"—you who was being schemed against?"
A woman who could read the cycle of her blood could predict, to some extent, the days when conception was most likely.
If she was a prostitute, all she had to do was have the client's visits rescheduled through a letter to a more convenient time.
"You mean the military strategist?"
Jinshi said, picking up one of the pastries Shuiei had brought.
"Women are cunning creatures."
That was precisely why, when her aim missed, she must have lost all sense of herself.
She would not have hesitated to harm her own body, and more than that—
The dream she had the other day.
That had really happened.
Not content with just her own, she had attached a baby's little finger and sent the letter.
In the pleasure quarters, no one spoke of the prostitute who had given birth to Maomao.
Everyone knew the madam had silenced them.
But such things inevitably seeped out through the atmosphere and idle curiosity.
That Rokusōkan was on the verge of collapse — the cause was Maomao.
That the oddball who loved go and shogi was her father.
"Lord Jinshi, that man has never spoken to you outside the office, has he?"
Jinshi tilted his head.
"Now that you mention it, I don't think he has."
Jinshi said the man always just gave a casual nod whenever they passed each other in the corridor. It was only when he was camped out in the office that he would persistently try to strike up conversation.
"There are people who can't recognize other people's faces. That man is one of them."
Maomao repeated what she had heard from her father. She was honestly skeptical about whether such a thing really existed, but hearing that that man was one of those people, she felt it suddenly made sense.
"He can't recognize faces?"
"Yes. For some reason. So, the"
"parts"
"other than the face are apparently how he recognizes who someone is."
Her father had told her with a somber look — that the man was pitiable too.
Even so, her father had his own way of thinking about it, and he never stopped the old maid from driving the man away with her broom.
"For some reason, he seems to clearly recognize only me and my adoptive father, and that strange obsession of his seems to stem from that."
The peculiar man who appeared out of nowhere one day had suddenly tried to take her away.
The sight of the old maid appearing and beating him bloody with her broom
struck deep in her young heart
with terror.
When someone with a bloodied face grins vacantly and reaches out to you with trembling hands, anyone would be frightened.
After that, he kept appearing and doing unexpected things,
only to
leave bloodied each time, so gradually she became the sort of person who was no longer surprised by much.
He insisted he was her father, but to Maomao, her father was her old man and that eccentric was not. In terms of his role, the best he could claim was that of a stud.
He tried to push Luomen aside and claim the role of father for himself.
That was simply unthinkable — one thing she would never budge on.
The people of the pleasure quarter had all suffered for it, and the woman who gave birth to Maomao was dead — but that had nothing to do with Maomao.
It wasn't solely that man's fault, either.
Most importantly, she had no memories of the dead woman. If she had any at all, they weren't memories of a mother. They were memories of a terrifying old hag.
She might not have liked her, but she didn't resent her.
That was how Maomao felt about Luomen.
Since she didn't actually hate him — just found him difficult to deal with — she tended to go a bit overboard in how she handled him.
Maomao raised her left hand and looked at the tip of her pinky finger.
"Lord Jinshi, did you know?"
"Know what?"
"If you cut off the tip of your finger, it grows back. The tip, anyway."
"...Is that really something to say over a meal?"
For once, Jinshi gave her a half-lidded glare. Their usual roles were reversed.
"Well then, here's another one."
"Another what?"
"What would you think if that monocle man told you to call him—"
"'Papa'?"
"How would you feel about that?"
Jinshi froze for an instant, his face openly showing a rare look of displeasure. "Oh dear," Suirei murmured, covering her mouth with her hand as she watched.
"I'd want to smash his monocle right off his face."
"Right?"
It seemed Jinshi had figured out what Maomao was getting at. He muttered, "So being a father is really that much trouble."
Standing nearby,
Gaoshun
somehow had a melancholy air about him.
Had something happened?
"What's wrong?"
When Maomao asked, Gaoshun tilted his head back to look up at the ceiling.
"No, just consider it as there being no father in this world who enjoys being despised by his child."
He said this with a wistful tone.
(Well, well.)
For the time being, Maomao brought the spoon to her mouth and decided to finish off the remaining porridge.