A day without ups and downs is a tedious thing. Unfortunately, Maomao was not built to endure such days.
Thinking about it, this room—half-storeroom in a manner of speaking—was actually a blessing for Maomao. As she rummaged through the accumulated cargo, she found quite a few interesting things.
*Th-this is!?* Beneath lacquerware and plates, there was a paulownia box stuffed with books. The box bore marks where it had been bumped and struck here and there, and looked quite old.
It was moth-eaten and falling apart, but still readable—and more importantly, its contents made her eyes light up.
It was a collection cataloguing not only domestic flora and fauna, but those of foreign lands as well.
Each volume, roughly an inch thick, was labeled "Insects," "Birds," "Beasts," "Fish," "Trees," and "Grass." They appeared to be part of a series, numbered sequentially, but only about ten volumes were present. At least several more seemed to be missing.
Maomao picked out the volume labeled "Grass" and began leafing through it. One species per page, with illustrations and accompanying text. The writing style was somewhat archaic and a bit difficult to read.
*Woodblock printing?* She realized it must be quite old. Paper had apparently become precious only within the last few decades. As a result, her father had once told her that techniques like woodblock printing—designed to mass-produce pages on paper—had become extremely rare in recent times.
For entertainment novels, perhaps, but honestly, producing illustrated compendiums with limited demand—and in a serialized format no less—would only have been feasible before the timber regulations were enacted. She couldn't imagine turning a profit on something like this.
*Such great content, though.* She turned the pages with shining eyes, never growing tired of reading.
Then she noticed that certain pages had fine, cramped writing in the margins. The hand was slightly idiosyncratic. It appeared to be supplementary notes added to the compendium's descriptions.
Maomao's eyes shone even brighter. She went from carefully turning each page to flipping through them rapidly, stopping only to scrutinize those with handwritten additions.
A shiver ran through her entire body. The content had excited her so much that goosebumps rose on her skin.
Here and there among the writing, characters from a foreign script were interspersed—the same script as the foreign medical texts her father had once burned to keep her from reading.
Foreign script aside, every handwritten passage described the properties of plants and their medicinal uses.
This made it clear that the person who had owned these books was involved in medicine—and, like her father, had studied abroad in a foreign land.
*Someone besides Father who did that?* She was practically trembling with the desire to meet this person.
But then she remembered something.
Why were this person's belongings stored in a place like this? And from there, she arrived at a certain possibility.
"Don't scatter things around."
When did she appear?
Cuiling was standing there. She held a basket containing food.
"When did you get here?"
"Right about when you pressed both hands to your cheeks, let out a strange laugh, and started swaying your body around."
"..."
Maomao slowly lowered her eyes and, with an aching heart, closed the book. She stroked the volume and placed it back into the paulownia box, vowing to continue reading once Cuiling left.
"It is, after all, my grandfather's, so please don't lose it."
She murmured this under her breath as Cuiling arranged the vegetables on the table.
(Grandfather...)
Maomao recalled what she knew of Cuiling's upbringing.
A court physician who had been expelled from the palace for making advances toward a lady-in-waiting. And Cuiling's mother must have been a child born to that physician before she too left the inner court.
If things had been different, Cuiling's mother would have been a noble young lady raised like a precious flower, doted upon with butterflies and blossoms.
But the word "if" was, in truth, cruelly far from reality.
What had become of the physician, framed with a crime to conceal the emperor's particular proclivities? And this Cuiling, who called such a person her grandfather— (There's no point in holding a grudge.)
Was that the reason she was now in this fortress?
Maomao didn't understand Cuiling, this woman. Nor did she understand Loulan.
Even if she thought deeply about such matters, she was neither Cuiling nor Loulan, so it was only natural that she didn't understand.
But there was something else that interested her far more.
"Might I be able to meet this grandfather of yours?"
She made this offer without reading the room at all. She knew it—given her current situation, she knew that saying such a thing was pointless.
But she couldn't help herself.
"...He's no longer with us. He was confined to this room the whole time, and he passed away five years ago."
The casually delivered words made Maomao's shoulders slump in defeat.
(So it was confinement.)
In other words, it must have been turned into a storage room after he died. That was why there were his grandfather's belongings—or whoever he was—stored underneath.
Hearing that, the iron bars on the window and the toilet connecting to the room all made sense.
"I was told to create an elixir of immortality for the mistress here."
Those words made Maomao's eyes light up once more.
There was no cure-all, and elixirs of immortality were no different. Her father had told her as much, yet the moment she heard the words, she couldn't help but grow curious.
Suirei pulled the volumes on "insects" and "fish" from the box and flipped through them casually.
"Were you able to make it?"
"If I had, he wouldn't have died."
A perfectly reasonable point.
Maomao herself tended toward a cold temperament, but this woman called Suirei was on yet another level.
"If you could create one, you could make yourself very useful to the mistress here."
With that, she handed the notebook she'd been holding to Maomao.
"Also, please don't make too much noise. Your voice was leaking outside earlier."
Maomao clamped a hand over her mouth.
Suirei picked up the empty basket and left the room.
For an instant, she thought she heard loud voices from beyond the opened door, but it was probably just her imagination.
Maomao stuffed her cheeks with the prepared meal and devoted herself to some reading for a while.
Before she knew it, it had grown dark outside. Since her being here was a secret, she wasn't allowed to light any lamps on her own.
Though part of her wanted to keep reading a little longer, Maomao lay down on the bed.
The former court physician who had been researching the elixir of immortality—just how capable she had been was clear even from the annotations she'd left behind.
(She couldn't hold a candle to the old man, of course.)
But Maomao thought she must have been the most capable person after him.
Every time she came across an unfamiliar plant or animal name and learned which part served what purpose, she realized she was letting out eerie sounds of excitement all on her own.
(This won't do, this won't do.)
Having thought that, she tried to hold her tongue, but this time her arms and legs were flailing about.
The items were just that fascinating.
They were more than enough to pass the time for Maomao, but calling it "research" felt rather inadequate. There must have been various other tools, but those must have been removed.
(I want to see more...)
With that thought, she closed her eyes and chewed over what she had learned that day. Besides the text written directly in the book, bits of paper were tucked in here and there like bookmarks. Various plants had been pressed and placed between the pages.
Maomao groped for the papers inside her collar.
She must have pulled out something that had been tucked in among these.
(Huh?)
Maomao sat up involuntarily. She tried to get off her bedding to check the contents of the paulownia box, but it was too dark to see.
She lost her footing and took a spectacular tumble.
(WHOA!)
With a tremendous racket, something propped up fell over. A box of lacquerware landed squarely on Maomao's stomach, and she let out a strangled, frog-like croak.
For a moment she writhed on the floor while keeping her mouth clamped shut.
Once the pain had subsided somewhat, she pressed her ear to the door.
(Nobody noticed, right?)
She was rubbing her stomach and about to let out a sigh when— (!?)
She heard a click, and then clattered forward.
Half of Maomao's body tumbled out into the hallway. Before her eyes, she could see silver-embroidered shoes. The long trailing skirt was made of silk, and as her gaze traveled upward, she saw an aging woman.
The woman was dressed in flamboyant hair ornaments and robes. The nails of her ring and pinky fingers had been grown to about two inches in length, and— tortoiseshell nail guards were fitted on them.
But her face wore a crooked smile. What must have once been a beautiful face had developed a strange distortion beyond the mere wrinkles of age.
Behind the woman stood two maidservants, smiling just like their mistress, and behind them was Suiryo, her face drained of color. She looked as though she was about to say "What's all the commotion about?" to Maomao.
(Ugh, this is bad.)
"So there really were sewer rats mixed in after all."
She laughed in a gleeful, cackling way, tilting her head high, then kept her gaze inverted as she looked down at Suiryo.
The color drained even further from Suiryo's normally calm and composed face.
It was a voice Maomao had heard before.
This was the woman who had driven a hairpin into a cage when they entered the fortress—the mother of Roulan, the legal wife of Shoshou, and a former high-ranking consort.
Whether it was the passage of years or some other factor, she was no longer the peerless beauty she had once been. She approached Suiryo with her face upside-down, laughing and shaking her hair. Her ghostlike movements made Suiryo visibly tremble.
"You shouldn't keep filthy things around, you know."
The woman raised her right hand while still smiling, and in a flash— Two finger guards grazed Suiryo's cheek. A red line of blood trickled down. And without a moment's gap, the folding fan in the woman's left hand struck Suiryo's temple.
(Ruthless.)
She had deliberately angled it to avoid wind resistance, aiming to hit bone. Suiryo bowed her head low, repeating "I am truly sorry" over and over.
The maidservants laughed behind her, but their eyes held no amusement.
"You poor thing. It's probably just another Roulan tantrum, isn't it."
As she spoke, she seized Suiryo's hair in her fist and pulled her face close. And just when Maomao wondered what she was going to do, she licked the streaming blood with her tongue.
(……)
"No matter how much you try to dilute it with noble blood, once filthy blood gets mixed in, it's all over."
The woman wrapped her blood-tinged saliva in a tissue from her sleeve and tossed it onto Suiryo's head.
The woman turned to leave, seemingly satisfied, when— "Oh, right, right. That little mouse of yours."
She hadn't been forgotten after all.
(Please, just forget about me.)
On the contrary, Maomao was pushed back into her room by a guard-like man from above.
"Call some of the girls working underground, would you? Even something like this should provide a modicum of comfort."
With those words, the woman departed, a cruel smile still plastered on her face.
Cui Ling, pale-faced, kept repeating over and over: "I'm so sorry.
Lady Shinbi.
I'm so sorry."
She offered nothing but apology after apology.
(What a grand-sounding name.)
Maomao watched the woman's retreating figure through the gap in the closing door and thought to herself.