At dawn the next day, the overcast clouds had been swept clean away. The blue sky looked freshly washed, revealing a crystalline expanse of azure.
The sun slowly rose over the eastern horizon, spilling ten thousand shafts of golden light across the earth and forests, dispelling the last trace of chill left behind by the wind and rain.
The female swordswoman groggily pushed herself up. Once seated, she discovered that she was lying atop bedding, covered by a white cotton quilt. A layer of dead grass lay beneath the bedding, and ashes from a firepit sat nearby.
Her shoulder twinged with pain. Looking down, she saw that half her garment had been removed around her injured shoulder and arm, bandages wrapped around her shoulder, carrying a faint medicinal fragrance.
"???"
I was injured?
A string of question marks drifted over the female swordswoman's head. After sorting through her thoughts, she finally remembered what had happened before she fainted.
Confirming there was nothing amiss with her body, she took out a light robe and draped it over herself, nodding inwardly. As expected of the husband her junior sister had chosen—upright in character and proper in conduct. She raised both hands in support of this marriage.
That said, which junior sister was it exactly? Her eye for husbands was far better than hers.
Curious.JPG
Just then, Xiang Yuan happened to enter the room. Seeing that the female swordswoman was awake, he stepped forward with cupped hands and apologized for his offense.
He crouched down, checked her wound, and redraped her robe over her. "Senior Sister, you were poisoned by Stellar Palace yesterday. You lost consciousness the moment you came inside, so I..."
"We children of the martial world don't stand on petty ceremony. It's nothing, nothing."
The female swordswoman raised her uninjured