Upon seeing the bamboo grove, Yagokoro Eirin smiled with delight and headed inside. Before long, she finally spotted a young man cutting bamboo.
"Found him—"
Eirin watched Mo Yi from afar for quite a while before muttering to herself, "He doesn't look like a bad person. That puts me at ease. I won't have to worry about Little Night being abused by him."
After checking in on Kamishirasawa Keine, Mo Yi began his usual Dragon King duties: wandering through the nearby bamboo grove and making inquiries, seeing whether he could find an old man who matched the Bamboo Cutter Old Man, as well as the Princess.
But Mo Yi discovered that there were no old men around doing bamboo-cutting work. After all, it was physically demanding labor. Given the average lifespan of humans in this era—where commoners were extremely short-lived due to living conditions, disease, and various other factors—most people who lived to old age were nobles. Even if commoners did not die of illness or starvation, once they reached a certain age, their descendants would carry them into the mountains. The outcome went without saying.
Old men were mostly nobles, and nobles could not possibly do work like cutting bamboo. Thus, Mo Yi was dumbfounded. He simply could not find his future father-in-law anywhere nearby.
"How about—"
After accomplishing nothing for several days, Mo Yi complained:
"Since no one is coming to cut bamboo, I'll cut it myself. Maybe that'll trigger the event where the Princess bursts out of a bamboo stalk."
With nothing else to do, Mo Yi immediately got to work. Every swing of his axe felled a stalk of bamboo. Not wanting to waste what he cut down, he decided to make some bamboo furniture from it.
*Plum blossoms, orchids, bamboo, and chrysanthemums are the