Heaven's Chosen Assembly!

"Why write it down?"

Ning Xiaohe thought for a moment. "I don't know. But what if it comes in handy someday?"

Lu Chi felt that answer was very much Ning Xiaohe's style: write everything down first, whether it would be useful or not. Leaning against the carriage wall, he gradually grew drowsy as the vehicle swayed, then drifted into a hazy sleep. When he woke, the carriage had stopped, and Ning Xiaohe was no longer sitting across from him. He lifted the curtain and looked outside. The carriage stood beside a dirt road, next to a harvested field. A row of poplars, most of their leaves gone, stood along the ridge between the fields. Ning Xiaohe was crouching on the ridge with her back to him, studying something on the ground.

He jumped down from the carriage, his legs slightly numb. It took a few steps for the feeling to return. When he came up behind Ning Xiaohe, he saw that she was using a thin twig to poke at a wild plant on the field ridge, more than half of it already withered. Several shriveled seeds hung from its stalk.

"What is that?"

"I don't know," Ning Xiaohe said. "But its seeds are different from a kind I saw in the Academy's medicinal garden. They're crescent-shaped and very small. I've never seen anything like them."

She carefully plucked the seeds from the stalk and placed them in a small paper packet. After folding it shut, she tucked it into a hidden compartment on the side of her wooden case.

Lu Chi glanced at her but said nothing. He felt that Ning Xiaohe's attitude toward things she "didn't recognize" was completely different from his. When he saw something unfamiliar, he would tense up first and judge whether it was dangerous.