The carpentry workshop was only a hundred meters from the shop Jin Shanyao had just bought. It was called a carpentry workshop, but in her eyes, it was a slaughterhouse.
The carpenters held planes, hand saws and chisels, pushing and planing away at the wood. Shavings flew all around the room... corpses, all of them bloody and mangled.
Jin Shanyao shuddered, found the old carpenter who was working the hardest, and explained what she wanted before taking him back to her place.
As soon as the old carpenter entered, he saw a man lying on the floor and froze. Before he could think, Jin Shanyao headed into the inner courtyard, and he hurried after her.
Jin Shanyao pointed to the main room and the wing rooms on either side. "Tear down all the kang beds and rebuild them. Replace the windows and doors, and furnish everything with wardrobes, desks, bookcases, washstand frames and wooden basins."
The old carpenter nodded repeatedly. This was a big order, and he cursed himself for not bringing paper and a brush to write everything down. After they had gone around the rear courtyard, the two of them came to the street-front shop.
Jin Shanyao pointed at one wall. "Cover this wall with medicine cabinets, and put a counter in front of them." She turned toward the east window. "Put a big table there, and make four chairs too."
As she spoke, she went outside and pointed at the signboard above the door. "Put a two-meter signboard here. Call it Anzhi Hall."
The old carpenter made a note of it. "Miss Jin, all of this will cost quite a bit."
"How much?"
"At least eighty or ninety taels. I'll go back and work it out, then give you an exact figure."
Jin Shanyao clapped her hands. "All right, go calculate it. But be quick. As you saw, the people I bought don't have anywhere to live yet."
"Don't worry, Miss Jin. My whole family are carpenters. We can get all of this done in half a month."
"Good."
After seeing the old carpenter off, Jin Shanyao walked back inside and saw Lu Chi craning his neck to look at her. "Are you a physician?" He thought he had spoken clearly, but all that came out was a garbled mumble.
Jin Shanyao squatted down and looked down at him. Without a word, she reached straight for his clothes and began undoing them, frightening Qing He into turning her back.
Qing Yang summoned her courage and spoke. "Mistress, what are you doing?"
"Examining his injuries."
Lu Chi's eyes seemed ready to spit fire. He pinned all his hopes on Qing Yang, hoping she would appeal to the propriety between men and women and talk this madwoman out of it.
Qing Yang swallowed. "Mistress, the... the doors are wide open, and people are coming and going in the street. I'm afraid this could harm your reputation. Why don't we move him to the rear courtyard?"
In the past, Jin Shanyao had always treated "people" right out in the street, and no one had ever objected. But Qing He had turned her back, her skin bright red from her ears down her neck.
Jin Shanyao was rather speechless. Humans were so troublesome. In the forest, males and females went without clothes and felt no embarrassment, yet humans had come up with rules about keeping men and women apart. Even so, they didn't miss out on a single dirty thing they wanted to do. Who knew what they were guarding against?
Jin Shanyao tucked Lu Chi under her arm, found a random room in the rear courtyard, and tossed him onto the kang.
Before Lu Chi could recover, Jin Shanyao began stripping him. Unable to move, he flushed crimson with shame. Just as Jin Shanyao tried to take off his trousers,
he finally exploded. "Are you a woman or not? Have you no shame at all?"
Jin Shanyao froze. What was he mumbling about?
When Lu Chi saw her stop, he had barely breathed a sigh of relief before he felt a chill below. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a pair of trousers in Jin Shanyao's hand.
Trousers...
"Ah... close your eyes! Close your eyes! Close them, quickly!" Lu Chi shouted in desperation. He tried to raise a hand to cover himself, but couldn't muster the strength. He could only watch helplessly as it was exposed to the air.
His face turned alternately green and red. "Don't look! Look again and I'll gouge your eyes out!" he said sharply.
Lu Chi thought he sounded terrifying, but in truth, his words were so garbled that she couldn't make them out.
Jin Shanyao took out a handkerchief and covered it, a faint look of distaste on her face.
Among trees like her, a branch like that would have been cut off. Sticking out every which way, it would have made her a laughingstock among her kind.
Lu Chi said, "What do you mean by that? What's with that look?"
Jin Shanyao pried his mouth open and checked the root of his tongue. Nothing wrong there? Could something be wrong with his vocal cords? She pushed her fingers farther in.
Urgh... woman, you're dead.
Jin Shanyao was puzzled. There was nothing wrong with his vocal cords, so he wasn't mute!
She placed her fingers on Lu Chi's pulse. Besides the knockout drug and the Sinew-Softening Powder, there were another three or four poisons in his body, all of which he had carried since he was in his mother's womb.
Jin Shanyao couldn't help looking at him. He was lucky to be alive after all that.
Lu Chi had been beaten so badly that there wasn't a patch of uninjured skin on him. New wounds lay over old ones; one look was enough to tell he had suffered inhuman torment.
Jin Shanyao sprinkled ginkgo leaf powder over his wounds bit by bit. The powder seeped into them, and the pain gradually faded.
Lu Chi was astonished. "What medicine is that? It's so good at stopping pain."
Jin Shanyao didn't understand what he said. She picked up another medicine bottle, poured out a ginkgo nut, pried open his mouth and put it in.
"What did you make me eat? Ptoo, ptoo, ptoo..." Lu Chi turned his head. "Urgh..." He retched for ages without bringing up even a drop of saliva, then slumped onto the kang in defeat.
The light had gone out of his eyes as he stared blankly at the roof. His dignity as a man was utterly gone.
Seeing him looking half-dead, Jin Shanyao said mildly, "It'll take three months to completely purge the poisons from your body. Removing them too quickly would be bad for you.
"Oh, right, you know the six arts of a gentleman, don't you?"
At a time like this, she was still asking him about the six arts of a gentleman. She's sick... Lu Chi didn't want to hear Jin Shanyao speak.
Let it all be destroyed... let's perish together.
It was late October, and the air was chilly.
A handkerchief was all that covered his body, and his heart was colder than the weather. Even when he had been locked in a life-and-death struggle with his family, he had never suffered such humiliation.
Vicious woman... a backwater breeds vicious women... once the poison is purged, that vicious woman's life will be over. No... Lu Chi suddenly stopped. That vicious woman had said she could cure the poisons in his body.
In the shop at the front of the property.
Jin Shanyao set a stool inside the shop. The moment she put up the cloth banner, a crowd surged forward.
Qing He and Qing Yang jumped in fright. Calling out to their mistress, they tried to close the doors, but the crowd knocked them from side to side. When they tried to turn back and stop them, the crowd had already divided into two lines on its own.
A woman slapped ten taels of silver onto the table and asked Jin Shanyao, "Where is my husband's mistress hiding?"
Jin Shanyao put away the silver and leaned toward the woman with a smile, whispering a few words. The woman immediately stormed out of the shop, and someone else promptly took the stool.
The sisters' mouths fell open in shock. Their mistress could not only practice medicine, but also tell fortunes. The young miss in particular could not only read and write, but was also learning medicine from their mistress.
Most enviable of all, even the medical hall had been named after the young miss.
The sisters were shaken to their cores. So girls could be cherished too, and could learn to read and write. If only they had an aunt like that.
By the time the fortune-telling and three consultations were finished, it was time for Meng Anci to leave school.
In the rear courtyard, Lu Chi was gradually regaining the ability to move. He strained to reach his clothes, cursing eighteen generations of Jin Shanyao's ancestors in his heart. He was the heir of the Marquis of Zhenyuan.
He had carried poison since his time in the womb and had visited famous physicians far and wide, but none could cure him. On his way home from a palace banquet, the poison had flared up, and he had been abducted and secretly sold on the black market.
Damn it... only ten taels.
Only after changing hands several times had his price risen to seventy taels.
That was less than the cost of one of his meals.
Lu Chi struggled into his clothes and pulled his belt tight. Leaning against the wall, he carefully felt the state of his body. The poison flared up once a month, around the fifteenth.
When it flared up, it felt as though ants were gnawing all over him, the pain and itching unbearable. When it had happened last month, the slave traders had thought he was dying and resold him cheaply to this remote border town.
Lu Chi lowered his eyes to the traces of medicine on his fingertips, thoughts churning.
Even the Imperial Medical Academy had been helpless against this poison, able only to keep him alive with medicinal decoctions. Yet this woman could cure it in three months.
She also seemed to have said that she feared his body couldn't withstand the detoxification if it went too quickly.
The words sounded ordinary, yet they shook Lu Chi to his core. Who was she?
Creak... the door opened.