He had never before wanted something so urgently, nor been so afraid of losing anything.

For a moment Xie Zheng even thought: if only he were truly just Yan Zheng.

In the end his mouth only twisted into a curve full of mockery.

· ─ ·✶· ─ · 

Fan Changyu returned carrying her food and saw Xie Zheng with one hand placed over his eyes, as if asleep.

When she stepped in, he lowered his arm and looked at her.

Fan Changyu smiled at him, “You’re awake? The cookhouse over there caught quite a few wild chickens and made chicken soup for the wounded soldiers, drink it while it’s hot.”

She held the large bowl in one hand and reached with the other to steady him. Xie Zheng’s face was excessively pale from blood loss; his eyes were dark and bruised from several days without sleep, yet his features were so well formed that, even like this, there remained a kind of decadent, haggard beauty, making him appear especially fragile.

After propping himself on the pillow and sitting up, Xie Zheng meant to reach for the bowl to drink himself, but Fan Changyu, as she had earlier when feeding him medicine, scooped some with a spoon and fed him.

Xie Zheng hesitated a moment, opened his mouth and drank, then without showing it, frowned.

—It’s so hot.

But Fan Changyu seemed not to notice this at all; after all, before this she had never fed anyone soup or medicine. When her parents died, Changning was already five, so she had never needed to worry about her meals or medicine.

The previous medicine had been cold for quite a while; this soup had just been brought from the cookhouse and was in a wooden bowl, so she couldn’t really sense the temperature.

When the second spoon was brought to Xie Zheng’s lips, the corner of his mouth twitched; he seemed about to speak but stopped, yet still opened his mouth and drank; then he reached out to take the soup bowl: “I’ll do it myself.”

Seeing his sickly face, Fan Changyu felt pity and did not let him take it. She stirred the soup with the wooden spoon, scooped another spoonful and fed it to him, saying, “Your injuries are so severe, rest properly. I’ll feed you.”

Xie Zheng looked at the steaming spoonful before him and ultimately resigned himself to drinking it.

After finishing that bowl of chicken soup, his tongue was scalded numb.

Fan Changyu looked at the empty bowl and, oddly, felt a surge of accomplishment.

She had really taken such good care of him!

Xie Zheng wanted to pour a cup of cold tea; she hurried to pour it too. When she handed it over she asked, puzzled, “You just finished a bowl of chicken soup, are you still thirsty?”

Xie Zheng pulled a careless excuse: “The gamey smell is a bit strong—just to cover the taste.”

A little broth remained in the bowl. Fan Changyu took a sip and found there was no salt in the chicken soup at all; it was so gamey she could hardly swallow it.

She frowned and said, “Probably the cookhouse was too busy and forgot to put salt, why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

Xie Zheng was silent for a moment; his expression grew somewhat grave as he said, “There is no salt.”

Fan Changyu was stunned for a moment, then immediately understood his meaning: this army was the kind that would fight one battle and then flee; they hadn’t prepared provisions, so how could they possibly have salt.

What the Jizhou reinforcements had brought were only food and medicine.

Here, survival itself was already a luxury—no one still cared whether things tasted good or not.

Before she came up the mountain, Old Tao had already told her about the dire situation above. Yixian Gorge was close to Chongzhou; after the Prince of Changxin suffered defeat at Lucheng, he had made a desperate gamble by besieging Yixian Gorge, intending to starve the Yanzhou army on the mountain into submission.

Continuous heavy rains had drowned fifty thousand of the Prince of Changxin’s troops, yet also left many soldiers on the mountain soaked and chilled.

The Prince of Changxin knew that Tang Peiyi’s siege of Chongzhou was merely for show, so he only withdrew half his forces back to the foot of the mountain as a precaution. But even with half his men gone, there were still twenty thousand Chongzhou troops below. If the main army descended now, even with the two to three thousand scattered reinforcements joining them, it would be like striking a rock with an egg.

Fan Changyu didn’t know what sort of situation they would face once the food on the mountain ran out. She only looked seriously at Xie Zheng and said, “Don’t worry. I’ve heard the Marquis of Wu’an is brilliant in strategy, he’s won so many battles; there’s no way he’d let the rebels trap him to death on this mountain. And even if, worst comes to worst, we finish all the food here and the rebels storm the mountain—as long as I still have the strength, I’ll carry you and escape.”

Xie Zheng felt a thousand emotions tangled in his chest as he looked at her and asked, “If it ever came to that point, you should focus on saving yourself. Why would you take me with you?”

Fan Changyu replied as if it were the most natural thing in the world: “I told you I’d take care of you from now on.”

He didn’t know what chord that struck within him. He stared at her for a long time before suddenly saying, “Fan Changyu, you don’t have to go this far out of guilt for me.”

“I joined the army not because I feared you or your neighbors would get into trouble—but because what I seek, all the power I want, lies here. I was wounded because I was earning military merit on the battlefield. It had nothing to do with you. What are you feeling guilty for?”

At that moment, his expression was almost cold.

Fan Changyu couldn’t quite understand why he suddenly seemed so distant and unfamiliar. She asked, “You didn’t want me to come find you?”

Xie Zheng’s black eyes were dark and restrained as he suppressed that faint, impossible hope. “If it’s only out of guilt,” he said, “then you shouldn’t have come. You owe me nothing.”

Fan Changyu began to grasp what he meant. She pressed her lips together and said, “Back in the tent earlier, I didn’t finish what I wanted to say. Before I came to find you, I’d already thought through both possibilities—whether you were alive or dead. When you left, I beat you so badly and said such harsh things, and then I never saw you again. Every time I thought about it, I felt awful—and yes, I did feel guilty.”

She paused, lifted her eyes to look at Xie Zheng, seeming a little lost. “But coming to find you… doesn’t seem to be just because of guilt. You don’t know—I almost died once too. Qingping County and Lin’an Town were both massacred. That rebel who had posed as a grain officer mixed himself in with the mountain bandits, wanting revenge on me. They had numbers, I couldn’t fight them off. I hid Changning and Aunt Zhao, but that bastard dislocated one of my arms and nearly drowned me in the river. Later, Changning was taken by someone, and while I was searching for her, I met Uncle Zhao. He told me you’d come here. I was afraid you’d die here, so I thought—whatever happens, I’d at least come see you. If you were dead, I’d bury you; if not, I’d talk with you for a bit, tell you Changning’s gone missing—I couldn’t find her, but I’ll keep looking…”

She rambled on, telling him all she had gone through after he left. Her vision grew inexplicably blurry, and when she blinked, a large tear rolled down from her eye.

How strange—she had seldom cried since childhood.

Unable to see the expression on the person before her, in the next instant she was forcefully pulled into an embrace even tighter than the previous time, so tight that her bones ached.

He pressed the back of her head so she leaned on his shoulder; the grip was fierce, his fingertips whitening. He seemed about to say something, his throat moving, yet he fell silent, closing his eyes heavily, and everything was contained in that soundless embrace.

The mingled smells of blood and medicine were unpleasant, but in this moment that embrace only intensified the sting behind Fan Changyu’s eyes; her chest swelled with an unfamiliar emotion, something akin to grievance.

After her parents died she had suffered many hardships, but she had never complained to others, nor shed a single tear in public.

Only today, taking advantage of this embrace, she laid her head on his shoulder and cried her heart out.

Outside the tent, Gongsun Yin led Changning to this spot. Hearing the sounds from within, he stood there torn—going in felt wrong, and not going in also felt wrong—his face full of indecision.