The delicious pastries Xu Lingxin had mentioned resulted in the cost of a few silver coins. In the end, it was equivalent to An Fei reaching towards her mountain of wealth and obtaining a pinch to discard away without a second thought.
It was to discard, for she couldn’t think of any other conclusion to a doughy pastry that was excessively crumbly, sweet, and sticky to the tongue. The taste wasn’t particularly horrible to her preferences, but the visual impact as well as its physical properties were abhorrent to the senses.
“Little Sister… ah, the pastries didn’t turn out so well. How about Elder Sister go seek out a person who possesses some of the books regarding Bei Tang in recompense?”
The young girl soon found herself devoid of a few grams of silver coin, and the culprit successfully fled after tossing behind an unremarkable excuse. An Fei allowed a long sigh to escape her throat and glanced towards the brilliant radiance of the setting sun, shielding her eyes with her hand in the process.
It stung to glare at the blinding rays of the falling sun, and reminded her that the maleficent winter rains that were so rumored as terrifying by the locals was beginning its tumultuous reign of terror over Bei Tang. The young girl patted at her chest with her fingers, and her lips puckered in distaste.
“Consistent raining during the first month, flooding during the second, and devastating thunderstorms by the third,” An Fei grumbled.
“How did they manage to survive so long if these conditions repeat each year?”
The buildings were constructed from various materials of wood and stone, and didn’t appear to be that resilient against the constant erosion of flowing water…
An Fei clucked at her tongue to chase away her roaming thoughts, and began returning to the Plum’s Grove. As she pried apart the double doors of the inn, she could distinctly feel the various glares of interest and schadenfreude from the numerous cultivators lounging throughout the multiple layers of the pagoda. Some were more illicit than the rest, as if beckoning at her tarnished identity and powerlessness as a mortal young girl, whilst others held the sole intention to gossip.
The young girl shook her head twice and cursed Wen Jiu to his third set of ancestors for his actions, and marched into her room. The moment the door closed shut and the cultivators acutely heard the locking mechanism snap into place, the entire pagoda burst into discussion.
“Looks like the young cultivator from the Violet Jade Pavilion wasn’t lying. This Young Miss Xu – for her husband to not arrive after an entire day had passed, the rumor is true that she was cast aside for another woman?”
“What a pitiful mortal girl, to be cast aside at such a young age,” a thin cultivator chewed at his failure of a beard.
“If it were up to me, I would definitely console her carefully and subtly…”
“Cultivator Gui, you mean that you would take her into her room, ravage her body, and make Cultivator Wen wear a brilliant green hat?” the cultivator grasping a branch of grapes chortled and whistled from the platform below.
“She is naught but a mortal. Would she even survive a night with your delicate hands, especially when she is so young?”
The cultivator surnamed Gui huffed in disagreement, and pointed a sharp, accusing finger towards the languished man sitting below. Then, with a deep breath of apprehension and a forced expression of horror plastered on his beady eyes, he tore apart his strangled beard with his teeth.
“Jang Muyin, don’t point such accusations at me, assess your… diligent and profound history! Let alone this miserable Young Miss Xu, did you think we didn’t know that you would accept and console flowers who have yet to bloom or sprout a single petal?”
“What did you say!?” Jang Muyin screeched with a flushed countenance, and pointed to himself in disbelief.
“Gui Rutian, this Buddhist is a proper cultivator of the Joyful Buddha! This is called the act of carefully teaching the profound mysteries of the Dao, do you understand!?”
“This act of teaching the profound mysteries of the Dao, does it require a luxurious bedchamber and several sticks of excitatory incense? In that case, I also wish to learn this mysterious and profound art from Almighty Buddhist Jang, such that my future disciples can also learn the Dao at its greatest depth!”
“You dare defile the Almighty Buddha’s teachings – “
Their minds burdened with the eternal enemy of cabin fever and sieged by a monstrous winter rain, the cultivators that littered the earth of Bei Tang began to hurl derogatory remarks and innuendos towards one another.
They cared not that the initial topic was to lasciviously gaze upon a mortal girl supposedly discarded by her husband at a young age, nor that such mortal girl could hear every statement and remark that crawled from underneath the door.
After a few minutes, the reverberating sounds were ruthlessly detained by a rag that had been casually discarded by Xu Lingxin a few hours before.
With silence finally returning to the dimly lit bedroom reserved for her use, An Fei sank down onto the soft mattress and allowed her body to slump into a sluggish posture. The young girl suppressed a brief rippling yawn that threatened to escape her lips, and directed her gaze towards the ceiling.
“Three months. Three months stranded in this city, then possibly years before I can leave Bei Tang’s borders,” she muttered with resignation.
“It’s already been more than two years since I left Jiang’an. With the way things are… just when can I return?”
A long period of time had passed since she last saw the magnificent wall enclosing the city of Jiang’an in the skies dominating over Great Yong. And yet, regardless of how An Fei stared into the mirror, her facial features nor bodily proportions had yet to change. Her height was cemented at a hundred and fifty centimeters, and her countenance failed to deviate from that of a teenage girl of fourteen years of age, perhaps fifteen.
It was truly perplexing. Perhaps she couldn’t discern any visible changes due to the application of the cosmetic medicament, or another reason altogether.
“However, three months – what am I supposed to do? Sit around in a room all day?”
She couldn’t resume her journey, for no intelligent person of Bei Tang would dare brave the winter rain. And yet, her “tarnished identity” forced her to be able to do nothing whilst cooped up in the Plum’s Grove.
They could offer their sympathies and refuse to collect exorbitant fees from a mortal girl deceived and ruined by a cultivator, but nobody dared intervene in the… “connected bond” between her and Wen Jiu. They ravenously gossiped behind her back, but the moment she turned to face them without Xu Lingxin present, the entire pagoda of luxury and decadence was silent and devoid of voice.
That too, was a perplexing matter. She didn’t know whether it was due to a set of social conventions that prevented them from offering a reply when she asked a question, or if they were just apprehensive of Wen Jiu’s unknown combative capability.
…whatever combative capability he could scrounge up from his everlasting reserves of shamelessness and deceit, An Fei didn’t care. And yet, she didn’t know whether she should attempt deliberately adding chaos to her current situation and divert some of the awkwardness onto the man who held most of the responsibility.
“Men – or rather those possessing any form of power over others will never hesitate to abuse it,” the young girl chuckled to herself in disdain.
“Why should cultivators be any different? If mortals possessing social authority can abuse the wives of others, who is to say that a cultivator won’t restrain himself when encountering me, a supposedly weak, young mortal girl?”
An Fei’s lips twitched as the words left her mouth, and couldn’t help but blink when receiving absolute silence in reply. She instantly sprung from her relaxed posture and onto her feet, and her right hand shot towards the lotus petal nestled in her hair.
“Xilong?”
Xu Lingxin had promised to return before midnight, and wasn’t expected to be present until after a few hours. As the reign of silence tightened its grip over the bedroom, An Fei’s brows increased their downwards slant.
“Xilong? Are you present?”
The heavenly dragon who used to be reliable in its advice in the past and instantly responded whenever she called its name was not present. Regardless of her calls, all An Fei received from the bedroom and its scintillating decorations was soft dispatches of her own voice.
Where did the suspicious dragon go?
The young girl’s brows settled into a pitched crease as her lips puckered in confusion and concern. As An Fei settled herself onto the bed with questions swarming around her heart, a heavenly dragon snuck into the Archives of Time.
It too, as well, was an astoundingly perplexing matter.
