The Guest (4)
Even so, the girl had been out in the jianghu for some years now. She knew the martial world — she had brushed up against it once — and she knew the authorities, having brushed up against them once as well. She had bought medicine to treat her wounds, and after she began making money by cutting down bandits, she had trained an eye for which of the things in a bandit stronghold were actually precious. Spirit herbs and the materials that went into them she had already seen often enough in the years she spent among the adults.
So the girl knew what ginseng was. She knew the shape of its leaves, and the shape of its flowers. She knew what lingzhi was, too. And of course she knew that such things did not simply spring up because someone stuck them carelessly into a front yard. If they grew that way, no one would ever have treated them as spirit herbs in the first place.
It was not merely a matter of planting them, either. Did ginseng really grow when you dumped it into the full blaze of the sun like that? From the stories she had pestered out of the adults whenever she was bored, ginseng grew in the shade — deep in the mountains, beneath the cover of trees — and that was precisely why it was not easy to find.
Which was why, looking at the mistress of this place, the girl could not help but find her uncanny.
The woman who had introduced herself as Wang Soyun left no particular impression of a martial artist. Calluses had set into her hands, but they were not the marks of someone who gripped a sword. Her gait, the way she stood — neither had a martial artist's shape. If she truly was one even so, it meant she had not been the least bit tense in front of the girl.
An immortal, then? Was that why whatever she planted, however sloppily, simply grew? But she did not even look like a Daoist, let alone an immortal.
"Young lady?"
"Ah — yes."
Only at Wang Soyun's prompting did the girl barely manage an answer. All at once she realized she could not smell blood here at all. What brushed the tip of her nose was a medicinal fragrance, a clean, sweet scent rising from herbs and provisions spread out and hung to dry in every corner. A little disappointing. But, well.
What truly mattered was the sharp, biting note threading through those smells — something other than the scent of blood. Poison usually smelled like this. So there were traps inside the palisade as well. Was inviting a guest in meant, rather, to lure them?
Wang Soyun. A worn-out surname, a worn-out given name. Gather every woman by that name in Chengdu and you could probably fill a house. Not that I have any right to talk, the girl thought, having offered up the equally common surname Jin.
Every time a guest arrived, the same headache came first. How was I supposed to drive this one off?
If I had truly been strong, I could have refused them at the door from the start. Unfortunately, aside from my poison arts, I had no particular ability worth mentioning. I did not even know whether that poison would take, and if I used it on a whim I would not be able to live in this room for a while. I had no desire to do that. Unless the situation left me no choice, I would much rather send them off on good terms.
The guests who had come so far usually had business.
First, the ones who showed up to take "revenge" on me. Well — the moment they said a thing like that, their status as guests was already revoked. Anyone who died in a trap was hardly in a position to be my opponent, and even the rare survivor tended to reach my door soaked in blood, which only made them easier to deal with. I could finish it outside, before they ever came in, so no blood got on the house.
Second, guests with an interest in the crops I grew. They came up into the mountains because there was a stronghold here, saw what was growing inside, and paid in gold to take it away. I had raised the crops the way I used to in the game, and they had grown rather well — good medicinal effect, apparently. The ginseng I raised was especially popular with people from the authorities. Or so I had only heard. They belonged to the authorities, yes, but they were really just a hunting troop that walked around with guns.
Tok. I set the tea things down in front of the girl, who had gone and seated herself inside the very house where I lived.
The leaves I had grown and dried myself were fine for my own drinking, but I had never studied the art of tea, so I only steeped them passably. The girl, whose face had gone rather blank, was for some reason smiling brightly again. She lifted the warm cup and took a noisy gulp.
"Oh."
She looked up at me with round eyes.
"It's toasty, and delicious! Is this Dragon Well tea?"
"It wasn't grown at Dragon Well, so it isn't Dragon Well tea. I grew it and dried it myself. It doesn't really have a name."
"You only dried it?"
"It's tea you steep in water. Isn't drying it enough?"
At my question, that bright smile returned to the girl's face.
No — why was she in such a good mood again? I had things to do today.
Lately I mostly passed the time making bamboo slips. Split the bamboo thin, dry it slowly over the fire, twist cord and bind it, and the hours went by remarkably well. This world wrote paper books, of course. It was an alternate history with arts more advanced than the real Middle Ages, so that paper was even mass-produced. But buying any of it meant going all the way down to the nearest village.
Judging by the reactions of the bandits who had seen my face so far, I was reasonably pretty. The reflection I had caught in the water was not particularly ugly, either. Stir up curiosity for no reason and someone might start following me — or grow curious about the woman who walked down to the village and back into the forest every time. And this was a stretch of life when I was filthy bored, with nothing that could be called a hobby. A mysterious beauty appearing out of nowhere in a village was gossip all by itself.
"......"
"......"
A suffocating stretch of time.
I fished the rice ball back out of my pouch. I had taken only a few bites, so quite a lot remained. I stole a glance at the girl. What if she asked me to bring out something for her to eat as well? It was not that I had nothing to offer if she asked. But I had enough only because I lived alone out here; start handing food to other people and I would end up without a coin to my name.
"Are you perhaps hungry?"
In the end I lost to that look, and asked.
"No, I'm fine. Please finish your meal, young lady. It hasn't been so long since I ate."
"......All right."
Hadn't she said she was wandering the forest? And she was only thirsty? Well. It had been a lie from the start.
"By the way, the medicinal fragrance here is lovely. Even if a rather strong smell drifts in from outside, it should be all right."
"Yes. Well."
I answered between bites of the rice ball.
"Is it because of the smell of the corpses outside?"
She said it while I was eating.
"......Well. Yes."
"I've been to plenty of mountain strongholds like this, but a fragrant place is a first for me. I was curious, that's all."
Just what was she comparing my house to?
It was nothing like the slapdash strongholds bandits threw together. Far sturdier, warmer, and above all, safe.
I had stormed a nearby stronghold exactly once. A little over a year after I came here, I had been living in what amounted to a hut and had only just, barely, built something that deserved to be called a house — and the moment I stepped out, everything inside was cleaned out. I completely lost my head. I scraped together the poison plants left trampled on the floor, brewed the worst toxin I knew how to make, and went in.
It was probably the worst smell I had ever smelled in my life, counting every smell from the world I used to live in. Worse than the poison in my own hands. Even the things inside were impossible to use because of the stench, so I came back empty-handed. That was when I started raising the palisade. I reinforced the traps until they were far sturdier, too. After that, at least, the house stopped getting robbed. Even if someone had survived and gotten out that day, they had either died of the corpse-poison I had laid in the pit, or taken one look, fled, and never come back.
"......"
I closed my eyes and set the meal down. Remembering that smell, I simply could not eat.
"So you needn't mind this girl."
"......I've eaten enough to be full, that's all."
As I began clearing my meal away, the girl went back to her tea.
She had asked for a cup of water, hadn't she. If she would just drink this and go, that would be ideal. Looking at her face, though, I had a feeling she would not.
More than that, I could not understand why she was acting as if she were the one offering the meal. This was my house.
......Right. My house. The ground I had tamped myself, the house I had built, the house I had kept all this time—
Bang!
But before I could even finish the thought, that sound came from the direction of the gate.
My brow furrowed on its own. I knew exactly what a sound like that was. I had not left the door standing open, so of course it was someone striking it with considerable force. And people who knocked on someone else's door that rudely were usually very bad-tempered.
Swallowing a sigh, I turned, and with a scrape of the chair the girl rose as well.
"Ah. I did get to drink good tea."
She said it without my asking.
"I'll be sure to pay properly for the tea."
"......"
Could he be with this girl? I looked at her, but she only wore that bright, beaming smile — the face of someone certain that something wonderful was about to happen today. As if she had already had a feeling of what was coming.
Bang, bang, bang!
The knocking outside grew fiercer. Someone was shouting, the words muffled. Was that a "guest"? Well. That would be decided after I opened the door.
Stepping out of the house, I closed my hand tight around the bamboo tube tucked inside my sleeve.
"Open the door! Open the door, now! You bastard!"
A thick reek of blood came rolling from beyond the gate. Someone badly wounded, no question. Whether he had been with the corpses I dealt with that morning, or had charged in alone, I could not say. From the way he was raging, he might be with them. Waited outside, sent his companions in first, felt no sign of them, came in himself, and walked into a trap — was that it? If he had stepped on a trap and was still alive, he had some skill, at least.
I let out a light breath and opened the gate.
The gate was far taller than I was, but opening it was not hard. I had learned no martial art besides my poison arts, but building a house required a certain strength. I was glad this world was a wuxia world. Otherwise, no matter how I trained this body, there would have been a clear limit to my strength.
"You Demonic Master of all the world! You man-eating bastard! If you don't open this door this instant—"
The man who had been hammering on the door like a madman clamped his mouth shut the moment it opened and his eyes met mine. For a moment he stared blankly at my face, and then his gaze traveled downward. That look was deeply unpleasant.
But whether he was a guest or not had not yet been decided.
"What brings you here?"
One leg was broken. He had not even splinted it. From the moment it broke until he reached this spot, he had probably hit every trap there was. His arm was torn and bleeding, and a needle was stuck in his shoulder. The poison would already be spreading through him, but the toxin itself was not lethal. It was only paralysis powder — something to dull the body so he would fall into the traps more easily. True deadly poison was expensive. Extracting it from the poison plants I grew was fussy work, and the yield was small. I could not waste it on a trap that might not even catch anyone.
The man's mouth fell open. What, had he thought this was just an ordinary bandit stronghold?
"What brings you here?"
I did not want to drag this out any further, so I asked again.
"......Hk!"
The man moved, late. His blade was already drawn and in his hand. There was no need to pull it from a sheath — I could see the hand lifting the sword. The edge was unusually bright. It was not merely the high sunlight glancing off it; if anything, the light was scattering. The very tip of the blade wavered, just a little, like a heat haze.
A full second-rate. Or the bare threshold of first-rate. Somewhere around there.
Good. Disqualified as a guest.
Every civilized person ought to have manners. The custom of hospitality. So long as someone treated me as the master of this place, I treated a guest as a guest — even if he had come to my house, ignored the warnings, wrecked my traps, and interrupted my lunch. Guests had their circumstances, after all.
I clenched the bamboo tube inside my sleeve, ready to throw—
—and before I could, the man's wrist dropped clean off.
"Ah."
And before I could even react, the blood poured over me.
"Ah."
The "guest" said it, looking somehow immensely refreshed.
The sword was still in its sheath. Had she drawn it and put it back? Or had she never drawn it at all? Hard to say.
Hm.
Well. At least her way with a blade was beyond my level.
Listening to the uninvited guest screaming where he had collapsed on the ground, that was what I thought.