A Capable Minister in Peace, a Hero of Chaos in Turmoil (10)
With Cao Ang still gripping my finger and beaming up at me the whole way, I carried her off to see Hua Tuo.
Whenever there was nothing unusual demanding her attention, Hua Tuo spent her days at the clinic tending to the patients who came seeking her out, and today proved no exception.
“…The child is healthy. There is no cause for concern.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
One slow sweep of those eyes was all it took. She stroked the child with hands as white as winter, then calmly delivered her verdict. So this was what it meant for the Divine Physician to actually be divine?
Honestly, if anyone other than Hua Tuo had pulled that, I'd have thought, What is this, some quack? and never come back. Watching her work, I could feel firsthand just how much reputation mattered when making your way through this world.
This was, after all, the woman who had seen through the venom of the zhen bird — a poison with no color and no scent — from clear across the room. Hua Tuo's way of looking at the world simply ran on a different track from everyone else's.
Like one of those psychics from fiction who could see straight through to a person's bones and organs the moment they widened their eyes.
In a world where a Daoist straight out of legend like Zuo Ci actually walked the earth, I wasn't about to declare anything impossible.
It was then that Cao Cao, who had been observing the whole exchange, opened her mouth.
“Hmm… You're quite certain about that, are you?”
“……”
Uh-oh.
A distinctly unusual air began to settle over the room, and I felt my composure crack.
…Surely we're not about to get a live historical reenactment here?
You know the one I mean. In the original history, Cao Cao asked Hua Tuo how to cure her chronic headaches — and ended up killing her over it.
In the official records, the fury came from the stream of excuses Hua Tuo kept inventing to dodge her summons; in the Romance, from that infamous axe diagnosis.
The official history was simply a case of Cao Cao being Cao Cao, but the Romance at least left a sliver of room to see her side of it.
I mean, come on — what kind of person hears the only cure is to split your skull open with an axe and stays calm?
It's a treatment plan that would make even a modern person — someone who knows such procedures genuinely exist — tilt their head. Imagine someone from that era, with zero medical knowledge to lean on.
And this was Cao Cao, a woman who had already survived one assassination attempt at a physician's hands. Reading that diagnosis as this one is out to kill me too was, frankly, understandable.
As it happened, Hua Tuo was thrown into prison, where she sickened and died; the Blue Satchel Book holding all her medical knowledge was soon burned as well, and with them vanished the art of the woman they called the Divine Physician…
“……”
“……”
On one side, Hua Tuo gazing back with placid blue eyes; on the other, Cao Cao glaring at her with silver eyes that had turned quietly dangerous.
Watching the two of them conjure this unknowable tension right in front of me, I fell deep into the problem of what on earth to do.
It was my hasty intervention that dissolved the ominous atmosphere before it could thicken any further.
Please! Cao Ang!
To Cao Cao — whose eyes looked fit to bury someone alive — I held out the little wriggler I'd been carrying.
“Aboo?”
Puzzled at first to find herself suddenly face to face with her mother, Cao Ang let out an uncertain sound — but she didn't keep her father waiting long.
“Mamah!”
She turned that innocent smile — the kind that tickles the heart of anyone who sees it — full upon her mother.
“……”
Against a fatal strike no loving parent could withstand, Cao Cao's face softened back into gentleness as though none of it had happened.
“Good grief… I suppose it can't be helped.”
Having clearly caught on to why I'd staged my little intervention, Cao Cao stretched out both arms and gathered her child into them.
“Treating a talent you trust in such a manner was poor conduct on my part as well.”
“……”
“I apologize for what I said just now. Where my child is concerned, it seems I grow sharp-tongued before I know it.”
“It is quite alright.”
Hua Tuo replied in a voice entirely unbothered.
Unshakable didn't begin to cover it.
That overflowing professionalism was conduct wholly worthy of the name Divine Physician.
…Which probably means she really would tell Cao Cao, someday, without a flicker of hesitation, that her skull needed splitting with an axe.
I would have to manage things very carefully to make sure that day never came.
“Awooh…”
True to a baby who slept more than fifteen hours a day, Cao Ang gave one drowsy murmur before drifting off soundly in the hollow of her mother's arms.
How was it possible for even the sight of her sleeping to be this lovely?
Gazing at the two of them, I couldn't help the warm contentment rising in my chest.
Cao Cao insisted I take the rest of the day to recover, and after parting from her, Seo Yeo and I went to see my mother, in whose care we had left the baby.
And this is what I saw.
“……”
My mother lying blankly on the floor, the soundly sleeping Yeo Hwa cradled against her chest.
Limp and listless, eyes fixed on the ceiling — she looked for all the world like a corpse.
“…Mother?”
“Ohh… so my son has come…?”
Apparently worried that the child she'd only just gotten down might stir, Mother answered without moving an inch.
…Or maybe she simply didn't have the strength left to sit up.
'Son! Mommy's hooome—!!'
It was a far cry from her usual entrance, which came bursting through the door with enough force to take half of it off its hinges.
Even Mother, whose energy had always welled up from some bottomless spring, seemed to have burned everything she had to a clean white before the trials of childcare.
I walked calmly to her side, settled into an easy seat, and spoke up.
“You look completely worn out.”
“Don't even start…”
Mother groaned the words out, her voice drained to a whisper.
“Ugh… you have no idea how loudly that child can wail. My ears are still ringing.”
“And yet this was the childcare you were so eager for, wasn't it?”
Mother had once lamented, at great length, how disappointed she'd been that I'd never once acted like a proper child when I was little.
In other words, she was now living out that wish that wasn't quite a wish.
At my words, Mother started violently and shot back.
“Wh-what? When did I ever say such a thing! I don't remember anything of the sort!”
“……”
I did wonder whether she realized how unbecoming that looked, this late in the game.
Back then, raising me had been such low-difficulty work that Mother had apparently drawn a certain conclusion…
'Raising a kid can't be that hard, can it?'
…A misjudgment of cosmic proportions — the kind that would have parents the whole world over slowly shaking their heads.
Hiding a snort, I turned to the woman slumped in her seat.
“You've worked hard. I'll take things from here, so please rest.”
“…No!”
“……?”
Now what was this supposed to mean?
While I froze at the answer I'd never seen coming, Mother barreled on.
“I-I only just got her to sleep! What if she wakes up again while I'm handing her over?!”
“……”
“I cannot watch our little sweetpea bawling her eyes out! Not on your life!”
So it wasn't that a woken baby meant more work for her — she simply couldn't bear the sight of her darling granddaughter in tears.
Hm… so even in this ancient age, a grandmother's devotion to her grandchildren ran every bit as deep.
I caught myself worrying that once my children grew a little older, she'd come pressing mountains of food into their arms while wailing about how skinny they were.
It was exactly like the mother who had nearly fainted dead away whenever so much as a scratch found me in childhood, and for a moment a gentle warmth settled over me.
But she seemed to have forgotten one rather important problem, and so I had no choice but to bring it up.
“Mother.”
“Yes?”
“The baby's already awake.”
“Wha—?!”
Mother's head snapped down at once to check on Yeo Hwa.
“……”
Just as I'd said, Yeo Hwa lay there wide awake, her adorable eyes blinking up at the world.
With all that racket going on around her, it would have been stranger if she hadn't woken.
“If, if she's awake, she'll start crying again!”
Even as she said it, Mother bolted upright the instant Yeo Hwa stirred — quick as a flash.
Well, well. She'd looked utterly spent a minute ago, but there was plenty of spring left in her after all.
“Euooo…”
But Mother's efforts were in vain — the freshly woken Yeo Hwa looked ready to let loose another storm of tears.
If Lü Bu, who had stepped away only moments ago, caught the sound of that wailing, she'd come smashing through the door demanding to know what was wrong.
And I do not mean that as a figure of speech.
Lü Bu was a woman who could — and would — physically detonate a door before storming in, and then some.
…It wasn't as if there had never been such an occasion before.
Watching her little face, I spoke up to spare us the calamity of our door becoming an ex-door.
“Hand her to me.”
“…Will that really be alright?”
Mother looked at me with genuine doubt written across her face.
She had a point, I supposed — I was a rookie dad myself, if anyone cared to check.
She seemed worried the situation might only spiral further.
But there was one thing I believed in.
“Yes. So hurry — before she starts.”
“O-okay!”
At my renewed urging, Mother hastily passed Yeo Hwa over.
And then something like magic happened.
“…Gyawoo.”
“There we go.”
The baby who had been one breath away from bawling settled into perfect calm.
“Ah… so that's how it is…”
Only then did Mother's face settle into the serene expression of someone who had finally grasped the whole of it.
Confronted with such open, unapologetic favoritism, it was hardly strange that she should feel a little wounded.
But what could anyone do about it?
Say what you would — the place where a baby feels most at ease in all the world is its parents' arms.