The Last Lamb

The oxcart wheels, which had been still for a while, began to roll again, carrying them toward the border between Liang and Qingqiu.

On the road, Gouwa, his hand shielding his eyes from the sun, kept fanning his sweaty face with his palm. "It's so hot out, Brother Li. How about we just wait until tomorrow to leave?"

"It's going to be hot tomorrow, too. What, should we leave the day after? It'll be hot then as well. Wait until autumn? If that place is so great, why did you bother following? You could have stayed and herded sheep with Baolu."

Hearing Li Huowang's sarcasm, Gouwa glanced at the remaining women, let out a little laugh, and fell silent.

He wasn't that stupid. He'd practically got his hooks into a wife; no way was he staying behind. Meat was good, but a wife was better. Besides, following Brother Li, he wasn't about to go hungry.

Noticing Gouwa’s gaze, the pear-faced woman first looked at Li Huowang, then feigned a shy, dismissive glance back at Gouwa.

"Phew." Li Huowang slowly unfolded the sheepskin parchment in his hand, studying the so-called "Seal of the Immortal Capital." Other than the Black Tai Sui, this was one of the few unexpected gains from their trip beneath Qingqiu.

"What's that, Brother Li?" asked Zhao Wu, who was driving the oxcart.

"A cultivation method for a supernatural ability."

Li Huowang's words immediately drew the burning gazes of the others. "So, have you practiced it, Brother Li?"

"No, I haven't. I don't dare to. After all, it was pried out of that thing's mouth. Better safe than sorry. Who knows if there's something wrong with it."

Li Huowang knew this trick too well—tampering with cultivation methods. It was exactly how he'd escaped from Qingfeng Temple back then. He had no intention of ending up like Danyangzi.

He pulled the bronze coin sword from his back, weighed it in his hand for a moment, then tucked it away again. "Mm. I need to find someone to test it out on."

"Brother Li! Let me! Let me!" Li Huowang looked up and saw that it was the only surviving acolyte, Yang Xiaohai, his eyes burning with fervor.

"Do your job. Don't stick your nose in grown folks' business."

Putting one of his own people on something that could easily be a trap was out of the question. He needed someone whose position was just right, someone it wouldn't matter if something went wrong.

"Brother Li, look at this!" Chun Xiaoman reached into the tent and pulled out a gold box inlaid with agate and gems. The gold ingots inside were oddly familiar.

Li Huowang paused. He remembered this—it was Sun Baolu's mother's dowry. She must have slipped it in sometime last night.

He understood what she meant by it. He'd fixed Sun Baolu's body, and this gold was her payment, a reward for his help.

He looked back, but the tents were long gone, replaced by a vast expanse of green.

"Forget it. Since it's her goodwill, no point in refusing. We'll keep it for travel expenses. Once we're in Liang, we'll need a nest egg."

For a while after that, perhaps because Qingqiu was vast and sparsely populated, or perhaps because their run of bad luck was finally over, the road was peaceful. No incidents occurred.

A month came and went like this. The sanfu days should have passed by now, but the weather was only getting hotter.

An unpleasant bird cry rang out from the sky. Li Huowang, studying a sheepskin map in his hand, looked up at the blurry speck in the air, then returned his gaze to the parchment.

He handed the map to Bai Lingmiao, who was beside him. "Can you read this? Do you remember where Ox-Heart Mountain is on your family's land?"

The map of Liang they'd gathered in Qingqiu wasn't very detailed, but the general outlines were marked.

They were about to enter Liang. It was time to pinpoint their exact destination.

"This isn't right... and neither is this..." Faced with the various winding lines on the map, Bai Lingmiao's expression was full of hesitation.

Finding the hometown she remembered among these simple lines was clearly very difficult. Not that she was to blame. Even Li Huowang himself sometimes got confused looking at this map. The draftsmanship was just too crude.

Li Huowang took the map back and thought to himself, "Looks like I'll have to buy a new map once we're in Liang and ask the locals."

"Right, I remember you're from Liang, aren't you? Whereabouts?" Li Huowang turned to look at Gouwa.

"It's fine. I don't have to go back. I was raised on handouts from the whole village. If I don't go back, it'll save the folks there some grain."

Gouwa said this with a smile, showing no anticipation whatsoever about going home. His eyes were fixed entirely on the pear-faced woman by the front cart.

Li Huowang saw through it but said nothing. He tilted his head back to look at the sun in the sky. "It's about that time. Let's have lunch. We're almost out of Qingqiu, so let's slaughter one of the sheep."

Hearing this, everyone's spirits lifted. They were all overjoyed. There was no shortage of meat in Qingqiu, but they'd been poor their whole lives and hadn't had their fill yet.

Li Huowang wasn't suddenly being extravagant. It was just that Liang obviously didn't have as much grass for sheep as Qingqiu. If they didn't eat them now, they'd be skinny by the time they reached Liang.

"Baaaa... baaaa..." Gouwa grabbed an old sheep by the horns and dragged it out of the flock, heading toward a river in the distance.

After eating so much mutton on this journey, everyone was an old hand. First, bleed it, then skin it, then gut it. The steps were clean and simple.

The white mutton was rubbed evenly with salt and spices, then skewered on the one-zhang-two-chi long halberd. It was propped between the two carts and roasted over the fire.

If Peng Longteng ever saw her weapon being used like this, she'd probably come back from the dead in a rage.

Looking at the burning dry sheep dung below, and then at the whole roasted lamb above sizzling and dripping fat, Gouwa licked his lips and grinned. "Heh heh. You could say this is original soup for the original ingredients. That's the good life."

After Chun Xiaoman smacked him on the back of the head, Gouwa ducked his neck and turned to walk toward the group of women who were gathering wild vegetables.

When the whole roasted lamb was done, the wild vegetable and lamb offal soup was ready too. The greasy roast meat paired perfectly with the light, clear soup.

Everyone sat in small groups on the grass, enjoying the feast.

Gouwa beamed as he cracked open his portion of the sheep's head, pulled out the long tongue inside, and placed it into the pear-faced woman's bowl of wild vegetable soup. "Hong'er, here. I saved a good piece for you. Sheep's tongue."

The woman called Hong'er shyly cradled the bowl in her hands, picked up the long tongue, and began to eat it in small, delicate bites. She made no objection to Gouwa's scrawny body pressing close to her.

Meanwhile, Yang Xiaohai angrily refused when the round-faced woman asked him for his sheep's tail.

Sitting on the oxcart, Zhao Wu watched this scene, a trace of envy deep in his eyes. But then he looked at his own limp, powerless limbs, sighed softly, and concentrated all his attention on the wild vegetable and lamb offal soup in his hands.