"Hey, are you dead?"
The young woman leaned over and nudged the man slumped across the small table, then reached out to check his breath. His face was stark white, devoid of all color; he looked as though he were already dead, yet not quite gone.
"What a nuisance."
She pouted and muttered under her breath, then pricked up her ears to listen closely to the reed marshes behind her. It sounded as though a good number of people were closing in from all directions.
"Never mind. Big brother, meeting you here is fate. This young lady is going to borrow your little boat for a moment. If the two of us manage to escape with our lives, I promise to give you a proper burial—consider it returning the favor for saving my life."
The young woman glanced back, leaped onto the boat, and rowed slowly away from the bank in the glow of the setting sun. Before long, the skiff reached the middle of the river.
Back on the shore, dozens of burly estate guards stood staring at the little boat in the middle of the river, hurling curses at the top of their lungs.
The young woman looked back at the people on the shore from afar, a smile curling the corners of her lips, her spirits suddenly lifting.
"Say, now—you saved my life, to begin with, so whatever silver I risked my neck to earn ought to have a share for you. But seeing as you're short-lived and have no one to collect your corpse even if you die, wouldn't it be better if I showed a bit of kindness and used these loose coins to buy you a cheap coffin in a nearby town?"
With that, she dropped the oars, strolled over to the man's side, and squatted down, studying the man in white's features closely in the fading twilight.
His face was fair. He didn't look particularly young; his features couldn't be called handsome, but they were regular enough—certainly a sight better than the crooked and battered faces she usually saw. And his build wasn't bad either.
Hm, his appearance was acceptable enough. It would be a tiny shame if he just died like this.
Two of her fingers brushed across the man's icy face and finally grasped his wrist to check his pulse. She couldn't help frowning.
Bicha Poison.
A poison unmatched in all the world.
And it had already reached his heart channels. There was no saving him—
Or perhaps there was. The young woman raised an eyebrow. She simply couldn't figure out why someone who looked so utterly ordinary—by no means resembling any sort of prominent figure—had brought such a massive disaster upon himself.
Should she save him?
Anyone else would truly be at their wits' end against this poison, but she might actually be able to give it a try.
Yet it wasn't worth it. The young woman sighed, weighing the pros and cons in her mind.
The poison ran so deep that even if she acted out of the goodness of her heart, nine times out of ten, after putting in all that strenuous effort to save him, he would only turn out to be a cripple.
Blind and deaf—wouldn't that simply mean saddling herself with an extra burden for no reason?
"How about I just toss you into the river to feed the fish and be done with it? What do you say?"
Naturally, a semi-frozen, near-corpse could not reply.
"Remember this: this young lady is called Bai Buyu. If you manage to survive, you'll have to be grateful for my kindness for the rest of your life, otherwise I'll be taking a huge loss."
Bai Buyu pulled a silver hairpin from her hair and swiftly sliced a small cut into her other fair, slender wrist. Then she brought her wrist, from which warm blood was welling up, to the man's icy lips, making sure to pinch his jaw so the fresh blood could better flow into his mouth.
"My grandmother said a single drop of my blood is worth a thousand pieces of gold. If you don't have the grit to live, this wretched boat of yours won't even begin to cover my debt. As for that cheap coffin, you can forget about it—I'll have to throw you in to feed the fish just to vent my anger."
In the deep moonlight, the skiff drifted downstream with the wind and unknowingly drifted ashore.
Bai Buyu stanched her bleeding and once again checked the white-clad man's breath. Her fingertips could detect a faint, barely perceptible trace of warmth in his breathing.
He should survive.
Bai Buyu curved the corners of her mouth. Only then did she feel the chill of the night. She pulled her robes tighter around herself and glanced around her surroundings.
There were no lights in the dark; the riverbank somehow felt thoroughly haunted.
Under this desolate moonlight, a lone young woman accompanied by half a corpse she had just dragged back from the gates of hell—anyone in this situation would want to curse.
It was simply, utterly rotten luck.
Bai Buyu sighed. Using a fire starter, she scrounged up some dry firewood and, after working busily for ages, managed to start a small pile of a bonfire on the bank. Then, with great effort, she dragged the half-handsome, half-dead man from the small boat over to the side of the fire.
Having finished all this, Bai Buyu unceremoniously rested her head against the man's waist, using the sky as a blanket, the earth as a mat, and his waist as a pillow, and fell soundly asleep without a single worry in the world.
The next day, Bai Buyu woke up because her pillow was acting rather restless. It shifted slightly, causing Bai Buyu's head to bump against a pebble on the bank. Her first reaction upon feeling the pain was to rub her head and search for the culprit.
"You..."
Before the scolding could leave her lips, Bai Buyu froze.
The man in white was still maintaining the posture in which he had been dumped ashore yesterday. His handsome eyebrows were lightly furrowed, and then he slowly opened his eyes.
A face that yesterday had not looked particularly striking now, upon opening his eyes, seemed to gain an extra layer of grace—rather gentle, handsome, and reminiscent of a clear breeze and a bright moon.
His handsomeness was somewhat different from anyone else's, and Bai Buyu couldn't quite describe it for a moment.
Bai Buyu thought to herself that this was probably the difference between being seventy percent dead and thirty percent vibrant.
Never mind. She wouldn't hold it against him for knocking her head just now.
Bai Buyu stood up and roughly straightened her clothes. Seeing that the man kept his eyes open for a long time without making any further movement, she couldn't help bending down and waving her hand in front of his eyes.
He couldn't have been left muddle-headed, could he? Bai Buyu muttered inwardly. This was someone she had managed to drag back from the gates of hell with great difficulty; if he turned out simple-minded, wouldn't she be taking a huge loss?
"This... young lady..."
Lianhua managed to open his eyes, dimly catching sight of a slender wrist swaying before him.
Was he actually... not dead yet?
He tried to move his body. The moment he spoke, his voice carried a dry hoarseness: "No need to test. I have been poisoned by a lethal toxin, my five senses are impaired, and I am already a useless cripple."
"A cripple?" Bai Buyu smiled, the corners of her lips curling up. She fished a small porcelain bottle from her tunic, poured out two dark green pills, and shoved them straight into Li Lianhua's mouth without any room for argument. "Since this young lady managed to save you, how could you have the cheek not to repay a life-saving grace? Since you think you're a cripple, you might as well keep that life of yours and act as a medicine-testing subject for this young lady."
"You saved me?" Li Lianhua repeated uncertainly.
"Naturally," Bai Buyu said. "Bicha Poison has no cure anywhere under heaven, but nothing is absolute. This young lady was merely trying her luck, never expecting that I'd actually manage to fish half your life back."
Li Lianhua let out a self-deprecating chuckle. "A broken shell of a man like me is truly not worth a young lady's trouble."
"You're already saved. And since I take you for a jianghu person, you surely wouldn't think of leaving a debt of gratitude unpaid." Bai Buyu propped him up against a tree, her face wreathed in smiles as she held out an open palm. "To be frank with you, the herb I used to save you is terribly expensive. If you have a thousand pieces of gold to offset the cost, this young lady would gladly accept."
"The last few pieces of loose silver I had were all given to the boatman who rowed for me yesterday. I don't have a single coin on me now." Li Lianhua gave two light coughs, his vision seeming to grow gradually clearer.
The young man—or rather, the young woman—before him was dressed in goose-yellow robes and didn't look very old, perhaps barely twenty. Her figure was slender, and her large eyes were full of mischief as she stared at him unblinkingly, hiding eight hundred schemes that she made no effort to conceal.
"Well, there's nothing to be done about that, then." Bai Buyu tilted her head, smiling with eyes curved into crescents. She held up three slender fingers and waved them right in front of Li Lianhua: "Then you'll just have to work off the debt with your body. Be my medicine-testing subject—a three-year term."