The Third Watch of the morning at Banxian Medical Hall was suffused with the scent of freshly harvested wheat. Huwa squatted on the threshold, carving a "grain-protecting Ghost-Face Lantern" onto a steamer basket for the eatery. The blade carved a crooked, smiling expression into the cypress wood, and the boy deliberately licked his tongue toward the abacus-bead-shaped eyes. "Brother Fan! Xiaotao says that if you look at a ghost-face while steaming mantou, the dough rises a good thirty percent more!"
Zhang Yifan emerged from the accounting room, clicking his abacus, the beads dusted with the chaff that Huwa had scattered. "Little rascal, are you having the ghost-face keep an eye on the steamer for you?" Even as he spoke, he noticed a half-length woodcarving poking out of Huwa's lapel—carved precisely in the likeness of Su Wanyue leaning against the eatery's doorframe, with a miniature string of steamer baskets tied to the tip of her riding crop.
The creak of a bamboo cart drifted from the front hall. Old Man Wang from the east of the city pushed his single-wheeled cart through the doors, piled high with freshly harvested buckwheat. "Manager Su, the buckwheat grown using fertilizer from your medicinal dregs can be ground into enough flour for ten baskets of ghost-face mantou!" Su Wanyue took the cloth sack, noticing an embroidered ghost-face holding a medicine jar in the corner of the fabric, its abacus-bead eyes fixed on the ears of wheat—clearly Zhang Yifan's doing.
Chapter 70