Nightfall

Drinking at Night, Dreaming of the Ocean

Staring at the ceiling of the tent, in his mind, Ning Que went through all the details and traces since they left City of Wei.

The curtain of the extravagant horse carriage stayed firmly closed throughout the time, while the little boy with obvious barbarian features would occasionally leave the carriage to play, the princess had seldom appeared. The pretty but arrogant maidservant was the one giving orders.

Strangely, that maidservant seemed to enjoy chatting with Sangsang.

And even more strangely, she never bothered to conceal her contempt towards him.

Ning Que considered her to be an excellent actress. Back in City of Wei and throughout the journey, nothing out of the attitude of the grassland men or her own manners and behaviors suggested that she wasn’t a real maidservant.

That was precisely what baffled him, since he never imagined anyone from the real nobility of Tang Empire should care about sympathizing with Sangsang.

Nevertheless, this wasn’t something that really mattered to him. Over the past few days, he had been keeping a close eye on the elderly man. If he guessed right, this kind-looking elder should be a sublime being from the South School of Haotian Taoism, the one mentioned earlier by general Ma.

Since a very young age, Ning Que had been determined to gain access to that enigmatic world at no avail. The presence of a true cultivator was the real reason why he agreed to travel with this group to the capital.

Unfortunately, he was given no chance to speak to the well-protected elder. Only occasionally when they stopped to eat, his gaze met that of the elder, and he could swear he felt a sense of kindness or even encouragement from the look in the eyes of the elder. This again left him rather perplexed.

Failing to reach a conclusion, Ning Que stopped thinking and realized the pair of little feet he held on his chest simply refused to warm up and stayed cold like ice, making his chest and abdomen feel just as cold. He frowned with concern.

Sangsang, the little handmaiden, went through a lot of hardship as a baby, surviving in cold wind and rain among a pile of rotting corpses. She fell critically ill after Ning Que found her, and didn’t recover for months.

She had been looked at by military doctors at Wei, and he even took her to the faraway Kaiping, and all the doctors shared the same opinion: prenatal insufficiency of weak and cold nature.

Due to her fragile and cold-prone body, Sangsang hardly ever sweated, and consequently, she was unable to expel all the harmful toxins her body produced daily. Over time and accumulation of the toxins, she became even weaker. That was why Ning Que followed the doctors’ advice and made sure that she endured a huge amount of physical exercise on a day-to-day basis to improve her circulation, and that was the real reason why in the eyes of others, he constantly made his skinny, dark-skinned little handmaid work like a slave.

Nevertheless, despite copious physical exercise, Sangsang could not necessarily warm up her body, and it felt freezing cold right now on the wool blanket.

Rubbing his freezing tummy, Ning Que decided to get up and take out the liquor sac made of cowhide as he woke up Sangsang and handed over the sac to her lips.

Half-asleep, Sangsang opened her eyes and grabbed the sac without hesitation. She unscrewed the lid and poured the liquid down without leaking a drop of it. The tent was immediately filled with a strong and spicy scent of the typical hardcore grassland liquor.

The tiny handmaiden held the large sac and gulped down the liquid as if it was water. In no time she managed to finish almost half a sac of liquor, of which two bowlfuls could easily leave a strong adult man unconscious. She didn’t stop until her stomach started to bulge out. It looked rather valiant, if not utterly bizarre.