[Novice Mission Three: You are presently in the “underground” stage. To advance successfully to the “aboveground” stage, you must acquire 100 followers, reach 100 popularity points, and collect 30 pieces of genuine feedback within thirty solar days. Only then will you stand at the threshold of a professional content creator’s career!
Mission rewards: Career Plan ×1; Popularity Lottery Draw ×1; Advanced Filming Equipment ×1; Cellular Therapy ×1 (additional reward).]
Ever since that so-called violation warning had appeared, Ying Yang had not heard the System’s electronic voice again. Its missions now arrived in silence, mere lines of writing suspended before her eyes.
The requirements for this new mission had risen so sharply that she was at something of a loss. The dislocation of time and space had thrown both the System’s demands and its methods of calculating data into confusion.
Under the Civilization Protection Law, the System could not broadcast videos to the technologically less advanced people of Qin. Instead, it uploaded them to some unknown network. But viewers drawn in from such an immense distance could contribute no popularity-point energy, and therefore did not count as followers. Ying Yang could obtain followers and popularity only from within Qin itself.
In an age without the internet—or even newspapers—and with herself no more than a little girl, how was she supposed to gather a hundred followers and a hundred popularity points in so short a time?
She opened her personal status panel. To her surprise, her follower count had already reached twenty, while her popularity had climbed to twenty-five points.
Why have I gained so many followers?
She stared at the figures, pondering. Suddenly inspiration struck, and she opened the “Follower Management” panel. Once her popularity passed five points, she could enter the management interface and examine her followers’ portraits and names. She had been so absorbed in her rehabilitation exercises that she had quite forgotten about it.
[Follower List—
Devoted follower: Xia Xianshi (mother / Xia Bazi)
Core followers: Ying Zheng (father / Qin Wang); Du Zeruo (wet nurse / deceased); Liao (personal maidservant)
Nominal followers: Chen Jiang; Fang Shuji; Luo; Duan Lun; Xia Changjun (maternal aunt / Xia Furen / pregnant); Zhao Ji (grandmother / Taihou); Chi; Juan; Juan Zhi; Ru’er; Lu Tun; Zhong Niu; Yu; Ye; Tao Zhi; Nü Ding; Feng Ru’er (former wet nurse).]
Chen Jiang? Fang Shuji? Who are they?
Oh! They were Chen Apo and Fang Apo, the two women who had entered the palace with her mother as her baomu and fumu. Come to think of it, Chen Apo had once been her mother’s wet nurse as well.
In this age, the bond between a wet nurse and the child she suckled could be an intimate one. Ying Yang stretched out a hand and gently brushed the empty air, as though she might touch the dark gray that marked a person no longer among the living.
In “Lament for Days Past,” from the Nine Chapters of the Songs of Chu, Qu Yuan had sung:
“Since ancient days they have envied the worthy, declaring that fragrant hui and ruo were unfit to wear.”
Ruo was a fragrant herb. A junzi might liken himself to fragrant plants, taking them as an image of the virtue he sought to cultivate. People of this age placed great weight upon trust and righteousness; those possessed of moral backbone had principles they would not bend.
Ying Yang asked herself whether, in Du Zeruo’s place, she could have risked her life to expose an injustice. The answer filled her with shame. Most likely, she could not.
Du Zeruo’s fellow attendants had connections both within and beyond the palace. They came from official households or established clans. She alone had been born into an ordinary scholar’s family, and her masters neither valued nor particularly favored her.
Her little mistress was thought to be a fool. No one believed the child would survive; some even considered her death no great misfortune. By custom, if the little mistress died, those who had attended her in life would receive a sum of money and be released from palace service.
For Du Zeruo, who had a daughter waiting for her outside, there was every advantage in enduring a few more years, taking the money, and leaving the palace. Why, then, should she die for a strange infant girl whose death nearly everyone seemed to be awaiting?
To Qin Wang and the women of the inner palace, Du Zeruo was a loyal servant worthy of commendation. Surely it was because she had held fast to the duties of loyalty and filial devotion that she had been willing to die for Wu Gongzhu.
The other attendants believed much the same. They praised her devotion with mingled admiration and regret, and envied the rewards that devotion had brought. After all, the palace paid different compensation to the family of someone who died saving her mistress than to that of someone who drunkenly stumbled to her death while on duty. The feelings of the great personages involved were different, too. Once the truth came to light, Gongzhu and her birth mother had made gifts, and even Dawang and Taihou had bestowed rewards!
Only Ying Yang, who could clearly recall what had happened, knew that Du Zeruo had not sacrificed herself because some moral code demanded loyalty. She had acted out of the most fundamental compassion of one human being for another. Unable to bear the sight of a helpless baby girl being tormented to death, she had tried to intervene.
I hope that one day I’ll be able to leave the palace, thank Du Zeruo’s family in person—and apologize to them as well.
Her melancholy vanished the instant her eyes reached the last entry on the list: “Feng Ru’er (former wet nurse).”
Ying Yang: “???”
System, have you developed another bug? Why is the chief culprit on my follower list? Don’t tell me that wicked Wet Nurse Feng is a hate-follower…
Absolutely not! Anything but that!
And wait—her follower count was twenty, but there were twenty-one names on the list. Something was definitely wrong!
[According to our assessment, Feng Ru’er currently harbors strong feelings of support toward you and hopes to be of service to you. She meets the criteria for follower status.]
Aaah! Begone, demons and monsters!
“Get lost!” Ying Yang snapped furiously.
“Gongzhu?!”
The person who had just entered started in alarm, her face full of bewilderment.
Ying Yang was abruptly recalled to the world around her. “Oh, it’s you, A-Liao. I just had a nightmare. I wasn’t angry with you.” She invented the excuse without a moment’s hesitation.
A nightmare? A-Liao was puzzled. But Gongzhu was staring straight at the ceiling just now. Wasn’t she awake? How could she have had a nightmare?
She did not understand, but neither did she dare ask.
“Gongzhu,” she said respectfully, “the appointed time has come.”
“Oh! It’s already that late! All right!”
Several maidservants came forward and arranged the prepared objects in their designated places: a lacquered writing table, white silk, brushes, medicinal ingredients, weights, a small jug of water, little spoons, a mortar and pestle, and grinding bowls.
Ying Yang seated herself before the table. First she examined the appearance and quality of the medicinal materials; then she smelled them and personally weighed out each ingredient. These were the medicines she had asked her father and mother to procure according to a prescription supplied by the System.
Whether she could recover enough to enjoy ordinary health depended upon them. There were many steps she did not trust to others, and she felt reassured only when she had overseen them herself. Of course, by “overseen,” she did not mean that she intended to undertake the backbreaking labor of grinding herbs. That was left to the diligent, steady-handed attendants selected for the work.
A maidservant named Luo was cutting the white silk to the required measurements. The eunuchs Duan Lun and Chi were pounding hard deer antler and achyranthes root. The maidservants taking turns pounding and grinding cinnabar, musk, sweetflag, danshen, and other medicinal ingredients were called Juan, Juan Zhi, Ru’er, Lu Tun, Zhong Niu, Yu, Ye, Tao Zhi, and Nü Ding…
“Ah!”
Understanding dawned upon Ying Yang. *So that’s where all these followers came from!*
“A-Liao, bring me the register of the newly arrived attendants.”
When the case of abuse perpetrated by the wet nurses of the Feng and Rui families had come to light, everyone except A-Liao, whom Ying Yang had fought to protect, had been thrown into the Baoshi prison.
Ying Yang had stammered out pleas to her own father and mother, trying to save most of those people’s lives. Unfortunately, the matter was reported to Xia Taihou and Huayang Taihou. Both Taihou were enraged and declared that the hundreds of people who had failed in their duties around the little Gongzhu and her Bazi should be put to death as a warning to others.
Qin Wang had not yet assumed personal rule. Affairs of state remained in the hands of his grandmother and mother. With both Taihou united in their determination to execute a group of enslaved servants, he had not approved, but neither had he opposed them with any firmness. Once the sentence was announced, he visited Huicao Hall bearing gifts and words of consolation from the two Taihou, to soothe his daughter.
The old attendants had been imprisoned; new ones had to be brought in. They could hardly leave a Gongzhu of Qin with no one at all to serve her.
As a gesture of affection and reassurance, Qin Wang and the Taihou assigned Ying Yang a hundred attendants.
Ying Yang set down the bamboo register and blinked her eyes, which had grown rather round.
Perhaps this mission isn’t so difficult after all.
What, precisely, was a follower? Everyone had their own understanding and definition of the word. Judging from the System’s list and its classifications, Ying Yang could only infer that her followers were people who liked her and gave her emotional or material support.
Of the three categories into which the System divided them, the designation “nominal follower” was particularly interesting.
A nominal follower was someone whose name was registered, whose affiliation was acknowledged, even if the bond was largely formal.
There was an ancient custom by which parents, wishing their children to grow up safe and sound, asked a Daoist temple or Buddhist monastery to give the child a religious name. In this way the child formed a symbolic bond with immortals or bodhisattvas, and the parents prayed that the connection would bring divine protection.
Taken together with the wording of the list, the meaning was plain enough. To win nominal followers, she needed to break the ice with her new attendants, assign them responsibilities, and reward or punish them according to how well they carried out their tasks.
…To tell the truth, this is a rather hellish way of gaining followers.
Ying Yang pressed a hand to her forehead.
And yet the method really did work.
Consulting the handbook of new attendants, she summoned them one by one, questioned them, and praised those who had performed their duties well.
Followers +12. Popularity +15.
She ordered the attendants to find pig bristles, horsehair, goat hair, and rabbit fur of suitable softness and stiffness, soak the hairs in filtered water made with plant ash, and prepare some fine thread—preferably white.
Followers +10. Popularity +15.
Dipping a brush in ink, she drew a crooked approximation of a toothbrush handle upon a rectangular willow-wood board one chi long and two and a half cun wide. Then she instructed someone to make handles of bamboo or wood, pierced with little round holes the size of grains of rice.
Followers +8. Popularity +10.
Next she asked for mountain-pepper leaves, pine resin, poria, branches of the scholar tree, willow branches, mulberry branches, ginger, lotus leaves, green salt, honey locust pods, rehmannia, eclipta, and asarum. They were also to collect mugwort and its leaves, chinaberry blossoms, arborvitae seeds, and sweetflag. She even sketched rough likenesses of the herbs she had named.
Followers +60. Popularity +80.
Mission complete!
“You’re such a little thing. What do you need so many medicines for?”
Xia Xianshi, who had been listening for some time, could no longer restrain herself and pushed open the door.
“A-Mu!” Ying Yang rose to offer the proper greeting. “I’m pre-preparing…”
To make toothpaste. The rewards would have to wait until later.
Before she could finish, she saw the wan, beautiful woman beside her mother preparing to enter the room, which was thick with medicinal scents. Ying Yang hastily called out, “Greetings, Ayi! Ayi, there’s musk in here. Please don’t come inside. It wouldn’t be good for you to breathe it in.”
Xia Xianshi gently chided her daughter, seeking to smooth over the awkwardness. “You child, how miserly you are! What fine fragrance hasn’t your Ayi smelled before? Are you afraid she’ll breathe in all the perfume and leave none for you?”
Ying Yang hurried to explain the medicinal properties. “Mu-musk invigorates the blood and disperses stasis. Preg-pregnant women shouldn’t smell musk.”
Xia Xianshi froze. “Child, what are you talking about? Since when has your Ayi been—”
She had been about to accuse her daughter of speaking nonsense, but then she remembered how strangely and wonderfully the child’s condition had improved. Just now Ying Yang had recited a long succession of medicinal names with the assurance of someone long practiced in their use. Many of those names Xia Xianshi had never even heard before.
*Could it be…?*
Xia Furen had reached the same thought. She stopped where she stood, even retreated several steps, her heart suddenly racing.
“Quickly, summon the Yi Daizhao! No—summon the Taiyi Ling!”
A faint flush rose upon Xia Furen’s pale cheeks.
Author’s Note
Oh, right! When the little one and everyone other than the System talk about age, they’re using sui counted by the traditional nominal-age system~ The little one isn’t yet three according to the System, but to people of Qin she’s four _(:з」∠)_ Of course, they know she was born only three years ago, so they’ll say she hasn’t spoken for three years. That’s not a bug! It’s simply that ancient and modern methods of reckoning age are different.