After drying her body and changing into a fresh, dry set of clothes, the post station courier had already finished brewing the ginger soup.
“Little lady, daybreak is just an hour away. You should seize the time to get some sleep.”
“Oh, right, when you head toward Qingzhou tomorrow, you must be extra careful. The drought in Qingzhou has just passed, and now it has been struck by a locust plague. Though the locusts have retreated, the disaster remains. The people there are not as ‘kind-hearted’ as the refugees around here.”
Shi Yin was slightly startled. Wei County belonged to Chang’an, the imperial capital’s heartland, yet she had never once heard about a disaster in Qingzhou.
Sure enough, the Great Xia dynasty was tilting toward ruin, and the officials had long since abandoned their duties.
Without entering the room, the courier simply handed over two arrows from outside the door: “This is from our boss. Many thanks for your helping hand, little lady.”
With that, he didn’t linger and turned away to leave.
Shi Yin expressed her thanks without putting on airs. She picked up the bowl of ginger soup and drained it in one gulp, then braced the door shut to rest for a while.
She wasn’t worried that the courier might tamper with the soup—those knockout drops found in storybooks were exorbitant, precious medicines in times like these. If they truly had such items, they would have long since traded them for food and clothing, leaving no need to strip the garments off corpses.
Just past the *mao* hour in the early morning, Shi Yin got up, tidied everything, and then woke Cheng Zhou and Rong’er.
After exchanging horses with the courier, they said their goodbyes and hit the road once more, pressing onward.
After galloping for a stretch, they finally stepped foot into Qingzhou territory. Just as the courier had said, the disaster here was a shocking sight.
Dead bodies along the official road were already a common enough sight to ignore. On the rare occasion that a few living people could be seen, the way they stared at her felt as if they were ready to devour her alive.
The *huan Shou* saber hanging behind Shi Yin’s back was eye-catching, and the red silk tied to its hilt was even more conspicuous.
Ever since entering Qingzhou, she had made no deliberate attempt to conceal it.
Yet the gazes of those people not only exuded a dead aura, but also carried a fierce ruthlessness that truly made Shi Yin uneasy.
“Faster! Even faster! Leave this place immediately!”
Judging by the appearance of these refugees, the draft oxen throughout the entirety of Qingzhou had probably all been eaten up, and the official horses they rode might not be enough to intimidate them.
Qingzhou was extremely perilous; she wasn’t even certain whether the post stations here could still handle normal horse exchanges.
After a brief calculation, Shi Yin simply bypassed the post stations along the way and skirted around the towns they passed as well.
Entering a town nowadays was easy, but if you wanted to come back out, getting peeled down a few layers of skin was probably considered the best-case scenario.
Shi Yin didn’t dare gamble. She whipped her horse into a gallop and raced fiercely for an entire day.
The official horses were all fine steeds, swift as the wind when running. Within a single day, they had almost crossed the entirety of Qingzhou’s hinterland, reaching eastern Qingzhou.
Shi Yin planned to reach the post station outside Ping County before dark—that area was already close to the coast, and the closer they got to the docks, the fewer refugees there would be, making it relatively safer.
Yet after days of continuous hard travel, even her entire body was aching and sore all over, let alone seven-year-old Cheng Zhou.
The child had finally reached his absolute limit.
Shi Yin had been keeping a close eye on Cheng Zhou behind her. Seeing his posture growing increasingly limp and weak, her heart plummeted. She instantly reined in her horse and turned around.
She saw that faint traces of blood were already visible on Cheng Zhou’s saddle.
“Cheng Zhou!”
Panicked, Shi Yin dismounted and lifted the child down to carefully inspect him.
Cheng Zhou was only seven years old with tender skin. Having been bounced about on horseback for five days, the skin between his legs had long since been rubbed raw by the coarse hemp garments. Combined with the fact that he hadn’t rested at all throughout the entire day, he had truly endured to the absolute limit.
“Cheng Zhou!” Seeing his consciousness growing dim, Shi Yin was filled with self-reproach.
“Mother, I really couldn’t hold on any longer. I’ve delayed the journey…”
Instead of crying and wailing in pain in his mother’s arms, Cheng Zhou was instead filled with guilt, blaming only himself for dragging down the trip.
“Silly child, it’s no matter. Tonight, we’ll rest right here. It’s Mother’s fault for not taking good care of you.”
Aching with pity, tears welled up in Shi Yin’s eyes. This child—even with his flesh torn and bleeding, he wouldn’t utter more than a single sound.
She looked around. At this moment, they had stopped in a desolate wilderness; the autumn scenery was bleak, and there was no shelter of any kind around them.
This truly could not be considered a good resting spot.
Shi Yin took out a handkerchief and padded it against his injury.
“Cheng Zhou, we can’t stop here. Bear with it just a bit longer; we’ll rest once we reach a sheltered spot.”
Cheng Zhou nodded and forced himself to stand up.
Shi Yin hoisted Rong’er onto her back, mounted the horse, and pulled Cheng Zhou into her arms, holding him horizontally.
The three of them shared a single horse while holding the reins of the second horse, slowly moving forward.
Crouched in his mother’s arms, Cheng Zhou’s days of accumulated exhaustion finally overpowered his pain, and before long, he fell into a deep sleep.
The sky gradually grew dark.
At this pace, they wouldn’t reach Ping County until late into the night, and camping out in the wilderness during the night in Qingzhou was extremely dangerous.
Shi Yin felt somewhat anxious.
Finally, the setting sun illuminated a slope of scattered boulders ahead. As they drew closer, they discovered that several giant boulders had rolled down,正好 forming a triangular gap—a place that could offer at least some degree of shelter.
They would simply have to rest here tonight.
Shi Yin took out two sheepskins from her bundle. She laid one over the dry sandy soil and carried Cheng Zhou and Rong’er onto it; it was just the right size.
Plucking a few dandelions nearby, she crushed them with a stone and applied the pulp to Cheng Zhou’s wound, which might relieve the pain a little.
Yet tomorrow it would undoubtedly be rubbed raw again; heartbroken as she was, Shi Yin had no other choice.
Exhausted to the point of collapse from days of continuous travel, the two children fell soundly asleep without eating a single bite.
Rong’er slept extremely restlessly, whimpering uncomfortably every now and then. Shi Yin gently patted her back and softly hummed a lullaby from her past life, and before long, the child grew quiet again.
The cheeks of the two children had already sunken in, and they were so thin that the spinal bones on their backs protruded high.
Rong’er was even more so; despite being extremely emaciated, her belly remained stubbornly rounded and bloated.
This was already the fourth day. Aside from the very first day on the road when Rong’er had a bowel movement, she hadn’t had one once in all these days.
Rong’er had only recently been weaned. Along the way, there was no cow’s milk and no rice oil, so they could only feed her some softened flatbreads; it was only when they reached a post station that she could drink a few mouthfuls of millet porridge.
Presumably, her bowels were congested from the lack of proper food.
Shi Yin gently massaged the belly of the sleeping Rong’er, tucked her rat-skin coat tighter around her, and couldn’t help letting out a sigh.
Originally, she had only harbored a bit of internal grievance, but right at this moment, she felt an incomparable envy toward those protagonists with spatial dimensions and supermarkets as cheat codes.
Why did they transport her over yet give her nothing at all?
Two-year-old and seven-year-old children—in her past life, these were the ages where children nestled in their parents’ arms to act spoiled!
She had never imagined that her own children would suffer this kind of torment. Even knowing it was a turbulent era and making thorough preparations of her own, things always changed faster than she could keep up.
Shi Yin wasn’t thinking of relying on external forces; she asked for no divine springs nor any system.
Yet for the sake of her children, she silently prayed—if only, if only she could be given a little more time, they wouldn’t have to endure such hardship.
However, the heavens did not seem to hear her prayer.
The horse tethered to the side suddenly snorted and restlessly stamped its four hooves.
Shi Yin hadn’t lit a campfire precisely out of fear of becoming a target in the dead of night, but judging by the horse’s behavior, there must have been some other disturbance after all.
Slowly standing up, she retreated behind a crevice in the rocks, nocked her crossbow, and swept a vigilant gaze across her surroundings using the moonlight.
Yet the moonlight was hazy, and she could see nothing at all.
Even so, the horse behind her grew increasingly restless, periodically tugging against its reins.
An animal’s instincts were a hundred times stronger than a human’s; the horse must have had a reason unknown to Shi Yin to act this way.
Shi Yin once again carefully observed her surroundings, but all around her was pitch black, save for the howling gusts of the northern wind.
Suddenly, from a rock crevice directly in front of the horse, a gray triangular head slowly poked out. Its slender tongue flicked in and out periodically, its body shaped in an ‘S’ curve as it slowly moved toward the horse and the triangular shelter where they were resting.
That was when Shi Yin discovered the cause of the horse’s agitation—a snake.
The entire snake was dark gray, making it extremely difficult to detect in the night.
If not for the horse’s reins being tied a bit long as it kept trying to turn around and kick out toward that patch of rocks, she probably wouldn’t have noticed it either.
Shi Yin was terrified of snakes, ever since her past life—the kind of person who shivered just looking at a picture of a snake.
At this moment, she only wanted to run away, yet her legs felt weak and devoid of the slightest strength.
The children behind her, the snake in front of her.
It forced her not a single half-step backward.
Shi Yin took a deep breath. The courage inherent to the identity of a “mother” forced her to raise her *huan Shou* saber.
With a fierce slash downward, she quickly stepped back.
The snake was split in two.
The snake wasn’t difficult to kill, nor was it thick—at most around the thickness of a child’s wrist—though it was quite long.
Yet it was utterly disgusting.
While alive, the snake’s body had slithered in an ‘S’ shape. Once cleaved into two sections, it went wild with violent twisting and convulsing due to the agony, blood spurting out from the severed ends and scattering everywhere.
Gazing at those two sections of the snake’s torso, Shi Yin felt every hair on her body stand on end, as if the marrow had been hollowed out from her bones.
However, watching those snake sections writhing toward this direction, Shi Yin could no longer care, no matter how terrified she was.
She had no idea whether the snake was venomous, but she had seen no shortage of news reports about severed snake heads biting people to death.
In a panic, she used her *huan Shou* saber to poke and prod wildly until she finally managed to flip the snake body away into the distance.
Just as she was letting out a sigh of relief, a startled cry abruptly echoed from the darkness: “Ah—!”