What was she doing, and why had she crumpled the journal entry she’d just written?
Zhao Xiaojin couldn’t quite make sense of her own reaction either. Frowning, she smoothed the crumpled ball of paper back out. She must have been startled by the little monk just now, which was why she’d done it.
“Weren’t you going to go rest?” she asked.
Yin Cheng didn’t answer, just stepped a little closer. He stood on the other side of the writing desk, watching his secondary consort slowly flatten out the paper she’d just crumpled.
The ink from her freshly written characters hadn’t even dried yet, so once crumpled, the black characters on the white paper had smeared into blotchy black clumps, only a few characters were still faintly legible.
“You startled me, now I’ve wasted all that writing.” Seeing her very first journal entry ruined like this, Zhao Xiaojin felt a genuine pang of regret.
“You can write it again.” Yin Cheng spoke, his voice sounding just as it always had. He picked up the crumpled paper on the desk, glanced over it briefly, then set it back down where it had been.
“You know my handwriting isn’t pretty, and writing something this long is tiring.” Zhao Xiaojin looked down at the blotchy mess on the page and let out a heavy sigh. “You were just standing there, why didn’t you say anything?”
Never mind the paper on the desk, the person who’d said he was going to rest had reappeared in no time at all, there had to be a reason for that.
Yin Cheng smiled.
How could he possibly admit that he’d grown so used to always having someone by his side as he fell asleep, that lying down alone just now, something had felt missing. Barely a month had passed, and already he found himself missing the feeling of having company.
Perhaps having been outside the palace for so long, his guard hadn’t fully come back up yet, that he’d come to dwell on something like this. The palace was nothing like the small pox-avoidance quarters, one careless slip, whether by a prince or a palace consort, could cost a life.
Staying silent just now had been because he’d realized exactly that.
“Seeing how focused you were on your writing, I didn’t want to disturb you.” That was his own doing.
“Too bad it’s gone now.” Zhao Xiaojin spread her hands. “So are you still going to go rest?”
“No, let’s just wait for the meal.”
On this first day at the Northern Five Houses, Zhao Xiaojin had mostly spent her time getting familiar with the place, and learned along the way that going outside here was just as difficult as it had been at the pox-avoidance quarters. Unless there was some particular reason, she was expected to stay within the Five Houses and not go out.
Fortunately, not long after the meal, her two potato baskets arrived. The fresh green sprouts were still there, which put her mind at ease somewhat.
The little monk, though, wouldn’t let her keep the baskets in her own room.
“Then where should they go?” Leaving them outside always made her uneasy.
“I just mean, not in the main room, put them in the room at the very end, it’s empty anyway, so put them there.” Having finished his meal and not wanting to go lie down in the inner rooms, Yin Cheng sat on the couch outside, letting Wang Xiaohai massage his legs.
Following the direction the little monk pointed, Zhao Xiaojin looked over, wasn’t that just this same room they were in?
Her confusion showed plainly on her face, which made Yin Cheng laugh again.
“I hadn’t realized the difference between north and south would be this significant,” he murmured. “The main room is the one we entered through, also called the central room. On either side of the central room are the side rooms. Where we are now is the left side room. Further in still are the end rooms. I use the left end room to sleep in, the right one is still empty, you can move those two baskets there.”
Yin Cheng spoke slowly, pointing out each area as he went.
Still, Zhao Xiaojin found herself thoroughly confused. It was all clearly one connected row of rooms, and yet each section had its own different name. All these “room this” and “room that”, she couldn’t keep them straight. All she managed to remember was that her potato sprouts could go in the room, at the very far right side of it.
With help from several people, the surprisingly heavy baskets were finally settled into place, and now all that was left was waiting for the sprouts to grow.
Zhao Xiaojin felt reassured, and the day was more or less drawing to a close.
Outside, night fell quickly, and candles had long since been lit inside the room. What was used in the palace really was different, even the candles here had gold dust sprinkled on the outside. The room the little monk lived in now was much bigger than anything outside the palace, so naturally more candles were used too.
Zhao Xiaojin had grown somewhat used to going without electric light. But with so many candles lit, even the slightest breeze outside made the flames flicker violently.
She’d meant to keep writing a bit longer, but now she couldn’t sit still.
“What’s wrong, sleepy?” Yin Cheng, beside her, noticed her set down her brush and stop organizing the records she’d accumulated back at the pox-avoidance quarters.
“No, it’s just this light, the flickering is bothering me.” Zhao Xiaojin blinked. At this rate, she’d end up nearsighted sooner or later.
“The wind picks up at night, and the paper on these windows needs repasting again. Tomorrow, then, once the windows are freshly papered, it should be much better.” With no one living here for a while, the window paper had grown a bit worn, and no one had noticed.
Zhao Xiaojin wasn’t quite so optimistic.
She’d actually been wanting to bring this up for a while now, every room here was built of wood, and even the windows were just wooden frames with paper stretched over them, and at night they lit candles inside. If someone carelessly knocked one over, a fire could spread everywhere in an instant, impossible to put out.
They needed some kind of glass cover for the candles, it wouldn’t get in the way of using them, and it would cut down on the risk of fire.
“What, that look of distaste on your face, what is it?” Yin Cheng wanted to hear her explanation.
How was she supposed to put this into words? Zhao Xiaojin sat at the desk thinking, and then it hit her, if it was hard to say, why not just draw it instead?
“Wait.” She picked up the brush. “Draw this candle for me, exactly as it looks.” Once he’d drawn it, she could just add a few simple details on top.
Yin Cheng had no idea what she was getting at, but didn’t refuse either.
Still, drawing a candle was a first for him. With a couple of quick strokes, the shape of the candle emerged, and with the flickering flame added on top, it actually looked fairly convincing.
“There, done.” Not that her own drawing would have been any better.
Zhao Xiaojin had assumed the little monk was skilled at everything, but it turned out his drawing was just as rough as his brush-writing, nothing to look at. If she’d had proper drawing tools, she could have made it look exactly right.
“No laughing.” Yin Cheng picked up the paper and moved to hold it close to the candle, his secondary consort really wasn’t giving him any face at all.
Having been bedridden for years, whatever time he’d spent holding a brush had gone entirely into writing characters, when would he have had time to learn painting? Though, really, it wasn’t too late to start learning now.
“Don’t move!” Just as she’d been thinking about the danger of fire, here the little monk was about to play with it himself.
Holding paper right up to a candle, if the flame flared up and wasn’t put out in time, burning down the room would be the least of it, if a person got trapped inside, that would mean lives lost! Zhao Xiaojin, furious, snatched the paper away and, without hesitation, shoved the little monk firmly back into his seat.
“Don’t you know better than to play with fire?! If that paper catches, and your hand shakes even a little, and it falls onto a book, and the book catches, and the table catches, you’ll lose this whole room! There are candles everywhere in here, flammable things everywhere, do you have any common sense at all?!”
Zhao Xiaojin grew angrier the more she talked, and by the end she’d unconsciously switched entirely into Mandarin, without even realizing it.
Yin Cheng watched her rattling on, understanding less and less of it as she went. But just from her expression alone, clearly furious and anxious, it was obvious that his little stunt with the candle just now, however trivial, had struck some nerve in her.
Ever since he’d met her, his secondary consort, despite the language barrier and the differences in northern and southern customs, had otherwise always been perfectly composed, never once losing her temper or throwing a tantrum.
This time, though, he’d clearly touched on something that made her push him away without a second thought and shout at him so fiercely.
“Young Master, Young Master, is Xiaohai coming in?” Outside the door, Wang Xiaohai, having heard the commotion, was already pushing it open.
The moment the door opened, the draft grew stronger, and the candle flames warped wildly, nearly catching the nearest sheets of paper.
“Shut it, now!” Zhao Xiaojin barked at Wang Xiaohai.
At the same time, she’d already pushed all the nearest sheets of paper out of harm’s way. That still wasn’t enough, to cut off the source entirely, she simply blew out the two largest candles lit on the writing desk.
Having done all that, Zhao Xiaojin still felt shaken, and looked over at the other lit candles in the room, feeling the urge to go blow those out too.
“All right, all right, it’s fine now, it’s fine.” Before Wang Xiaohai could step further in, and before Zhao Xiaojin could actually act on her impulse, Yin Cheng had already gotten up from his seat.
He’d more or less figured out what his secondary consort was afraid of.
“Xiaohai, put out all the candles over here, I only need one left in the end room.” He gave Wang Xiaohai, who’d been shouted at for no clear reason, something to do, then took his secondary consort by the hand and led her away from the spot that clearly unsettled her.
Wang Xiaohai moved quickly, and soon the space behind them was plunged into total darkness.
“All right, wipe your face, and go to sleep.” Yin Cheng sent off the reluctant Wang Xiaohai, then turned to urge his secondary consort to bed.
She seemed somewhat dazed now, doing whatever she was told like a wooden puppet, none of the earlier fire left in her at all.
The candle in the end room was put out as well, and Yin Cheng lay awake for a long while, still able to hear her heavy, uneven breathing. Normally by this hour, his secondary consort would already be deeply asleep, impossible to wake no matter what.
“Are you afraid of fire?” he asked, not really expecting a response.
Zhao Xiaojin indeed said nothing at first. She wasn’t afraid of ordinary fire, the kind you saw every day, only of the kind that caught and simply couldn’t be put out, no matter what.
She’d had a classmate who lived in the same neighborhood as her, in a standalone single-family villa, though it was quite a distance away, on foot, at least a ten-minute walk. Outside of school, the two of them weren’t especially close.
That morning, on the way to school as usual, the driver was taking her there, and as they passed her classmate’s house, she was struck with terror.
Zhao Xiaojin had seen with her own eyes that one floor of her classmate’s house was on fire. At that point the fire had only just started, and there was hardly anyone nearby. The driver went to make a call, and she pulled out her phone to reach out to classmates in their group chat.
But for a long time, no reply came from her classmate.
Help arrived quickly, but by then the fire had already spread to the second floor, leaving almost no way to escape. The whole neighborhood turned out to help, everyone shouting the parents’ names, and Zhao Xiaojin joined in shouting her classmate’s name too.
Her classmate’s parents lived on the third floor, and her classmate on the fourth, they finally woke up. But the fire raged on as if doused in oil, impossible to extinguish no matter what anyone tried.
To this day, she still remembered her classmate standing at the window, unable to find even a place to jump, the twisted shape of her body just before the flames swallowed her whole, and that piercing, agonized scream, all of it seared deep into her memory.
“It’ll catch fire, and there’ll be no escape.” No one could outrun a fire soaked in gasoline everywhere.
There was no gasoline here, but everything was wood, everything was flammable paper, the principle was the same. Zhao Xiaojin knew that, according to historical records, the Forbidden City had suffered fires many times over, each time destroying some palace hall or another.
But she couldn’t recall the specific times or locations of those fires.
What if it happened right here, this time? She wouldn’t be able to escape either.
After hearing her mutter something indistinct, Yin Cheng got nothing more out of her. Eventually, unable to hold on any longer himself, he drifted off to sleep first.
That night, having fallen asleep quite late, Zhao Xiaojin began to dream.
In the dream, flames surrounded everything, and she stood outside the fire, spinning around frantically, unable to find any water to save anyone with. Inside the blaze, the little monk stood utterly alone, watching her, with no way out to be found anywhere.
“Wake up, wake up.” Yin Cheng shook his secondary consort forcefully.
That night, he himself had actually slept quite soundly, it was his secondary consort, instead, who was still caught in a nightmare at this hour.
Zhao Xiaojin’s eyes snapped open, and seeing the little monk right there in front of her, perfectly fine, she made up her mind about something in her heart.