Xue Mu came to hazily, his eyes still refusing to open. He could feel himself lying on a soft couch; a faint fragrance clung to his nose, and the sound of wheels rolling over a mountain road reached his ears, along with one jolt after another.
Looks like I'm in a carriage...
The girl's voice was clear and sweet. "Master, have some tea. Don't strain yourself so."
Xue Mu's professional instincts instantly registered: an ethereal, crisp voice like that had real potential. Even if she couldn't sing, she'd be top-tier voice-acting material. Then again, which dynasty is this supposed to be? They're speaking Mandarin, of all things—just with some soft, velvety accent from who knows where that's actually pretty easy on the ears.
Another woman's voice rose. "Thanks to that idiot Feng Lieyang, eight-tenths of our holdings in the south are wrecked. Grand plans are out of the question now—if we don't find a way, the whole sect will sit around eating through its reserves until there's nothing left. And your martial uncle is still stuck in the Six Doors waiting to be rescued, and that will soak up sacks of silver. How is Master supposed to set her mind at ease?"
This voice is nice too. An indescribable charm to it—tingly all the way down...
Xue Mu finally forced his eyes open. Turning his head slightly, he saw a young married woman sitting cross-legged to one side, one hand stroking her cloud-like hair into place, eyes like autumn water, a thin volume held in her hands. A single fleeting glimpse of that gauze-veiled profile was enough to make him suck in a breath.
This woman is gorgeous... Before I fell in the water I saw people bathing—were those two the ones? What a waste. Neither of them seemed to have a stitch on, and I didn't get a clear look at all!
A girl in white was furiously shaking a little fist. "Next time I see Feng Lieyang, I'll cut that thing of his off with my own hands and hand him over to be a catamite!"
"This is no time to be assigning blame... If you've got that much energy, why not help your master do some bookkeeping?"
The girl's fist froze in midair. "Uh, uh—what books?"
"Last month the Baihua Garden in the capital lost one thousand three hundred and twenty taels. The Rouge House in Lingzhou lost four hundred and fifteen taels. The Xunfang Studio in Wuzhou made a profit of seventy-four taels... So how much did we lose in total last month?"
"..." The girl quietly edged backward, step by step, her eyes darting this way and that. Her face was so awkward that Xue Mu nearly laughed out loud.
"Oh, you—do you really think being good at martial arts is enough to carry a whole sect? Sooner or later these things will land on your shoulders. What good is running away?"
"Uh... haha... oh, right, Master, I just remembered I haven't done today's morning lessons. I'd better go practice..."
"Stand right there! First go fetch your master the counting rods!"
Xue Mu finally spoke. "No need to fetch any counting rods. The total loss is one thousand six hundred and sixty-one taels."
The girl turned to Xue Mu, curious, blinking her big eyes a few times, and grinned. "Bragging the moment you wake up—that's a bad habit. Just you wait!" She had clearly been too lazy to fetch any counting rods, but now that Xue Mu had blurted out the answer, her curiosity was hooked, and she really did go thumping out.
Xue Mu's whole body still ached. He sat up with some difficulty and gave the young married woman a slight bow. "Many thanks, madam, for saving—"
Before the words of thanks were out of his mouth, the woman whipped her head around. All the autumn-water softness, melancholy and all, vanished in an instant, replaced by something sharp and freezing cold as a divine light blazed from her eyes.
Xue Mu felt that her gaze alone carried some immense power; the Qi and blood in his body churned into chaos, and he could not help spitting up another mouthful of blood, horror-struck.
What the hell is this? Killing with a look? Is that really necessary—how ridiculous can you get?
The radiance faded from the young woman's eyes. She frowned and murmured to herself, "Not a trace of cultivation, truly? How is that possible?"
Seeing Xue Mu's blood and Qi in turmoil and him unable to speak, she mused a moment longer and then said flatly, "Who are you? How did you come to appear out of thin air in midair? And what is this strange poison in your body?"
Xue Mu was baffled by the question. "What strange poison? I don't have any strange poison."
"You are riddled with over a thousand kinds of toxin, and you carry a contagious plague source besides. You are a plague carrier, plain and simple. Speak. Who are you, and what do you want?"
Xue Mu stared blankly for a long while, then muttered, "A walking periodic table of the elements?"
His body harbored every sort of epidemic virus, many of them mutated strains that simply did not exist in ancient times. Add a physique raised on gutter oil, poisoned baby formula and every kind of food additive under the sun... Someone had once said that flatten a modern man out and you'd get a complete periodic table of the elements—drop him into ancient times and his own body became a mobile plague source. So it really is true?
He had absolutely no idea how to explain any of this. He scratched his head for a good long while, at a loss for words, and in the end actually turned it around and asked, "Does madam have a way to fix this problem of mine?"
The young woman was almost angry enough to laugh. "You really don't stand on ceremony."
Xue Mu said, "Or is madam perhaps hoping to get her hands on a way to make plague carriers such as myself?"
Her smile faded, and the cold light rose in her eyes again. "You're clever."
Xue Mu privately reflected that this master and disciple pair were indeed no good people. He shook his head. "I'm afraid madam will be disappointed. My condition is absolutely one of a kind—you will never replicate a second one."
The young woman said lazily, "Since you won't talk, then go ahead and die."
As she spoke she raised a hand, ready to strike. Xue Mu shouted in a panic, "I alone am already enough to help madam create a plague!"
Her beautiful eyes flickered. She pondered briefly, and her palm slowly came back down, as if she were working out how best to put this plague carrier to use.
Just then the girl Chan'er came bustling in, all eagerness. "Master, the counting rods are here."
Cold sweat drenched Xue Mu—he had truly been one step from death. This woman was absolutely a fiend who killed without blinking, and she had honestly been weighing such a venomous scheme as weaponizing a plague. She had clearly saved him only because the poison saturating him made her curious and might prove useful; that was no act of kindness. The moment he seemed useless, he'd be dead before he even knew what killed him.
Xue Mu was, after all, a management-level figure. How could he be content to let his life be held in someone else's fist, to be used by a woman as a plague tool? Taking advantage of the moment when the two of them were paying him no mind, he searched his mind for some way to seize the initiative.
His gaze fell on that bundle of counting rods. Actually, that might just be my way in. Looking at those bizarre wooden slips, he couldn't even muster the energy to complain. Not being able to do such simple addition and subtraction in your head is dumb enough. And if you're going to use a tool, at least use an abacus! What the hell are counting rods? These women have terrifying martial prowess, but their book learning seems a bit... lacking...
Come to think of it, whether this is a wuxia world or a xuanhuan world, it's plainly a world of power—the kind where martial strength is everything, right? As a modern man, why should I compete with them at brute force, grinding through endless bitter cultivation and level-grinding? That's throwing away my own strengths to pit my weaknesses against the natives' strengths. What would be the point?
From the way they were calculating profit and loss, you can tell they still need food, clothing, shelter and transport, and they still have to worry about developing the sect. They're not immortals living on air, and even less the sort fixated on eternal life. Which means a modern man in a society like this still has plenty of room to maneuver...
Just as he was thinking this, Chan'er suddenly let out a startled cry. "It really is one thousand six hundred and sixty-one taels!!"
There was some surprise in the young woman's eyes as well. She turned her head to look at Xue Mu, and her expression now held a measure of the respect one gives a person of real ability; it was no longer the look one gave an ant. Xue Mu met her gaze calmly and smiled slightly. "If developing the sect matters more to madam than manufacturing plagues, then perhaps I can be of far greater use than madam imagines."