The afternoon sun hung fiercely in the sky, baking the yellow earth on the camp walls until a layer of white alkali surfaced.
The backyard of the field headquarters was somewhat better. Two old locust trees spread their dense branches and leaves, tightly shading a small half of the courtyard and casting a large, irregular shadow on the ground.
Xu Qinghuan sat in a bamboo chair next to the stone table. She had changed into a thin blouse, her hair loosely held up by a single wooden hairpin, with a few stray strands resting on her shoulders.
On the table sat a bowl of herbal tea. The tea had long since gone completely cold, and a few locust flower petals that had fallen in at some unknown time floated on the surface.
She didn't touch the tea, nor did she leaf through the stack of official documents at her side.
The courtyard gate was half-open, letting in the distant sounds from outside.
The rhythmic sound of hammering came from the blacksmith's workshop, striking down one blow after another.
Separated by several courtyard walls and half an alley, the sound had grown thin and scattered, leaving only a muffled beat.
Occasionally, it was mixed with the shouts of people. It was impossible to hear clearly what they were yelling, but it was probably Jenny Huang scolding some apprentice for slacking off again.
Xu Qinghuan leaned back against her chair, her arms resting on the armrests, her fingers hanging loosely.
It was rare for her to be this idle.
From the moment she arrived in Zhenbei City until now, she had barely stopped.
She had pushed forward one project after another, keeping the people around her running in circles, and leaving herself with no time to sit down and think about where all these matters had actually led.
After lunch today, she had shooed Li Sheng away to the stables to keep an eye on those carrier pigeons.
Xu Zhan had long since led the Raid Camp out of the pass, and Lao Sun was busy in the wounded soldiers' camp with his grand project of thirty pots of boiling water. Finally, there was no one in the courtyard to bother her.
She didn't process the documents. Instead, she just listened to the distant sounds and brought up the events of the past few months in her mind, going over them one by one.
The medicinal rations had been entered into the military supply register.
It sounded simple, but to achieve this step, how much had been sacrificed in the process?
In Jiangning, Xiaocui had been working around the clock to expand production, and the workshops running in three shifts had even driven up the price of vegetables by a margin.
On the northern border side, Zhao Kui spreading rumors, Ma Jin'an inciting unrest, the storehouse being burned, death squads setting fires—one incident after another. If any link had gone wrong, the medicinal rations would have been a joke.
But she had held her ground.
Tie Lanshan's military order was stamped with the Commander-in-Chief's seal: medicinal rations required three signatures to enter the warehouse and dual registers to leave it; anyone caught taking them privately would be beheaded.
This wasn't just giving her face; it was the lifeblood and rations of a hundred thousand border troops.
The clean water mandate had been rolled out.
The entire camp was forbidden from drinking unboiled water; violators were punished by emptying chamber pots for twenty days.
When this order first came down, there was an uproar of curses from below, saying the Imperial Envoy wanted to control heaven and earth, and even what they drank.
As a result, in less than half a month, diarrhea cases in the wounded soldiers' camp dropped by sixty percent.
Lao Sun slammed the medical records on the table in the Commander-in-Chief's mansion, declaring this was the most effective prescription he had seen in his thirty years of practicing medicine.
No medicine was needed; just boiling water.
The mining of black stone had also started.
Heifeng Ridge indeed had open-pit coal veins, and the scouts had rushed over overnight to dig up the first batch and bring it back.
The smoke-exhausting iron stove forged by Jenny Huang had been test-fired in the wounded soldiers' camp for two days. No one was poisoned, and the heat was vastly stronger than firewood.
Tie Lanshan didn't say anything, but the next day he changed the mining detail from a temporary assignment to a permanent outpost.
The fire-thunder canisters had been tested.
Two dead horses were blown into minced meat, leaving a blackened pit half a fathom deep.
Xu Zhan's eyes had turned red on the spot, hugging that iron lump as if it were his own son.
Director Zhou of the Armory was already figuring out how to mass-produce them, while Jenny Huang led her people working day and night to cast the iron shells.
The Raid Camp had left the pass.
Fifty elite veterans, two horses per man, equipped with light bows and short swords, plus three fire-thunder canisters each.
Before leaving, Xu Zhan had patted his chest and told her that if he didn't bring back ten times the value in loot, he would absolutely not return to the city.
Laying out these matters one by one, not a single one of them was a minor feat on its own.
When Xu Qinghuan lined all these things up and looked at them, she suddenly felt thirsty.
She picked up the bowl of herbal tea on the table and plucked out the locust flower petals floating on the surface.
She took a sip; the tea was bitter and astringent. It had been steeping for too long.
She thought of Jenny Huang.
According to the original trajectory, Jenny was just a nobody, completely untraceable in the original book.
No one would have asked her to grind glass lenses, and no one would have thrown a sketch of a microscope in front of her and said, "You build this."
Her name would not have appeared on any ledger of merit. When she died and was buried, no one would have even erected a tombstone for her.
But now, things were different.
Jenny Huang had ground two convex lenses capable of revealing living creatures in water.
The fire-thunder canister shells she cast had gone out of the pass with Xu Zhan.
This woman's fate had been diverted onto another path by her, Xu Qinghuan.
The same went for Su Mu.
Luoxia Valley's reputation among the royal family had always been neither good nor bad. A bunch of artisans and apothecaries with incredibly foul tempers holed up in a ravine, forming their own isolated community and refusing to give face to anyone.
According to the old path, this group of people would have been briefly conscripted by some faction during the chaos of war, drained of their last drop of value.
Then, in some military disaster, they would scatter into ashes, and even the old archives and fragmented prescriptions they had accumulated for hundreds of years in the valley would be fed to the flames.
And now?
Su Mu had personally signed that indenture contract. Before the bloody fingerprint he pressed after biting his finger had even dried, he had kicked his two apprentices back to Luoxia Valley overnight to pack up and move.
Twenty skilled master artisans, the complete set of old archives, fragmented prescriptions, mining vein data, and even the base formula for gunpowder that had been half-gnawed by rats—everything was loaded onto carts and transported to Zhenbei City.
What was the reward Su Mu received?
A few slips of red paper.
A masterclass on the classification of microscopic organisms, the method for making fire fuses, and the blueprints for a sand-filtering water tank.
As for how the class would be taught... that was naturally something he would have to figure out for himself.
In Su Mu's eyes, these things were more precious than life itself, but ultimately, they were things Xu Qinghuan had pulled out of her own brain.
She didn't attribute these changes to the will of heaven or mere coincidence.
She had stumbled upon Jenny Huang in Jiangning. At the time, the woman was squatting at the entrance of a blacksmith shop, arguing with the shopkeeper over the fact that the quenching temperature of a woodchopping knife was off by thirty percent.
Xu Qinghuan had stood nearby and listened for the time it takes to drink half a cup of tea, and right after, she demanded to take the person away.
Su Mu was someone she had hooked using the microscope and firearms.
This man was a fanatic for learning. Throwing silver at him didn't work, and tempting him with an official title didn't work either.
But as long as you showed him something he had never seen before, he would stick his own neck out and ask you to put a leash on it.
She had taken every step herself, and she had chosen every single person.
Xu Qinghuan took another sip of the cold herbal tea and set the bowl back on the stone table.
The situation over in the capital also spun through her mind.
Xu Youde.
Her father had knelt in the Golden Throne Room to confess his crimes, degrading his eldest son, Xu Wuyou, as if he were nothing but a shameless scoundrel.
Then, with a backhanded strike, he had backed Shang Qitai into the dead end of a closed-door self-investigation.
She had already experienced this tactic of retreating to advance back in Jiangning. The things Xu Youde was best at in his life were playing the meek coward and executing a sudden counterattack—and he often used both together.
But she was also well aware that the muddy waters Xu Youde had stepped into were far deeper than those at the northern border.
The Ministry of Revenue, the battle for succession, the noble families, the centralization of power, and so on—who knew how many threads were tangled together.
Xu Qinghuan didn't dwell on it for too long.
Xu Youde was keeping an eye on things in the capital. She couldn't manage things that far away, nor did she plan to.
But she remembered the line mentioned in that family letter: "The medicinal ration accounts must be kept so meticulously that every single vegetable leaf can be traced."
The chessboards of the northern border and the capital looked like two separate games right now, but sooner or later, they would merge into one.
When that day came, whether the account books in her hands were clean or not would determine the lives of the entire Xu family.
The locust tree leaves overhead rustled in the hot wind, and a few withered leaves spun as they fell onto the stone table.
Xu Qinghuan reached out to brush the dead leaves aside, resting her chin on her hand as she thought for a moment.
The situation was accelerating.
The news of medicinal rations being included in military supplies could not be suppressed; sooner or later, it would reach the capital.
The commotion caused by the fire-thunder canisters was even greater. That explosion on the drill ground had been heard by half the camp.
The raid battalion going beyond the pass to harass the Helian merchant caravans would soon cause ripples across the grasslands.
Resources were gathering around her, and people were drawing closer, but the troubles that followed these resources and people would also grow larger one after another.
Xu Qinghuan drank the last mouthful of water from her cold tea bowl, leaving only a thin layer of tea stains at the bottom.
The signposts from the old story were no longer of any use.
Before she came to the Northern Frontier, her mind still held the general plot of the original book.
Which person would meet with an accident at what point, and how which battle would turn out.
But ever since she arrived at the Northern Frontier, those old tracks had broken one after another.
Everything that had happened was a divergent path she had forcefully carved out.
Since the old path had already been dismantled by her, there were no ready-made answers to copy for what came next.
From now on, everyone, whether they were her own people or those looking for trouble, would have to follow the rules she set.
The earlier the rules were established, the better; the more ruthlessly they were set, the more stable they would be.
Just then, the courtyard door was kicked open.
Lao Sun strode in, carrying a few crumpled pieces of paper.
"Lord Xu, the newly added boiling water sheds over at the wounded soldiers' camp need thirty large cauldrons. The blacksmith workshop said they need your signed slip to allocate the iron. Please sign this for me."
Lao Sun slapped the papers onto the stone table. Without waiting for Xu Qinghuan to reply, he reached out, picked up the empty bowl on the table, and took a look.
Finding no water, he set it back down, turned his head to reach for the teapot on the nearby shelf, lifted it, and took two big gulps straight from the spout.
Xu Qinghuan picked up the pieces of paper and scanned them. Thirty cauldrons; the dimensions, amount of iron needed, and installation locations were written clearly.
Oh, there was even a rough sketch of the boiling water sheds drawn by Lao Sun himself. It was crooked, but one could barely make out that it was a few sheds.
She did not put pen to paper immediately.
"Lao Sun."
"Hmm?" Lao Sun put down the teapot and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
"If a dead person comes back to life, how are the subsequent accounts settled?"
Lao Sun froze for a moment. He put the teapot back on the shelf, turned around, and looked at her.
"Who died? Which battalion? Where is the autopsy report?"
Xu Qinghuan shook her head. "I am asking, if someone who was supposed to die was saved by someone else."
"The extra rations they eat later, the extra pay they receive, and the extra favors they owe, whose account should that be charged to?"
Lao Sun stared at her for a long time, then reached out and snatched the papers on the stone table back into his own hand.
"Lord Xu, are you delirious from the heat or have you not had enough sleep?"
"Saving a life is a military merit, and eating rations is a matter of human survival. Isn't this a matter of course? Why are you overcomplicating things?"
Lao Sun tapped the stone table with the rolled-up paper, his tone carrying a lecturing posture.
"Stop pondering these senseless things. Sign the papers and go rest."
"You are just a kid, staying awake all day thinking about crooked ideas."
"If you wear yourself out and get sick, my medical camp has no time to wait on you."
Xu Qinghuan laughed out loud at his scolding.
She took the paper back, picked up her pen, signed her name at the end, and handed the approval slip back to Lao Sun.
Lao Sun snatched it, stuffed it into his shirt, and turned to leave.
But when he reached the courtyard gate, he stopped, turned his head, and tossed out a sentence.
"Drink that bowl of mung bean soup before dinner. Li Sheng said you only ate half a steamed bun for lunch today."
"If you don't eat properly again, believe it or not, I will have the cooks bring your meals separately to the wounded soldiers' camp and make you eat with those injured men!"
Lao Sun slammed the courtyard door, and it shut with a loud bang.
Xu Qinghuan sat in her chair, listening to Lao Sun's footsteps fading away as the courtyard grew quiet once more.
In the distance, the sound of hammering from the blacksmith's workshop continued, strike after strike, unhurried and steady.
Saving a life is a military merit, and eating rations is a matter of human survival.
Xu Qinghuan chewed over Lao Sun's words in her mind.
The old man might have been scolding her, but his rough words made perfect sense.
If the old path was broken, then it was broken.
From now on, the extra people, the extra events, and the extra battles—she would fight what needed to be fought and accept what needed to be accepted.
No matter how many enemies came, she would settle every score.
The hot wind tumbled in from over the courtyard wall, blowing the locust flowers all over the yard until they rustled to the ground.
