Gradually, a few travelers began to appear on the narrow path.
But the road did not seem busy. Occasionally a slow ox cart creaked by, but most passersby were villagers like her, walking on foot with various baskets strapped to their backs, heads bowed in silence as they hurried along. There was none of the clamor of merchants and traders.
It was only when she overheard two passing merchants speaking loudly to each other that she learned the reason.
"Finally leaving this cursed place!" one of them complained. "This spot isn't far from the capital, yet it sits right next to that huge cremation ground. Smoke and ashes drifting all day long—it brings nothing but bad luck!"
His companion nodded in agreement. "You said it! If the boss weren't in such a hurry for this shipment, who would want to take a detour to this backwater? Only the likes of us, hard up as we are, have to come here—and it takes seven or eight days to get back to our Lingzhou."
The speakers meant nothing by it, but the listener took it to heart. Because the area sat beside a cremation ground for burning corpses, it was widely shunned, and few merchants passed through. This made the place far from prosperous. For Lin Wu, however, that was actually a good thing.
Lingzhou... She lowered her eyes, keeping her pace steady, but her mind was racing with calculations.
A few years back, Lingzhou had suffered flooding, and His Highness had been sent there to oversee disaster relief—that had been a significant matter in the palace. The place lay east of the capital, slightly to the south, about seven or eight days' journey—not too far, not too near.
In her limited knowledge, the farthest place to the east and south was Huzhou, where the finest silks in the imperial court came from, delivered each year by merchant caravans traveling nearly two months over thousands of li.
More importantly, any prefecture able to produce such exquisite silk and sustain such large trading caravans must be teeming with merchants and well connected by waterways. Such a place would be a crossroads of all sorts of people—every day, countless strangers arrived, and countless others left.
It was a wealthy, bustling place with constant coming and going, and most importantly, it was far enough from the capital. A plan began to take shape in her mind.
She mimicked the villagers around her, hunching her back slightly, wearing a meek, downtrodden look on her face.
The exhaustion of the long journey seemed to leave people with little energy for striking up conversations with strangers, and so Lin Wu blended into the sparse stream of travelers, unremarkably walking all the way to the city gate.
It was the morning market hour, the busiest time for people entering the city.
The guards at the gate were occupied with directing the flow, occasionally pulling aside merchants with ox carts or villagers carrying large loads of goods to collect tolls. For her, a rural woman carrying only a small wicker basket and a patched cloth bundle, they cast only a cursory glance and waved her through.
Lin Wu breathed a quiet sigh of relief and followed the crowd through the city gates.
The scene inside was somewhat different from what she had imagined a county town to be. There was only one slightly wider main street running east to west, flanked by low, worn-down houses. The clothes of the passersby were often patched, giving the whole street a drab, lifeless appearance.
She dared not look around too much, only keeping close to the villagers who, like her, carried baskets of vegetables and mountain goods as they pressed forward.
Before long, she arrived at an open-air market in the middle section of the main street.
Here, the noise was a bit louder, with assorted farm produce laid out on the ground.
Lin Wu found an inconspicuous corner spot, crouched down like the woman beside her, and set out her bundles of wild myrtle berries and hawthorn fruit wrapped in broad leaves. Beneath them she had laid a clean piece of cloth, so the display looked neat and tidy.
She began to call out, a bit clumsily at first: "Sweet and plump myrtle berries! Hawthorn to aid digestion and whet the appetite! Come take a look..."
She didn't have much, but what she had was good quality. The myrtle berries were plump and dark purple, the hawthorns bright red and clean. She had ten bundles of the former and five of the latter.
Few people bothered to pick wild fruit worth little and bring it to market, and her neat little bundles quickly drew attention.
Moreover, her prices were cheap—two wen for a bundle of hawthorn, one wen for a bundle of myrtle. Within the time it takes to drink a cup of tea, she had sold them all, earning twenty wen in total.
Lin Wu packed up quickly, left the market, and walked along the livelier main street, glancing cautiously left and right until she soon spotted an apothecary.
The shop had a wide frontage, with a bold black sign that was hard to miss.
She walked in with her bundle on her back. The shop was thick with the smell of medicinal herbs. A young assistant was dozing against the counter. He opened his eyes lazily at the sound of her entrance; seeing a shabbily dressed villager, he closed them again and went back to his nap, indifferent. Further inside, a doctor in a long robe was taking the pulse of an elderly man, not even raising his eyes, as if oblivious to anything around him.
Lin Wu went straight to the counter and spoke timidly to a middle-aged man who was fiddling with an abacus: "Storekeeper, sir, I picked some wild mugwort in the hills and dried it nice and clean. Would you be willing to buy it?"
Before the storekeeper could answer, the assistant beside him waved his hand impatiently. "Shoo, shoo! Wild mugwort can be found in every mountain ditch. Worthless stuff, and it takes up space! We get our herbs from a fixed supplier—we don't take whatever random weeds every Tom, Dick, or Harry brings in!"
Lin Wu flinched as if frightened, drew her neck in, muttered a quiet "Excuse me," and hurried out of the shop.
She wasn't upset by the assistant's snobbery, only thought to herself that wild mugwort really was cheap. Still, since she had come all this way, it wouldn't hurt to try selling it elsewhere—even a few coppers would be something.
As she mulled this over, she walked on a bit further and found, in a quieter corner, a smaller apothecary. Its front was narrow, and the lettering on its sign had faded with age.
Lin Wu stepped over the threshold and saw only an old shopkeeper with white hair and a white beard, leaning back behind the counter with his eyes closed, resting.
She approached and called out softly, "Grandfather."
The old man opened his eyes at the sound. Seeing a poor woman with a patched cloth bundle, he showed no annoyance at being disturbed. He asked slowly, "What can I do for you, young lady?"
"Grandfather, do you buy dried wild mugwort?"
"Wild mugwort? Ah, that stuff grows all over the mountains. You can spend all day picking a basketful, but once dried, it's as light as a feather—won't fetch you more than a few coppers. You'd be better off cutting a load of firewood, honestly."
Even as he said this, he straightened up. "Never mind. Since you've already picked it, let me have a look."
"Thank you, Grandfather!" Lin Wu quickly thanked him, set the large bundle on the counter, and opened it with nimble fingers, revealing the neatly cleaned mugwort inside.
The old shopkeeper leaned in, poked at it a few times, and nodded. "Hm, cleaned very thoroughly. No weeds mixed in, dried nicely too. You put real care into this."
He casually picked up the small bundle wrapped around the ugly lump and set it aside, then lifted the large bundle, weighing it in his hand. "About eight liang. Normally I pay two wen per liang, but since yours is so carefully dried, I'll give you three wen per liang. That comes to twenty-five wen in all. What do you say?"
A load of firewood fetched around seventy wen. All that effort, and it wasn't worth half a load of firewood. Now Lin Wu truly understood how worthless the stuff was, but she said gratefully, "Thank you, Grandfather."
“And this one?” the old shopkeeper picked up the small cloth bundle again, weighing it in his hand. “Not heavy by size, but it has some heft to it. Is this for sale too?”
Lin Wu smiled shyly. “Grandfather, I found this one up in the mountains as well, but—”
Before she could finish, the old shopkeeper had already unwrapped the little bundle.
When the lumpy, brown tuber was fully revealed, the old shopkeeper suddenly let out a surprised “Oh!” He leaned in for a closer look, somewhat astonished. “Goodness, young miss! This is quite an aged polygonum multiflorum!”
