During the wait, a fragrance gradually began to permeate the air.
Judging that enough time had passed, Lin Wu carefully used a wooden stick to pry open the clumps of soil that were no longer hot to the touch, pulling out the leaf-wrapped parcels that had been roasted dry and yellowed.
As she peeled the leaves open, an even more pronounced wave of heat rushed out, mingled with the savory scent of cooked fish.
She placed the fish carefully onto a tile that served as a plate, one for each of them.
Poking the fish skin with a small stick, the flesh revealed itself in an enticing milky white—clearly cooked through.
Lin Wu took a bite. The taste was a little odd, but still edible.
"Delicious!" Lin Jing, sitting beside her, was thoroughly appreciative, squinting his eyes in delight as he ate.
The two then had some wild yam and wild fruit. With a staple, fish, and even dessert after the meal, it counted as a fairly complete spread.
By then, the water in the clay pot had also turned lukewarm.
They took a few sips directly from the mouth of the pot, then carefully set it aside and covered the opening with a tile.
On the third day after entering the mountain forest, the two had successfully achieved food and warmth.
The initial panic and helplessness now seemed like a distant memory.
But Lin Wu, gazing at the short jacket, trousers, and a few scraps of cloth hanging from a tree branch to dry, fell into a contemplative silence.
Though everything was going relatively smoothly, lingering questions nagged at her: would the villagers from afar venture into the mountains? Could their tracks truly remain hidden? What if beasts attacked?
These unknown risks were more than they could afford to take on at the moment.
Most importantly, they were still not far enough from the capital.
On another early morning, the two filled their stomachs with the leftover fish and yam from the previous day.
In the morning light, Lin Wu, as usual, laid out the plan for the day to Lin Jing: "Today, we need to venture farther."
She was in the habit of telling him her plans, keeping him informed of each day's arrangements to prevent the anxiety that comes with uncertainty.
Lin Jing looked up and listened. Sometimes he didn’t fully grasp her plans, but he always obeyed.
"We need to try to find a nearby county town, and then figure out a way to get inside."
The moment Lin Wu finished speaking, Lin Jing was visibly taken aback. To him, the phrase "entering the city" was almost the same as "walking into a trap."
Lin Wu understood his fear. Crouching down to meet his gaze at eye level, she said: "I know it’s dangerous. But A Jing, if we want to truly get away from the capital, walking on our own two feet won’t be enough. We have to get into a county town, find a way to rely on a merchant caravan or a carriage company, so we can travel farther and be safer."
Lin Jing knew, of course, that fugitives needed to make use of outside help, but that it was dauntingly difficult. Still, after several days together, he had come to know that Lin Wu was someone extremely cautious. He nodded firmly.
The two had become quite familiar with the area around the cave. After gathering enough food, they began to explore farther afield.
Their strategy remained the same as ever: head toward higher ground, for elevation allowed them to see afar.
Arriving at the foot of a ridge, Lin Wu told Lin Jing to wait behind a relatively concealed cluster of trees while she, using rocks and shrubs for cover, carefully climbed upward.
When she finally reached the top, panting hard, and brushed aside the branches that obstructed her view, her heart began to race.
Beyond the small village she had spotted earlier, far off in the distance, she could faintly make out a dense cluster of rooftops—and even the vague outline of an encircling city wall.
"That must be the county seat," she thought.
However, having entered the palace at the age of six, her knowledge of places beyond the capital amounted to little more than a few well-known names. There was no way for her to tell exactly where this was.
She carefully noted the general position of the county town relative to the mountains and the village, then made her way down cautiously.
After she relayed what she saw to Lin Jing, the boy fell into a brief silence before shaking his head in dejection.
He was too young, and moreover, having spent his whole life in the deep palace with little chance to go out, he was equally clueless about the outside world. At that moment, he only felt a deep sense of helplessness.
"Never mind," Lin Wu said, noticing his self-reproach, and lightened her tone. "No matter where it is, as long as we are fully prepared and stay careful, we won’t be discovered."
She said this both to comfort Lin Jing and to steel her own resolve.
The most immediate problem at hand was that they didn’t have much money on them. Even if they did get into town, it was anyone’s guess whether their paltry funds would stretch that far.
In these remote mountain woods, had either of them been even slightly familiar with herbal medicine, they might have gathered some herbs to exchange for money. But in her previous life, she had been a modern person with a humanities background, and now she was a court-bred ancient—her knowledge of wild plants was almost nonexistent, let alone medicinal herbs. The only reason she could identify the wild fruits, yams, and mugwort was thanks to her childhood spent in the countryside.
As a result, the two had been subsisting on a very monotonous diet these past few days. Apart from fish, their meals went back and forth between wild yams and a few odd fruits. And the patch of yams near the cave had almost been dug up entirely. They would need to see if there were any other yam clusters nearby.
The two walked back the way they came, Lin Jing’s short stature naturally drawing his gaze to the fallen leaves and twigs beneath his feet. After a stretch of walking, he suddenly stopped.
"A Wu, take a look at this," he said, pointing at a plant by his feet. "Don’t its leaves look a little like yam leaves?"
Lin Wu bent down, crouching to take a closer look. It was a plant with heart-shaped leaves, which at first glance did indeed resemble those of a yam.
But she soon shook her head. "It’s not yam."
Wild yam vines grow by climbing, whereas this plant stood upright, and its leaves looked more like sweet potato leaves.
However, from what she had seen in the palace, sweet potatoes hadn’t yet been introduced to this dynasty.
If they had been, given that high-yield crops are a staple plot device in novels, the female lead would have found them long ago and made a grand show of promoting them.
Lin Wu reached out and felt the leaf, also concluding it wasn’t sweet potato—there, the leaves were thicker than this.
Still, it was possible that this was an unrelated starchy tuber plant similar to sweet potato. So, using her stick, she carefully dug down along the base of the plant to see what was underneath.
The moment she uncovered a little, she was certain it was neither sweet potato nor yam. What emerged was a sizable tuber, roughly the size of two fists combined. Once fully unearthed, it was heavy in her hand—likely weighing over two pounds.
Its shape was somewhat irregular and lumpy, covered with a rough, dark-brown skin. Based on her extremely limited botanical knowledge, she could not at all determine what on earth this thing was.
"What is this?" Lin Jing leaned in, seeing that this ugly lump was clearly not a yam, and looked at Lin Wu in confusion.
Lin Wu shook her head. She took out a pair of scissors, pressing hard against the skin to make a cut. A small amount of murky sap seeped out immediately, and the inner flesh revealed beneath was a light brown, wood-like in texture—nothing that looked like it could satisfy hunger.
She racked her brain, trying to recall whatever meager stores of knowledge she had.
She considered herself somewhat widely read on the internet—well, in truth, mostly web novels—and the first things that came to mind were, of course, the must-haves for any character seeking to strike it rich through herbal gathering: ginseng and lingzhi.
Lingzhi, however, was clearly the wrong choice—this thing looked nothing like a lingzhi mushroom. As for ginseng, she recalled the ginseng tubers she’d seen in a traditional Chinese medicine museum: ginseng had lots of fine root hairs and wasn’t this color either, so it definitely wasn’t ginseng. This thing was earth-toned and dull-looking. Her impression was that poisonous plants were mostly brightly colored, so this ugly lump probably wasn’t toxic, right?
“Oh well, it’s already dug up. Might as well keep it.” She stuffed the ugly lump into her basket.
