Chapter 100 (2/2)

Mistress Jian picked up the cup of Gold Orchid dew, took a sip to moisten her throat and then raised her head to continue in a calm tone, ”You can come here to relax, but not too frequently, and don't drink too much wine. As a mammy in this field, of course I won't call it degrading to indulge in brothels, but I also won't boast of it as something elegant or beneficial. Thirty years ago, the great poet Mr. Caocun spent half of his life in brothels, but who dare to disrespect him? In fact, he even marries the daughter of the prime minister. That's not to say, his lingering in brothels has won him a great reputation. After all, it is because of his incomparable talent!”

”The Tang Empire values talent. So long as you have ability and you are a talent, no matter you are downstairs or upstairs, inside or outside, a lad from border town or a n.o.blemen in Chang'an, you won't be covered up.”

After those instructions, Ning Que went downstairs, covering his forehead, to find the gathering also ended in the hall. He inquired from the steward to find out that it was Ms. Situ who had paid. And this made him felt lucky, because his two thousand silvers could be kept for a longer time.

As he was prepared to say goodbye to Dewdrop and other girls, the maidservant Xiaocao impolitely herded him to the horse carriage under the order of Mistress Jian, and then told the driver to send the drunk lad back to Lin 47th Street as soon as possible.

The horse carriage darted ahead joltily, and Ning Que was b.u.mped up and down on the verge of vomiting, but somehow he remained quite sober at the moment, constantly pondering over that serious problem, ”I insist on entering the old library and going to the Second floor, at the sacrifice of my health and spirit, just because I like it, or more probably because I want to take revenge and strengthen myself. From now on there will be one other reason... to perform well in brothels?”

While his mind was in disarray in the horse carriage, another guest visited Dewdrop. As one of the most popular girls in the House of Red Sleeves, except for some regular guests like the censor Zhang Yiqi, she enjoyed a right to select her guest or even reject guests to a certain extent. However, for this guest visiting her at midnight, she had to disguise her weariness, braced herself, and poured tea water for him.

”Go and wash your face. As a pretty girl, you ought not to be as dirty as me.”

This guest was a thin and tall old man, wearing a worn Taoist robe with traces of grease all over. Some rice could even be found inside the seams, not knowing when they had been left there. All of these made him dirty to the extreme. The face of this tall and thin Taoist was relatively clean, with several long beard under his lower jaw. His slanted eyes tilted upwards and the obscenity they shone with again made him extremely dirty.

Dewdrop smiled and followed the handmaiden to wash up and put on her makeup again.

She knew the importance of this n.o.ble guest, whom Mistress Jian had told her ahead of time. But she was not aware of his ident.i.ty and his job, and she never cared about outer appearances. The focus was, this Taoist had always been generous, what's more, he called himself Vitality-protecting G.o.d and didn't really have physical contact with her although he had been here for two or three times. For this reason, how could those brothel girls dislike him?

The filthy, tall and thin Taoist poured himself a cup of wine and sipped unhurriedly. In boredom, he caught the sight of a piece of paper rubbed into a lump beside the wine pot. That was the ordinary paper from an account book, from which words could be vaguely perceived. Out of the inclination fostered during decades of cultivation, he instinctly picked up that lump of paper and spread it carefully on the table.

On that ruffled paper wrote a line of ink words, with no clear distinctions in between, which, added by the mess and tilted frame, revealed something unpleasant.

On the paper it read, ”Sangsang, I, your young master, am drunk today and won't come back to sleep, so you must remember to drink the stewed chicken soup left in the pot.”

His messy brows tightly knitted at these words. But surprisingly, what was displayed between his knitted brows was not disgust but complete shock and delight.

The tall and thin Taoist carefully appreciated those words, which seemed to be blindly written by the claws of chicken, and then his eyes rested on the two words ”chicken soup” at the last of the sentence. His skinny right hand dipped in the wine cup and began to imitate the style of writing strokes with strokes on the table.

The wine on the tip of his figures was transformed into characters on the rosewood table, which, in fact had little difference with the two characters that Ning Que had written on the memo. It seemed that a flow of Tao had penetrated the wine following the Taoist's figure and penetrated into the depth of that rosewood table, which then sprinkled immediately into numerous tiny whirls and disappeared.

Dewdrop who was making up outside seemed to sense something and stiffened as she watched the reflections of twinkling stars in the water of the basin. Not knowing why, she suddenly felt homesick, wanting to see that warm home which only existed in her dream. Thinking that she had never enjoyed a pot of chicken soup cooked by her mother, her eyes were filled with tears.

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