She exchanged a glance with Su Wei, who already understood what she was thinking.
"You said he helped you become the river god. How did he help you?"
The man with a small mustache glanced at the quiet young man who asked him a question, and subconsciously wanted to say something nonsense, but was immediately glared back by the ferocious woman next to him. He confessed reluctantly after a long while.
"I don't know how he helped me, but he seemed to have some ability to predict the future, and he was very accurate in calculating small matters for people. He didn't like to be in the spotlight, but he wanted to make a lot of money, so he asked me to do it for him. I suggested the idea of the river god, and he thought it would work..."
"So... is he hiding something from you?"
"It seemed like he had. It was in a broken porcelain bottle about the size of a palm, but he always carried it close to his body and refused to let anyone else touch it. I only took a peek from a distance and had no idea what was inside."
Xiao Nanhui looked at the embarrassed "River God" and felt that he was probably not lying.
She knew exactly what kind of people the Shen family was. If they wanted to hide some secrets, they would definitely not let an outsider know.
But now, no one may ever know what is in the bottle.
******************
As the sun rises, the banks of the Ju River are bustling with activity again, with no apparent difference from the past.
A large ship heading north to Huling set sail today. Many passengers were coming and going, and the market business nearby was booming.
Xiao Nanhui bought a lot of things as usual. Before getting on the boat, he suddenly remembered something, hurriedly explained a few things, and rushed back to the market.
Half a minute later she returned to the dock, but the man was gone.
At first, she thought he was just bored and wandering around, but when she thought about it carefully, she realized that he had never been interested in anything else. Even if it was a journey of a hundred miles, he would still sit alone in the carriage.
Could it be...some trouble?
Although there had been people secretly arranging things along the way, there was no guarantee that there wouldn't be any mistakes. Being arrested and thrown into the county yamen dungeon was a lesson learned.
Although he was far calmer and more intelligent than she, he didn't understand the dangers of the underworld, nor did he have much experience in it. If he had just encountered some ordinary thieves, it would have been fine, but he was afraid...
She didn't dare to think further. She took bigger and faster steps and plunged into the market, searching door to door.
She didn't know how long it had been, but sweat had already broken out on her forehead. Finally, when she looked back, she saw him.
Three or four alleys away, he stood quietly beside a fortune-telling stall, the corner of his moon-white hakama half wet.
She pushed through the crowd, walked up to him with difficulty, grabbed his arm and spoke urgently.
"Why didn't you tell me you ran out by yourself? It would have been so easy for me to find you!"
He didn't answer her question right away.
In fact, he had already seen her running around with an anxious look on her face.
But he didn't say anything.
He looked at her quietly for a while before speaking slowly.
"Actually, I saw you when you passed by the fish-killing stall just now."
Xiao Nanhui was stunned and didn't react for a moment.
But she was simple and straightforward, and in the blink of an eye she found a very reasonable explanation for herself.
She raised one eyebrow and stuffed the mandarin oranges she had just bought into the other person's hand.
"I understand..."
Wasn't it just before when they were on the river that she refused to feed him the tangerines because Yuan Sanniang was angry.
However, the man's dark eyes looked at her, and there was a hidden pain that he had not seen for a long time.
Before she could see what the pain was, he pulled her into his arms.
"No, you don't understand."
The month-long, purgatory-like torment he endured several years ago still often causes him to wake up from nightmares in the middle of the night. He would panic and hold her hand for a long time before he could calm down.
This is not fair.
She didn't understand the torment he had endured. Even if it was only one ten-thousandth of that torment, he wanted to see her face because she couldn't find him and was afraid of losing him.
She was indeed confused, but also a little amused in her confusion, and subconsciously reached out and patted his back.
"What's wrong with you again..."
But the next moment he let her go, and when he looked at her again, she had returned to normal.
"Wei Xiang has another letter."
As soon as he interrupted her, she forgot about it, hurriedly took the letter box, opened it skillfully, and read it at a glance.
"There are three more reports from Zhangzhou. They say there's a fox spirit at the foot of Wuxi Mountain that transforms into a human, travels thousands of miles at night, and specializes in kidnapping beautiful young women. I don't think that's the case. It seems more like a flower thief. And this..."
As she spoke, she noticed that it was a little too quiet and looked up.
"Are you even listening to me?"
The man nodded calmly as he peeled a mandarin orange she had bought.
"I'm listening."
Xiao Nanhui lowered her head and read for a while, but the other party was still eating happily and had no intention of paying any attention to her.
She couldn't stand it any longer, so she grabbed the remaining half of the mandarin orange and stuffed it into her mouth.
"Are you a descendant of the Qiu family or am I a descendant of the Qiu family?! The emperor is not anxious about the eunuchs..."
She was halfway through her speech when she suddenly felt something was wrong and quickly stopped talking.
But he was already smiling. His eyes and eyebrows were lively and the orange-red juice of the mandarin oranges brightened the curve of his lips.
"Who is the emperor? And who is the eunuch?"
She was so angry that she started talking without thinking.
"The Emperor is you, and the Eunuch is also you!"
He is not ashamed of it, but proud of it.
"Husband and wife are meant to be on the same boat, but you're not a good swimmer, so I'm afraid there's no other choice. I don't mind, but I'm afraid you'll scream so loudly..."
“You, you, you!”
In terms of how thick her skin is, she still has a lot of room for improvement.
"The ship is about to sail."
The woman, after a long preparation for a counterattack, abandoned it and hurried away from the dock, dragging the man along. A pair of figures, tightly entwined, passed through the waves, startling sleepy water birds and sending them flying.
A white sail slowly passed by the side of the sunken boat.
The boat sailed farther and farther in the waves until it disappeared at the end of the sky and water.
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