The only one of the three shop assistants at Baohetang who wasn't scolded by Su Wan ran out the back door to find reinforcements.
Halfway there, he saw a crowd gathered by the roadside, pointing and whispering. Not wanting to join the commotion, he decided to run straight over, when he heard someone in the crowd laugh, "Aren't these the thugs from Baohetang? They've actually gotten beaten up!"
He went over to take a look and saw that several of his thugs were lying on the ground, bruised and battered, yelling in pain. There were several cloth bags on the ground, with traces of blood and a few missing teeth.
"What happened?" He pushed through the crowd and approached the thugs.
One of the thugs, covering his bruised right eye, said, "We had just gotten here when a few people suddenly rushed out, put sacks over our heads, and started beating us. By the time we took the sacks off, they had all disappeared."
The man then realized why the thugs hadn't arrived yet; they were all stuck here.
He was now even more certain that the troublemaker had powerful backers and was definitely not someone they, the men, could handle. Going to the manager, Zhao Fu, was out of the question; Zhao Fu had never gotten along well with them.
It's more reliable to go and complain to Mr. and Mrs. Yang.
He dashed off to the Su family mansion north of the county town. Two servants were sitting on a bench chatting at the entrance of the mansion. When they saw him arrive, they stood up and said, "Li Si, what brings you here? Why aren't you running the pharmacy properly?"
Li Si said angrily, "Don't even mention it! Someone came to the pharmacy to cause trouble. Are the master and mistress at home?"
"Master went out to accompany the county magistrate to the opera. Only Madam is at home... Oh, right, someone is causing trouble. Didn't Madam arrange bodyguards at the pharmacy?"
"The bodyguards were beaten too!" Li Si quickly skipped past two dumbfounded servants and ran into the courtyard. "Madam, disaster has struck! Disaster has struck!"
Madam Yang was looking at the account books inside the house, and she was all smiles as she read them.
They married Su Yue'e off to the Zhao family of the Marquis of Shangjing, receiving a dowry in return. They also married Su Wan off, receiving a sum from the Wei family. The pharmacy, after deducting all expenses, brought in seven or eight thousand taels of silver each month. The family had now saved forty thousand taels of silver, and Su Heng had also established a relationship with the magistrate of Suiyang County. The situation was extremely favorable.
Hearing the shop assistant shouting outside, she put down the ledger and said unhappily to the maid beside her, "Is that Li Si outside? What's he yelling about?"
The maid said, "Madam, he shouted 'Trouble has struck!'"
Madam Yang glared at the maid, secretly cursing her as an idiot. She got up and took two steps outside, but then realized it was inappropriate and sat back down. She said to the maid, "Let Li Si in."
Before, he and Su Heng were dirt poor and had to do everything themselves. Now that they were rich and of high status, they couldn't continue to do everything themselves; they had to act like a wealthy family.
She had just finished instructing the maid when Li Si burst through the door, shouting, "Madam, disaster has struck! The pharmacy..."
Madam Yang glared at her: "How dare you barge in like this?"
The maid, who had just been given a disdainful look, wanted to make amends quickly, so she hurried over to Li Si and shooed him away like a fly: "Get out, get out."
Li Si was bewildered. As he backed away, he said to the maid, "But I haven't said anything yet!"
"Then let's go out first!"
Without a word, the maid pushed him out the door and closed it. After a pause, she opened the door again, walked outside, and said, "Li Si, Madam wants you to come in and talk to her."
Li Si was both amused and exasperated, so he went back inside and said to Madam Yang, "Madam, something has happened at the pharmacy."
Madam Yang picked up a round fan and fanned herself, asking, "What is it?"
"Someone is causing trouble."
"Making trouble?" Madam Yang glared. "They're incredibly audacious, causing trouble for the Su family. How many of them are there?"
"I don't know," Li Si replied truthfully.
"Someone's come to cause trouble, and you don't even know how many there are?" Madam Yang slammed her fan on the table. "What are your eyes for?"
“I really don’t know how many there are,” Li Si said with a mournful face. “There’s one causing trouble at the front. And there seem to be people blocking the back door. I don’t know exactly how many there are.”
Seeing that Li Si's answer was so confusing, Yang was even more annoyed and said, "Doesn't the pharmacy have bodyguards? Why don't you just let the bodyguards handle it? ... I know, those guys must have been drinking and messed things up again. I shouldn't have hired those good-for-nothings from the Lin family; it cost quite a bit of money."
As she was pondering this, Li Si said, "Madam, the bodyguards weren't drunk, but they were beaten up too."
Yang didn't believe it and asked, "Did you see it with your own eyes?"
Li Si nodded: "Madam, I asked them myself. They said they were beaten up by several people and didn't even see who it was."
Yang was startled and sat back down in her chair.
These bodyguards were hired by her specifically from the Lin family. According to the Lin family, these men were selected from the Lin family's private army and were definitely not street thugs; ordinary people would be no match for them.
Li Si said that these bodyguards had all been beaten up, so the other party must be no pushover.
She paused for a moment, then said to Li Si, "You can surely see clearly the person who came from the front gate, right?"
“I saw him clearly, of course. He was skinny, wearing a blue dress, and quite pretty. He looked more like a woman than a man.”
"Stop talking nonsense," Madam Yang interrupted impatiently, not wanting to listen. "What did he do when he came in?"
Li Si said, "He said he wanted to buy medicine, so we packed it for him. We packed over two hundred catties..."
"More than two hundred catties?" Yang slammed her hand on the table in anger. "Who wants two hundred catties of medicine? Even livestock can't eat that much."
Li Si dared not admit that he had acted without thinking because he was greedy for money, so he changed his story: "Madam, didn't you say that we business people should be polite to our customers? We thought that maybe his family was large, with about a hundred people, so two jin per person wasn't too much."
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