Hot flashes

Xiao Jue didn't refuse again, picked up the bowl of porridge and slowly drank it, but his gaze remained fixed on the face opposite him.

Zhou Heng was very focused when he ate. He held his chopsticks firmly and chewed slowly, as if he was taking every bite of food seriously.

His eyelashes were long, casting a small fan-shaped shadow under his eyelids when they drooped down, trembling slightly with the chewing motion.

Xiao Jue suddenly put down the porridge bowl, reached out, and gently rubbed Zhou Heng's lips with his thumb.

Zhou Heng was taken aback and looked up at him. Xiao Jue had a little crumb of osmanthus cake on his thumb; he glanced at it and put it in his mouth.

Zhou Heng's face flushed red. He lowered his head, his ears burning as if they were about to bleed. His chopsticks tapped against the rim of the bowl, making a crisp clinking sound.

Xiao Jue picked up the bowl of porridge as if nothing had happened and continued drinking it.

After breakfast, Zhou Heng leaned against the couch in the East Warm Pavilion and flipped through a book, while Xiao Jue sat at his desk and reviewed a few urgent memorials that had been delivered to him. In reality, he just glanced at them, wrote "read" on them, and put them aside.

There weren't many memorials submitted on days off; they were mostly trivial greetings. Truly important matters wouldn't be delivered on this day. Xiao Jue finished reviewing them, put down his pen, walked to the couch, sat down, and took the book from Zhou Heng's hand.

Zhou Heng reached out to grab it, but Xiao Jue raised his hand a little higher, so he reached up even higher. When Xiao Jue raised it even higher, half of Zhou Heng's body was sticking out, and he was hanging on Xiao Jue's body like a cat that couldn't reach the fish tank.

Xiao Jue wrapped his arms around his waist, pulling him back, and casually placed the book on the small table beside the couch.

The afternoon sun streamed in through the window, casting streaks of light and shadow on the floor.

The light spots moved slowly, from the doorway to the edge of the tatami mat, and from the edge of the tatami mat to the two people, stretching their shadows and casting them onto the wall behind them, overlapping each other like a watercolor painting imbued with the passage of time.

It started snowing again outside the window sometime during the day, the snow falling finely and densely, silently onto the thick layer of white snow.

In those unseen places, in the secret chambers of those grand mansions, on those official roads covered by heavy snow, and in those carriages that travel by night and hide by day, there is an undercurrent that is colder, faster, and more unstoppable than the snow, surging in all directions of the capital.

On the very night that Cui Yin received Shen Duan's letter, he wrote more than a dozen warrants, affixed his personal seal, and sent them to Cui family estates in various prefectures and counties north of the Yangtze River, sealed with wax and distributed to them.

The wording on the order was vague, only saying that "the end of the year is approaching, the ancestral home needs to be repaired, and the grain, fodder and equipment stored in various manors should be inventoried and transported in batches to the fortified villages around the capital for future use."

On the surface, it was just a routine year-end inventory and allocation of assets for a large family. But the managers who received the order knew in their hearts that the "inventory and registration" was just a pretext, and the real purpose was to "transport the goods to the fortified villages around the capital".

The Cui family had been operating in Jiangbei for generations, with manors of all sizes scattered throughout various prefectures and counties. Each manor had granaries and armories, with enough grain to feed the farmhands and tenants for three to five years, and weapons and armor piled up in the storerooms.

Over the years, the Cui family has used the names of "guards," "manor guards," and "local militia" to raise thousands of private soldiers. On the surface, these soldiers are scattered throughout various manors, but in secret, they are always ready to assemble at any time.

These private soldiers did not engage in production on a daily basis. They were responsible for collecting rent, debts, suppressing tenants, and guarding fortified villages for the Cui family. They were all young and strong men carefully selected by the Cui family. They ate the Cui family's food, took the Cui family's money, and obeyed the Cui family's orders. They had no regard for the imperial court.

On the 20th day of the twelfth lunar month, the first batch of supplies departed from the Cui family's farm in Qingzhou.

The convoy was small, consisting of a dozen or so oxcarts piled high with grain sacks covered with tarpaulins. From the outside, it looked like an ordinary grain transport team.

The guards escorting the cart were all servants from the Cui family, dressed in coarse cotton-padded jackets with bulging waistbands, clearly hiding weapons.

They avoided the official roads, choosing instead remote country lanes. During the day, they rested at the Cui family farms along the way, and traveled at night. The wheels of their vehicles crunched over the snow, making a loud, creaking sound that carried far across the open fields.

At each village they arrived at, the village head would bring out the dry rations and fodder that had been prepared beforehand, change the driver, and continue on their way. The Cui family had been operating this secret transport route for countless years. Every rest stop along the way had been carefully selected, every section of the road had been scouted in advance, and they even knew exactly how many dogs were kept in the villages along the route.