Chapter6

Shaoxing First Encounter (Five)

"You fix this for me!"

Yu Manyi might have sounded fierce, but her voice wasn’t loud—after all, after these days in the cellar, she’d gotten used to speaking in a hushed tone. But as the flickering candlelight slowly settled, Song Qi’s forcibly calm face gradually came into focus before her eyes. And along with that face came the clarity of his still-damp upper body.

The scream that had been stuck in her throat ever since he dragged her down from the field embankment finally erupted, albeit a beat too late.

But the sound had barely begun to escape when someone pulled her close and immediately covered her mouth. The scream was smothered in an instant, like boiling water being slammed back into the kettle by a wet towel over the lid. Yu Manyi struggled desperately, her fingertips raking across Song Qi’s shoulder and chest, leaving red scratches in their wake. The pain made his brows twitch hard—

"Don’t scream!" he whispered sharply.

Yu Manyi finally started to calm down, her lips pressed against his palm, her eyes wide with fear. Song Qi took a deep breath, and both of them heard footsteps outside the cellar.

It was likely the night watchman had heard a noise, come over to check, and saw nothing. Once there were no more sounds above, Song Qi finally eased his grip. But before his hand could even retreat a full inch, Yu Manyi suddenly bit down hard on the base of his thumb. His brows twitched again, and his other hand, which had been gripping her shoulder, instantly pulled back. The two of them sprang apart in the blink of an eye.

“What are you doing!” Song Qi growled. All his other wounds had either healed or stopped swelling—he hadn’t expected to suffer another one just before leaving. And Yu Manyi, getting up from the ground, now looked at him not with shame or shyness, but with the satisfaction of vengeance fulfilled.

Well, of course. The first time Song Qi had met Yu Manyi, he’d bruised both her wrists and ankles. And after she’d humbly tended to him for ten whole days, all she got in return was a veiled insult. So now, on this fine day, what was wrong with leaving him a mark or two in return?

“Who told you to not wear clothes!” she retorted, though this time remembering to keep her voice down. “Only lunatics in the countryside run around naked.”

The uninjured side of Song Qi’s head throbbed in pain from her words. “How am I naked—” He glanced down at himself, fuming as he grabbed his clothes and threw them over his shoulders. “I was just staying quietly in the cellar. How was I supposed to know you'd suddenly barge in? Didn’t you say yesterday you weren’t coming anymore?”

As soon as he said this, both of them remembered the first thing Yu Manyi had shouted when she came running in. Their eyes simultaneously dropped to the floor. Song Qi picked up the broken kite, examined it under the candlelight, and realized it did indeed look familiar.

“I was carrying the kite out that day, and everything was fine,” Yu Manyi said. “But then you dragged me down the field embankment and snapped the frame.”"Can’t you just go out and buy another one?"

Song Qi was puzzled. Then he thought of how Yu Manyi wasn’t her parents’ biological child and might not have any private savings, so he dug into his clothes, kept only the cash needed for his own train ticket, and handed the rest to her. But Yu Manyi looked down at the money and got even angrier.

"I can’t just go out and buy things whenever I want," she said. "Besides, my little sister has seen my kite—there’s nothing like it in the market. I want the one I had before, the one you broke."

"Didn’t you say you weren’t locked up in the attic?"

"Of course I wasn’t locked in the attic, I was—"

Yu Manyi paused to think, and suddenly realized that while she wasn’t locked in the attic, she still couldn’t walk out of the Yu family compound. She couldn’t leave freely, just like how the second concubine of the You family couldn’t leave her attic. This was the first time Yu Manyi felt truly confused about her situation.

Song Qi had given her money, but what she lacked wasn’t money. What she lacked was something far more important than that.

And it seemed only now that Song Qi began to grasp the confusion in Yu Manyi’s heart. He took the money back and, by candlelight, carefully observed the expression on her face as she sank into thought.

His classmates could already take to the streets waving banners, while Yu Manyi couldn’t even walk through the front gate—let alone hear the voices beyond the high walls. He had once called her a spirit born from the late Qing dynasty’s patched robes, but clearly, he hadn’t considered what that meant for her situation.

At this moment, Song Qi felt a subtle sense of guilt. He raised Yu Manyi’s kite in front of him, realizing this might be the only way to repay her for saving his life.

A top student, trained in school to build airplanes, sketching calculations on steel structure ratios—yet now faced with a paper kite, he was at a complete loss. Song Qi traced the kite’s frame with his fingers and realized how fragile and unstable it was. A slight imbalance in weight on either side would prevent it from flying at all.

He had originally planned to leave at dawn the day after tomorrow. There wasn’t enough time to rebuild the kite from scratch, nor did he have the skill for it. After fiddling with it for a while, he finally looked at Yu Manyi and said in detail, "Then you need to bring me glutinous rice and some yarn. Thin iron wire, if possible."

Yu Manyi crossed her arms behind her back and looked at him suspiciously—she hadn’t expected he might actually have a way."And also paper for re-pasting the kite," he said. "The surface is torn—I’ll paste it back for you. But these little birds on it—I don’t know how to draw them."

He was asking for all these materials—if Yu Manyi couldn’t gather them, then even a skilled woman couldn’t cook without rice. Fortunately, after these past few days of practice, the Yu family’s grand residence was, in Yu Manyi’s eyes, already a sieve full of holes—especially now that the sky was pitch black. She quickly calculated a route in her mind to get the materials and nodded at Song Qi, then turned and climbed off along the ladder.

In no time at all, the yarn, glutinous rice, thin iron wire, and kite paper were all laid out in front of Song Qi.

There was no turning back now.

The place where Yu Manyi had scratched him earlier was tingling with pain and starting to itch. Song Qi knelt on the ground, arranged the kite’s frame according to its original shape, and began carefully repairing each damaged part. In his heart, he hoped that the scratches on his body could heal just as neatly.

Seeing how seriously he was working, Yu Manyi felt a twinge of guilt. She climbed back up to the ground and went to the kitchen to steal him a cold rice cake.

The incident of the “spirit born from patched robes” was flipped over like a page, and their relationship slightly eased.

After confirming that Yu Manyi could replicate the little birds herself, Song Qi completely tore off the damaged kite surface, giving himself more space to work on the frame. Yu Manyi, bored, sat beside him burning paper birds one by one over the candle flame. The firelight illuminated the paper, and Song Qi glanced over, noticing that the brushwork of the birds was quite detailed—even the feathers were drawn.

"Did you learn drawing before?" he asked, while tying a broken bamboo strip with yarn.

"No," Yu Manyi shook her head, "I just traced them off the folding screen."

Song Qi nodded, affirming, "You draw really well. Not like that classmate of mine—he only knows how to draw wild weeds in the newspaper."

The first time he had come to the Yu family was to raise funds for a newspaper. Now, mentioning it again in front of Yu Manyi, she couldn’t help but grow curious. She asked what kind of newspaper it was—what was so important about it that they ran around raising funds for it, even getting into trouble and ending up hiding in her family’s cellar.

The question was rather broad, and Song Qi found it difficult to explain in a few words. So Yu Manyi asked again what kind of content the newspaper had—this question made Song Qi seem a little embarrassed to answer.

"At first..." he hesitated, "at first, we wanted to promote some new ideas. Like science and democracy, rights and duties, and some newly introduced ideologies..."

Yu Manyi looked at him with curiosity."But no one bought it," Song Qi said, discouraged.

"Of course no one bought it," Yu Manyi said. "I’ve never even heard of those things—why would I buy something I’ve never heard of?"

"Exactly, so we changed direction," one broken piece was now tightly secured—Song Qi tested its strength, then picked up a piece of wire to repair another joint of the kite. "We started serializing novels in it."

Novels—Yu Manyi understood that.

"Novels are storybooks," she said. She was at least somewhat literate. "Du Liniang, Romance of the Western Chamber, and Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, right?"

"Those are outdated," Song Qi replied. "Our newspaper serializes stories issue by issue. To make people buy each edition, we have to write the kinds of stories that are popular now. Once they finish reading the new installment of the novel, they’ll glance at the supplement with science, democracy, and ideologies…"

But Yu Manyi had no interest whatsoever in science, democracy, or ideologies. She brought the topic back to the familiar realm of storybooks and pursued relentlessly: "Then what kinds of stories are popular now?"

Song Qi lowered his head and focused intently on repairing the kite.

He truly found it hard to say aloud—the most popular stories now were those of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school, which focused on the romantic affairs of talented scholars and beautiful maidens. Although many of his classmates and even teachers criticized this genre as "vulgar and lowbrow," ever since their newspaper started serializing such love stories, sales had skyrocketed like never before!

But as sales soared, so too did criticism of the newspaper’s crude and shoddy quality. Song Qi decided he could no longer tolerate the illustrations being only classmates' sketches of wild plants. He resolved to raise funds to expand the layout and hire two professional editors—one for illustrations, the other for typesetting.

No one expected that this very fundraising effort would end up with their most important serial author, Song Qi himself, disappearing into a cellar in rural Shaoxing, his fate unknown. Not only was there no new expanded layout, the half-finished story had to be taken over by someone else, and due to the drop in quality, readers lashed out with harsh complaints.

"So what kind of story was it?" Yu Manyi climbed on all fours to get behind Song Qi, eagerly pressing the question.

Song Qi took a deep breath, twisted the wire into a loop, and with a soft click, closed it tightly.

"A new kind of story," he said, eyes avoiding Yu Manyi entirely. "About young men and women… falling in love freely."…

Young men and women falling in love freely.

That night, Yu Manyi fell asleep with her imagination full of this new concept, feeling that each of those four characters held infinite possibilities—

“Free,” meaning one didn’t have to rely on a parent’s order or a matchmaker’s arrangement; meetings and encounters were left entirely to fate.

“Love,” meaning there didn’t have to be a marriage agreement from the beginning—it was a process, an experience.

And listening to what Song Qi said, free love wasn’t a one-time thing. A man and woman could be together for a while, and even if it didn’t work out, they didn’t have to die for love or rebel through tragic ends. It was simply an experience, and they could go on to have the same experience with someone else—wow!

Yu Manyi rolled excitedly back and forth in bed, to the point that she showed up to breakfast the next morning with dark circles under her eyes. But compared to her fatigue, Third Mother was beaming with joy. She hadn’t been seated long before they learned that her cousin had sent a letter to the family, which had arrived early that morning.

Third Mother couldn’t read, so they had to wait for Second Mother to come and read it aloud. Yu Manyi sat nearby and listened. The contents were nothing unusual—he wrote that his studies in Europe were strenuous, the language was difficult, but thanks to Father Yu’s support, he wasn’t struggling financially. There weren’t many Chinese at the school, and as someone from Shaoxing, he was the only one—studying abroad was very lonely. He hoped to finish his studies soon and return home to seek a teaching position.

The letter wasn’t long—just a few lines of polite formalities.

“This child,” Third Mother became more disappointed as she listened, “finally sends a letter home, and doesn’t even think to ask how Manyi is doing. It’s like he’s forgotten he has a fiancée.”

Yu Manyi kept her head down and ate, not minding at all.

Third Mother also continued eating. On the table were some leftover sticky rice cakes from the Fang family. Yu Manyi looked up at the bright red characters printed on top—Growing Old Together and A Joyous Union. Suddenly, she couldn’t hold back and called out: “Third Mother.”

Third Mother looked up at her, her expression a little puzzled.

Yu Manyi wasn’t sure if asking what she was about to ask would earn her a scolding, but at that moment, she couldn’t hold it in any longer.

“Do you think my cousin might be, in Europe…”She gathered her courage.

“Fallen in love freely?”