Fan Changyu lifted the braising basket and lowered it into the water to drain. The smell rising from the pot was rich and layered, the sauce color deep and glossy, far better than anything sold at the cooked-food stalls in town.
Changning stood at the stove, eyes scanning every piece in the basket. Her face fell.
"No pig ears."
She loved pig ears.
Fan Changyu prodded the fat sausage and pork belly with chopsticks. Both yielded easily, cooked through to the core.
"Fat sausage noodles tonight," she said. "Pig ears tomorrow."
Changning brightened immediately.
Fan Changyu kept the fire going, ladled out the braising broth, rinsed the pot, and set water to boil. She laid out five portions of noodles.
"Go next door," she told Changning. "Tell Aunt Zhao not to make anything tonight. Tell them to come eat with us."
Changning took off at a trot.
Noodles take no time at all. Fan Changyu set four large bowls and one small one on the counter in advance, dropped a spoonful of rendered lard into each, added the seasoning, then poured the boiling noodle water over it all. The lard dissolved on contact. The smell that rose was immediate and sharp.
She kept her assembly simple: noodles ladled in, fat sausage cut into short sections and laid over the top, chopped scallion scattered across everything.
Her mother, when she made noodles, always simmered a full pot of bone broth first and used that instead of plain noodle water. The difference in flavor was not small.
Fan Changyu set her sister's bowl on the table and told her to start eating, then carried the three remaining large bowls next door.
The attic connected to the ground floor by a single wooden staircase. Xie Zheng was lying still when he heard footsteps on the boards below, steady and unhurried. He opened his eyes.
A moment later, her voice came through the door.
"Are you awake?"
"The bolt is on."
His voice was still rough, but stronger than yesterday.
Fan Changyu braced the door open with her forearm, walked in carrying an oil lamp in one hand and a bowl of steaming noodles in the other.
"I just heard my aunt say a large falcon crashed through the downstairs window this morning," she said. "Flew straight into it and smashed the frame. Strange thing to happen."
Xie Zheng said nothing.
He had not expected Haidong Qing to be foolish enough to come in headfirst at the sound of a whistle.
Fan Changyu glanced at his face. Still pale, but the color was returning. She set the oil lamp on the table.
"Lucky the bird didn't hurt anyone. My uncle will fix the window when he has time. The attic is narrower, but it's clean."
Xie Zheng gave a low sound in acknowledgment.
She held out the bowl. "Eat while it's hot."
He had already caught the smell. Whatever was layered over the noodles had been sending that same thick, meaty fragrance through the alley all evening. After days of bitter medicinal broth and plain white porridge, the smell alone turned his stomach with hunger. Calling it a fine meal would not have been an exaggeration.
He thanked her, took the bowl, picked up his chopsticks, and ate.
The noodles were smooth, made from ordinary flour, but at that moment they were better than anything he could remember eating. The meat cut through the richness with a soft, yielding chew, the flavor deepening with every bite. He had eaten at tables most people would never see in their lives, and he could not identify this.
"What is this?" he asked.
Fan Changyu was already thinking about her own bowl going cold. "Fat sausage," she said on her way out.
Xie Zheng's chopsticks slowed. The two characters landed, and something in his gut shifted uneasily.
She either did not notice or did not care, because she added plainly: "Pig intestine."
His expression changed at once.
He had seen people who simply disliked offal. This was not that. He had been eating it without objection, and now his face looked like something had gone wrong with the floor beneath him. Fan Changyu stared at him, genuinely confused.
"What's the matter?"
"Nothing."
It was not nothing, but there was no good answer to give.
Xie Zheng sat still and breathed steadily, several slow breaths, until the churning in his stomach settled.
Fan Changyu was already thinking about soggy noodles. "I'll leave you to it, then. When you're done, set the bowl on the cabinet. My aunt will collect it later."
The door eased shut. Her footsteps descended the stairs.
Xie Zheng sat looking at the bowl in his hands. His brow was creased.
He had not been raised soft. On campaigns when supplies ran out, he had eaten bark. He had eaten grass roots. He had never once eaten the large intestine of an animal.
Pig intestine. Which is to say, the tube through which pig waste travels.
The thought made swallowing difficult.
But he looked at the bowl and weighed it against his injury, his depleted body, the two days of near-nothing he had been given. This was the first real food he had seen.
He breathed in. Picked up his chopsticks again. Put a bite in his mouth with the determined expression of a man accepting a difficult commission.
Heaven assigns great tasks only after it has worked the body and the will to their limits.
It smelled good though.
That night, Xie Zheng, who rarely dreamed, had a dream he could not account for.
The woman who had taken him in was in it. She was cheerful, driving a pig ahead of her along a path. Then she stopped, pulled a large knife from nowhere, opened the pig's belly in one stroke, and drew out a length of intestine. She turned and looked at him.
"Fat sausage," she said. "I'll make it for you."
The pig was screaming.
He came awake sharply and found himself lying in sweat on the attic bed.
The pig next door was still screaming. Xie Zheng turned toward the window. The sky was just beginning to lighten at the edges.
Noise had already started below. The old couple were up and moving around, lending a hand with the slaughter.
He pressed two fingers against his brow and closed his eyes.
Chasing pigs. Killing pigs. Pig intestine. Everything connected to that woman seemed to lead back to pigs.
He lay still and tried to wall out the sound.
A few more days. Haidong Qing would return with the letter, and his men would find him. He would be gone from here before long. He would leave enough money for the woman and the old couple, more than enough, and that would settle it.
In the backyard, Fan Changyu had the pig lashed to the slaughter bench with thick rope. She had learned from her father and pressed down with the full weight of her body, the kind of force that usually took several grown men. The bench at home was not wood but stone, custom-cut at her father's order, and once the pig was tied to it, no amount of struggling moved it. There was no need to pin the tail.
The bloodletting knife went straight in under the jaw, nearly to the handle. The pig's cry cut off. Blood ran in a thick stream down the groove of the blade and fell into the wooden basin below. It filled quickly.
A clean kill mattered. And the more blood released, the better the meat.
Aunt Zhao, watching from the side, laughed with satisfaction. "That basin will feed us for days."
Fan Changyu did not respond. She pulled the knife free. Her face was closed, expressionless, a few flecks of blood across her cheek and sleeve.
It was always like this when she killed. Something about her manner changed, and people nearby felt it without being able to name it. A certain stillness. An efficiency that left no room to approach.
She drained the pig, untied it, and hauled it to the side of the large pot of boiling water. She ladled scalding water over the hide, waited, and began scraping the bristles free. Changning appeared at the doorway, peering in.
"Ningning, go play outside," Aunt Zhao said. "Children shouldn't watch this. You'll have nightmares."
Changning muttered that she wasn't scared, but drifted away all the same.
When the carcass was clean, Fan Changyu rinsed it down, grabbed it without asking anyone's help, and hung it by the iron hook on the yard pillar. She split it down the center with the cleaver, left one half hanging, carried the other to the door panel set across two benches, and began breaking down the cuts.
Carpenter Zhao and his wife watched without speaking for a moment.
"She really is her father's daughter," one of them said quietly.
Fan Changyu loaded the pork onto the cart and got it moving. The twenty jin that Chef Li from Yixianglou had ordered the day before went with Carpenter Zhao's help. She also packed in a jar of braising liquid for the chef, not because she had any plan to compete with his kitchen, but because he had been good to her business and she wanted to show it.
At the meat market, she was among the first to arrive. A few stalls had opened, butchers stacking their cuts for the day. Someone looked over at her with raised eyebrows.
"Changyu, opening your father's shop today?"
She answered yes and kept walking.
The shop had been shut for over a month. She opened it herself, took in the space. Everything her father had arranged was still where he had left it, filmed over with a thin layer of dust.
The pang came before she could stop it. She let it pass, drew water, wiped the shop down inside and out, and began laying out the morning's pork on the block. The braising water went up front where it could be seen.
By the time the first buyers trickled into the market at six, she was ready.
The shop occupied a good position. The neighboring stalls were run by grown men or older women, and she stood out by simply being there. A few of the market women paused as they passed, seeming to find it easier to ask the price from her than from the men across the way.
Fan Changyu told them the price and mentioned, as if in passing, that the shop was reopening today. Buy one jin of pork, receive one or two pieces of braised meat as a gift. Just for the occasion.
The women heard "free braised meat" and most of them stopped walking.
Within the first hour she had done more business than any other pork stall nearby.
The butcher across from her, a man named Guo, watched his own stall sit quiet and his face went dark.
"Fan's second daughter," he called out. "Don't break the rules. Meat in this market has fixed prices. What do you think you're doing, throwing in extras?"
Fan Changyu looked at him steadily.
"Uncle Guo, what rule have I broken? My prices are the same as everyone here. My shop is reopening today. I'm marking the occasion. Is there a rule against that? Or do you just think that because I have no parents, I'm easy to push around?"
Guo's face went from yellow to red. "Sharp mouth on you. I can't argue with that."
A nearby butcher who had been friendly with her father cut in: "Lao Guo, she's only selling one pig today. Leave it alone."
Being called a bully in front of the market was its own problem. Guo backed off with a final shout: "Fine. One day. But tomorrow it stops."
Fan Changyu had only planned one day of gifts anyway. Tomorrow she intended to sell the braised pork outright.
"Naturally," she said.
Once the market filled out, she started calling.
"Pork for sale! Buy one jin, get braised meat free!"
The response was immediate. People came over, asked prices, looked at the cuts. Fan Changyu chopped and wrapped without stopping, negotiated with enough pushback to seem credible, let them feel they had won a few coins off her. By the midpoint of the morning market the board was nearly cleared. Better than she had expected.
Guo sat across the way in silence. His expression required no description.
Fan Changyu tidied the stall, tucked her knives into her coat and strapped them against her back, pulled the door closed, and set off toward the livestock market with the purse heavy against her ribs.
Passing Guo's stall on the way out, he called after her: "Tomorrow I'm giving away extras too. Don't think I won't. And don't go crying that an old man is picking on an orphan girl."
Fan Changyu let the air out through her nose and kept walking.
Tomorrow I won't be giving it away. Tomorrow I'll be selling it.
She did the numbers as she walked. The pig had come in at ninety jin. Strip the head, set aside the offal, and the sellable meat came to roughly seventy jin. Sold entirely at fresh-meat prices, today's gross came out just above two thousand coins.
The head and the offal went into tomorrow's braised pork. Still profit there.
After paying back the cost of the pig, she was ahead by a full string of cash.
The purse sat solidly against her. Her steps came easier. Guo's noise was already behind her and already forgotten.
Then, just before she reached the livestock market gate, someone called her name from behind.
"Changyu! Changyu!"
She turned. It was Carpenter Zhao, running hard, his face stripped of color.
"Uncle Zhao? What happened?"
He was still catching his breath. "Go home. Now. Your uncle came with men from the gambling house. They broke the door in, they're tearing through everything looking for the land deed. Your aunt and I couldn't stop them."