When Gong Xiaohua awoke again, she found herself in a dim thatched cottage. Aside from the crude wooden bed she was lying on, the only other visible furnishing in the cottage was a dilapidated trunk. Although the thatched cottage was simple, it had been kept very clean.
"Sister Gong, you're awake," she suddenly heard a child's voice say from beside her left ear. She turned her head to look and saw a gaunt little face sitting on the inside of the bed, with a pair of sleepy big eyes looking at her joyfully.
Gong Xiaohua took a careful look at the child next to her who was almost emaciated to the bone, recognizing him as the child she had met in prison: "You? Are you Xiao Hao'er?"
"I'm Xiao Hao'er. Sister Gong, are you still in pain? Hao'er will blow on it for you," he said, preparing to bend over to help her, but Gong Xiaohua stopped him.
"Xiao Hao'er, sister is not in pain," she said.
"Oh, is sister hungry then? My mother told me that when sister wakes up, I should give her some congee."
"Sister is not hungry either. Is it just you at home? Where are your father and mother?" Gong Xiaohua looked around the cottage, where there was only her and Xiao Hao'er, and asked in puzzlement.
"Mother went to the mine to work and won't be back until night. Father died," Xiao Hao'er said, unable to conceal his low spirits when he uttered the last sentence.
Gong Xiaohua had not expected that his father was no longer around. She raised her left hand and stroked the top of his head, apologizing, "I'm sorry, Hao'er, sister didn't do it on purpose."
"It's okay, I know sister didn't do it on purpose."
"Such a good child. Are you home alone every day?"
"Mm, usually when mother goes out to work, I stay home to practice reading and writing. When I get tired, I go for a walk by the river."
"If you get bored, go do what you like. You don't have to keep sister company all the time."
"Hao'er is not bored. Hao'er wants to keep sister company."
As night fell, Hao'er's mother returned from the mine. Before even entering the cottage, she could hear the sound of her son laughing heartily from inside, something she had not heard since her husband died.
"Miss Gong, you're awake," Hao'er's mother said as she came in from outside.
"Mother," Xiao Hao'er stood up and respectfully addressed his mother.
"Madam."
Gong Xiaohua struggled to get up to bow to her, but was stopped by the other party: "Don't move, you still have injuries. If you don't mind, just call me sister-in-law directly."
"Yes, sister-in-law. Thank you for saving my life this time."
"Miss Gong, there's no need to be polite. If it weren't for you back then, Hao'er and I wouldn't have been able to make it alive to this northernmost exile either. Besides, the one who saved you was Hao'er."
It turned out that after she had jumped off the cliff into the river below, she had floated downstream with the current, but soon lost consciousness due to excessive blood loss and was washed to this northern exile by the river water.
Fortunately, Xiao Hao'er happened to be by the riverside and found her. He took care of her there until night fell when his mother returned, and the two of them carried Gong Xiaohua back home in the middle of the night to avoid people's eyes and ears.
"Thank you, Hao'er."
Xiao Hao'er smiled from ear to ear, extremely happy to see Sister Gong again, even if it was in this way.
"I don't know if there were any other people when you saved me at first?"
"There was only you by the river at that time."
She also wondered how the other two were doing. Oh well, things will work out for good people.
Gong Xiaohua recuperated here for almost half a month before her injuries finally began to slowly heal.
Since this was an exiled mining area, security was tight and people inside were not allowed to freely enter and exit the mine, otherwise they would be killed without question. For safety reasons, she had stayed inside the thatched hut without going out for more than ten days.
The monthly wage at the mine was only twenty wen. The meager amount of money they had barely managed to save up was all used to buy her a bottle of hemostatic medicine.
As for the money Gong Xiaohua had on her, there were only a few bits of silver, and the banknotes had all been soaked by the river water and turned to nothing.
The frontier was bleak, and merchants were often unwilling to come here to do business, resulting in scarce supplies, especially medicinal herbs, which were extraordinarily expensive. Half of the few bits of silver were used to bribe the mine guards to get her some medicine, leaving little left over.
In order to survive, they had no choice but to give the jade bracelet Qin Chuyuan had given her to Xiao Hao'er's mother in exchange for some rice to sustain the three of them.
Her injuries also kept recurring, taking a long time to scab over and slowly heal.
In the meantime, Qin's people had been desperately searching for her.
"Young master, you haven't slept for days. Please go rest. The young mistress is so capable, she will surely come through safely."
After Gong Xiaohua and the two Wei Country princes were forced over the cliff into the water that day, it wasn't long before the Second Prince of Wei's true confidants arrived to provide rescue.
The eunuch and his men were all executed. The other group was also killed except for the leader who escaped.
Of Qin's eleven secret guards, only three remained.
The escort team had left the capital with a hundred men, and now only a few dozen remained.
It took the Second and Third Princes of Wei two days to be found, then Wei's troops searched for another three or four days but found no trace of Gong Xiaohua before finally withdrawing back to Wei, leaving only Qin's secret guards and escort team members to keep searching, sending homing pigeons back to the capital.
Upon receiving the message, Qin Chuyuan rushed over day and night, arriving at the northernmost part of Ye Country within seven days, running who knows how many good horses to death along the way.
Orders also came from the court for the local government to cooperate in the search, insisting on seeing the person alive or the body dead.
When they arrived at the scene of the incident, they kept searching along the river, staying up for days and nights. There was no trace of her, and Qin Chuyuan's eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. It wasn't until several days later that they found a unique ruby bracelet at a pawn shop in a town dozens of kilometers downstream.
On this night after Xiao Hao'er had fallen asleep, his mother came to Gong Xiaohua and said, "Miss Gong, there is something I want to discuss with you."
"Sister-in-law, please go ahead."
"When we were exiled, my husband didn't make it. But I know it was because those people didn't want him to live. He didn't want to implicate us mother and child, so he starved himself to death."
"What do you mean?"
"Do you still remember that time you were injured in prison?"
"Injured?" She had been injured shortly after coming here, she wasn't sure if it was that time.
"Yes, that time when someone kicked you onto the steps and you suffered a serious head injury."
"I remember that, so the culprit was looking for you guys?" It turned out to be the first time after she came here.
"Yes. They were looking for something important and thought my husband had hidden it on us, so they broke into the prison at night. Coincidentally you happened to catch them, so you were beaten until severely injured. Fortunately you were fine in the end."
"What important thing?"
"It was an account book." After speaking, she went to a hidden corner, took out a cloth package, and opened it to reveal a yellowed sheepskin scroll.
"The culprits weren't wrong that time. This account book really was on us, but they didn't expect that it was a sheepskin scroll, and I had sewn it into Hao'er's clothes."
As she spoke, Hao'er’s mother handed the sheepskin scroll to Gong Xiaohua.
Gong Xiaohua accepted the sheepskin scroll and unrolled it. The scroll was not big, densely filled with records of extra silver earned by troops near the capital in recent years and where it went, as well as silver given to certain high officials in the capital.
"Miss Gong, I have an inappropriate request."
"Sister-in-law, please go ahead."
"My husband was falsely accused because of this account book. He served as an official for over a decade, always working diligently without any corruption or crime. My health cannot hold out much longer, but Hao'er is still young. His life should not be like this. I am giving this sheepskin scroll to Miss Gong, hoping that after you return to the capital you can hand it to His Majesty, to pardon my son of the label of traitor's child. Please also take care of Hao'er for me, rewarding him with a bowl of rice to eat will do, until he can be self-reliant."
