Gu Nian didn’t move out of the way.
He stood in the kitchen doorway with his math book under one arm and stared up at his father. “Dogs don’t make the ground shake, Dad.”
“Big dogs do,” Gu Changsheng said.
“How big?”
“Big enough that you should finish your porridge first.” He pointed at the table. “Sit.
Both of you.”
Su Nuannuan climbed onto her stool and set her pink watering can beside her bowl. The plush turtle in her backpack wiggled free and hopped onto the table. Grandpa Yao pushed his tiny gold glasses up his green nose and looked north, toward the window.
“Brother Gu,” he said quietly. “That is not a normal pack. I smell burnt blood in the wind.”
“I know.” Gu Changsheng took the notebook back out of his apron pocket. The cover was still warm.
“Give me one minute.”
He stepped into the pantry and shut the door.
The page from earlier was still there, wet with red ink. But the bottom half had gone blurry, like someone had spilled water on it. Only the first line was clear.
[Original Script, page 53: Lin Fan hires 50 Blood-Wolf scouts to test the Gu Clan’s walls. They burn one barn and leave.]
Fifty scouts. One barn.
That was the version I remember, Gu Changsheng thought. Small, annoying, and over by lunch. Of course the script couldn’t leave it alone.
A new line glowed under the blur.
[Ding! Foreknowledge Decay detected. This event has changed.]
[Unblur the new version? Cost: 20 DP (Enemy leader: Rank 2).]
Twenty DP to know who’s coming to kill my kids. Cheapest thing I’ll buy all week.
“Yes,” he said.
[20 DP spent.]
The ink cleared.
[New Script: Lin Fan’s Luck Halo has fallen to 22%. He has no ring, no money and no master.]
[He has promised Commander One-Ear Scar (Rank 2 Peak) the entire Peace Pharmacy vault.]
[All 500 Blood-Wolf mounts have been fed Berserk Blood-Boil Pills.]
[Target: West-End Orphanage Street. Expected arrival: noon.]
Gu Changsheng read it twice.
The orphanage. Thirty kids lived on that street. Half of them came to the Peace Pharmacy every morning for free honey gummies.
Nuannuan knew every one of their names.
He’s not even aiming at me, Gu Changsheng thought. *He’s aiming at the softest spot in town. Smart.
Disgusting, but smart.*
Gu Changsheng closed the notebook and walked back out.
Thirty li to the north, on a bare ridge above the Red Willow River, Lin Fan knelt beside a war-wolf the size of an ox.
He had no eyebrows. His burned hair had been shaved off. His jaw was still purple where a plush turtle had slapped him three nights ago.
He pushed a red pill into the wolf’s mouth. The beast swallowed it and shook. Its eyes turned the color of fresh meat.
“That’s the last one,” Lin Fan said. “All five hundred.”
Commander One-Ear Scar sat on a fallen log, sharpening his axe. He was a wide man with a thick neck and only one ear. The other side of his head was a smooth, shiny scar.
“Tell me about the vault again,” he said.
“Ten pill recipes worth a fortune. Silver. Hundred-year herbs.”
Lin Fan’s eyes burned.
“And the Gu family’s whole stock of medicine.”
One-Ear Scar kept sharpening. “And the father? I hear he beat a Rank 2 Elder with a cooking spoon.”
“He’s Rank 2 Mid. You’re Rank 2 Peak.” Lin Fan smiled.
“And he can’t guard the orphan street and his own house at the same time.
He’ll run to the kids. While he’s busy saving brats, your men take the vault.”
One-Ear Scar stopped sharpening. He thought about it.
Then he nodded once. “Good plan. If you’re lying, I’ll feed you to the wolves.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Everyone says that.” The warlord stood and lifted his axe. “Brothers!
We ride at the third bell!”
Five hundred wolves howled at the same time.
Back in the Gu Mansion, the window paper shook in its frame.
Nuannuan covered her ears. Little Snowball crawled under Gu Nian’s stool and whined.
Then someone started pounding on the front gate.
“Patriarch Gu! Patriarch Gu!”
Captain Gu Tie opened the side door. Magistrate Liu fell through it. His official hat was crooked and one of his boots was missing.
Two clerks ran in behind him, both pale.
“Patriarch Gu!” The magistrate grabbed the front of Changsheng’s apron. “The Blood-Wolf Mercenaries!
Five hundred riders!
My scouts saw them on the north ridge!”
“Good morning, Magistrate,” Changsheng said. “Have you eaten yet?”
“Eaten? Eaten?!” Magistrate Liu’s voice cracked.
“One-Ear Scar is leading them!
He burned three villages last autumn! And your old enemy Lin Fan is riding with him!”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“Grandpa Yao told me.” Changsheng nodded at the table.
The plush turtle lifted his teacup with both flippers. “One-Ear Scar,” Grandpa Yao said in his deep, old-master voice. “I saw him fight once, forty years ago, when he was a boy.
He swings too wide on the left. And his breath smells like goat cheese.”
Magistrate Liu stared at the talking turtle.
He looked at Changsheng.
He looked back at the turtle.
“Patriarch Gu,” he whispered. “Your daughter’s toy just insulted a warlord.”
“He’s not a toy. He’s family.” Changsheng peeled the magistrate’s fingers off his apron.
“Sit down before you fall down.”
The magistrate didn’t sit. He pulled a crumpled report from his sleeve.
“My scouts say the wolves have gone mad. Red eyes. Foam on their mouths.
They broke our ridge watchtower in ten breaths.” His hands shook. “Patriarch Gu, I’m begging you.
We have to evacuate.
Everyone. Ring the town gong and send the people into the southern caves!”
“How many people live in town?”
“Over six thousand, with all the new families.”
“And how many fit in the southern caves?”
The magistrate opened his mouth. Then he shut it.
“About two thousand,” one of the clerks said quietly.
“So four thousand people run through the snow,” Changsheng said. “Old folks. Babies.
Sick people who came for Auntie Qin’s medicine. And five hundred fast wolves chase them across an open field.” He shook his head.
“That’s not an evacuation, Magistrate.
That’s a buffet.”
Magistrate Liu went white.
“Then what do we do?” he asked.
Changsheng didn’t answer him right away. He turned to the hall.
“Grandpa Fu.”
The old butler was already there, one hand on his abacus cane. “Third Young Master.”
“Take Captain Tie and ten guards to West-End Street. Bring every child from the orphanage here. Bring the widows on that street too.
Put them in the east hall and light every stove.”
“Right away.” Grandpa Fu bowed. Then he paused.
“And the cost of the extra charcoal?”
“Bill it to Lin Fan.”
Grandpa Fu’s one eye gleamed. “Old Fu has written it on the bill.”
He left with Gu Tie at a fast walk.
Auntie Qin came in from the side door, her sleeves rolled up, a basket of bandages on one hip. She had clearly heard everything.
“The orphans are coming here?” she asked.
“All thirty.”
“Then I need more beds, more blankets and a lot more gummies.” She looked at him hard. “And you need a plan that isn’t just you with a spatula.”
“I have a plan.”
“Is it a good one?”
“It’s a dad one,” Changsheng said.
Auntie Qin rolled her eyes and went to boil water.
Twenty minutes later, the east hall was full of small, scared faces.
The orphans sat in rows on the warm floor with blankets around their shoulders. Nuannuan walked between them with her pink watering can. She sprinkled a little sweet mist over each child’s head.
“Pain, pain, fly away,” she said to a crying boy. “Bad dogs can’t come in. Papa won’t let them.”
The boy sniffed and stopped crying.
An old widow caught Changsheng’s sleeve as he passed. Her hand was bony and cold. “Patriarch Gu.
Thank you for taking us in.”
“Eat something hot,” he said. “Then thank me.”
He felt a soft click in the back of his head.
[Ding! 30 orphans and 46 West-End residents: Warmth 60+.]
[Magistrate Liu: Warmth 41 -> 63.]
[Daily Dad Points income: +48,000 DP/day.]
Funny, Changsheng thought. Lin Fan just made me richer by trying to kill these people.
He walked back to the dining room.
Gu Nian hadn’t touched his math book. He sat very still at the table, his small hands flat on the wood. His eyes were on the north window.
“Dad,” he said. “The test.”
“What test?”
“Teacher Li’s winter math test. It’s tomorrow morning at eight.” Gu Nian’s voice was flat and careful.
“If the wolves run through town, they’ll break the schoolhouse.
Then there’s no test.”
“And?”
“And I learned the nine-times table for four nights.” His jaw got tight. “I’m not learning it again next month.”
Nuannuan came in behind him and climbed back onto her stool. “Nuannuan wrote her name ten times with no smudges! I want my Little Red Flower!”
Magistrate Liu, who had finally sat down, dropped his teacup. It rolled across the floor.
“A math test?” he said. “Five hundred mad wolves are coming to eat this town, and the children are worried about a math test?”
“They’re worried about the right thing,” Changsheng said.
“Think about it, Magistrate Liu,” Changsheng continued calmly as he rolled up the sleeves of his blue cotton shirt, his dark eyes steady and warm in the morning sunlight streaming through the dining-room window. “If a father lets five hundred unwashed mountain bandits scare his children out of taking their winter math test after they studied their nine-times tables for four nights in a row. What kind of example does that set for the household?
Next time they don’t feel like doing their arithmetic homework, they’ll start praying for a bandit raid!”
“Dad, I would never pray for bandits to skip homework!” eight-year-old Gu Nian protested earnestly. Holding up his neatly penciled multiplication worksheet to show that every single column was already filled out in ruler-straight numbers.
“I already finished the practice sheet Grandpa Fu gave me last night—and I helped Nuannuan practice counting to one hundred with dried red beans!”
“And Nuannuan didn’t eat a single bean while counting, because raw red beans aren’t sweet!” six-year-old Su Nuannuan added proudly from her stool, patting the pink watering can beside her porridge bowl.
Sitting on the corner of the dining table in his chubby two-foot-tall emerald-green plush turtle body, three-hundred-and-eighty-year-old Grandpa Yao adjusted his tiny gold-rimmed spectacles with one fuzzy flipper and nodded in solemn scholarly agreement:.
“Well spoken, Patriarch Gu! Three hundred years ago in the Central Plains, whenever rival demonic sects tried to lay siege to this old man’s alchemy mountain. My junior apprentices were taking their quarterly herb-identification exams, I simply walked out to the mountain gate, blasted the siege engines into charcoal.
Came back inside before the incense stick burned down by half an inch! Education is the foundation of a thousand-year clan—how can a pack of mangy mountain wolves interrupt our grandchildren’s school schedule?!”
Magistrate Liu stared from the eight-year-old boy holding a multiplication sheet, to the six-year-old girl proud of not eating raw counting-beans. To the two-foot-tall stuffed green turtle lecturing him on educational discipline while sipping wolfberry tea.
For the first time since the northern watchtower scouts had sounded the alarm at dawn, the cold, suffocating panic in Magistrate Liu’s chest suddenly gave way to an absurd, unshakable sense of security!
Wait a second, the town magistrate thought, blinking hard as he picked his teacup up off the floor. *Ten days ago, when Second Elder Gu Ba brought three Shadow-Rat Assassins into the Ancestral Hall, Patriarch Gu turned them into pig-farmers in pink aprons. Four nights ago, when eighty-one killers of the Five-Venom Scorpion Gang raided this courtyard, Little Miss Nuannuan melted eighty steel sabers with a single sneeze and turned them into a choir of dandelion gardeners.
And three nights ago, that stuffed green turtle on the table slapped Lin Fan forty feet into a manure cart! Why on earth am I panicking over One-Ear Scar when I’m standing inside the Gu Mansion?!*
He walked into the kitchen. The others followed him.
The [Nine-Flavor Earth-Fire Chef Wok] sat on its iron cart by the back stove. It was wide enough to bathe a pig in. Its black rim had a faint red shine, like coals under ash.
Changsheng took a clean white apron off the hook. He tied it tight behind his back.
Then he knocked the wheel-lock off the cart with his boot.
“Patriarch Gu,” Magistrate Liu said weakly. “What are you doing?”
“Lighting the stove.”
He struck a fire-stone on the wok’s side. A deep red flame woke up under the iron. It didn’t smoke.
It just burned, low and steady, and the whole kitchen got warm in a heartbeat.
The magistrate grabbed the doorframe. “Patriarch Gu, please! I’m asking you one last time!
Evacuate the town!”
Changsheng picked up his cast-iron spatula and tapped it once on the rim. The wok rang like a bell.
“Evacuate?” he said. “My kids have a math test tomorrow morning.”
He looked over his shoulder at the magistrate.
“Nobody interrupts their study schedule.”
Gu Nian stood up straight. Nuannuan grinned so wide her missing front tooth showed.
On the table, Grandpa Yao set down his teacup. “Brother Gu,” he said slowly. “You’re not planning to cook for the wolves, are you?”
“No.” Changsheng reached into the cold box and pulled out a heavy rack of red, marbled ribs. “I’m cooking for my son.”
He dropped the ribs on the cutting board with a thump.
“Old man, get your Golden Core seasoning chart. Nian’er is breaking through before lunch.”