Chapter 5 – The First Exchange (Patreon)

After hanging up her clothes, Lynn Naya shut the door, leaving the scowling Fan Shi outside.

Fan Shi could be as unhappy as she wanted; someone would surely come to apologize to her tonight.

Lynn Naya calmed herself and began to think about her body’s deficient blood and weak state.

Essentially, her body was too weak. To fix it, she needed to eat well and nourish it with food and medicinal supplements.

She had considered this since she first arrived, but she was dirt poor and had no room for error, let alone the luxury of nourishing her body.

Now, she was a little better off. She could eat her fill, but eating well was still difficult unless she was willing to go into the wild to scavenge for resources.

But her goal in nourishing her body was to cultivate, and her goal in cultivating was to survive. Going into the wild to get food would be like going to her death for the sake of living.

With that option off the table, there were three others:

First, she could grind her Medicine skill proficiency. Healers were well-compensated, and if her skill got high enough, she could probably eat meat every day.

The problem was that it was a slow grind. She had been at it for eight months and still hadn’t reached the “Beginner” level. The difficulty would only increase after that.

It was the same with her Evergreen Technique. After breaking through to the first level, her experience, which used to be 1 to 2 points a day, was now only 1 point every four or five days. It was a snail’s pace.

Second, she could grind her Medicinal Farming skill. She had already done her research. She was currently responsible for the lowest-level medicinal fields. If her skill improved enough to get her a position in a higher-level field, her contribution points would at least double. With the extra points, she might be able to afford meat from time to time.

Lynn Naya quickly dismissed this idea. There was a simple reason for this: positions in the Dao Palace were one-to-one. Unless someone above her died, she couldn’t take their place. Even if she mastered the Medicinal Farming skill, if there were no openings, she’d have no choice but to stay put.

The last option was the opportunity her parents had left her.

The original owner’s father was an innate martial artist. Experts usually had their own hidden stashes. Her father had left her several cultivation methods for mortals and a few medicinal recipes.

The former was not very useful to Lynn Naya, but the latter was invaluable.

The most common and most feared thing for people in the wild was getting injured. With medicine, you had a better chance of surviving. Many people made a decent living just by selling things like hemostatic powder.

Among the recipes her father left behind, the most valuable was something called the “Life-Preserving Pill.” Its function was to sustain a severely injured person for at least two hours.

When Lynn Naya was inventorying her assets, she had been extremely tempted by the pill’s recipe. Its value was self-evident. But she knew she didn’t have the ability to protect it, so she didn’t act on the thought.

Now that she was a cultivator, she could afford to take a small risk.

After long consideration, Lynn Naya looked at Xue Yong’s wife, who was collecting rainwater outside.

Based on her observations over the past eight months, Xue Yong and his wife were both smart and trustworthy people. Lynn Naya felt she could try working with them.

That evening, after the men had returned from their work outside, Uncle Wang, just as Lynn Naya expected, came to her door to apologize.

He told her not to mind what happened, that no one wanted her to leave, and that he would teach his wife a lesson so she would know not to speak out of turn again.

Uncle Wang was a bit of a simple man who just kept his head down and worked. Lynn Naya just wanted to stop the nagging, so she immediately accepted his apology.

They were neighbors who would see each other every day, so she would try to be as civil as possible.

After Uncle Wang left, Lynn Naya took out a pile of bottles and jars from a wooden box in the corner of her hut. These were the powders and pills she had made over the past months with the herbs her patients gave her.

There weren’t many—only five or six types. Making the pills might have been part of the Medicine skill, as she hadn’t seen any new skill proficiency on her status panel.

Her finger moved from left to right, and she finally chose the bottle on the far right. She took it out, looked at the three pills inside, and then put them into a bamboo tube the size of her finger. She put the ceramic bottle back.

Ceramic was much better than bamboo, and she couldn’t bring herself to give it away.

With the pills in her sleeve, she guessed that most of the families had finished their dinner. She put some of her dried peaches in a bag and knocked on Xue Yong’s door.

His house was similar to hers, with a small room crammed with two beds. When they invited her in, their daughter was picking up food scraps from the table.

They had probably just finished dinner, but there was no lingering scent of food, a clear sign that even though they went out hunting often, they still lived a hard life.

“Auntie Xue, these are some peaches I dried myself. They don’t keep for long, and I don’t want them to go bad, so I brought some over for your two little ones to try.”

The peaches were her “consultation fees” from the summer months. Fruits were hard to store, so she would steam and dry them to save for later. Her current stock of dried fruit was the largest she had, filling seven or eight bamboo tubes.

“Oh, that’s so kind of you,” Xue Yong’s wife said, trying to decline. “You even healed our son’s fever a while ago, and you wouldn’t accept any payment. We can’t possibly take your things.”

“Your son is just like a nephew to me. Besides, you’ve all taken good care of me as well. How could I possibly stand by and do nothing?” As she spoke, Lynn Naya had already placed the dried peaches on the table and continued to chat with them.

After about fifteen minutes of small talk, Xue Yong and his wife realized that Lynn Naya hadn’t left because she had something she wanted to talk about.

Xue Yong gave his wife a look. His wife then used the excuse of taking her son and daughter outside to look at the stars. She left the door ajar and stood outside, pretending to watch the kids.

Seeing that his wife and children were outside, Xue Yong went straight to the point. “Is there something you need, Lady Lynn?”

“Not at all,” she said, knowing she couldn’t keep the door shut for too long. She put the pills she had brought in front of Xue Yong. “These are three Detoxification Pills. If you are poisoned or inhale miasma, you can take one. They will neutralize the toxins. I believe they could be useful to you, Brother Xue.”

Lynn Naya wasn’t going to show them the Life-Preserving Pills right away. That was too much of a risk.

The Detoxification Pills were one of the basic recipes her father had left behind, and she considered them a good test. They weren’t as essential as hemostatic powder, and the demand for them wasn’t high. But they could have a miraculous effect in a pinch. Even if people started to notice them, they wouldn’t attract too much attention.

“These are indeed very useful,” Xue Yong said, but he didn’t touch the pills. “I didn’t know you knew how to make medicine, Lady Lynn. But I might not be able to offer you a price that you find satisfactory.”

He was already talking business.

But Lynn Naya didn’t want to talk price yet. She smiled shyly and said, “To be honest, this is my first time making them. I don’t even know if they’ll work. Why don’t you take them, Brother Xue? If you find them useful, you can give me some of the prey you catch later.”

She put the ball in his court. It was up to him to decide what to do next.

With that, Lynn Naya stood up to leave. “It’s getting late, and I need to rest. I hope tomorrow is a clear day. Oh, and by the way, with what happened to Aunt Wang, to avoid any unnecessary trouble, I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone I know how to make medicine.”

The poison that killed Aunt Wang couldn’t be cured by her pills anyway. She only said that to avoid getting herself into the spotlight.

Fame and prestige were directly linked to risk. She preferred to stay an anonymous nobody.

After leaving Xue Yong’s hut, Lynn Naya played with the two kids for a bit. When she saw them yawning, she went back to her own hut.

Inside, she could hear Xue Yong and his wife talking next door.

“…We haven’t used all the detoxifying pills we bought before. What should we do with these?” That was Xue Yong’s wife.

“Put them in the rucksack. You can never have too many of these.” Xue Yong said.

“What should we give Lady Lynn in return?”

“She even healed our son last time. Let’s wait until tomorrow and give her the best we can.”

“Okay, whatever you say.” Then, his wife said, “I never knew Lady Lynn had this skill. Our two families have always gotten along. If we can buy these pills from her in the future, maybe we can get them for cheaper. And there’s a lot of miasma in the Peach Blossom Forest. We’ve never been able to get through it. If we had a pill that could resist the miasma, we could probably get to the other side of the forest.”

Xue Yong was silent for a moment before saying, “Let’s wait and see. I know what I’m doing.”

After that, they were quiet.

The next day was a beautiful, clear day. But when her neighbors returned, all they had were some firewood and wild fruits. They came back empty-handed.

A few days later, after they came back from the wild, Xue Yong and his wife quietly gave Lynn Naya a chicken leg with the foot still on it.

It was still roasted and cold, but there was a large piece of roasted chicken skin on the leg. Out of her body’s desperate need for fat, Lynn Naya’s mouth watered uncontrollably.

She knew the chicken leg was probably a show of gratitude for her having healed their son last time. But Lynn Nayawasn’t in a hurry. Her Detoxification Pills were slightly different from the ones outside, and she believed Xue Yong would soon find out why.

That night, Lynn Naya lit her brazier. It was now autumn, and the fields were bountiful. She had received a lot of wild fruit as payment and needed to process them to preserve them. Tonight was the perfect opportunity.

She roasted the wild fruit little by little. When she was done, she took out the chicken leg.

It would be difficult to heat the chicken leg. The smell would draw attention. Xue Yong and his wife had given her cold meat precisely so it wouldn’t attract any notice.

Lynn Naya placed the chicken leg in a bamboo cup with some hot water to warm it up. She then ate it with her bran cake. The taut, springy meat had an indescribable fragrance, and the satisfaction of the first bite filled her entire heart.

She finished the chicken leg in a few bites, but she couldn’t bear to throw away the bone. She broke it into pieces, put it in the bamboo cup with some water and salt, and placed the cup on the brazier to stew.

The brazier was filled with smoldering sawdust, so the temperature wasn’t too high. A stone rack above it allowed for a low, slow simmer. The advantage was that the sealed cup wouldn’t let out too much of the smell. If any did leak out, it would be masked by the sweet aroma of the fruit she was drying.

By the time the bone broth was ready, it was late into the night. Lynn Naya woke from her cultivation, held the warm cup of broth, and took a small sip while sitting on her bed in the dark. She let out a contented sigh.

This is what it feels like to be alive.