After Li Shan said this, he suddenly found that Deng Ying was looking at him. He was stunned for a moment. It was difficult to describe the feeling of being stared at by these eyes.
He didn't seem to have such a soft heart to pity Deng Ying, but he didn't have a good reason to hate him. After all, during the three years when Deng Yi was corrupt and killing officials in the cabinet, Deng Ying took over from his own teacher Zhang Chunzhan and presided over the design and construction of the three main halls of the imperial city. Just before the Ministry of Justice was ordered to arrest him, he was on the roof of the hall of Shouhuang Palace with the craftsmen to correct the eaves.
So no matter how the matter is settled, Deng Ying has nothing to do with his father's crimes.
However, as the eldest son of Deng Yi, Deng Ying was still imprisoned. The three courts were in a dilemma when sentencing him. The imperial city had not yet been completed, and Zhang Chunzhan, who was initially in charge of the matter, was old and confused and could no longer do the job. Deng Ying was Zhang Chunzhan's only student. He passed the imperial examination in the same year as Yang Lun, the assistant minister of the Ministry of Revenue. He was a rare doer among the younger generation of officials. He was not only proficient in poetry and prose, but also in Yixue and engineering. If he and other men from the Deng family were convicted and executed at this time, the Ministry of Works would not be able to find such a person at once. So the three courts and the Silijian repeatedly discussed this person, but could not agree on how to deal with him.
In the end, it was He Yixian, the eunuch in charge of the Imperial Household Department, who came up with a solution.
"Your Majesty executed Deng Yi's entire family because he had been deceived by Deng Yi for many years. Once the truth was revealed, he was filled with resentment and anger. However, the Imperial City is the residence of the royal family. Its construction project is related to the foundation of the country and cannot be abandoned. In order to calm Your Majesty's anger, there is only one way, besides the death penalty..."
He put down the draft proposal that the three officials had drafted several times but was still in draft form, and said with a smile, "There is still one more punishment, castration."
This method, which was hard to tell whether it was vicious or kind, gave Deng Ying a way out, but at the same time ended his originally upright life. That is why Yang Wan wrote at the beginning of "Biography of Deng Ying": It is difficult to say whether Deng Ying's life ended or began in this year.
Of course, people like Li Shan don’t have Yang Wan’s God’s perspective.
They simply didn't know how to treat this evil and treacherous queen who had done nothing wrong.
"It's no use looking at me."
Li Shan could no longer look Deng Ying in the face. He walked to his side, unconsciously blowing on the dry skin on his fingers, and continued, "Although I also think it's a pity that you have ended up like this, your father was indeed guilty of a heinous crime. Now you are like a rat with a broken leg on the street. Anyone who touches you will be unlucky. No one dares to sympathize with you. Just accept it and take the blame for your father. Do your filial duty and accumulate good karma for him."
He was not wrong.
It would have been fine if Deng Ying had died, but while he was alive he was a political symbol, and his life was constantly used by the court to test people's hearts and minds.
Although Deng Ying herself had never been at odds with others before, the situation at this time was truly bleak.
His former best friends kept silent about his experience, while those who had grudges against the Deng family were eager to step on him.
It took more than a month from the time he was imprisoned to the time he was escorted to Nanhaizi. In total, Yang Lun had only secretly given Li Shan a silver ingot to ask him to look after Deng Ying.
After Li Shan finished saying these endless words, he thought of the silver ingot and looked at the injuries all over Deng Ying's body. He felt that he was pitiful. He coughed a few times and was about to say something to ease the tension when he suddenly noticed a pile of herbs beside Deng Ying's legs. Upon closer inspection, they looked very familiar.
"Hey… "
Li Shan lifted his robe, squatted down and grabbed a handful. "Which castrated rat brought this here?"
The eunuchs in the warehouse trembled with their heads down, not daring to speak. Some of those sitting next to Deng Ying were even afraid that Li Shan would stare at them, so they secretly moved to sit somewhere else.
Li Shan glanced at the panicked people, threw away the herbs, stood up, clapped his hands and looked at Deng Ying. For some reason, he suddenly laughed, "It seems that I was wrong. It's not that no one cares about you." He pulled the herbs with his feet and continued, "Steal the herbs in my yard to treat your injury."
As he spoke, he turned around and pointed at the eunuchs in the warehouse, "Among you, there are some who are not afraid of death. Master Li, I respect your courage. I will not pursue these herbs today. If I find out about it again, you will never get out of this lake again."
After saying that, he really didn't pursue the matter any further. He clapped his hands, and strode out with his men.
Yang Wan waited until the footsteps faded away before coming out from behind the haystack. She leaned on the window sill and looked carefully. Suddenly, she heard the sound of the door behind her being locked. She rolled her eyes and her face fell. She laughed at herself helplessly, "Oh no, I can't go out tonight."
Before she finished saying this, the looks from the people around her and Deng Ying suddenly became complicated.
Yang Wan turned around and looked at the people in the warehouse in surprise, then looked down at Deng Ying. She suddenly recalled what Li Shan had said before and reacted immediately.
At this time, there were three types of people locked up in the room: a man, a woman, and a bunch of eunuchs.
Of course, according to Li Shan, this man will no longer be a man after tonight.
So, should something happen tonight
If she were just a bystander, Yang Wan would probably sit down and make a thorough analysis of this extreme environment from both a literary and sociological perspective. However, at this moment, she was really a little uneasy under the gazes of the people around her. She didn't know whose body she was in now, nor did she know if the original owner of this body had someone she liked. Although Yang Wan believed that she was just a consciousness from the 21st century, and her purpose of traveling through time was to observe history and record history related to Deng Ying, since she had traveled through time and space in someone else's body, it seemed that she still had the responsibility to protect the body that supported her consciousness.
As a result, she fell into a seemingly normal logical closed loop, and her mind filled with a lot of inner drama. She couldn't help but cover her chest, completely forgetting that the man in front of her was someone she was not allowed to touch.
Deng Ying looked at her somewhat frightened face, and sat up straight with her hands on the ground.
Seeing him move, Yang Wan quickly took another step back.
"What are you going to do now?"
What? It should be the second pronunciation of "what"!
After hearing this, Deng Ying gently pinched the ground with her hand, and Yang Wan instantly became so embarrassed that she became autistic.
She is from Sichuan and usually has the problem of stuttering when she is nervous.
In an age where people are fined for using puns, this is the only little bit of contrast left in her perfectly-crafted doctoral character. But the people in front of her, including Deng Ying, still don't understand this good thing.
"I mean..."
"cough."
Deng Ying coughed, and it sounded like he did it deliberately. However, after interrupting Yang Wan's words, he did not make any other reactions, but instead restrained his "offensive" intentions in his actions. He stopped looking at Yang Wan, bent down to pick up the herbs on the ground, and put them on his knees and casually held them up.
After Zhang Chunzhan retired, he was considered the ceiling in engineering in the early Ming Dynasty.
So even something like tying grass on the hands can be done neatly and accurately.
However, Yang Wan felt that Deng Ying's hands were not particularly good-looking. The skin on her hands was a little rough due to long-term contact with wood and bricks, but the joints were distinct and the meridians were just right. She didn't look particularly ferocious, but she was different from a young man. There was a small, pale red old wound on the back of her hand, shaped like a crescent.
Yang Wan saw him making a straw pillow with the herbs she brought, and then she realized that she had thought too much. From what she had seen in the past few days, Deng Ying was a gentleman, and she seemed like a female hooligan with impure thoughts who always wanted to touch Deng Ying. Thinking about this, she couldn't help but feel that she was a little hypocritical, and she reached out and scratched her head awkwardly.
Deng Ying was still coughing a little, and raised her wrist to her chest, obviously trying to hold it in.
After calming down, she moved a little to the side and sat on the ground without hay. She reached out and placed the straw pillow beside her. She straightened up and clasped her hands together again. Yang Wan hugged her knees and squatted beside Deng Ying, "Is it for me?"
Deng Ying nodded.
"What about your legs?"
Deng Ying looked down at the wound on her ankle that was almost bone-exposing, and her Adam's apple moved slightly.
He has been unwilling to speak since he was imprisoned, firstly because he was afraid of bringing disaster to others, and secondly because he needed a quiet environment to digest the reality that his father was sentenced to death and the Manchus were sentenced to death. Over time, he has accepted his situation as described by Li Shan, a rat with a broken leg crossing the street, everyone shouting and beating him, so at this time he is not used to people asking about his well-being and illness.
"How about this, I won't touch you, I will crush the herbs for you and you can apply it yourself."
After saying this, Yang Wan rolled up her sleeves.
Deng Ying took a look at the jade pendant she used to pound medicine. It was made of high-quality hibiscus jade, which was absolutely impossible for ordinary people to have. Yet she wore two pieces around her waist.
"Take it."
Seeing that Deng Ying didn't take it, she took off the hairband behind her back.
"Take this bag."
Deng Ying still didn't move.
Yang Wan's hands were sore from being raised so much. She bent down and spread them on the ground, looking up at Deng Ying. "You are actually a good person. You have been a pillow for me in this situation. I am not a bad person. If you don't want to talk to me, forget it. Don't be hard on yourself. You don't want to be unable to leave in the future, do you?"
He still refused with silence.
For Yang Wan, the significance of this matter is neither big nor small.
Historically, his leg disease was caused by this period, but even if Yang Wan knew and tried to help him change his fate a little bit, she still couldn't do it. But she was not sad, she wiped her hands with her sleeves and gave up trying to persuade Deng Ying.
When the people in the warehouse saw that Deng Ying and Yang Wan did not act as they had imagined, they gradually lost their patience. It was cold and they were sleepy, so they all lay down and huddled together after a while.
Yang Wan sat opposite Deng Ying, and waited for Deng Ying to close his eyes before carefully curling up beside him and lying down on the straw pillow. The only sounds in the warehouse at this time were snoring and the occasional sound of turning over. Yang Wan lay down, took out the book from her sleeve, and opened it in the only little light on the window sill. She put her fingers under her chin and whispered to herself, "Tomorrow is the thirteenth day of the first month of the twelfth year of Zhenning... The record in the Ming History is March, so there is also an error in the time..."
As she was talking, she felt sleepy. She rolled over towards the wall, hugged her knees and curled up like everyone else.
"Deng Ying, I heard that you have never been married before, so do you... have a woman of your own?"
Deng Ying shook her head behind Yang Wan.
Yang Wan seemed to have seen it, and said in a daze: "If this body was my own..."
How about it
She seemed to fall asleep before she finished speaking.
Deng Ying did not fully understand what he thought was illogical. He waited for a while but got nothing from her next words, so he simply closed his eyes.
Unexpectedly, she whispered softly in her dream: "Anyway... Yang Wan lives her life just for Deng Ying..."
Along with these words fell the first heavy snow of the twelfth year of Zhenning.