Chapter 6 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 6 : The Nightingale's Past 02
"How can this be? My potions are all strictly made according to the formula. There's no reason the first one would work and the rest wouldn't!" Garcia rubbed her forehead in confusion, took out a worn-out book from the cabinet behind, "Magic Potion Preparation Guide", flipped to the page on cold medicine, and pointed it out to them.
The recipe for cold medicine was one ling of taro leaf powder, half a ling of Malabar spinach root powder, dissolved in three lings of morning dew from creeping foxglove leaves. While boiling, one must seize the opportunity to comb through the magic factors, causing them to transform into a mass of magic with fixed properties. Finally, sprinkle in half a ling of driftwood fish scale powder, shake to mix, and cool. The formed magic power would stabilize and disperse in the potion, neither evaporating and dissipating nor congealing and spoiling.
Garcia led them to the inner room, a specialized pharmaceutical laboratory. On the experiment table sat a silver balance scale.
"Ling" was a very small unit of weight. One pound was ten ounces, and one ounce was ten lings. Therefore, when measurements involved lings, Garcia would specifically use this high precision balance. This kind of balance looked very exquisite and rare—probably why she was one of the few people who could make potion preparation a full-time occupation.
The potion materials needed for cold medicine were almost everywhere in the Peace Forest to the west, so they were readily available in her shop. She brought out the corresponding potion materials and tools: various powders in labeled jars, transparent pale green grass dew in large flasks, a glazed fuel lamp that had burned halfway through its fuel, fire pith for lighting, and so on, arranged them neatly on the experiment table, then tied up her scattered long hair with a green ribbon, preparing to prepare it again.
The resulting cold medicine still had no scent—or more accurately, Lucita, whose sense of smell had failed, still couldn't smell it.
In fact, because current potion formulas widely used driftwood fish scale powder as a stabilizer, the prepared potions always had a faint fishy smell, mixed with the freshness of grass dew and the slight bitterness of Malabar spinach root, forming a very complex scent.
They tried giving this newly prepared potion to the nightingale. Unsurprisingly, there was still no improvement.
"There must be something special about that first potion. Garcia, please think carefully again," Mavis pleaded.
All hope seemed to rest on Garcia's memory. Garcia pressed her lips together and paced back and forth with furrowed brows: "You know the sources of these medicinal materials very well. Many were picked by you personally and sold to me, and there are also materials collected from others and some I picked myself. I don't make separate distinctions based on source, I dry and grind them all together. The driftwood fish scales are purchased at a low price from what's left after Sylvette and the tavern process fish. The morning dew is collected by me personally."
"These materials are collected at different times and places, but when I prepare medicines, I take materials from the same container. Logically, if one works, they should all work. There shouldn't be any difference. Moreover, Lucita can't smell that scent called 'life' from these materials either. But if the problem isn't with the materials, where else could it be?"
She hesitated for a moment, couldn't help asking: "Mavis, the illness your nightingale has is exceptionally rare, and the medicine that can cure it is really too strange. I really can't figure it out, what's so special about this nightingale? Tell me, and maybe I can recall some related experiences and figure out what exactly can cure it."
Mavis lowered her deep black eyes, stroked the nightingale that had fallen into sleep again, was silent for several breaths, then as if making up her mind, said in a low voice: "Her origins are indeed somewhat peculiar."
"You should know that I wasn't originally a resident of Irttat. I came here ten years ago."
Mavis was a pure-blooded human with only a hundred-year lifespan. When she came here ten years ago, she was still a sixteen-year-old teenager. This year she was twenty-six—what seemed to the hybrid residents like merely a brief period of time, yet she had completely changed.
When the sixteen-year-old Mavis first arrived here, Garcia still remembered, wearing this same red old hood she wore now, messy black hair hanging on her chest, her body and face all dirty, covered with fine wounds, traces of being scratched by thorns and vines when crossing the mountains. A pair of pitch-black eyes looking up at people, showing extreme vigilance and aggression.
Even then, this nightingale was perched on her shoulder.
There were many small doubts that the townspeople didn't ask about, but that didn't mean they couldn't see. Ten years had transformed Mavis from a wolf cub-like rebellious youth into a taciturn solitary hunter. Fair skin had become rough in the forest's wind and sun, her clear voice had become hoarse in long silence, and her originally vibrant eyes seemed to have accumulated a layer of dust. But the nightingale—it had lived past the limit of an ordinary nightingale's eight or nine year lifespan. Even ten years later, the nightingale remained as strong and beautiful as when it first arrived, the luster of its feathers not diminished in the slightest, and the way it looked at people was too complex to be that of a bird.
Both its sudden weakening and its decade-long vigor seemed very abnormal.
Dark clouds covered the sun, and the sky darkened slightly. A pot of jasmine tea on the stove began to boil. Garcia lifted it down and poured a cup for each person. Steam rose in curling wisps, obscuring Mavis's expression.
"I was born in a small city in the southern part of the continent that once belonged to a kingdom called 'Eaton.' Sophia—the nightingale you see here—I found her in the forest outside the city. At that time, she wasn't yet a nightingale."
Not a nightingale, then what?
Yet this absurd statement was somehow expected by both Garcia and Lucita.
Ten years ago, Andas City.
Mavis was born into a good middle-class family. Her mother was a clerk in the government, and her uncle was a tutor in the local viscount's household, teaching the viscount's young petit frère piano. From childhood, Mavis had shown astonishing archery talent and always won first place at the annual hunting festival.
This was the annual hunting festival. Nobles gathered at the hunting manor outside the forest in the city's outskirts.
In the hunting competition among nobles, sixteen-year-old Mavis's archery skills—no dragging or flaunting, but had nothing to do with elegance and beauty—seemed out of place, and she even lost the victory and honor that had already been within her grasp.
"Look! Mavis from Andy’s family! Just like a crude country hunter, every arrow must draw blood, using so much force, it's really too cruel! She has no reverence for the sport of archery at all! Didn't her mother teach her manners?"
The judges revoked her honor. The original second place, Elizabeth, who always stood against her, walked proudly before the city lord, bent slightly at the waist, and accepted the lily garland representing honor.
She watched coldly.
Sixteen years old—an age full of rebellion. Mavis cast contemptuous glances at those who mocked her, as if this could transform one-sided exclusion into mutual disdain. When the whole world opposed her, she instead developed a proud spirit of heroic ambition: These weak and powerless stupid pigs!
When the night of celebration arrived, the adults who had been listless during the day became excited.
The hunting festival’s main event was never the hunt commemorating the conquest of nature, but the carnival at night.
The long tables in the hall were filled with violets, lilies, snowdrops, and bottled water lilies; roast goose, smoked ham, bitter vegetables and thyme-roasted herring, whole roasted lamb stuffed with apples, soft white bread and deep red wine. Carved silver plates held expensive green grapes, and three candles on a row of silver candlesticks burned through the night. Women talked grandly at the dining table, showing off their noble ancient surnames and enormous wealth, as if any one of them controlled the lifeblood of this small city. Men elegantly held wine glasses and sipped, praising each other's clothing with hidden barbs, showing off their figures, family, and beauty like peacocks displaying their plumage.
She saw her mother holding a glass of wine, flirting with a pretty petit frère. The boy had blonde hair and blue eyes, beautiful as a young deer. He seemed to be the youngest son of Judge Charles's family.
She knew her mother Andy was fed up with her own excessive compassion for commoners, her incompetence in general affairs, and her insufficiently elegant manners. Her mother also intended to find a new lover at this festival and have a new child to inherit the family business. When that time came, Mavis would only need to assist her future sister.
Her mother's eminent look, wisdom, and refinement made her like a fish in water in the dating scene. Who wouldn't want to find such a lover to satisfy their youthful burning passion with nowhere to go?
Mavis leaned against a pillar in front of the hall, coldly watching the women and men in the hall, each with their own thoughts.
The hunting festival was a holiday that had existed since time immemorial (although this history was quite brief), just like the so-called harvest festival. Although the commoners who truly struggled with nature were still struggling in hunger and hardship on this day, the upper-class people who held the festival still harbored sincere wishes, celebrating how people had already emerged from disaster, reconquered nature, obtained nature's gifts, and then fully enjoyed those delicious gifts of nature, as well as the secret love that occurred in the back gardens and guest rooms after being full of wine and food, hinted by bay leaves, scattered iris petals, and dropped handkerchiefs.
Mavis was already sixteen years old, just old enough to be considered an adult. She had noble black hair and black eyes, a fair and beautiful face, and a tall, well-proportioned figure. Although her heroic posture shooting arrows on horseback wasn't appreciated by the old-fashioned adults, her vibrant aggression brought her countless praise from her peers.
But Mavis never cared about these things and even detested such moments. The bestiality revealed by those well-dressed people on this night, the smell of grass and flower juice mixed with perfume that covered their bodies, all brought her a suffocating feeling she couldn't escape.
Rejecting the suggestive hints with romantic undertones from the viscount's young petit frère, she rode away from the manor filled with the smell of alcohol and fragrance, going to the nearby forest to get some air.
It was June 15th. The full round moon was hidden among tree shadows and clouds, leaking weak pale light into the forest like lines of uncatchable sand, casting shifting shadows across her profile
She rode casually forward on horseback, clip-clop, clip-clop. The calls of night owls occasionally came from deep in the woods.
In that dim light, turning around a dawn redwood, she saw a face covered in blood, bathed in pale moonlight.
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