A soft sigh interrupted the silence reigning in the small room located in the young lord's residence. Almost an hour had passed since the last word had been spoken there.

Maomao brought the small gourd she had let Jinshi drink out of earlier to her lips and drank the last few sips of water it still contained to moisten her parched throat. Then she leaned back in her chair and stretched a bit, gazing down at the table and the fifteen small, elongated pills she had just formed out of a mixture of grinded herbs and laid out on a piece of cloth.

A faint smell of herbs had spread through the once immaculately clean room, almost like an evidence that its former resident had truly returned.

"This should be enough for now,"

she thought.

"I shouldn't give him too much of it anyway."