Chapter 22 – Cat Buttons

“Young Master is back!” A manservant shouted.

At once all the underlings moved about and began to prepare lunch, a large table resting in the hall, Fan Xian and the old madam sitting opposite each other on either side, with many plates of food in bits and pieces in the center.

The feeling in the room was a bit strange, because those subordinates who had nothing to do were also staring at Fan Xian’s chopsticks, and did not go to the backyard to eat, and there were a few younger maids who were secretly swallowing their saliva, as if they were a bit hungry.

This was an unwritten rule of the Earl’s Mansion, and after Fan Xian forcefully requested it, and after the old madam’s tacit approval, everyone had long since grown accustomed to it – the Earl’s Mansion, as long as Young Master Fan ate in the Mansion, he had to have tasted each and every dish and expressed his satisfaction before anyone else was allowed to eat it.

Although he didn’t understand why the always lovely and gentle young master would have such brash ideas, when once Fan Xian’s closest eldest maid, Dong’er, tasted the saltiness before he ate, and was driven out of the mansion by Fan Xian’s ferocious and incomparable behavior, everyone knew that this young master still had the shameless side of a powerful nobleman’s son after all.

Moreover, when Miss Dong’er left in tears, Old Lady Earl only looked on with cold eyes and did not say a word more.

Inside the entire room, there was only the sound of Fan Xian’s chewing and the slight sound of slurping as he drank his soup, and all the subordinates quietly waited with their hands down. Just like all large families, the leftovers from the master’s meal would always be sent to the place where the subordinates lived, as a reward for the lower classes-so Fan Xian didn’t eat much of each serving, just a chopstick tip, and sent it into his mouth.

But he ate slowly and carefully, his thin lips pursing, looking like two bright lights opening and closing.

The old lady of the Earl’s Mansion kept rubbing a statue in her hand, and her mouth also opened and closed slightly to recite prayers, but no sound was made.

After a long time, Fan Xian finally tasted all the dishes and smiled sweetly, his eyes glowing with a clear, soft light as he pointed to a plate of stir-fried bamboo artemisia on top of the table and instructed the servants, “This is a dish I like to eat.”

The servants and maids breathed a sigh of relief and hurriedly began to add more food, and those who had no duties could finally go to the backyard to eat, but another servant went to the kitchen and brought all the remaining stir-fried bamboo artemesia to the hall, placing it in front of Fan Xian.

“Grandmother, please eat.”

Fan Xian stood up and bowed respectfully to the old madam, then took the rice bowl with both hands and politely placed it in front of her. As for himself, he was holding a bowl of rice and kept holding the sauteed bamboo artemisia on his plate, chewing while a hint of a smile flashed across his eyes, only that smile looked extraordinarily odd on his beautiful face, as if he had finally found something he had been searching for for a long time.

But for some reason, the maids waiting on the side looked at the smile on the face of this twelve year old boy, and thought of the heavy slap on Butler Zhou’s face back in the morning, and their hearts chilled for no reason.

“I’ll bring it back to my room to eat.”

Fan Xian spoke to the maids around him, then carried the plate of stir-fried bamboo artemisia, and a bowl of white rice, and headed for his own bedroom in the side courtyard. At this time, the old madam had not yet finished her meal, and it was a rude thing for a latecomer to leave the table, but the old madam did not say anything.

Back in the room, he took some emetic powder and swallowed it directly, then stuck his fingers into his throat and dug desperately, finally spitting out the remnants of the meal in his abdomen, and immediately after, not daring to be slow, he took out a few self-formulated medicinal pills from the drawer and swallowed them with water, and then used his true qi to move all over his body, and realized that there really didn’t seem to be any problem, and that’s when he let go of his heart.

He looked at the plate of fried bamboo artemisia, smiled bitterly, and then poured into the toilet behind his bed – the dish is poisonous, is often used by those secret agents of the Supervisory Yuan “cat button”.

“Cat buckle” is a kind of fruit that grows in the southern island like citrus, long beautiful, born out of the flowers have a strange spicy flavor, and the toxin is stored in the fruit of this fruit.

Because the cat button juice mixed into the meal, not easy to make the meal discolored, and smell will not be abnormal, but will increase the flavor of the meal, so often used by the inspector general’s secret agents to carry out assassinations that need to be covered up. After this poison enters the stomach, it will start to work around night time, making people convulse and die, especially like some kind of infection type of death, and it is hard to find out the real cause of death.

Fei Jie was the grandmaster of the Inspectorate’s preparation of poisons, and Fan Xian was Fei Jie’s only disciple, so when he took his first bite of the stir-fried bamboo artemesia, he tasted it right away – the cat’s buttons didn’t have much of a flavor, and the only thing that was broken was that they would have a slightly bitter taste – the poisoning of the The assassin actually knew to mix the juice of the cat’s buttons into the bamboo artemisia, which already had a somewhat bitter flavor, and was really a very powerful character.

Fan Xian didn’t leave to detoxify the poison right away just now because he was afraid that the old lady would be frightened. But at this moment, he suddenly had some second thoughts, his own guts were not too big, if it was not what he thought was a cat’s buttons, but some kind of acute poison, he would only have died at this point.

Since Fei Jie admonished him, he had been very careful with his diet, afraid that the aunt in the Earl Sinan’s residence in Kyoto would poison himself, hence the odd scene during his meal just now. He was afraid that the poison he had eaten hadn’t poisoned himself, but had poisoned the subordinates in the mansion, so he had demanded that all dishes must be passed through first by himself, just like the eunuchs in the palace who, as legend had it, specialized in trying out the dishes.

Although Fan Xian thought that his life was more important than anyone else, he was not willing to let innocent people die because of him.

Seeing that the young master had come to a place like the kitchen, the servant hurriedly stood up, brought a bench for him to sit on, and asked with a smile, “Young master, is it true that you didn’t have enough just now, and would like some more?”

Fan Xian smiled and said, “I like the fried bamboo artemisia.”

The chef stood next to him and laughed, “It’s good that young master likes it.”

“Well, it’s quite fresh, when did you buy it?” Fan Xian nodded vigorously and asked carefully.

“Bought in the morning, naturally fresh.”

“By the way, has anyone from outside the mansion come to the kitchen today?”

“The old ha who delivers vegetables is sick, and his nephew came by.”

“It’s nothing, then I’ll leave first.” Fan Xian grabbed a piece of bacon from the plate handed over by the cook and ate it, chewing on one side and smiling sheepishly on the other, “Don’t tell grandma I came to the kitchen to steal food.”

Watching the little boy leave the kitchen, the servants began to talk, all said that this private son of the earl is really nice, without half of the vices of the son of a powerful family, except for …… the rules of eating are really a bit big.

In the middle of a narrow street in Tanyu Port, Fan Xian hooked his finger on the back wall of a certain building, and with a push of his arm, the whole person climbed in like a nimble cat, this was the home of Old Ha, the food delivery man.

The count’s residence has only a dozen people in total, in addition to the maid changed a batch, but also are local people, so many years, so not very worthy of suspicion. Although Fan Xian, the old ha who delivered the food, had seen him before, he knew there was something odd when he heard that he was sick at such a strange time.

Old Ha’s room was dark, but to Fan Xian’s eyes, it was as if it was daytime, and he walked softly and noiselessly into the room, his nose catching a hint of blood.