Chapter 401: Chapter 149: Storm_2
She was very fond of this little dog.
It was like a gift from God to her.
One morning, as Lu Tong woke up, she did not see any trace of the dark clouds. Usually, by this time, the little dog would have already been biting the corner of her blanket.
Feeling a sudden unease, she hurried out of the house, and finally saw the dark clouds in the corner of the courtyard.
The dark clouds were lying on the ground; upon seeing her, they struggled to open their eyes and whimpered.
Lu Tong threw herself beside it, frantically trying to pick it up.
"Don’t worry, I had it test a new medicine for me."
Lady Yun emerged from beneath a tree, holding an empty bowl, and with a smiling expression, she began to speak while looking at Lu Tong on the ground, "I haven’t named it yet; its ingredients are fern, female green, wolf poison, iris, arsenic..." She listed many.
Lu Tong gazed at her dumbfoundedly until she could not help but start trembling.
Arsenic is poisonous.
Dogs should not take arsenic, not to mention that the dark clouds were not even half a year old.
Lady Yun said, "Seven days."
"...What seven days?"
"Now that you’ve learned some medical skills, right? If you can cure it of the poison within seven days, it will live."
The woman’s smile was gentle, tinged with a curious concern, "I have already told you the ingredients of the poison, Little Shiqi; don’t disappoint me."
Lu Tong held her companion tight, her face deathly pale.
Those were both brief and endless seven days.
Every moment was an ordeal; she barely ate or slept, forgot the days, flipped through all the medical books, only hating that her knowledge of medicine was not more extensive and that her medical skills were not more exquisite. She felt like a waste, her past pride shattered, her dream of becoming a female doctor suddenly broken.
Ridiculously stupid.
By the seventh day, the sores covered the entire body of the dark clouds, no longer looking like itself.
The little dog was not dead yet and was too weak to make a sound. Those bright eyes looked at her with infinite affection, and as Lu Tong’s tears fell on her hand, the little dog strenuously stuck out its tongue and tenderly licked it.
She could not come up with a cure for the poison; she simply could not save her friend.
Lu Tong knelt before Lady Yun, choking with sobs and pleading, "Lady Yun... Lady Yun... save it..."
Lady Yun bent down, gently removing her hand that was grasping the hem of her dress, shaking her head with a sigh.
"Little Shiqi, you can’t place all your hopes on others."
"Moreover," she said with a slight smile, "you don’t have any payment to offer me now."
That year, Lu Tong bargained herself to Lady Yun to save the Lu Family.
But now, she wasn’t even her own, without any right to strike a deal with Lady Yun.
The clouds outside were heavy, and the dark clouds breathed their last in her arms.
She watched helplessly as they breathed their last breath.
The warm, furry body gradually grew icy and stiff. It would no longer be the first to rush up to lick her hand after each drug test. Those dark, shiny eyes slowly lost their vibrance, becoming two fixed, dim orbs of death, no longer reflecting Lu Tong’s silhouette.
She wandered aimlessly, holding the dead dark clouds to a pine forest at the mountain’s peak.
The pines and cypresses were evergreen on the mountain; Lu Tong found a beautiful little pine and started to dig a hole beneath it, wanting to bury the dark clouds there. When she was halfway through, thunder rumbled suddenly and the rain poured down in torrents.
Lu Tong hurriedly picked up the dark clouds, afraid that the rain would wet its fur. The cold body of the little dog pressed closely against her, and she could not hold back any longer, embracing the corpse of the dark clouds and bursting into loud sobs.
The rain poured down like a breached dam, and the howling wind enveloped her crying.
She just sat there, her pupils reflecting the sudden, unanticipated summer storm on the mountain. Until the dark clouds dispersed and the rain began to ease; summer rains in the mountains came quickly and left swiftly. A rainbow emerged in the afterglow of sunrise.
Just as the poem said, bustling through the rain to hurry across the stream... the rain stops abruptly, and the mountain turns green again.
The rain had stopped.
But the rain hadn’t stopped.
It hung overhead, ready to fall at any moment. The dark clouds were dead, but the rain persisted, never to permanently halt. You never know when it will descend, like the cresting waves, pulling you down beneath the water.
That was the first lesson Lady Yun taught her.
One cannot prevent the rain from falling, just as she could not stop the ebb of life.
"Plop—" a sound.
Lost in thought, her hand unsteady, the pen dropped onto the paper, trailing an eyesore of an ink stain.
Outside the window, the waning moon was hazy, and the light filled the room. The ink stain on the paper resembled a dark scar, suddenly hurting one’s eyes.
Lu Tong suddenly felt somewhat stifled.
She grabbed the paper in front of her, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it away forcefully.
The paper ball tumbled along, catching the light, rolling up to a pair of boots.