Chapter 211: Her Life-Savior
Translator: Antonia
Su Qi rode on horse and followed next to the carriage of Junzhu Susu.
He planned to send her back as soon as possible, but the driver ran the carriage so slow.
He was back! But he never went to her after he had come back for so long. She was afraid he had forgotten everything. Junzhu Susu sat in the carriage and felt the sense of security the slim strong man outside had brought her, her mind flying back to seven years ago.
On a day seven years ago, Su Qi had run into a huge trouble and left the capital.
On that year, she had just turned ten, while Su Qi was ten years old too.
That day was her ten-year-old birthday party, and Prince Jing mansion was full of people.
It was boring. A bunch of guests came to talk with Princess Jing. Nanny Zhang and other servant girls were busy accepting gifts and receiving guests. She wanted to have some fun and sneaked out of the inner courtyard when nobody noticed.
It was a snowy day when the adults were staying indoors for warmth. There were few people outside, and she tried to avoided it, so no one found her.
She played with snow and went all the way to the lotus pond in the outer courtyard. She heard boys quarreling and traced over along the voice out of curiosity.
Approaching them, she hid herself behind a tree by the pond and peeped.
She saw the young lord of the Qiguogong Mansion and five or six of his followers, surrounded a boy in purple.
The boy was surrounded by them but wasn’t a little intimidated, his lips curling up in the corners with a touch of disdain.
She had met the young lord who was a mere douchebag, but she had never met the boy in purple.
But she didn’t think that he would be on the lower hand and believed the young lord of the Qiguogong Mansion would be sorry…
It seemed that the disdain in the eyes of the boy in purple irritated the young lord, so the latter pointed at him and yelled to his followers, “It’s him. He’s Su Qi. He beat him last year. Come on and beat him…”
At this time, she learned that this boy in purple was the famous little bully in the capital.
She had heard a lot of his feats and always wanted to see him in person. While watching the fight, she thought to herself: The little bully didn’t have three heads or six arms or look hideous. He was very handsome in fact, much better-looking than the young lord. But why was he a ‘bully’?
The several followers, much taller than Su Qi, seemed bewitched by the young lord and all rushed to Su Qi. Yet, Su Qi effortlessly knocked them down and stepped on the young lord.
Staring at the person under his foot with a grin, Su Qi put his hands on the knee to trample harder, teasing, “Today I can still beat you so hard that even your parents couldn’t recognize you.”
The voice was arrogant and playful, as if beating the young lord Qi wasn’t a big deal. The playful tone and the careless loud laugh impressed her a lot, so that she could still recall it vividly now.
The young lord Qi was terrified, trembling, “How…dare you…”
“Guess what?” Before Su Qi finished, fists splashed on the face of young lord Qi.
Seeing it, the followers exchanged a look and rushed towards Su Qi again. These boys’ fathers were generals under Qiguogong. Su Qi had heard his father and brother talked about it.
They dashed over, and young lord Qi took the opportunity to rise to his feet but unexpectedly was hit by Su Qi’s powerful kicking, flying onto the tree where she was hiding behind.
Young lord Qi bumped on the trunk, and she didn’t manage to escape. She slipped and fell into the lotus pond.
The beaten-up followers and young lord Qi all saw a person falling into water. Certainly, they knew Junzhu Susu.
Young lord Qi was stunned for a second and pointed at Su Qi, “It’s you. It’s you who scared Junzhu and made her fall in water. Everyone saw it. You pushed me, and I just hit on the tree. So this has nothing to do with me.”
She struggled in the water and cried for help. That young lord Qi was merely one step away from the pond. However, he didn’t try to save her but ran away with the followers after making the speech. Water flew over her head, freezing bone-piercingly cold…
She thought she was going to die. Just in this moment, she saw a touch of purple dashing over and plunging into the pond.
Then she was overwhelmed by the coldness and passed out. When she woke up again, she saw a magnified anxious face.
The person’s lips seemed to be on hers, blowing air into her mouth.
Dizzy and staying too close to him, for a time she forgot that she had fallen in water and thought: Who was this dandy? How dared him to take advantage of her! Without thinking, she slapped him in the face.
The boy let go of her lips, covered his face in palm, stared at her, aggrieved. Only then did she find that it was Su Qi, who had just saved her life.
But…why, afterwards, did he take advantage of her?
She was going to ask him, but then coincidently, her father arrived, led by young lord Qi and the followers, and saw everything. Because of his bad fame as a little bully who had burned the hair of his fathers’ concubines at the age of three…beat the young lord Qi at nine…and everything else that was horrifying, and because young lord Qi complained first, a misunderstanding preoccupied Prince Jing’s mind.
Therefore, he presumed that Su Qi was so bold that he did such an evil and obscene thing at such a young age. The boy had not only pushed her in water but also tried to do that to her.
Immediately, Prince Jing raise his palm to him. Her heart almost leaping out of her throat, she reached out to stop his father. Though he wasn’t a master in martial arts, she was afraid Su Qi would either die or at least be disabled by the furious palm.
However, after soaking in the icy water for long, exhausted and cold and nervous by what was going to happen, she saw only darkness before her eyes and passed out again.
Since then, she fell ill, lying in bed in a fever, and didn’t wake up until three days later. Only after the whole winter passed and the next spring came did she finally completely recover.
As to what happened later on that day, she only heard it from others.
Back then, her father hit the boy, but Su Qi also raised his arms to catch it. He didn’t die or became disable and merely stepped back by the blow. Nevertheless, he swallowed the anger, with blood stain on his lips, and never begged for mercy or pleaded guilty. He just stubbornly stood in confrontation against her father.
Su Qi was a legal son of the Su family with a special identity. No one could rid of the blame if he died under father’s attack if the Su family sent a punitive expedition.
Therefore, everyone present stood out to mediate. Prince Jing worried about her daughter, snorted, and carried her to the room, for a time busy sending for an imperial doctor and punishing her servants.
Her mother was also on the go, bathing and changing clothes for her. The party almost ended up a funeral.
When she woke up and became sober, Su Qi was already sent out of the capital, because when she was critically ill, Prince Jing, in a rage, carried his sword and went to the Su mansion, demanding the life of Su Qi to compensate for his lose of a daughter.
Even though the Su family didn’t fear the Prince Jing mansion, they felt guilty after all and could only yield, secretly sending Su Qi away.
In fact, later she told father the truth, but he refused to believe her words and only repeated that no matter what, it was because of Su Qi that she fell in water. Sending him away didn’t do him wrong.
As for the kiss, Prince Jing had suppressed the news from spreading on the spot. It was said that even the Su family didn’t know it. Later, she heard an imperial doctor mentioned that it was a way to give her breath…
Nonetheless, she didn’t want to listen. As long as he toughed her, he should be responsible to her. Therefore, over so many years, whoever the suitor was, she asked mother to turn the man down. She was waiting for him to come back. In the last year, Su Qi came back. She had believed that he would remember the ‘kiss’ and come to her to give her an explanation.
However, she only heard that he molested ladies and remained the same lawless carefree bully as before.
Yet, even so, she never believed what others said about him. Only based on the fact that on that moment, everyone else ran away but Su Qi, regardless of the cold, dived into the pond and saved her, she couldn’t believe that he was a bad man.
She guessed that he only pretended to be a bad guy. In fact, she also looked down upon those hypocritical people and didn’t want to talk to them.
She was planning that if he didn’t come to her, she would go to visit him. She was never a reserved girl who only waited for happiness to come to her.
However, he stayed in the capital for less than a month before she found a chance to visit him, and he was then sent by the Su family to a town.
Right now, Su Qi’s horse was right next to her carriage, slowly going forward. Junzhu Susu recalled everything in her mind and decided that if she didn’t say anything now, there might not be a chance for them to meet or talk again.
Making up her mind, she lifted the window curtain and tried to make her voice sound soft, “Why didn’t you explain to my father?”