I Brought Home a Cthulhu - Chapter 3

We were inland!

I ground my teeth.

Where was I supposed to find seafood for her?

I drove my Mini to the market and finally managed to bring back shrimp and clams. Since I had never cooked seafood before, I hurriedly opened a lifestyle app and searched for recipes.

Why did every single recipe require cooking wine to remove the fishy smell?

I didn’t have any cooking wine!

Resigned, I made another trip to the nearby convenience store.

At least the rain had stopped. Otherwise, she could have lived on air.

I banged around the kitchen in a foul mood for half the day and eventually produced a plate of poached shrimp. After mixing a dipping sauce, I carried it to her.

“I made shrimp. See if you like it.”

If she didn’t, there was nothing else. She could take it or leave it.

I wisely kept that last part to myself.

She did not turn around. “…Leave it,” she said flatly.

“…”

She’s sick. She’s sick. She’s sick.

Repeating the words three times in my head, I set the plate down with perfect “calm.”

“Eat it while it’s hot. I have work to do. I’ll come collect the plate later.”

My studio was the most expensively renovated room in the entire house. Maintaining the correct temperature and humidity alone had cost me well over a hundred thousand yuan.

That day, I was restoring a bowl sent to me by a private collector.

It had been fired at a Qiong kiln during the Tang dynasty. It had a low ring foot, green glaze that stopped short of the base, a chip in the rim, and a crack running through the body almost all the way to the foot.

The collector said he had bought it from a farming family near Dujiangyan. Supposedly, they had dug it up while laying the foundation for a pigsty.

I put on white gloves and placed the bowl on the padded center of my worktable.

First, I inspected it with the naked eye. Soil staining marked the glaze, and calcified deposits clung to several areas. The sides of the crack no longer aligned, possibly because the vessel had dried too quickly after excavation and developed a stress fracture.

I took out a handheld microscope and studied the chipped rim. The exposed clay body was dense and gray-white, the classic “incense-ash body” of Qiong ware.

Opening my notebook to a fresh page, I wrote down my findings: mid-Tang dynasty, folk kiln, utilitarian ware, glaze approximately 0.3 millimeters thick, full-depth fracture, no evidence of an earlier repair.

I followed this process every day. It was second nature to me.

Restoring cultural relics always quieted my mind. I loved working with fragments left behind by time.

The moment I entered my studio, I forgot the hours.

By the time I came back to myself, it was already three in the afternoon.

I had forgotten lunch again.

Rubbing my empty stomach, I suddenly remembered the patient in my bedroom.

I could skip a meal, but a sick person couldn’t!

I rushed back into the main house and burst into the bedroom. “Qi Wuzhi, are you starving? What do you want? I’ll make it.”

Before the words had left my mouth, I saw the empty plate on the table.

The dipping sauce was untouched, but every shrimp was gone.

So she had an appetite after all.

Qi Wuzhi was sitting upright in bed. She looked displeased, her brows drawn into a faint frown.

“…This room is too dry,” she said.

I checked the hygrometer. The needle sat squarely in the healthy green zone.

“It’s been raining hard for days. If the house gets too damp, people get sick.”

I had no idea why I felt compelled to explain myself.

She glanced up at me.

“Seafood,” she said.

I stared blankly before realizing she was answering my earlier question.

Did she really like seafood that much?

I did not understand it, but I respected it. A patient should eat whatever she could stomach. The important thing was getting her healthy again.

“I have some clams left. How about I stir-fry them for you?”

She looked at me.

“Steamed.”

“…”