Chu Lian pressed down on the mattress with her small hands.
The thin mattress was practically stuck to the bed board. She flipped it over to check the insides of it and discovered that it was not made of cotton or fur, but dried grass.
Chu Lian’s brows gathered together in a frown. Such a thin mattress wouldn’t be able to keep the body warm at all. If it was spring or autumn, it might still be alright to make do with this mattress, but in this bone-piercingly cold winter…
She remembered that she had specially ordered the servants to send bedding to He Changdi when she was back in the estate. Her gaze landed on Xiao Hongyu’s bed. That thick fleece bedding that should have been He Changdi’s had somehow been placed on someone else’s bed.
Chu Lian wasn’t so silly as to think that He Changdi had been bullied in the camp. The short and plump Xiao Hongyu had been amongst the rescue party that had come for them back then too.
She wondered if Xiao Hongyu had any sort of internal injury that caused him to be more susceptible to the cold. That seemed like a possible explanation for why He Sanlang had given him his own bedding…
Chu Lian rolled her eyes. That lunatic husband of hers had only ever showed her cold expressions, yet he was extremely kind to others!
However, that fellow was rather stupid. After giving away all his things to others, what was he going to use to cover himself? Didn’t he know how to buy another for himself?
Chu Lian felt a momentary lapse of disappointment at He Sanlang.
She stood up and wrapped her grey squirrel cloak around her as the cold air turned her sigh into a white puff of breath. She then turned to Wenqing and Wenlan to give them orders.
“Have someone bring the big rugs and blankets from my carriage here. Bring some needles and thread too.”
Wenlan blinked as she processed the order. In a quick moment, she understood what Chu Lian was going to do, so she hurriedly ran off to execute the order.
Wenlan was a practised martial artist, so she was pretty fast on her feet. In fifteen minutes, she had brought everything over.
Chu Lian took off her cloak and moved the blanket on He Changdi’s bed aside before pulling up the thin bedsheet. There was only dried grass under the sheet, although the grass was laid out quite evenly.
Chu Lian was about to move the dried grass away, when she noticed a flash of blue hidden within them. She walked over to it curiously and brushed the grass aside, revealing an indigo purse lying flat on the bed.
Chu Lian pulled out the purse from where it had been stuck between a gap in the layers of dried grass. When she shook it out in front of herself, Wenqing spotted the purse and spoke up, “Isn’t that the purse that you use to keep your snacks, Third Young Madam?”
All of Chu Lian’s snack purses had been made by the maidservants in Songtao Court and most of them were plain in colour without much embroidery on them. Wenqing and Wenlan had made quite a few of them too, so they could recognise it with just one glance.
Chu Lian had recognised it as well. The purse was bulging slightly, but it wasn’t heavy. The jerky and snacks that had originally been placed inside were already gone. She undid the ties on the purse and realised that there was a stack of similar purses placed neatly within.
When Chu Lian finished eating all the snacks in a purse, she would normally throw the purse away, since they were just some crude bags like the plastic bags of the modern era. However, He Sanlang had actually kept every single one of them…
A strange and indescribable feeling sparked to life within Chu Lian’s heart.
She tied up the purse again and put it back where she had found it.
Just as she was about to stand, she noticed a blue leather book slotted between a gap in the planks of the wooden bed.
In a moment of curiosity, she bent down and took the book out.
The cover of the book was made of blue leather and it was a very thin book. It looked like there were twenty or so pages in it at most, yet there was nothing written on the cover.
Chu Lian found it strange, so she carefully flipped the book open.
It was only when she looked at the first page that Chu Lian finally found some words: ‘Pleasures of the World’.
Chu Lian frowned. That seemed to be the title of this book. Why was it so weird though? There wasn’t any author’s name written in the book either.
When she flipped to the next page, Chu Lian finally realised why this book didn’t have a title on the cover nor any author.
The page she had flipped to was a crude picture of a half-dressed couple. They were locked in a passionate embrace while lying on a bed next to a half-opened window.
Chu Lian almost puked up some blood. He… He Sanlang actually read naughty books?! It was such a crudely made one too…
After she recovered from her shock, she continued flipping through the book with a calm expression. It was just twenty or so pages, so she quickly finished looking through the book. There wasn’t actually much of note inside. The people and scenes inside were just too cartoonish and unrealistic. Some of them were even contorted into such weird positions that their heads and bodies seemed disconnected. Why was He Sanlang hiding a book as lousy as this like it was some kind of treasure?
If she randomly picked out a porn book from the modern era and gave it to He Sanlang, wouldn’t he dig out a secret vault to hide it then?
Her lunatic husband was way too inexperienced.
