Little Purple

"Now, this is how you make a stroke. Hold the brush like this and slowly move it." Zhi Shao Yao taught the small Hu Xiang Yi.

Both of them were sitting face to face with a clean, unused parchment between them that Zhi Shao Yao attained from Fa Sui.

"..." Hu Xiang Yi was around a year old, and his fist was supposed to be too weak to grip the brown brush, but he managed to take it from her hand and swing it around. He tried to do exactly what she showed him.

He steadily placed the tip of the brush right on top of the brown parchment. The ink dripped down the fine tip and made a small black pool.

His small arm moved to try and make a perfect stroke, but he accidentally swung the brush too hard.

"Aiya!" The brush flew toward Zhi Shao Yao's face and splattered ink on her nose. "It hurts…" she said and rubbed at her nose.

Hu Xiang Yi was shocked when he saw his cousin's face covered in ink. He rose from his sitting position, intending to help Zhi Shao Yao clean away the stains. However, he got up too fast and his body staggered. He ended up stumbling toward the ink bottle, causing it to fall flat on her.

Their heads collided and the two ended up in a miserable state. The world seemed to be spinning faster for Hu Xiang Yi and Zhi Shao Yao, who were laying weak on the floor with both of their foreheads showing the color crimson, the color of embarrassment.

"What happened?" Zhi Yu heard the commotion and immediately opened the sliding door to Shao Yao's room. His lips were pale and dry, and eyes red. He looked like he hadn't slept in a very long time.

Seeing his daughter and nephew sprawled on the ground, he sighed. "What are you two playing again?"

Zhi Shao Yao held her head and helped Hu Xiang Yi up. There was ink everywhere on their clothes, some even spilling to the floor and dirtying the parchment.

"Ugh… It's nothing, Father," Zhi Shao Yao answered.

Zhi Yu helplessly sighed. He was glad to see his daughter being strong even after her mother's death. He remembered her telling him that as an older cousin, she should be the one responsible for Hu Xiang Yi, and had been following him everywhere since.

Teaching Hu Xiang Yi how to walk, to talk, and to read was her doing.

She was practically Hu Xiang Yi's caretaker.

This reminded Zhi Yu of when he was still in his teens. He was also Hu Bai's caretaker then.

While helping the two kids clean up their mess, he looked around the room and saw a scarf on the table.

"This is…" It was the scarf Hu Bai had been working on before she went to the memorial palace, though it was supposed to be only half-finished. Zhi Yu took the scarf and looked at the details. "Yao'er, did you finish this yourself?"

Ten months ago, it was supposed to be a scarf that she would wear to the new year festival.

Zhi Shao Yao looked up and nodded.

Zhi Yu smiled gently, his daughter had grown up to a clever and talented girl.

Suddenly, he felt an extreme migraine. His body shook, and he fell to his knees.

"Father?" Zhi Shao Yao, who was cleaning Hu Xiang Yi's face, looked up at him.

"Ugh… Yao'er, call Sui… I…" Zhi Yu collapsed.

"Father!" She screamed, her eyes widening and face losing its color.

-----

Hu Xiang Yi looked at the door where he saw Hu Zi come in.

"How is he?" she asked.

"It's sleep deprivation," Fa Sui explained. "He was pushing himself too hard. Looking at his condition, I presume he hasn't been sleeping for a week."

"So Father should be fine after some sleep?" Zhi Shao Yao asked.

"Yes… And no." Fa Sui sighed. "He seemed to have been skipping meals on top of overworking himself. He'll need about three days to recover."

"It must be because of the added work from these past months." Hu Zi sighed.

Ever since her father passed away, Zhi Yu, who was his right hand man, took charge of the army. Normally, they would need two years to actually take charge of a Great General's army, but they were in a hurry because they needed to get them ready before the imperial family made their move.

They were lucky that Zhi Yu was very well known among the ranks, and many of the generals respected him as much as they respected the Great General.

The fact that he was raised in the battlefield made Zhi Yu a very disciplined man. For as long as Fa Sui had been the household's doctor, he had never once received Zhi Yu as a patient, as the man never got sick.

But then again, Sui only graduated from the academy and officially became a doctor still quite recently. Before that, his uncle, Fa Rong, was the one who took care of the household members.

"..." Hu Xiang Yi looked at the sick bed and contemplated. He fluttered his long eyelashes and puckered his cherry red lips. He was a very beautiful to see.

Fa Sui stared at Hu Xiang Yi's face. The boy sure took after his parents a lot.

Hu Xiang Yi didn't really look cold nor bored; he was calm, almost never talking. Fa Sui had wondered if his calm and quiet attitude was accumulated because of the loss of his parents, but remembered how he and Falcon were also orphans, yet they hadn't developed the same attitude. Fa Sui shook his head of those weird thoughts.

Suddenly, he remembered something. "I forgot to get the record!" He exclaimed.

Fa Sui exited the patient room, taking a few turns before coming to a small archive room just under the stairs that lead to his bedroom. He went inside to get the Zhi Yu's medical record.

He looked up toward the dark brown bookshelf in front of him, the dim lighting that came from the candle he was holding making it obvious that the once full shelf was now almost empty.

Every time there was a member of the household who passed away, Fa Sui needed to sweep the shelf of their record and put it into a box.

Fa Sui had a forlorn smile. Ten months ago, when he last came to this room, he recalled how he had to put away more than half of the record books.

The main family's record books were on the first row, The Zhi family's on the second row.

Fa Sui put the candle on top of a small table, raising his thin and fair arm to reach for Zhi Yu's medical record. The book was thin and had a dark green cover. He opened the book and looked into Zhi Yu's medical history that was made by his uncle.

As Fa Sui expected, Zhi Yu almost never got sick.

Just as Fa Sui was about to go back to his office to write down the day's record, right before he closed the door, he halted his steps and looked back. Something was amiss.

His eyes wandered to Hu Zi's record. Fa Sui always checked his patients' medical records, but he didn't find anything unusual when he checked the Hu family's record.

While everyone else's book was dark green, Hu Zi's record book cover was colored dark purple, the only one.

But no, it would be incorrect to say she was the only one with a different color. There was one more person that had a different colored cover. Fa Sui.

Fa Sui was very sickly when he was young, so he was already on the dark brown cover. If Fa Sui was not wrong, his uncle gave him the brown cover because that record book was his third volume. The first was green, second was purple. "So the Third Miss is already on her second volume?"

That was strange. He didn't recall her being the type to get sick often. He wondered if it was because of the injuries she would collect when she was training.

The record book was made by tying up pieces of parchment together with a rope. Every time a parchment was full, they would add another until the rope could no longer be tied. After that, they would start another book.

Fa Sui reached for Hu Zi's purple record book and flipped the pages. He saw that the first page was recorded when Hu Zi was just a year old. His eyes widened.

How could this be? Did she fill the entire green record book within just a year?

Fa Sui gulped. "Why didn't I realize this before?"

She was blind and her eye color was different than others, that was why he thought that her eye color and her inability to see correlated with one another. Some people might turn blind if they meet a mishap, but, if his memory serve him right, the eye color wouldn't be changed to purple just by an accident.

"Something must have happened to her in the past." He grew very curious. "But…" Fa Sui only had Hu Zi's second volume, he wondered where his uncle put the first one.

"Doctor Fa, Father is awake." Zhi Shao Yao called him urgently.