CH 19

Everything had happened in a flash. Boss Mu was the first to regain his senses and shouted : “You’re still not coming in? Hurry up!” As his words were uttered, a group of people in black broke through the doorway, and the dancers in red also reacted, turning away and drawing soft swords from the qin at their side, approaching Chu Mingyun’s side.

T/N: Good grief, I hate translating action scenes since the way they’re written is rather metaphorical in historical pieces, and it seems like there’s quite a lot of it in this book. Now we have Chinese poetry too, I hope someone is reading the footnotes  The text in blue have hover text to tell you what the word is referring to when the original text vaguely writes several ‘he’s in the same sentence, but it takes a while to pop up and I’m not sure how it appears on mobile so I might put it in brackets in plain text like “his (Chu Mingyun)” instead. Which do you think works better? Please leave a comment! The scene in the beginning with teamwork between the two is so cool, the poor man in black who tried to dodge Shiyu’s tea only to get his sword smacked out of his hand by Chuchu and then getting conked in the knees by Shiyu with his teacup. And he’s supposed to be the gentle one. Edit 09/06/21: changed all the ‘Jing Shu’ to ‘Jingshu’ to be consistent with the chapters already translated by Dust Bunny. Tried to make it clearer that the Jingshu naming scene is a flashback.

2. “不缺你一个将军” which could mean that they have sufficient generals and don’t require him (presumably Su Shiyu?)

3.“怀中” can either refer to something dropping from within his arms (if he was hugging something) or from his bosom; so since he was fighting I’ll assume it was within the chest area of his robes the way the account book was hidden within Shiyu’s robes a few chapters ago.

4. “一线火色河流” literally means a flame coloured line flowing like a river, presumably referring to the visual effect of a procession of soldiers on horseback carrying lit torches.

5. This is quoting the first line from “The Quiet Lady” which is a poem in the State of Bei (邶风·静女) Bèi fēng·jìng nǚ section of the Shijing《诗经》,the Classic of Poetry aka the Book of Songs or otherwise known as the Book of Odes. This is the oldest existing collection of written poetry, written the four-character stanza style of the Western Zhou period. The line goes, “静女其姝，俟我于城隅。爱而不见，搔首踟蹰”, and it’s a man writing about his gentle and quiet lover arranging to meet him in the city corner, yet deliberately hiding such that he becomes so anxious he grabs his ears and scratches his cheeks.

6. The type of ‘Young Master’ used here is 少主 which is a informal title as the owner of a small garrison of guards, which is also what the manager called Boss Mu in the previous chapter. This is different from the ‘young master’ 公子 that you generally call a young man of assumedly noble birth. I will try as much as possible to use small caps for the latter. Also, whenever Su Shiyu and Chu Mingyun address each other as ‘Master Su’ it is ‘大人’ daren which is the general respectful address for an official.