At this point, Thomas Foster felt that the princess was not foolish after all. Growing up in the palace, she certainly had enough wits. When it comes to new things that she doesn’t quite understand but has to try, she’ll rope in as many people as possible to join her. The more people involved, the safer she feels.

Anyway, the huge Prince Consort’s residence doesn’t care about the cost of a little milk and eggs. If he skips just one banquet, it’s enough to feed everyone in the household for more than half a month.

After breakfast and a half-hour rest, it was time to exercise. The concept that life lies in movement had already taken deep root in Thomas Foster’s mind. If you want to be healthy, you must first ensure sufficient nutrition intake, and then make sure you get enough exercise. Input and output must be proportional.

But in this era, there are no gyms, and he certainly couldn’t take the princess swimming in the wild—that would be beneath royal dignity and would get them reported by the censors. So what to do?

Thomas Foster first went through all the sports he could think of: horseback riding, cuju (ancient football), sumo wrestling, chuiwan (ancient golf)—forget about those. Either the exercise was too intense and unsuitable for the princess’s frail body, or it was too little to be effective.

Shuttlecock kicking was possible, but having to accompany the princess every day kicking that thing seemed too boring. When it comes to exercise, you have to find something you enjoy, stick with it every day like eating, and once you stop, the results are halved and it’s not worth much.

By the same logic, just running every day is also dull. He could stick with it, but the princess might not. If they ended up bickering every day just to exercise, it would hardly be worth it.

“This is a new thing I came up with, called badminton... It can be played one-on-one, or as a group of three or four. It doesn’t take up much space, and playing for an hour a day is very beneficial for your health.”

In the end, given the limited conditions at hand, Thomas Foster came up with the most suitable sport for the princess: badminton.

It wasn’t hard to make. The racket was woven from bamboo, with bowstring used for the strings. The shuttlecock was even simpler: a cork head, with sixteen trimmed and arranged bird tail feathers tied on.

Bamboo, bowstring, cork, bird tail feathers—all these materials existed in the Song Dynasty, and as a princess, she’d have no trouble finding them. The only issues left were craftsmanship and weight, and he certainly couldn’t make it himself.

But that wasn’t a problem. As soon as Thomas Foster told the princess about the idea, the little woman, who had just begun to taste the happiness of family life, immediately took Nanny Bennett and headed into the palace.

Now, as long as the Prince Consort was willing to stay home obediently and no longer treated her with indifference, she could even ask her imperial brother for a mansion, let alone request a little toy.

As for why she brought Nanny Bennett with her, that was the princess’s wisdom. Although the emperor doted on his sister, he also knew she often lied for her husband. Nanny Bennett would never dare deceive the emperor, so bringing her along proved that Charles Bennett had truly turned over a new leaf, which put the emperor at ease.

Naturally, the request was granted. To make his sister more comfortable, Emperor Shenzong was quite generous, specially ordering the Palace Service Department to dispatch five skilled craftsmen from the Bow and Crossbow Arrow-Making Institute and the Rear Garden Workshop, along with two ox carts of tools, to reside at the princess’s mansion and make badminton equipment for her.

What was the Palace Service Department? It was an inner court institution, not a state agency, dedicated to serving the royal family’s daily needs. The Bow and Crossbow Arrow-Making Institute, as the name suggests, made bows, crossbows, and arrows. The Rear Garden Workshop was a workshop for making ceremonial vessels for the royal family, such as those used for weddings and funerals.

In any case, craftsmen who could serve the royal family and the military were, if not the very best in the country, close to it—certainly the highest representatives of the era’s craftsmanship.

Of course, whether any of the five were spies from the Imperial City Department, Thomas Foster and the princess didn’t know. In fact, it didn’t matter. They were already crazy—let them spy if they wanted. Thomas Foster even thought it would be better if the emperor sent a stunning female spy to try a honey trap on him.

The five craftsmen were settled in the rear garden of the Prince Consort’s residence, and now Thomas Foster had another place to hang out every day, wandering over to take a look whenever he had nothing to do. He truly admired craftsmen from the bottom of his heart—this was real skill, with no room for fakery.

One of them, an old man from Shu, specialized in bamboo weaving, and his work was truly superb. He first split thin bamboo strips with a knife into slivers finer than toothpicks, then wove dozens of them together.

Just like using silk threads, he could weave any pattern he wanted, with a tough wooden strip threaded through the middle as a frame. In less than a day, she had made a badminton racket according to Thomas Foster’s instructions.

“Old brother, your craftsmanship is amazing!” Thomas Foster tried it out in his hand. Aside from being a bit heavy, its flexibility and feel were just right. As long as you weren’t smashing with professional-level force, there was no need to worry about the racket’s strength. Most importantly, it looked like a work of art, the whole thing covered in pale yellow bamboo slivers, not prickly at all.

“Sir Commandant, you flatter this old man…” These craftsmen, perhaps because they’d spent so long in the palace, hadn’t heard of the mad Prince Consort’s reputation, and were very nervous about such strange titles and ways of speaking—their hands shook even more than after a full day’s work.