Volume One, Chapter 5: The Matriarch’s Ambition

As dusk fully settled, the loom’s shrill creaking finally fell silent. Supper was as hard to swallow as breakfast had been. The family chewed in silence on coarse steamed buns and tasteless wild greens, only the faint sounds of swallowing echoing in the stifling air. Exhausted to the bone, Old Madam Yu’s sallow, weary face had almost no color left. She waved a hand and, trembling, made her way back to her own main room.

Almost the moment she closed her door, in the two low side rooms of the Xiao household, two dim pinpricks of yellow light struggled through the thick, torn paper on the latticed windows.

Mrs. Wang and Mrs. Zhou each drew a deep breath, then steeled themselves and pushed open their husbands’ doors. By their mother-in-law’s strict command, the hour for the “hanging from the beam and pricking the thigh” supervision had arrived.

In the second branch, Xiao Zhongyuan’s room.

An oil lamp, fragile as a candle in the wind, cast a meager glow over the battered low table. Xiao Zhongyuan held a frayed copy of the Classic of Documents in his hands, the section “The Military Speech.” His eyelids were as heavy as lead, and his head bobbed lower and lower toward the tabletop. The words he read out were muddy and indistinct, like sleep-talking: “Says... says...”

Mrs. Zhou sighed, then tiptoed behind her husband, her movements so practiced they had become numb. She took down the rough hemp rope that had long been hanging from the beam, carefully tied it around the sparse knot of hair at the back of Xiao Zhongyuan’s head, and pulled the other end taut, fastening it to the window lattice.

“Whoosh...”

Xiao Zhongyuan’s head suddenly lurched downward!

“Riiip—!”

A tearing pain stabbed instantly through his scalp!

“Aaaiiigh—!!” Xiao Zhongyuan let out a pig-slaughtering scream and sprang up from the stool, tears and snot smeared all over his face. He clutched at his head with both hands but did not dare touch the taut roots of his hair. “It hurts to death, my dear mother! My hair... I never had much hair to begin with! Pull a few more times and I’ll be bald as a peeled egg!”

His face was twisted with pain, his eyes full of terror. The last traces of drowsiness had flown clear beyond the ninth heaven.

In the great room on the other side of the wall, Xiao Bodu’s room.

The same oil lamp cast light over the same exhaustion, and over a soul even more restless. Xiao Bodu stared at a copy of the Classic of Documents, “The Duke Shao’s Announcement,” his face trembling with suppressed fury.

“In the second month, after the full moon, six days later, the yimao day, the king marched from Zhou and then arrived at Feng. The Grand Protector... the Grand Pro...” He clutched his own hair tightly, eyes bulging as he glared at the page as if he meant to burn a hole straight through it. “The rest... what comes after that?! In the daytime I had it memorized perfectly! Why have I forgotten everything now?” He slammed the table in frustration, veins standing out on his forehead.

“H-husband,” Mrs. Wang said, her hand gripping a gleaming awl, trembling so badly her teeth seemed to chatter, “d-don’t be anxious...”

“I am anxious! I’m about to go crazy!” Xiao Bodu whirled on her, his bloodshot eyes fixed on the awl in her hand with a kind of self-destructive excitement. “Stab me! Stab me hard! If it hurts enough, I’ll remember! Here, in the arm! Harder!”

He rolled up his sleeve and exposed a tense forearm.

“But... but last night there’s still...” Mrs. Wang looked at the bruises, old and new, layered on his leg, and at the small puncture wound that had not yet fully scabbed over. She simply could not bring herself to do it.

“I said stab, so stab!” Xiao Bodu barked, almost like an order.

Mrs. Wang shut her eyes, grit her teeth, and, with a hardening of her heart, drove the awl fiercely into the soft flesh on the inside of his forearm.

“Aaah—ssshhh—!!”

A heart-rending, bone-deep agony shot instantly up his arm to the top of his skull! Xiao Bodu’s howl was even more piercing and terrifying than his younger brother’s next door. But the very next second, the twisted muscles of his face loosened all at once, and a blaze of joy erupted in his eyes.

“Yes, yes, that’s it! I remember now! It’s ‘the yimao day in the waxing of the third month’!! Hahahaha!” He laughed madly through the pain, as if he had truly attained sudden enlightenment.

But before the laughter could fade, Mrs. Wang’s shrill, tear-choked scream tore through the room: “Blood! Husband! Blood! There’s so much blood!”

Xiao Bodu’s savage grin froze on his face. Slowly, belatedly, he looked down—on his arm, the freshly made hole was now gushing dark red blood, instantly soaking half his sleeve.

“Uh...” A wave of intense nausea, mingled with pain, crashed violently against his already taut nerves. His vision went black, and with a heavy thud he toppled straight from the stool to the floor, stiff as a broken post.

“Father—!” “Mother—!”

Then came Xiao Yun and Xiao Yao’er’s terrified cries from outside, smashing through the room and driving the chaos in the great room to its peak.

In another, smaller side chamber.

Lying on the cold hard bed beneath a stiff thin quilt, Xiao Ning shut his eyes tight and pressed his little hands over his ears.

His father’s “hanging from the beam” wails next door and his uncle’s “pricking the thigh” panic after the awl had become, in his head, like two off-key brass bands in riotous concert.

And then, from a former life, a brainwashing melody of cursed catchy brilliance began to echo uncontrollably in his heart:

He did not dare open his eyes, hoping this was only an illusion...

Too miserable. Far too miserable.

With that state of mind and that method of study... there was probably no hope at all.

Xiao Ning’s heart sank to the bottom, then rose with an inescapable suffocating frustration. To expect those two fathers to pass the prefectural exam was less realistic than expecting a sow to climb a tree.

It seemed that the task of breaking through the ceiling of humble birth and dragging the Xiao family out of its pit of poverty would ultimately have to rest on the shoulders of him, this false eight-year-old and true top student! He was the Xiao family’s true, and only, star descended from the literary heavens!

But what was he supposed to do now?

Xiao Ning felt so stifled his chest ached.

He knew the county-level examination would come in just over half a month. He knew that his father and uncle’s method of rote memorization, with no real understanding, could do nothing except wear them down into illness. At the very least they should pose each other some model-essay questions, drilling the practical steps of opening the topic, continuing the argument, and beginning the exposition! If they only sat there hugging their books and droning away, then passing the exam would be a miracle indeed.

What mattered most was that he understood the prefecture they were going to test in, Yu Province, was a fertile land that had produced countless scholars—a giant province for the imperial examinations. A hell-level examination dungeon.

A belly full of elegant prose, battle-hardened test-taking skill, insights far ahead of the age—all of it surged and roared in his mind!

But!

This damned eight-year-old body! This child’s identity!

He could not speak at all. If he dared say, “Father, Uncle, memorizing like this won’t work; you have to break down the eight-legged essay this way...” he would probably be seized as a monster and thrown into a human-dunking cage the next moment.

For half a month since coming here, he had lived in constant fear, learning to speak and walk like the original child, pretending to be foolish and harmless, like a clumsy actor. Any slip at all—such as instinctively correcting Xiao Yun’s improper wording, or casually using terms like “parabola” or “photosynthesis”—would break him out in a cold sweat, terrified that the sharp-eyed and perceptive old matriarch might notice something amiss. This child’s skin was, at present, his only talisman and his greatest shackle.

In the main room.

Old Madam Yu had not yet slept. She sat rigidly on the cold edge of the bed, like a dried-up statue. Through the wall came the first cries from the great room, then the ensuing chaos; from the second room, intermittent sobbing and the stubborn, mosquito-like buzz of forced reading. She heard it all.

In her clouded eyes there was no concern, only a deathly stubbornness and... a despair so deeply buried even she did not dare touch it.

Expend the family fortune... and study one’s way into a future...

Again she seemed to hear, in her ears, the voice from twenty years ago, when her husband lay dying: eyes bulging, veins standing out, clutching her hand with all his remaining strength, unleashing a low roar that seemed to come from hell itself:

Otherwise... I’ll die with my eyes open!

That ferocious face, that bone-deep resentment and unwillingness, had become her nightmare for twenty years.

Her wrinkled old hands clutched the cold bed edge tightly. Her aged back remained stiff and straight, and in her clouded eyes a fragile sheen of tears unexpectedly gathered. Her cracked lips moved soundlessly, praying toward the merciless night sky:

Heaven above... open your eyes... let a wisp of blue smoke rise from the Xiao family grave... and bring forth a star of literature...