Volume One, Chapter Six: Visitors at Home

The uproar in the second branch finally came to a temporary end.

With his scalp aching from all the pulling, Xiao Zhongyuan crawled onto the bed like a frostbitten eggplant gone limp.

Zhou snuffed out the wick of the lamp, which had already swallowed up quite a bit of oil, and the room sank into thick darkness.

“Ah...” In the dark, Xiao Zhongyuan let out a weary sigh that oddly carried a note of satisfaction. “Ning’er...”

Xiao Ning said nothing, pretending to be asleep.

“Maybe your father really will pass this time!” Xiao Zhongyuan’s tone was suddenly brimming with inexplicable excitement. “Your grandmother said your grandfather came to her in a dream. This year’s our lucky year! Heh heh...”

That chuckle sounded especially abrupt in the still darkness.

Xiao Ning nearly stopped breathing.

A delusion born of poor grades... how terrifying.

He decisively turned over and offered his back to his overaffectionate father.

“Hm?” Seeing his son give no response, Xiao Zhongyuan froze, then actually sounded wronged as he lowered his voice to Zhou beside him. “Wife, look at this brat! Ever since he woke up after falling into the water, he hasn’t been fond of me anymore! He won’t even call me ‘Father’!”

The sleeping Xiao Ning jolted inwardly.

No good. He’d slipped up.

The original owner had been very attached to his father. As for him, an orphan from his past life, calling a living, breathing man “Father” had been an obstacle of no small size. He avoided it if he could, and if he absolutely could not, he would muddle through with a vague “Mm” or “Uh.” He had never expected his father to keep thinking about it.

Zhou was exhausted to the point of fighting sleep, already irritable. Hearing this, she shoved Xiao Zhongyuan without ceremony. “Enough! Go to sleep! What a grown man, bickering with a child. Maybe he just thinks your hair’s too thin and is afraid you’ll hug him too tightly and make him uncomfortable!”

Xiao Ning nearly laughed out loud in the dark and hurriedly covered his mouth with the blanket, his shoulders trembling.

“What? Too little hair?” Xiao Zhongyuan was instantly stabbed in his sore spot, both aggrieved and indignant. “I... I got this from hanging myself on a beam! It’s all Mother’s fault!”

“All right, all right! Say less!” Zhou cut him off impatiently and rolled over. “Sleep already! We still have to borrow wheat from the village head tomorrow and grind flour!”

Xiao Zhongyuan fell silent, sulking in the dark for a while. Then, still unconvinced, he reached out and groped until he hauled his son—the one who supposedly despised his thin hair—into his arms, holding him tight and domineeringly, with a hint of childish stubbornness. “Brat! Father likes you very much!”

Xiao Ning’s body stiffened, instinctively trying to break free.

This embrace was far from comfortable, carrying the smell of sweat, ink, and... a faint trace of blood? Probably from the wound on his scalp. Yet the arms around him were astonishingly strong, like a heated iron ring.

How could an eight-year-old possibly wriggle free?

After several futile struggles, Xiao Ning gave up at last and curled into a small ball against his father’s chest. By his ear came Xiao Zhongyuan’s rough, low snoring, like an old ox dragging a broken cart. It was full of exhaustion, yet it also held a strange... vitality?

His taut body slowly loosened.

In the darkness, a smile even Xiao Ning himself did not notice quietly crept to his lips.

Flowers bloom again, but a man is never young twice.

Who could have imagined that he, an orphan who had grown up on the cold iron bed of an orphanage in his former life, would get to experience childhood again? This eight-year-old body was a restraint, yes, but also... a gift?

The bedding was cold and coarse. The man holding him slept with thunderous snores. The surroundings were shabby and poor.

Yet this crude, warm, real sense of existence, this rough embrace belonging to “home”...

This feeling, unexpectedly... was rather nice.

He drew a silent breath, and a strange warmth smoothed even his soul.

It really was rather nice.

That gentle tide washed away the gloom and frustration left by the night’s reading farce. Weariness surged over him like the tide, and in his father’s heavy snoring, Xiao Ning’s consciousness at last sank completely into the warm dark.

By the faint light of dawn, he mouthed his breathing exercises, the familiar bitterness of the six-character formula lingering on his tongue. Another rough cornbread bun nearly choked him. Xiao Ning silently swallowed a large mouthful of thin gruel, clear enough to see the bottom of the bowl, and then followed his eldest aunt, Wang, into the courtyard to twist hemp thread. His grandmother, Old Madam Yu, sat on a stone stool, her sharp gaze still sweeping over everything, though the fatigue between her brows was deeper than before. His father and uncle’s reading voices came on time from the low tiled room, hoarse and stubborn, as if driven to the brink. Everything seemed once again a repeat of yesterday, the dull rhythm flowing slowly over a background of poverty.

The atmosphere in the courtyard was broken by a cautious cough.

The village head, Xiao Laoqi, whom the clan respectfully called Uncle Seven, had appeared at some point outside the half-open gate. He stood there rubbing his hands together, looking somewhat uneasy.

“Uncle Seven!” Wang and Zhou almost simultaneously put down their work and hurried to their feet, forcing polite smiles as they greeted him. Old Madam Yu lifted her eyelids, glanced at him coldly, and gave a faint, almost nonexistent “Mm” through her nose as a response before turning back to the hemp thread in her hands. Her attitude was clearly distant.

Zhou’s mind turned quickly. She hurried to smooth things over. “Uncle Seven, please come in and sit. Mother, I’ll go boil some hot water.”

Only then did Old Madam Yu speak slowly. Her voice sounded as though it had been rubbed over sandpaper. “Come in. Eldest daughter-in-law, pour a bowl of water for our guest.” There was no warmth in her tone.

“Yes!” Wang answered and turned toward the kitchen.

Zhou briskly ushered Uncle Seven into the main room, and at the same time she glanced back at Xiao Yao’er, who was helping Old Madam Yu sort the hemp thread. “Yao’er, take your two younger brothers to the village entrance for a bit.” Adults were talking; the children should not be listening.

Xiao Yao’er agreed and looked at Xiao Ning and Xiao Yun. Xiao Yun nodded sensibly. Xiao Ning’s heart stirred slightly. Since the children were being sent away, it seemed Uncle Seven’s visit was anything but casual.

The kitchen.

Wang lit the stove, and the firelight danced across her worry-lined face. Flames licked at the blackened mouth of the stove, casting shifting light and shadow over her features. She listened closely; there was still no movement from the main room. Quickly, she reached behind a stack of firewood beside the stove and pulled out a tiny oiled-paper packet, no thicker than a little finger. She opened it swiftly. Inside were three small, dried, dark edges of cured pork.

She beckoned to her son Xiao Yun, who had just poked his head in to help.

“Quick, eat this while your grandmother is busy talking and not paying attention,” she whispered, her eyes filled with a mother’s particular mix of affection and worry, along with a trace of sneaking hope.

Xiao Yun’s eyes widened at once, brimming with disbelief.

Meat. It was really meat—the meat he had been dreaming of.

After only a brief hesitation, his overly serious little face wrinkled. He snatched the two smallest pieces and pushed the packet back. “Mother, take this one! Give the other two to little brother and elder sister!” With that, he turned and was about to run out.

“Hey! You child!” Wang failed to catch him, stomping her foot in frustration. In a low, urgent voice she muttered, “You blockhead! Just like his deadbeat father! Good things and you never think to keep them for yourself!”

She looked at the tiny dried strip of meat left in her hand, then at her son’s disappearing back in the doorway, and felt both angry and helpless. But before she could put it away, Zhou’s slightly hurried voice came from the courtyard.

“Big sister-in-law! Mother says you should come to the main room too and listen in!”

“I’m coming!” Wang’s heart tightened. She instinctively wanted to hide the meat again. But when her fingers touched that little bit of oiliness, and she looked at Zhou standing outside with her belly rounded and her movements a little awkward, she paused, as if making some great decision. She strode quickly to the doorway, and just as Zhou had not yet stepped into the main room, she suddenly reached out and precisely stuffed that last tiny piece of cured pork into Zhou’s half-open mouth.

“Mm!” Zhou was caught off guard and startled. Her mouth reflexively chewed once.

At that instant, the rich, savory saltiness of pork, smoked over firewood and carrying the deep fragrance left by time, forcefully flooded her taste buds.