Volume One, Chapter Seven: Forced Labor

As soon as she saw the meat, Madam Zhou’s eyes lit up with delight. She slapped a hand over her mouth at once, terrified that even the faintest trace of aroma might escape, and her muffled voice seeped through her fingers in a jumble of words. “It smells so good! So good it’s to die for!”

That tiny scrap of minced meat brought with it a surge of happiness so immense it was almost the only bright spot in the past few months. She carefully rolled it on her tongue, unwilling to swallow too soon, stamping her feet in excitement all the while as she tugged on Lady Wang’s sleeve and choked out praise. “Sister-in-law! You’re wonderful! Truly kind as a bodhisattva! In our family... you’re the best of us all!”

Lady Wang was caught off guard by this outpouring of sincere gratitude and adulation. Looking at her sister-in-law’s shining eyes and the glistening oil at the corner of her mouth, the selfish hesitation and heartache she had felt moments before somehow dissolved away. In its place came a warm, glowing sense of being needed, so pleasing that her lips lifted before she could stop them. Even the pregnant woman beside her now seemed far more agreeable. “All right, all right, hurry along inside!” she chided, giving Madam Zhou a pretend shove. The two women, still flushed with the strange exhilaration of having shared some great secret, turned together and were just about to head into the main hall.

At the very instant Madam Zhou’s foot crossed the threshold, and Lady Wang followed right behind her—

A shout, crushed down to its limit and yet erupting like a volcano, exploded from deep within the hall!

“Seventh Brother!”

It was Old Madam Yu’s voice, trembling with rage and disbelief!

“When your elder brother was alive, he treated you poorly enough? And now, before his bones are even cold, you mean to send Boruo and Zhongyuan off for corvee labor?! Eh?!”

The words “corvee labor” struck the two sisters-in-law like two icy iron hammers to the chest.

The precious morsel of cured meat in Madam Zhou’s mouth, not yet properly savored, lost every trace of flavor in an instant.

The blood drained from Lady Wang’s face so fast it seemed to vanish in a flash.

The two of them stood rooted to the spot, their hands and feet gone cold.

Inside the main hall, silence fell for a moment before Village Head Xiao Laoqi let out a long sigh, thick with helplessness and weariness. “Sister-in-law... I’m in a hard position too. In all the years they’ve been levying labor, has it ever landed on your family? It’s only taken and never given back; every other household has been swallowing its resentment for ages. If this goes on much longer, even I, as village head, won’t be able to hold it down... Sister-in-law, if you truly don’t want them to go, you’d best make plans early. As for the fee to be exempted from labor... it’s five taels per person. For two men, that makes ten taels.”

“Ten taels? Ten taels of silver?!”

Like an invisible bolt of thunder, that number detonated in the minds of Lady Wang and Madam Zhou.

Their faces turned deathly white. Their pupils widened in sheer terror and shock, and their bodies began to tremble uncontrollably. The faint warmth and ease brought by that tiny piece of cured meat were crushed to dust beneath this cold wave of reality.

Elsewhere,

Madam Zhou’s words, “Yao’er, take your brothers out to play for a bit,” sounded like a reprieve. Xiao Yao’er obediently nodded at once, taking one child in each hand as she quickly led Xiao Yun and Xiao Ning out of the suddenly solemn courtyard and toward the village’s only dirt road.

Once they had left the cramped walls of home, the view opened abruptly. Xiao Ning’s gaze swept across the whole of Xiao Family Village.

More than a hundred households were crowded together in crooked disorder. The earthen walls, packed from yellow soil, had weathered years of wind and rain until they were lined with grooves and cracks of varying depth. In many places the mud had worn away, exposing the straw fibers within, while rainwater dripping from the eaves had left black, filthy streaks of moss at the base of the walls. Most roofs were thatched with rotten, mold-blackened straw; here and there, one could see a few crooked gray tiles, like the last yellow teeth left in an old man’s mouth. Some courtyard walls had collapsed on one side, revealing yards within that were just as cramped and impoverished. A few gaunt village dogs wandered at the lane’s entrance with tails tucked, while chickens and ducks foraged uselessly in the sparse weeds.

A shocking sight.

That phrase leaped into Xiao Ning’s heart without restraint. This was the broad, lowest stratum of rural life under the Great Yu dynasty—a desolation and despair no single word like “run-down” could truly encompass.

An endless sorrow rose in his chest. In his previous life he had read the histories from cover to cover; the lines recording heavy taxes, labor levies, famine, and displacement had now become a scene before his very eyes—mud-brick houses, ragged clothes, faces numb with fatigue, the air thick with the smell of firewood, damp earth, and the faint stench of livestock dung. The four simple characters in the histories, “deep water and scorching fire,” had turned out to describe a burden so crushing it could break a person’s back. Only by standing within it could one truly feel the bone-deep despair and suffocating weight.

Must leave.

Xiao Ning clenched his small fists, nails nearly digging into his flesh. In this backward, closed-off land, forgotten by time itself, even if he carried in his mind an ocean of stars and boundless seas capable of illuminating an era, there was not the slightest room to make use of them. Not even a sliver of light could seep out.

He wanted to study. He wanted that road to higher rank and better fortune. But looking at his family’s dilapidated, drafty tile house, and thinking of how his uncle and father had spent ten years reading without being able to bite through the Four Books and Five Classics, he could not bring himself to speak.

His family had already done all they could to support two “mud-legged scholars,” burning themselves out to the last drop. Add him to the burden? Old Madam Yu’s stubborn heart was now pinned entirely on her sons; as for her grandsons... in the original owner’s memory, she had only had the father and elder uncle teach him and Xiao Yun a few of the simplest characters whenever they had spare time, calling it “opening the mind.” In truth, it went no farther than that.

Sigh...

Xiao Ning let out a silent sigh, his childish face shadowed with a heaviness beyond his years.

For now, he could only take one step at a time.

The opening had to come from the county town. The next time he had a chance to go to Shouwen County, he would have to look carefully and see if there was any way to earn even a few copper coins. That first step had to be taken.

The three of them walked on in silence for a while. Once they were sure they were far enough from home and no idle onlookers were nearby, Xiao Yun suddenly stopped. Glancing nervously left and right, he cautiously opened the right hand he had kept tightly clenched all this time.

There, lying quietly in his not-quite-clean palm, were two shriveled, blackened corners of cured meat.

“Quick, take it!” he said in a low voice, pressing the larger piece into Xiao Yao’er’s hand and then, without room for refusal, offering the smaller one to Xiao Ning. His eyes shone with astonishing brightness. “Little brother, this one’s yours!”

“Cured meat?!” Xiao Yao’er cried out before she could stop herself, as if scalded. She immediately clapped her other hand over her mouth, eyes wide with alarm, her voice shrinking to a mosquito’s buzz. “Good heavens... Grandmother would beat us to death...” But before she had even finished speaking, the rich, aged, uniquely savory scent already threaded its way into her nose like a tiny hook. She could not help inhaling hard, and as her throat swallowed of its own accord, the rest of her words dissolved into a murmur. “Mmm... but... it really does smell amazing...”

Xiao Yun himself swallowed fiercely too, his throat bobbing visibly. His eyes remained stuck on the piece of meat he had given Xiao Ning, as though it took all his strength to tear them away. Forcing himself to sound casual, he urged Xiao Ning, “Little brother, eat it quickly! I... I’ve already had mine! It’s really good! Try it!”

He tried hard to make his words sound more convincing, but the desire he was straining to hide gleamed unmistakably from the depths of his eyes.

Xiao Ning looked at the blackened little chunk of meat, no longer than a pinky finger, its edges hardened and giving off a faint sheen of oil. This little cousin in name only really did have the bearing of a gentleman carved into his bones. He was obviously drooling with desire, yet he firmly kept the good part for the siblings, insisting he had already eaten, putting on the air of an old soul caring for those younger than himself. It warmed Xiao Ning’s heart, and at the same time left a trace of quiet bitterness.