After drinking hot water, Qin Xiaozhou felt warm in her stomach and regained some strength to get up and sit on the stool Lu Yan had brought. The small bamboo stool creaked and groaned under her bottom as if in protest. The sun was shining brightly; a bowl of hot porridge or soup would have been even better, but looking around, the house was truly bare.

After a while in the warm winter sun, Qin Xiaozhou forced himself to sit up, grabbed a hoe from the corner of the wall, and Lu Yan followed with a basket. The Lu family lived at the end of Wangjia Village. There was a large field in the middle of the village to the north. It was not yet spring, and the wheat in the field had not yet sprouted and grown, only covered with a layer of green.

Fruit trees were planted on the hillside behind the Lu family's house, and tender wild vegetable shoots sprouted from the withered grass under the trees. Shepherd's purse was the most common. Qin Xiaozhou patted a peach tree and asked, "Is this land yours?"

Lu Yan was distressed, "Our family only has this wasteland and the bamboo forest to the south."

These wastelands were left over because no one wanted to buy them last year. We sold everything we could—the house, the fields—to pay for my father's medical treatment. After more than half a year of treatment, he still died. Later, we paid for treatment for my mother and younger brother. I don't know if my mother and younger brother will recover.

Qin Xiaozhou patted his chest and said, "Not bad, not too poor. At least we still have this hillside and that bamboo forest, which looks like it covers more than fifty or sixty acres."

Qin Xiaozhou broke the roots of the wild vegetables with a hoe, bent down to pick them up, and damn it! His thick waist couldn't bend down at all. "Lu Yan, I'll dig them up, you follow behind me and pick them up."

"Oh!" The little girl was so well-behaved and obedient.

The two searched and dug, but there was very little nearby, probably because the family had dug it all up. They crossed the mountain and headed west. About a kilometer away was a mountain with high mountains and deep forests. It was said that the two pillars of the Lu family had died deep in those mountains two years ago, and now almost no one dared to go there.

The two walked and stopped intermittently, turning back at the pass where the small hill met the larger mountain. A basket of shepherd's purse was barely enough for one meal for their family of seven. The weather was still cold, and wild vegetables were scarce. Back in the thatched hut, Qin Xiaozhou once again deeply felt just how poor this family was. They didn't have a tinderbox to start a fire. Lu Yan took out the charcoal left over from boiling water that morning, blew on it to create sparks, and as the sparks slowly grew brighter, she added fine bamboo shavings and blew on them for a long time before the fire finally started.

The little girl was covered in dust and dirt.

The only place to wash vegetables is in the river, where the water is freezing cold and makes your hands frostbite. Qin Xiaozhou sighed, "Next time I'll have to boil some hot water to wash them. If I wash them like this two or three times, I'll definitely get frostbite."