He shook his head.
"The Zhongli clan is destined to be lonely. The word 'final separation' is a curse for all those who stay together in this world. No matter how deep the love, no matter how long the fate brings us together, there will always be a day of separation. This is our fate, and it is the fate of everyone in the world."
"I don't believe in fate. Mother doesn't believe in it either."
"When I was little, I didn't believe in fate either." The woman actually laughed, her expression lively, as if she had returned to the past. "Someone told me that no matter how beautiful the flowers bloom, they are destined to wither from the branches. But every day when I walk by the pear trees in front of my house, I always feel that those flowers will never wither..."
Hearing the woman talking about the past again, he instinctively moved forward, but the other party stopped talking abruptly.
"It's just that those who don't believe in fate will always suffer. I don't want you to suffer."
After saying this, the woman didn't speak again.
She simply reached out and pulled him in front of her, holding his hand and writing random strokes on his palm.
Those were symbols that didn't form words, and since his mother couldn't hum them, he used them as a lullaby to lull him to sleep.
The evening breeze was chilly, and he lay heavily on the cushion embroidered with twin mandala flowers in front of his mother, his consciousness gradually fading away with the woman's gentle movements.
He didn't know how long it had passed, but in the darkness, he heard his mother's young voice again.
"Wei'er, wake up. You are dreaming."
Dreaming? Hadn't he already woken up from a nightmare?
"Wake up, you should go back."
Go back? Where to go?
His body felt heavy, even wiggling his fingers was a struggle, and he tried to open his eyes but was still shrouded in darkness. He felt his now awake soul desperately struggling within this lifeless body until a crack appeared in the darkness, letting in a ray of light.
He opened his eyes in the darkness.
Above his head was a simple wooden beam, on which hung a tattered paper lantern, the fire in the lantern having gone out.
The morning light was dim, and a cool breeze came into the house through the sparse window slats. The air smelled of soil and fresh plants.
He slowly sat up from the simple bed, stepped barefoot onto the creaking old wooden boards, and walked step by step towards the light.
******************
At the intersection of southwest Huozhou, northeast Chizhou, and southeast Minzhou, there is a sparsely populated and little-known village.
The village is located in a desolate valley. There is a small plain at the bottom of the valley. The plain is divided into three parts by a three-way intersection, belonging to Huozhou, Chizhou and Minzhou respectively.
The people in the village don’t know where they are from, and the people outside the village don’t know which side the village belongs to.
To the northeast of the village lies a moderately high and steep mountain, to the southwest a barren expanse of land, and to the southeast an ancient pagoda, built at an unknown time. This mountain, this expanse of land, and this pagoda constitute the village's entirety.
Outside the valley where the village is located, there is a kind of thorny thorn tree that grows all year round. In winter, the village is shrouded in fog for several months in a row. The entrance to the valley is often submerged in a sea of thorns and fog. Therefore, few caravan travelers are willing to pass through, and outsiders are even more unwilling to take root and live in this poor mountain and bad water.
People outside don't want to come in, and people inside don't want to go out.
The villagers rarely ventured beyond the ten miles of Sanchakou, and even less often interacted with the outside world. They subsisted on a small patch of farmland at the bottom of the valley. This small patch was the fruit of generations of hard work, cultivated by the villagers, who found it abundant in the valley, a kind of white stone that was mixed in with the soil and scattered everywhere.
This kind of stone is neither hard nor soft. It can neither be fired and polished into floor tiles nor used as carving stone. It can only be crushed and used to pave the courtyard. It is time-consuming and labor-intensive, with little profit, so no one has ever mined it.
This village nestled among the white stones is called Baishi Village.
How small is Baishi Village? A five-year-old child can run from one end of the village to the other in one breath.
How obscure is Baishi Village? Even the elderly who have lived in Chizhou Town, 30 miles away, for 50 or 60 years cannot name this place.
Everyone only knows that there is a village among the pile of white stones, so for the sake of convenience, let's call it Baishi Village.
For such a small village that has been isolated from the world and self-sufficient all year round, the villagers have very limited and poor ways to spend their time. They have to work hard all day starting from sunrise, and the greatest comfort is to light a lamp and drink a glass of wine at home after sunset.
Thus, while Baishi Village has no rice shops or oil mills, it does have a thriving winery. During the busy summer months, they brew rice wine, while during the winter, they brew fruit wine. Although the wine is often laden with impurities and tastes crude, it represents the most easily accessible pleasure in the mountains.
Although the wine shop is small, there are many customers. There is only one person in the shop all year round, so the person who does the work has to be particularly efficient.
If the villagers wanted to drink some wine, they would carry their bamboo tubes and go to the wine shop made of white stones at the entrance of the village to buy wine.
The woman behind the wine shop who was busy serving wine had obviously been doing business here for a long time. On the wine shop was a row of bamboo tubes of various colors waiting to be filled. She only needed to take a look at the appearance of those bamboo tubes to know whose wine tubes they were. She was never wrong when she called out to someone, and her hands never stopped moving for a moment.
However, this time when she turned around, she paused involuntarily.
She had never seen this tube before.
With a flick of her wrist, the wine seller threw the bamboo tube away rudely.
A figure flew out nimbly and steadily caught the tragically discarded bamboo tube. He walked to the stove in two or three steps, his voice filled with confusion and anger.
"Why did you throw my tube?"
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