"Zu Ge'er?" Ren Yaoqi frowned. "What's your last name?"
Xia Sheng shook his head. "This Zu Ge'er lived with a woman named Li Niang in Shangzhuang Village. Li Niang called him Zu Ge'er, and the old man didn't even know their last names. Li Niang earned some money by doing freelance work during the busy farming season, and they lived very poorly. Later, when Zu Ge'er grew up, she started herding cattle. Li Niang claimed that Zu Ge'er was her son, but the old man said that once when he went to look for Zu Ge'er, he heard Li Niang call him "Young Master."
"After all these years, he still remembers all this clearly?"
"He said that if it were someone else's words, he wouldn't remember them, but this mother and son were very special back then. Besides their Yanzhou accents. Although Zu Ge'er did some work like other children in the village when he grew up, his body, hands and face were always clean. He didn't fight and didn't go to the river to bathe or fish with others. Because of his delicate appearance, some people even suspected that he was a girl. What's even more surprising is that sometimes they were so poor that they couldn't even open the pot, but Li Niang still insisted on letting Zu Ge'er go to private school. When he couldn't pay the tuition, Li Niang went to teach. They continued to do their laundry, cooking, and mending, provoking a lot of gossip, but they continued as usual. Eventually, many women in the village came with brooms to chase them away. However, Li Niang later fell ill and died. Soon after, a disaster struck Chuzhou, and Zu Ge'er fled Shangzhuang Village alone. After he left, someone secretly went to their former home, hoping to find some food. Instead, they dug up a blood-stained straw doll, a curse, from under the bed where Li Niang had lived. Strangely, the name on the doll didn't belong to anyone from Shangzhuang Village.
Ren Yaoqi looked at Xia Sheng and asked, "Whose name is on the doll?"
Making straw dolls to curse enemies is a folk curse popular in the Yanbei area. Regardless of whether it is useful or not, everyone born in Yanbei knows it. Even Ren Yaoyu, who grew up in seclusion, has used it before.
However, unless there was a deep blood feud, no one would use blood on the straw doll; at most, they would prick it with a needle. This was because a blood sacrifice would cause the person who cast the curse to be retaliated, which was equivalent to exchanging life for life for a shared enemy.
Xia Sheng said, "It was a year of famine, and people couldn't even get enough to eat. So when the villagers found the straw doll and were startled, no one in the village paid much attention. However, a few brave teenagers in the village ran to see the man out of curiosity, and happened to follow him. Some of them could read and recognized the words, but it's a pity that after so many years, the man couldn't remember them clearly." At this point, Xia Sheng looked up at Ren Yaoqi and said, "I had no choice but to tentatively ask if the name on the doll was Ren. The man thought for a long time before he remembered that it seemed to be someone with the surname Ren."
Xia Sheng asked out of caution, but was surprised when he got a positive answer.
"But this is not certain. The man is not young anymore, so it is possible that he remembered it wrongly." Xia Sheng saw that Ren Yaoqi didn't speak and thought that she was scared.
After thinking about it, he hesitated and said, "But it was just a coincidence that I saw the bridge this time and traced the person who built it. Apart from that, no one knows Han Dongshan's background. I heard that there were a few people who left Shangzhuang Village and headed north with Han Dongshan, but in the end none of them left any trace in Yanbei." Han Dongshan has lived in Chuzhou for so many years. Since no one knows his background, this in itself is a weird thing.
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