Learning to read while hibernating
Ling Zhan's gaze swept over the little faces in the dim firelight. In a low voice, he announced, "From today onwards, every evening after dinner, you will learn to read."
It's concise and to the point, without any explanation, getting straight to the point.
Holding the charcoal stick between his fingertips, he steadily drew the first stroke on the earthen wall—a short, straight horizontal line.
“One.” Her voice was clear and steady, as if she were issuing a battle order.
The children stared blankly at the simple black line on the wall.
She looked at Ling Zhan again, her little face full of confusion.
Having enough to eat and wear is already a great blessing; literacy? That's something as distant as the stars in the sky.
Shen Yan scoffed.
She leaned lazily against the kang cabinet, her golden hairpin gleaming in the firelight.
He dragged out his words, with utter sarcasm.
"Oh, so Mr. Ling has finally enlightened them? Teaching these mud monkeys to read? Isn't recognizing rice jars and vegetable baskets enough? Besides—"
He abruptly changed the subject, his beautiful peach blossom eyes glancing sideways at Ling Zhan with blatant suspicion and provocation.
"You, the once-famous 'Strong Woman' of the streets, when did you learn to read? Or are you drawing talismans to ward off evil spirits?"
Ling Zhan ignored his taunts and didn't even turn his head.
The charcoal stick steadily drew a slightly longer horizontal line below the "one": "two".
"You, the notorious 'peacock punk' of Qingzhou Prefecture, can even read!"
Ling Zhan's voice remained steady, as if stating an ordinary fact, yet it struck Shen Yan's sore spot with precision.
Why can't I read?
After she finished speaking, she turned her head to the side.
His gaze swept calmly over Shen Yan's face, which froze instantly.
There was no smugness in his eyes, only an almost cold sense of entitlement, as if to say, "Isn't that right?"
She then looked away, as if she had merely swatted away a noisy fly.
Her fingertips continued pointing to the "one" and "two" on the wall.
“‘One’ represents the beginning. The first meal, the first piece of clothing, the first road. ‘Two’ represents companions. You, and him.” She pointed to Da Niu and Er Gou, who were sitting side by side. “Two people, carrying water together, gathering firewood together, helping each other out, make winter less unbearable.”
She imbued simple numbers with meaning that was most closely related to the realities of these children's lives.
Da Niu and Er Gou exchanged a glance, and a faint light seemed to appear in their bewildered eyes.
The other children also looked at the two black lines on the wall with a mixture of understanding and confusion, and for the first time, those charcoal marks didn't seem so unfamiliar anymore.
Ling Zhan didn't stop; the charcoal stick continued to move, drawing three horizontal lines: "Three."
Her gaze swept over the twenty little heads huddled together on the kang (a heated brick bed). "Three is a lot. Just like us, a whole room full of children, squeezed together, enduring the winter together, waiting for spring together."
"One, two, three..." In the corner, Sanya sucked her finger and mumbled the numbers, her big eyes staring curiously at the numbers on the wall. She pointed to "three" with her little finger and counted in a childish voice, "One, two... more!"
The mockery on Shen Yan's face froze completely.
Ling Zhan's casual question was like a stone thrown into his heart lake, stirring not ripples, but turbulent, stifling waves.
He looked at the symbols Ling Zhan had carved on the simple mud wall, listened to her explain them in the most straightforward and realistic language that was closest to the reality of these mud monkeys, and then looked at the faint but real curiosity that was gradually igniting in the eyes of those little radish heads. His heart felt as if it had been hit by something, not too hard, and he felt a dull ache, unable to tell whether it was irritation or something else.
He suddenly pursed his lips, as if trying to shake off some unpleasant thought, and forcefully turned his head away, no longer uttering any sarcastic remarks.
However, his movements as he wiped the golden hairpin became somewhat rough and absent-minded.
However, his uncontrollable peripheral vision kept sneaking glances at the earthen wall.
The charcoal stick continued to slide across the earthen wall, leaving clear marks.
Ling Zhan's voice flowed smoothly through the warm room, filled with the aroma of food and the smell of firewood.
"people."
She drew a simple yet towering pictograph. She herself stood upright, like a javelin.
"Head to the sky, feet on the ground. To live upright is to be human."
Her voice carried the strength of metal and stone: "The spine must be straight, and the bones must be strong."
Her gaze, almost tangible, swept precisely and slowly over Chen Yan, who was leaning against the kang cabinet, his back slumped and his posture languid. Her tone suddenly turned cold: "If you're crooked and fall over, you'll lose your human form."
Shen Yan stopped wiping the golden hairpin completely.
He understood the implication, of course. A surge of anger welled up inside him, and he sat bolt upright, about to retort, when he met Ling Zhan's calm, unwavering eyes. There was no contempt, no provocation in those eyes, only a cold, calm statement of fact.
He opened his mouth, but the harsh words stuck in his throat, neither coming out nor coming down, making his handsome face turn slightly red.
He glared angrily at Ling Zhan, crossed his arms, leaned heavily back against the kang cabinet, and deliberately turned his face to the other side, leaving Ling Zhan with only the back of his head and a few strands of golden hairpins that still stubbornly shone in the firelight.
However, his straight back betrayed his unease at that moment.
Ling Zhan withdrew his gaze.
“Mouth.” A square frame. “The mouth for eating, the mouth for speaking.”
She paused, her voice as thin as ice, "If you can't control yourself and eat whatever you want, you'll get sick."
Her gaze swept over the back of Chen Yan's head again, her voice turning icy, "Talking nonsense will bring trouble upon yourself and implicate innocent people."
Shen Yan's back stiffened noticeably.
A surge of anger, as if his sore spot had been hit, made his neck flush slightly, and he gripped his arm so tightly that his knuckles turned white. He whirled around, his beautiful almond-shaped eyes blazing with fury as he glared at Ling Zhan, about to unleash his fury—
"Wow! Brother Er Gou! Look! What I wrote!"
Sanya's excited, childlike scream suddenly rang out, like a small pebble thrown into a pot of boiling oil. It turned out that the little girl had somehow slipped off the kang (a heated brick bed) and was squatting by the wall with her little bottom sticking out. She was intently and crookedly drawing on the muddy ground in the corner of the wall with a small piece of broken charcoal that she had picked up from somewhere.
She drew a big, flat circle, like a crushed egg, with a few black dots scattered around it, and pointed at it like a treasure: "Mouth! Eat! Candy!" Her little face was covered in charcoal ash, but her eyes shone like stars.
These childlike, lifelike "works" and innocent words were like a bucket of ice water, instantly extinguishing Shen Yan's newly flared anger, leaving only a bone-chilling cold and a sense of absurdity with nowhere to turn.
Looking at Sanya's little hands covered in charcoal ash and her bright eyes, and then at the children around him who were also attracted by Sanya and were eager to draw something on the ground, the breath he had been holding in suddenly burst out.
He irritably gripped the expensive yet ridiculously ridiculous golden hairpin in his hand, his knuckles turning white from the clenching. In the end, he just let out a heavy "humph" through his nose in frustration, turned his face away forcefully again, and completely gave up on this argument that was destined to humiliate him.
But those shoulders, taut like a bowstring, silently betrayed the owner's extreme displeasure and... a hint of embarrassment.
Shen Yan remained with his back to them, arms crossed, like a frozen, resentful, handsome statue.
Only the ear that was slightly turned toward the earthen wall.
The shoulder line loosens almost imperceptibly when the children pronounce a word correctly.
This revealed that he was not entirely isolated.
As night deepened, the wind and snow outside seemed to intensify, howling and pounding against the newly pasted window paper.
The children finally couldn't stay awake any longer and fell asleep one by one, slumped over in various places.
The older children carried her to the heated kang (a traditional heated brick bed) and settled her in.
Only Ling Zhan and Shen Yan remained in the main room.
The flames in the stove gradually weakened, and the light dimmed.
Ling Zhan stood up and stretched his shoulders and neck, which were stiff from standing for so long.
She walked to the door of the small room on the west side of the main room, which had just been barely partitioned off with old wooden boards and straw curtains—the “bedroom” she insisted on creating, though it was so simple that it could only fit a narrow plank bed covered with thick hay and an old mattress.
She pushed open the door and went in sideways.
Then, in front of Chen Yan, he swiftly and decisively picked up a sturdy wooden stick that he had prepared during the day, as thick as a child's arm and with a sharp stub at the end, and steadily pressed it against the inside of the door panel with a teeth-grinding scraping sound.
One end of the wooden stick was firmly pressed against the weakest point of the door panel, while the other end was securely and perfectly wedged into a small, specially dug groove in the ground, as if it had been tailor-made for the door. The movements were practiced, precise, and fluid, carried with a cold indifference as if it had been rehearsed a thousand times.
"What do you mean?!"
Shen Yan finally couldn't hold back any longer. Like a cat whose tail had been stepped on, he sprang up from beside the kang cabinet, his new cotton-padded coat rustling loudly as it rubbed against the wall. He rushed to the door of the small house, staring at the door bar that stood like an iron gate in the dim light.
The pent-up frustration from the day, the embarrassment of being retaliated against, and the immense humiliation of being treated like a thief erupted like a volcano:
"Ling Zhan! What do you take me for?! A lecher? A womanizer?! Or some damn thief?! Even if I, Shen Yan, am a despicable scoundrel, I wouldn't be so desperate as to prey on someone like you..."
The following words were extremely harsh.
He gritted his teeth and swallowed it, but the anger burning in his beautiful peach blossom eyes almost burned through the wooden stick.
"Guard against honest people, not scoundrels."
Ling Zhan interrupted his impending outburst of vile words, her voice sounding particularly cold and distant in the dim light, like icicles hanging from the eaves. She turned around, facing Shen Yan directly, her gaze calmly falling on his face, which appeared particularly vivid and even somewhat ferocious due to his anger, through the thick stick that symbolized the boundary.
"An agreement is an agreement. Living under the same roof is only for the convenience of taking care of the children. Separate rooms are a clear boundary."
She paused, her gaze sweeping over the doorpost, her voice flat yet each word like an ice bead striking the ground, "This doorpost is a reminder. A reminder for you, and a reminder for me."
"remind?!"
Shen Yan laughed, a sharp and piercing laugh. He took another step forward, his nose almost touching the cold wooden stick. "Remind whom? Remind you to be chaste? Or remind me that a toad shouldn't dream of eating swan meat? Ling Zhan! Stop pretending to be high and mighty! You think I want to be with you..."
“I’d like to,” Ling Zhan interrupted him again. “Peace of mind. Less hassle.”
After she finished speaking, she didn't give Shen Yan any time to react. She turned around and slammed the simple wooden door shut with a "bang"!
"Click! Click!"
Two crisp, light clicks—the sound of the bolt inside the door falling without hesitation. Then came a dull, resentful scraping sound as the doorstop was adjusted more forcefully to its most secure position.
The last sliver of light through the crack in the door vanished completely.
Shen Yan stood frozen in place, maintaining her forward-approaching posture, like a magnificent ice sculpture frozen in an instant.
The last embers in the stove struggled to burst out a few weak sparks, reflecting on his handsome yet distorted face. His thick new cotton-padded coat seemed unable to block the bone-chilling cold and humiliation seeping from the crack in the door.
He stared intently at the tightly closed, simple wooden door, which was held shut from the inside like a fortress by a thick wooden stick, his chest heaving violently! A suppressed, beast-like growl escaped his throat.
After a long pause, he managed to squeeze out a few words through his clenched teeth, his voice low, hoarse, and broken, almost swallowed up by the howling wind and snow outside the window:
"Good...good very good...Ling Zhan...you reckless woman who can't distinguish between beauty and ugliness...you deserve to sleep on a cold bed for the rest of your life..."
He whirled around and, in a fit of rage, kicked the corn sack beside him with a loud thud! The sack swayed, and a few golden kernels of corn rolled to the ground. Then, fueled by unvented anger and deep-seated resentment, he pulled his thick, now dull-looking cotton-padded coat tighter around himself, like a wounded, trapped beast, and threw himself heavily back onto his makeshift bed on the east side of the main room, covered with thick straw. He pulled the blanket over his head and all.
The wind and snow howled even more fiercely outside the thatched hut, and the newly pasted window paper flapped and rustled as if it would tear at any moment.
Inside the house, there were the soft, peaceful breaths of sleeping children and the deathly stillness of the stove ashes having completely cooled.
And... on the east side of the floor, there was a bundle wrapped in a thick quilt, radiating a strong aura of resentment that said "keep away, strangers."
And the bulge trembled slightly due to the owner's suppressed anger.
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