On the third day of the sixth lunar month, the sun was so vicious it could bake white smoke out of the stone slabs.
The southernmost end of the West Ward in Zhenbei City, right up against the base of the city wall, was one of the filthiest corners in the entire city.
Even the patrolling armored guards couldn't be bothered to spare it a glance.
Dozens of crooked shacks were crammed together, haphazardly built from rotten wooden boards, torn felt, and scavenged broken bricks.
The roofs leaked in the rain, and the wall crevices let the wind howl through.
In summer, it was stuffy enough to steam a person to death; in winter, it was cold enough to freeze off one's ears.
In the middle of these shacks ran a stagnant ditch half a person wide.
The ditch was choked with blackened sludge and slop dumped by who-knew-which household. Baked by the sun, the stench could drift half a street away on the wind.
Yet, a woman was actually crouching by the ditch.
Her posture was more like she was crawling.
She was half-kneeling beside a slop bucket, both hands reaching into the bottom, fighting a stray dog—so skinny its ribs could be counted one by one—for the same piece of sour, coarse flatbread!
The bread had long since grown green mold.
The stray dog's teeth clamped onto a corner of the bread, letting out low growls, its claws digging marks into the dirt.
The woman did not let go, because she dared not let go.
Her fingers were so thin only the joints seemed to remain. After deadlocking with the stray dog for a full dozen breaths, she suddenly exerted her strength and snatched the bread from the dog's mouth.
The stray dog, having lost out, bared its teeth and lunged at her. She blocked its mouth with her elbow, and a bleeding bite mark immediately appeared on her forearm.
But she didn't even spare it a glance. She hastily stuffed that green-molded, sour bread into her mouth, chewed it whole twice, and swallowed it hard.
A grizzled head poked out from a neighboring shack. It was a crippled old man leaning on a cane. He glanced at the woman by the ditch and spat on the ground.
"It's this jinx again, fighting a dog for food. Serves her right for cursing her husband to death!"
Before his voice even faded, a woman holding a child in the shack opposite chimed in, "Who says otherwise? Back then, her man was risking his life on the front lines, but her? Less than half a year after she married him, he was gone!"
"A woman with such a cursed fate, if she were in our hometown, she would have been drowned in a pond long ago."
These words had been said for three years, spoken to her face and behind her back.
Eventually, even the speakers themselves felt there was nothing new about it.
So, it was merely gossip to grind their teeth on when their mouths couldn't stay idle.
...
Her name was Lin Siniang.
Three years ago, she followed the military dependents' convoy from Jiangnan, enduring a bumpy journey all the way to Zhenbei City.
At that time, her husband was still alive. He was an ordinary infantryman in the Zhenbei Army, earning a monthly pay of one tael and two mace of silver. Though life was hard, there was at least hope.
Her husband died in a skirmish that winter. Not even his bones were brought back... only a wooden plaque with his name written on it was sent home.
Her mother-in-law received the wooden plaque and kicked her out of the house.
The reason couldn't be simpler.
She was a husband-killer.
As for the unprecedented thirty taels of pension silver issued by the imperial court, her mother-in-law pocketed it all, not leaving her a single copper coin.
She went to see the clerks in the military camp. The clerk flipped through the registry and said the silver had already been distributed to the family members, complete with signatures and fingerprints, and it had nothing to do with the military camp anymore.
She also went to the local village head in charge of civil affairs. After hearing her story, the village head looked her up and down and said, "Your mother-in-law is your husband's birth mother. Giving the silver to the birth mother is perfectly justified."
"You are an outsider daughter-in-law who hasn't borne a single son or daughter. On what grounds should you get a share?"
From that day on, Lin Siniang moved into the shack by this stagnant ditch.
No household registration, no land, no relatives, not even a way to find work.
None of the shops or workshops in Zhenbei City dared to hire a husband-killing woman, considering it bad luck.
She survived for three years by picking up rotten vegetable leaves and rummaging through slop buckets.
This afternoon, just as the sun was slanting west, it suddenly grew noisy outside the shack.
Lin Siniang was curled up in the corner of the shack, wrapping her dog-bitten forearm with a dirty cloth. Hearing the commotion, her body instinctively shrank back against the base of the wall.
Walking at the very front was an old woman in her fifties, with sallow, dark skin and lips so thin they were just a line.
She wore a blue cloth jacket washed until it was pale, holding a dry tobacco pipe in her hand, the bowl still puffing blue smoke.
This was Lin Siniang's mother-in-law, surnamed Qian.
Behind Madam Qian followed two burly men. One wore a felt hat askew, and the other was shirtless, revealing a body full of brawn, with a short club tucked into his waist.
These two were notorious thugs in the West Ward, who usually ran errands and collected debts for gambling dens and secret brothels.
Madam Qian kicked open the shack's broken wooden door and pointed her tobacco pipe inside.
"That's her. Drag her away."
Lin Siniang's spine pressed against the wall, her eyes staring at the intruders, her lips pressed tightly together.
The man with the crooked hat swept a glance over the scene inside the shack: rotten straw mats, broken clay pots, a few withered yellow vegetable leaves, not even a proper stool.
Immediately, he wrinkled his nose and twitched his cheek in disgust.
"Auntie Qian, for goods like this, how much money can those people outside the city even offer?"
Madam Qian knocked the ash out of her pipe bowl, carrying her usual harshness: "Three taels of silver, it's already been agreed upon, so don't even think about reneging! Two taels if she's dead, three taels if she's alive. You just worry about getting her out of here."
Lin Siniang felt her chest tighten, almost unable to breathe.
Three taels of silver.
The thirty taels of pension silver her husband had traded his life for, this woman had swallowed whole; now she was going to sell her for three taels of silver, selling her to the kind of place outside the city that didn't even dare hang a signboard.
The shirtless man took a step forward and reached out to grab Lin Siniang's arm.
Lin Siniang moved.
She lunged forward fiercely, opened her mouth, and bit down on the extended wrist.
Her teeth sank deeply into the flesh, and her mouth was instantly filled with the salty, metallic taste of blood.
"Ah!" The man let out a miserable shriek, swung his other hand in a full circle, and smashed a fist into Lin Siniang's temple.
Lin Siniang's head buzzed and her vision went black, but her teeth still did not let go.
When the second punch landed, her body was knocked sideways to the ground, tearing away a chunk of flesh in her mouth.
But she was still struggling. Both hands desperately hugged the man's calf, her nails digging into the calf muscle, dragging downward.
Madam Qian stood at the shack door, watching this scene coldly, twirling the tobacco pipe in her hand.
"Beat her to death, but don't leave marks on her face. They don't accept ones with scars over there!"
The man with the crooked hat circled behind Lin Siniang and kicked her in the ribs. The sound of dislocating bones rang out.
Lin Siniang's body immediately arched up, choking out a breath of bloody froth, and only then did her tightly clenched jaw finally loosen.
Closely followed by a second kick to her chest.
Her entire body was kicked flying out of the shack, rolling into the stagnant ditch outside.
Black mud and sour slop submerged half her face. Her body twitched a few times in the filthy water, and then she stopped moving.
Madam Qian walked to the edge of the ditch, looked down at the motionless figure in the muddy water, and tapped her pipe against a stone on the bank.
"I'll bring people to collect her first thing tomorrow morning. If she's dead, it's two taels of silver; if she's alive, it's three. Either way, we won't lose money on this deal."
After saying this, she turned and left, the two thugs cursing and swearing as they followed behind.
The bare-chested man walked away, wrapping a strip of cloth around his bloody, bitten wrist, cursing foully under his breath.
The people around the shacks had watched the whole ordeal from beginning to end, yet not a single one stepped forward to say a word.
The crippled old man pulled his head back inside, the woman holding a child pulled her wooden door shut, and a few idlers cooling off at the base of the wall exchanged glances before finally looking away.
Such things were nothing new at the bottom of Zhenbei City.
If a rootless, outsider widow died, there was not even a need to report it to the village head.
After nightfall, there was movement in the stagnant ditch.
Lin Siniang crawled out from the muddy water.
Her movements were agonizingly slow; for every inch she dragged herself, she had to stop and take several gasping breaths.
At least two of her left ribs were broken. With every breath, a dull, bone-grinding pain emanated from her chest, but she gritted her teeth and crawled up the bank from the ditch, inch by inch.
Following the base of the wall, she crawled deeper into the stagnant ditch.
There lay a half-collapsed old earthen wall. Beneath it was a pile of broken bricks, shattered tiles, and dead leaves—something an ordinary passerby would not even bother to glance at.
Lin Siniang crawled to the earthen wall and, with hands covered in mud and blood, moved the broken bricks away one by one.
Beneath the bricks was a chipped black earthenware pot.
The mouth of the pot was covered with a few dead leaves. She carefully peeled them back. Moonlight filtered through the gap in the ruined wall and fell into the pot.
The pot was filled with soil.
Growing in the soil were five green seedlings.
The seedlings were not tall, only about half a span in length, with slender stems and narrow, long leaves.
Under the moonlight, they glowed with a faint green hue. Having taken root amidst drought and barrenness, the leaves displayed a deep, resilient green.
Millet.
Was it just the ordinary millet found around Zhenbei City, the kind that nine times out of ten would wither and die from drought once planted?
No. This was the seed she had selected from hundreds of withered sprouts, the result of three years of batch after batch of trials and deaths—a breed that could survive in the saline-alkaline sandy soil.
She was from Luzhou Prefecture in the south. She had grown up soaking in the fields with her father. By the age of nine, she could judge the fertility of the land by the color of the soil, and by twelve, she could plan a whole year's planting perfectly in tune with the solar terms.
Before getting married, she had helped manage the paddy fields back home; from raising seedlings to harvesting, there was not a single step she was not intimately familiar with.
After arriving in Zhenbei City, however, she discovered that the soil here was completely different from that of the south.
It was sandy, heavily alkaline, and could not hold water. The sun was brutally toxic. If ordinary grain seeds were scattered here, they would be scorched to death by the sun before they even sprouted.
But she refused to believe that this place truly could not grow crops!
The first year, she secretly scavenged a handful of millet seeds from the horse fodder pile in the military camp's kitchen and planted them behind her shack. They all died.
The second year, she changed her method. She first mixed rotten cabbage leaves with mud and sand, composting it for half a year before planting the millet in the fertilized soil. Three stalks survived, but before autumn arrived, they were all frozen to death by a sudden late spring cold snap.
The third year—this year—she changed her approach yet again.
She dug up the roots of the millet stubble that had frozen to death the previous year, only to discover that two of the fibrous roots were significantly longer than the others and had rooted much deeper!
She carefully peeled off the surviving buds from these two fibrous roots and buried them in sandy soil mixed with bone ash and compost. This time, they lived...
Five seedlings, each robust and with upright leaves. Every day, she saved her last mouthful of clean water to pour into this broken pot.
Lin Siniang cradled the pot in her arms. Her broken ribs pressed against the side of the pot, the pain causing a fine layer of sweat to break out on her forehead, but she did not let go.
She sat leaning against the earthen wall among the pile of broken bricks for the entire night.
As dawn approached, her consciousness blurred. The area over her broken ribs had swollen high, and every heartbeat sent a wave of dull pain crashing through it.
She could not tell if she was awake or dreaming. Only one thought remained in her mind—
Madam Qian had said that people would come at dawn. There was no escape.
This ditch was only so big, and the slum area only had a few paths. Dragging her broken ribs, she could not even walk steadily. Where could she run?
Dawn broke.
Lin Siniang, clutching the earthenware pot, inched her way to the street corner outside the shack area and sat down against a crooked wooden pillar.
Her face was caked with dried blood scabs and mud, her hair matted into hard clumps. Her tattered clothes could not hide the black-and-blue bruises covering her shoulders.
Pedestrians passing by walked around her; some lowered their heads and quickly hurried away.
Her eyes were half-open, her eyelids so heavy they could close at any moment.
In her daze, Lin Siniang saw what looked like a few people gathered together at the earthen wall across the street, chattering and discussing something.
Someone was reading aloud a yellow paper notice pasted on the wall:
"...The Imperial Envoy's estate has posted a notice seeking talent, offering a heavy reward for anyone skilled in water conservancy, irrigation, farming, and seedling cultivation... Anyone with true talent and practical knowledge may proceed to the Imperial Envoy's temporary residence in the West City Ward to offer their services..."
Lin Siniang's body suddenly went rigid.
The piercing pain of her broken ribs spread through her chest, and her lips twitched.
Her cracked lips moved slightly, and from her throat came a voice so hoarse it was barely discernible.
"...Seedling cultivation..."
She looked down at the chipped black earthenware pot in her arms. The tips of the leaves on the five millet seedlings still held this morning's dew.
That green faintly gleamed in the morning light.
