A cut from a bamboo strip was hardly worth mentioning by village standards. Unfortunately, Ye Zheng's hands were slender and delicate, his skin so fair it was almost translucent, making the wound look especially alarming.
He certainly hadn't led a life entirely free of work, so why were his hands so tender? Perhaps that was the difference between a scholar and a farmer.
Yun Qing gently removed the bamboo splinters in the sunlight. Only after making sure there was no dirt left in the cut did he fetch a small jar of wound medicine from the main room and apply it to Ye Zheng's finger. Then he wrapped his hand in a clean cloth.
Throughout the process, Ye Zheng kept hissing through his teeth, his eyes growing hot with tears.
He was so angry with himself for being dramatic that he kept cursing himself inwardly, but he couldn't control his body's reactions.
For some reason, this body was extraordinarily sensitive to pain, and its tear ducts were equally overactive. Even the smallest mishap could leave his eyes wet.
Ye Zheng remembered hearing people on the internet in his previous life talk about a condition where tears came uncontrollably. You didn't want to cry, but your body wouldn't listen. Whether you were arguing or telling someone off, it ruined your authority.
He'd thought they were joking. What sort of condition was that? Now that he'd experienced it himself, he had to believe it. Perhaps this body really did have that strange tendency toward involuntary tears.
Yun Qing finished wrapping the wound and looked up, only to meet the enormous, watery eyes set in Ye Zheng's palm-sized face.
Yun Qing had always been tough, even as a child. Whether his father scolded and spanked him for mischief or his mother reprimanded him, he never cried. He'd always looked down on boys and gers who burst into tears at the slightest thing.
Yet the two tears suspended in Ye Zheng's eyes seemed to melt straight into Yun Qing's heart. Along with his sympathy came an unexpected sense of helplessness.
He wanted to pat Ye Zheng's head, but worried that the movement would dislodge his tears. Instead, he wove him a dragonfly, then a butterfly, and even promised to take him to town when his wound healed and show him the ducklings.
He really was coaxing him like a child!
Ye Zheng's eyes simply couldn't hold back tears. His heart wasn't that fragile, and a few soothing words were enough to comfort him. Having learned his lesson, though, he didn't dare reach for the bamboo again before his hand healed.
What he couldn't understand was that Yun Qing's hands didn't feel especially rough, so how could they withstand those sharp bamboo strips?
Yun Qing held out his hands for inspection. Only after looking closely did Ye Zheng discover a thin layer of calluses between his index and middle fingers. They felt hard, obviously the result of years of weaving. Protected by those calluses, and with the right technique, Yun Qing could make the strips behave exactly as he wanted.
Yun Qing demonstrated how to draw the bamboo strips between his fingers and carefully explained how to avoid cutting himself.
As Ye Zheng nodded, a deep admiration rose in his heart. Every household in this era could weave simple objects, so bamboo baskets weren't valuable. After painstakingly making one and carrying it to town, it would sell for only one copper coin. The labor involved was utterly disproportionate to the reward. Yet Yun Qing wove them day after day to supplement the household income.
Then Ye Zheng thought of how Yun Qing could spend an entire afternoon making baskets and earn only a handful of copper coins, while that vicious Madam Wang had demanded thirty taels of silver without blinking.
Thirty taels! How many baskets would Yun Qing have to weave, without sleeping or resting, to earn that much? Ye Zheng felt suffocated with anger. He had to find a way to get the money back. Even throwing it into a river just to hear it splash would be better than letting that old shrew profit from it.
In the evening, Father Yun and Mother Yun came home from their fields. They first scraped the mud off their feet against the base of the wall, then washed their hands and faces with the water Yun Qing brought them.
Turning around, they saw the Ye boy sitting in the courtyard.
Father Yun nodded. “It's good for you to come out for some air. Lying down all the time will only make you weaker.”
Then he saw the bandage and gave Ye Zheng a puzzled look. “What happened to the boy's hand this time?”
He hadn't noticed any hand injury that day.
Yun Qing explained, “He cut it on a bamboo strip this afternoon. I put some wound medicine on it and wrapped it a few extra times so he wouldn't disturb the cut and slow its healing.”
Father Yun: “…”
What? He'd put wound medicine on a little cut from bamboo?
And wrapped it up like a rice dumpling?
Good grief! Someone who knew what happened would recognize it as a bamboo cut. Anyone else would think someone had hacked his hand with a weapon!
For a man, he was far too delicate.
No, that wouldn't do. Father Yun would have to say something and teach the boy a few things about being a man!
By now Yun Qing had gone into the kitchen to help his mother. Only Father Yun and Ye Zheng remained in the courtyard, staring at each other.
Ye Zheng didn't know why Father Yun was glaring at him, but it would be rude to sit there without speaking.
He took a deep breath and said first, “Dad, you've worked hard in the fields today.”
Father Yun: “…”
He'd already started calling him Dad so naturally?
But you couldn't slap someone who was smiling at you. Father Yun couldn't very well ignore him, so he cleared his throat. “Right. Ahem… I'm used to it. It's nothing.”
And just like that, the conversation disrupted his train of thought. What had he been planning to say?
They stared at each other again.
Before Ye Zheng could rack his brains for a topic to improve his relationship with his future father-in-law, Father Yun put his hands behind his back and went inside.
Forget it. The boy was so delicate he barely resembled a man, but he was pretty and pleasant to talk to. If that was the sort of person Qing liked, a parent had no business interfering. Let them get on with it.
Ye Zheng shrugged, picked up his little stool with his good hand, carried it to the kitchen doorway, and sat there waiting for his Qing to come out.
Father Yun's feelings were complicated, to say the least.
Ever since Yun Qing turned thirteen, he had been mentally prepared to become a father-in-law. When Qing's marriage prospects turned out so poorly, he had worried endlessly. His Qing was such a wonderful person. Why couldn't those village boys see what was right in front of them? Were they blind?
Now that someone had finally called him Dad, he was happy, even if he'd paid thirty taels for a son-in-law who would marry into his household.
But alongside the joy was worry. Why did the boy have to be so fragile, making such a fuss over a little scratch from a bamboo strip?
With practically no flesh on those bones, how was Qing supposed to rely on him after both his parents had died?
Dinner was a simple meal of three dishes and one soup.
There was a plate of cabbage cooked with rendered pork scraps, half a bowl of rabbit left over from yesterday, a little dish of pickled long beans, and tofu soup.
That showed the importance of having a skill. Yun Qing had learned his father's hunting trade and often caught rabbits or pheasants in snares up in the mountains. At a time when villagers rarely had enough meat, that skill at least allowed the Yun family to put something meaty on the table now and then. They couldn't afford much more.
And the situation was not unique to Xishan Village; rural communities throughout the Great Qi Dynasty were much the same.
The realm was fairly peaceful and the emperor wasn't especially harsh with taxes, but ancient productive capacity was what it was. Farmers who depended on the weather had always been the hardest-working and poorest people, whatever the dynasty.
Summer evenings grew dark late. The family ate quietly by the remaining daylight to save lamp oil.
Father Yun, Mother Yun, and Yun Qing all had the same meal before them: mixed-grain rice and a coarse steamed cornbread bun. Only Ye Zheng had a bowl of fragrant white rice porridge.
White rice was precious in this era. A pound of it could be exchanged for two pounds of mixed grain. Although farmers grew rice, they generally kept only a little of the polished white grain after harvesting and sold the rest to merchants, trading it for twice as much coarse grain to feed the family. White rice was reserved for special occasions or particularly honored guests.
The Yun family didn't have much farmland or a large harvest, but there were few mouths to feed. The parents were still strong, and they had an adult ger who could hunt. Compared with other village households, they lived relatively comfortably and ate white rice more often.
But they had just paid thirty taels as a “bride price,” so the family had gone back to coarse grain and cornbread buns in recent days.
No matter what the others ate, though, there was always a bowl of thick white porridge in front of Ye Zheng.
Previously, Ye Zheng couldn't leave his room, and his meals had been brought to his bedside. He hadn't noticed. But now that they were all eating together, his special treatment was obvious.
Ye Zheng understood perfectly well.
Before, there had been nothing he could do. How could someone complain about food when others were kind enough to bring it to him?
Now, however, he could get out of bed and had sat in the courtyard all afternoon without feeling tired. He decided that the special treatment had to stop.
He pushed his bowl of white porridge into the middle of the table, took another bowl, ladled some tofu soup into it, picked up a cornbread bun, and bit into it.
The coarse bun nearly choked him at first. He took two large gulps of soup, swallowed it with determination, then said between bites, “Dad, Mom, I'm much better now. I can eat the same thing as everyone else. You don't need to cook white rice porridge separately for me anymore.”
The two forms of address came out so naturally that all three other people at the table choked on their food.
But he spoke as though calling them Mom and Dad was the most obvious thing in the world. If they made too much of it, they'd look less generous than their new son-in-law. So they tacitly accepted it.
Madam Luo, Mother Yun, responded with tears in her eyes. As a mother, she'd wanted to hear someone call her that for so long, and she was naturally more emotional than Father Yun.
She hadn't been especially satisfied with Ye Zheng's skinny figure at first. But the moment he looked at her with those big, black-grape eyes and called her Mom, her maternal instincts surged. Wiping her eyes, she said, “You're weak and need more white rice porridge to build your strength. Don't worry about us.”
Ye Zheng knew how to seize an opportunity. Seeing his future mother-in-law react like that, he immediately set down his chopsticks, took her hand, and said emotionally, “Mom, you still have to cook after a whole day in the fields. Cooking one kind of food is already enough, and now you have to make two. I just feel sorry for you. I don't want you to work yourself too hard.”
At those words, Yun Qing lowered the hand he'd been about to extend and turned his head away, his shoulders trembling.
Father Yun pressed a hand to his cheek, feeling as though the sweetness of it had made all his old teeth ache.
Just listen to that! “I feel sorry for Mom. I don't want her to work too hard.”
Could such sickeningly sweet words truly have come from a young man's mouth? Even the most coquettish village girl would probably struggle to say something like that in front of her whole family.
And it was true. Most villagers were tongue-tied or spoke in a rapid torrent of blunt words. They showed concern for family through actions rather than speech. They could plow the fields all day, but asking them to speak a single gentle sentence to someone close to them was nearly impossible.
But who was Ye Zheng? A thoroughly modern young man, raised under the red flag in a new era. Even if his lack of close family ties in his former life meant he'd seldom acted spoiled or affectionate, that was mainly because he'd had no opportunity or desire to. It didn't mean he didn't know how.
Oddly enough, for all the convenience of modern transport and communications, he'd always felt that people were distant from each other and that he had no truly intimate connection with anyone.
Yet after only a few days in this world, although he'd been ill and life was poor, his wandering heart had found a sense of security he'd never known. He was willing to show his true self.
Perhaps it was the same reason he'd fallen for Yun Qing at first sight and wanted to spend a lifetime with him.
It was fate.
