That dilapidated hovel, in Shen Taotao’s eyes, was nothing more than a few withered tree frames.
Even before reaching it, a pungent smell of mold and decay assaulted their nostrils.
The tattered thatch on the roof flapped wildly in the wind, several large gaping holes left exposed like dark, mocking mouths.
The cracks between the planks were wider than a finger, allowing the wind to howl through unchecked.
There wasn’t even a straw curtain to block the wind at the entrance, and snowflakes drifted straight inside.
The ground was covered with a layer of half-rotted straw, emitting an indescribable dampness.
“We’re… staying here?” He Shi’s legs went weak at the sight of the conditions. If not for Shen Xiaochuan and Second Sister-in-law supporting her, she would have collapsed to her knees.
This was worse than a livestock shed!
“Can people even live here? Won’t we freeze into ice blocks tonight?” Shen Xiaochuan also gasped in shock.
The stubborn resolve they had mustered at the relay station gate, fueled by sheer anger, completely dissipated.
Even Father Shen, who had seemed like a lost soul until now, watched the drafty shack with its gaping holes, the lifelessness in his eyes transforming into deeper despair.
“No.” Shen Taotao’s voice was resolute, like a rock smashing onto ice—cold and hard, cutting off He Shi’s sigh of “Let’s endure it, just for tonight.”
She broke free from He Shi’s tight grip, strode to the hovel’s entrance, and without stepping inside, craned her neck to look toward the nearby earthen slope.
The terrain there seemed slightly higher, backed by an earth embankment with a few clusters of half-withered shrubs nearby.
The location was sheltered from the wind, facing south with a hint of a sunny slope.
A clear outline of an underground structure formed in her mind.
An earth shelter, similar to the windbreak caves used during the War of Resistance.
“Father! Eldest Brother! Second Brother!” Shen Taotao spun around abruptly, pointing at the wind-sheltered, sun-facing earth embankment, her eyes blazing with intensity. “Look there, it’s a decent spot. Let’s dig a pit.”
The Shen family was stunned.
Not staying in the shack, but digging a pit? In this freezing place where water turned to ice?
“Little Sister, the ground here is frozen solid. What do you want to dig a pit for?” Shen Dashan asked instinctively, but his feet were already moving toward the direction Shen Taotao had pointed.
After experiencing digging for roots to make fire and snatching squirrel provisions, he had an almost instinctive trust in his younger sister’s “crazy” commands.
“Brother, hurry and dig. A heavy snow is coming.” Shen Taotao stamped her feet anxiously. She saw the dark clouds on the horizon closing in fast. “Listen to me, Eldest Brother, Second Brother, find tools. Father, lend a hand too. Mother, Sister-in-law, help find some sturdy branches, as thick as an arm.”
Shen Xiaochuan was the quickest. Without a word, he rushed to the side of the hovel and picked up a few broken planks that looked relatively sturdy.
Shen Dashan scanned the area, then dashed to the relay station’s broken fence and forcefully broke off a long wooden pole as thick as an arm.
Father Shen hesitated for a moment but was handed a short stick left over from Shen Dashan’s efforts by Second Sister-in-law.
The entire family was instantly mobilized, like a wound-up machine.
No one asked, “Will this work?”
He Shi and Second Sister-in-law Shen rummaged through the nearby shrubs, searching for relatively straight and sturdy branches—Shen Taotao had instructed that these would serve as the “skeleton” supports.
Shen Taotao herself ran to the earth embankment, enduring the numbness in her frozen toes, and estimated the approximate size.
Without a measuring tape, she spread her arms and paced out the dimensions.
Two steps wide, three steps long, depth… just enough to stand upright.
Swiftly, she used her foot to trace a crooked rectangular outline in the snow.
“Right here! Dig according to this size!” She pointed at the snow line.
Shen Dashan immediately swung his thick wooden stick, using it as a makeshift shovel, and thrust it hard into the iron-hard, thinly snow-covered ground.
Thud!
A dull sound echoed as the frozen soil only left a white mark. The impact numbed his palms.
“My goodness! This… this is harder than the stone drum at the entrance of our ancestral hall back home!” Shen Dashan grimaced.
“Find firewood, burn it, soften a patch with fire before digging…” Shen Xiaochuan’s mind worked quickly.
“No time! Use large rocks to smash it first!” Shen Taotao rejected the fire-making plan—it was too conspicuous and time-consuming.
She crouched down, picked up a stone, and aimed it at a relatively softer spot inside the outline drawn by the snow line, smashing down with all her might.
“Listen to little sister! Smash it!” Shen Xiaochuan also grabbed a stone and followed suit.
Shen Fu paused for a moment, seemingly infected by their determination, and began fiercely chiseling the ground with the short stick in his hand.
Thud! Thud! Thud! Clang! Clang! Clang!
The dull thuds of stones hitting frozen soil sounded muffled in the wind and snow, yet carried a relentless, desperate intensity.
Shen Dashan, being the strongest, quickly mastered the technique—repeatedly striking the same area with the blunt end of a rock.
Once the surface layer of frozen hardness was loosened, he used the tip of his stick to pry up the cracked soil chunks.
Shen Xiaochuan was responsible for moving the pried frozen soil chunks aside and stacking them.
Shen Fu lacked strength, but he tied a sharp stone to the short stick he had picked up, fashioning a small pickaxe, and tirelessly chiseled at the edges.
Progress was excruciatingly slow. The frozen soil layer was too hard.
Their hands soon cracked and bled from the vibrations, mixed with ice chips and mud, causing piercing pain.
The cold felt like countless needles stabbing their exposed skin, especially when bending over to work—the wind seeped in through the back of their necks.
But no one stopped.
He Shi and Second Sister-in-law gathered a few relatively straight shrub branches and placed them to the side under Shen Taotao’s direction.
He Shi watched her daughter’s blue-tinged, silent, and focused expression as she directed the digging, then glanced toward the other dilapidated hovels nearby.
The other exiled people huddled inside, shivering and resigned to their fate.
Her eyes reddened instantly.
It was their fault—they, as parents, were useless.
They had caused their delicately raised youngest daughter to dig in this frozen wasteland just to survive.
When had Taotao ever suffered like this?
He Shi trembled as she walked to the side, found a piece of concave tree bark, and shakily scooped a few handfuls of clean snow into it.
She curled up in a relatively sheltered spot formed by an earthen ridge and shrubs, clutching the snow with her frozen fingers, trying to melt it with her body heat.
After much effort, a tiny amount of water—less than a fingernail’s worth—finally accumulated in the concave bark.
A few bits of bark sediment settled at the bottom.
He Shi carefully held the damp piece of bark as if it were a priceless treasure, bringing it to Shen Taotao’s lips as she dug intently.
“Taotao, open your mouth and drink some water.” He Shi’s voice trembled with suppressed tears and heartache, her hands shaking violently. “Rest for a while, stop working. Mother…” She sniffled, leaning closer to Shen Taotao’s ear, her voice dropping to an almost inaudible whisper, filled with desperate resolve. “Mother will definitely find a way… I once helped the Empress Dowager, there’s some goodwill there. I’ll risk my life to send a message, to get you back to the capital…”
Shen Taotao’s body jolted abruptly.
She lifted her head, her face smeared with several streaks of black mud, her frost-reddened nose exhaling long puffs of white vapor.
She gazed into her mother’s tear-filled eyes, brimming with boundless sorrow and reluctance, and at the murky snow water held in her mother’s hands, frozen like carrots.
In the hazy recesses of the original owner’s memory, there seemed to be such an incident.
It appeared to be a trivial favor, too faint to recall clearly.
Using this insignificant act of kindness, the Empress Dowager had altered the original sentence—execution for the male members of the Shen family and enslavement as official prostitutes for the women—to the maximum extent possible: exile for the entire family.
Shen Taotao couldn’t bear to tell her mother.
Instead of taking the water, she leaned over He Shi’s hand, lightly brushing her lips against the edge of the bark to moisten her chapped lips with a hint of dampness. Then, she squeezed her mother’s icy hand firmly.
“Mom, cut it out,” she said crisply, deliberately raising her voice with a tone full of disdain and scorn. “What’s so great about the capital? The rules are suffocating—you have to count your steps when walking, watch people’s faces just to breathe, and there are a thousand fussy rules for drinking water. How can it compare to here? Vast lands, boundless opportunities!”
He Shi was dumbfounded: “B-boundless opportunities?”
“You bet!” Shen Taotao’s eyes blazed with intensity as she pointed at the men whose hands were torn and bleeding from digging into the frozen ground. “See that? Our family is going to take root and flourish here. This pit is our foundation—we’ll build our own house and install a heated brick bed. Later, we can grow vegetables, raise pigs, whatever we want. We’ll be our own masters! Doing as we please is ten thousand times better than groveling under the whims of the nobility. Don’t you think so, Mom?”
He Shi was stunned by her daughter’s unconventional, earthy yet vibrantly bold “declaration.”
Even Shen Dashan and the others stopped breaking the frozen soil, staring dumbly at their younger sister, whose cheeks were flushed from the cold but who seemed electrified with energy.
It was as if a tiny sun were glowing within her.
“Little sister, you’re right!” Shen Dashan managed to blurt out, though it was unclear whether he was convinced or just frozen stiff.
“Keep digging, deeper!” Shen Taotao slapped her thigh and urged them on.
At that moment, from the direction of the distant relay station’s wooden cabin.
Xie Yunjing’s gaze swept over the row of dilapidated hovels, where many newly arrived prisoners huddled like quails awaiting slaughter.
His eyes drifted casually westward.
Then, they halted.
Beside the western earth embankment, that little female convict named Shen… Shen something was half-crouching, half-kneeling in a… pit, with several men also squatting around it, using broken sticks and ragged stones to dig furiously.
The wind and snow battered them relentlessly, turning their hair and eyebrows white. Their movements were unmistakably like a family of groundhogs struggling to burrow for survival in the icy wilderness.
Xie Yunjing’s brows, usually as straight as if drawn with a ruler, instantly furrowed into a deep “川” character.
Was she trying to dig a ready-made grave to bury herself in?
Xie Yunjing stood by the window, the deep blue hem of his robe flapping sharply in the bitter wind. He did not step forward to reprimand them but watched the “groundhog” family coldly, as if observing an absurd play.
After a moment, his thin lips moved slightly, uttering a silent murmur: “Madwoman.” Then, he closed the window.
That night, the Shen family’s pit had only been dug deep enough to barely crouch six people, but it was already sufficient to shelter them from most of the fierce winds.
The blizzard swept in as expected.
There was no time for elaborate preparations. Shen Taotao immediately directed her family to place thick wooden poles across the center of the pit, supporting both ends.
Then, they arranged the gathered shrub branches side by side, leaning them diagonally against the thick poles with one end embedded into the earth of the pit wall, forming a crude, slanted frame.
For the roof and walls, they slathered on a thick mixture of half-withered shrub branches, thatch grass, and the frozen mud they had dug up earlier—slightly softened by body heat—in a frantic rush!
It stood like an oversized, oddly shaped mud hovel planted on the ground.
The wind and snow grew fiercer, overwhelming the sky and earth.
From inside the hovel came suppressed, alternating coughs and the chattering of teeth, creaking and grating—so cold it was audible.
Shen Dashan, Shen Xiaochuan, and Shen Houpu, the three men, leaned against the outer wall of the pit, doing their best to block the gaps.
He Shi and Second Sister-in-law held Shen Taotao tightly between them, squeezing her into the warmest spot in the very center.
The space was cramped and crowded, their shared body heat becoming the most precious source of warmth!
Pressed between her mother and sister-in-law, Shen Taotao could barely breathe. Listening to the howling north wind outside and the sound of the hovel being battered, she could only sigh inwardly.
She couldn’t save others; she could only do her best to protect her own family.
Hunger struck again, but everyone remained silent. They had arrived late today and missed the food distribution time. After digging the pit for so long, everyone was already faint with hunger.
“Sleep! At dawn, they’ll distribute food.” Shen Taotao gritted her chattering teeth, staring into the impenetrable darkness before her.
Hope was like the windbreak cave she had just dug out—no matter how crude, how drafty, it was a real shelter. If it could block the wind, it was a good shelter.