When Shen Yuntan returned to her own yard, the gate was wide open. Madam Qian and her daughter-in-law were gone. Her teeth were scattered all over the yard, and the ground was stained with dark red blood.
The house where grandmother and granddaughter had lived was not grand. It was two main rooms built of mud brick, also thatched. The kitchen and outhouse were put together with wooden planks. Grandmother Liu had hired people to build them when she returned to her maiden village, already sixteen or seventeen years ago.
After Shen Yuntan was brought here, grandmother and granddaughter had lived here all along, getting by on two mu of paddy field, one mu of dry land, and Grandmother’s craft.
Grandmother had been buried this morning. Shen Yuntan had fainted at the grave from overwhelming grief and only woke up just now. Only now did she have the time to sort through the things at home.
The money at home had always been kept by Grandmother. The Liu family often came looking for trouble and rummaging through things, so they hadn’t hidden their valuables in the house. Instead, they had dug a hole in the firewood pile by the slope outside, storing the valuables in a wooden box inside it.
Shen Yuntan dug it all out now. Five ten-tael silver ingots, and seven or eight pieces of broken silver of various sizes, the largest about five taels, the smallest only the size of a peanut. Together it came to exactly fifty-six taels. The copper coins were strung on hemp rope she had twisted herself, three strings and some change, over three hundred coppers.
All told, a little over fifty-six taels.
Fifty-six taels of silver. That was Grandmother Liu’s wages for twenty years, plus over a decade of savings.
Grandmother Liu had worked for Shen Yuntan’s maternal grandparents’ family for nearly twenty years, learning many skills along the way. She was skilled at needlework and embroidery, and was somewhat well-known throughout the surrounding villages.
A knot ornament sold for five coppers, a pair of mandarin duck pillowcases for thirty coppers, a pair of embroidered shoes for seventy or eighty coppers, an embroidered ruqun for two hundred coppers. She could supply a good amount every month.
But embroidery ruined the eyes and took time. Working dawn to dusk without rest, she could earn at most a little over half a tael of silver a month. After subtracting the daily expenses for grandmother and granddaughter and buying clothes, being able to save this much was already Grandmother Liu pinching pennies from her teeth.
Shen Yuntan wasn’t good at needlework or embroidery. Grandmother Liu hadn’t made her learn either, but she was diligent and sensible, taking charge of all three meals, the housework, and the farm work. Grandmother and granddaughter had divided the labor in silent understanding all these years.
Besides these savings, there were also two silver notes and a gold hairpin.
The two silver notes: one was for two hundred taels, the pension the family had given Grandmother Liu when she left Shen Yuntan’s maternal grandparents’ household. The other was for five hundred taels, the fee Shen Yuntan’s mother had given her to raise her daughter.
The hairpin in the wooden box was pure gold. It wasn’t heavy, but the craftsmanship was extremely fine. The head of the hairpin was engraved with a twin lotus flower, the petals thin as cicada wings, and a grain-sized gemstone inlaid at the flower’s center, refracting a warm luster.
Shen Yuntan had seen this hairpin before. Grandmother had shown it to her, and told her then that this gold hairpin was a gift from her mother for Grandmother’s fortieth birthday.
Grandmother had raised her mother as her own daughter. A gift from her mother, Grandmother treasured like a precious thing.
She had never worn it out. Only occasionally, late at night on special days, would she take the gold hairpin out to stroke and look at it, then wrap it up and put it back in the mud hole.
Shen Yuntan had seen many rare treasures in the apocalypse. She had an eye for such things. This hairpin was no ordinary household object. Just the engraving craft alone was not something an ordinary jeweler could produce.
With a thought, she stored the gold hairpin and the silver money into the jade bracelet space.
“Mother, the hairpin you gave Grandmother ended up in my hands. I’ll take good care of it.”
“Grandmother has gone to join you. She suffered a great deal to care for me. Please receive her well and take care of her over there, and honor her for me.”
Then Shen Yuntan stored all of Grandmother’s keepsakes into the space. These were the memories Grandmother had left her, and she absolutely would not let the Liu family’s pack of trash and bandits get their hands on them.
Even a scrap of rag, they wouldn’t get.
She had been too grief-stricken these two days and hadn’t eaten or drunk anything. Now she went to the kitchen and made herself some food. Once she had eaten her fill and drunk enough, she filled her waterskin, then put a basket on her back, found an old straw hat and set it on her head, and pushed the door open to leave the yard.
The sun had climbed overhead. She headed straight along the small path toward the back mountain.
Grandmother Liu’s grave was on the slope of the back mountain. The freshly piled earth hadn’t dried through, and the paper ashes before the grave had been blown everywhere by the wind.
Shen Yuntan had witnessed Grandmother’s burial this morning, then fainted and was carried home on a neighbor’s back. Now she knelt again before the grave, her forehead pressed against the cold earth.
“Grandmother, your granddaughter has come to see you.”
A light breeze swept gently over the slope, rustling the leaves.
Shen Yuntan knelt before the grave, running through every detail of Grandmother raising her in her mind.
Those memories weren’t hers, and yet they truly were, like a person possessing two entirely different life experiences at once, each one carved into her bones.
“Grandmother, I’ve remembered everything you told me at the end. I promise you, I will live well.”
Her voice was very soft, soft enough that only she could hear. “I’m no longer the me of before. The split soul that went through tribulation in another world has returned to the main body. I have another life’s worth of rich memories now. The me standing here is no longer the simple, sheltered Yuntan.”
“I’ve obtained the family inheritance, learned skills and martial arts. I have the ability to protect myself now. I will live well, and I will take revenge, sending everyone who killed you and Mother to hell.”
“Just now, I already took revenge on the Liu family. I didn’t take their lives for now, only punished them severely.”
“I’m still weak now. Killing them would only bring trouble down on myself. For a pack of trash like them, it’s not worth throwing away my bright future. I’ll use a dull knife and grind slowly, torturing them bit by bit until they wish they were dead.”
Shen Yuntan reached out and touched the fresh earth on the grave, her fingertips meeting the coarse grains, cool to the touch, her heart churning with emotion.
“Grandmother, you surely haven’t gone far. You must have heard what I just said.”
“I can’t explain it now. This should be a special inheritance of my family. After you meet Mother in the underworld, she will tell you.”
“Grandmother, rest assured. The granddaughter you raised has always been here. She just grew up overnight.”
“I will keep the kindness you taught me in my heart, and I will use the skills I learned in that other life. I won’t fail the grace of your raising me, and I will avenge you and Mother.”
With that, she kowtowed three times neatly before the grave, then stood.
Her knees were stained with yellow earth, but she couldn’t be bothered to brush it off. She put on her straw hat, picked up the basket, and strode off toward the Great Green Mountain.