Chapter 10: 10. Chapter 10: Going Out (1)

Chapter 10: Going Out (1)

Baijia Village leans against the mountains. It is not a large village, consisting of about twenty households living quite scattered. Overall, it can be seen as three rows, with a north-south road running through the middle. The Bai family lives in the second row, right next to the central north-south road, in the first house on the west side of the road.

Er Ya led her toward the end of the village. The end of the village is a hillside, and looking into the distance, one can see layers of rolling mountains.

Shuyue’s eyes lit up—it was a mountain.

Thinking about why they had come, Shuyue asked curiously, “Isn’t catching fish done in the river? How do you catch them on the mountain?”

“What mountain? The river is over there!”

Er Ya pointed her finger to the east and turned her steps in that direction. Shuyue followed her gaze and sure enough, she could see the river at the end of the lane, with reeds swaying in the wind here and there along the bank.

“But…”

Wouldn’t it have been closer if they had just walked east directly from their front door?

“Shh!”

Er Ya held a finger to her lips in a gesture for silence. Shuyue became nervous, watching as Er Ya stealthily scanned her surroundings. Seeming to confirm that no one else was around, she lowered her voice, “You saw that dilapidated big courtyard on the east side of the road, east of our house, right?”

Shuyue nodded. She had seen it; she had even looked at it quite carefully several times.

There was no reason not to—in a village where thatched cottages, adobe houses, and picket fences were the norm, that place with its red bricks, green tiles, and tall courtyard walls was very conspicuous.

It was just a pity that a section of the wall had collapsed. Looking in from the roadside, the inside was overgrown with weeds, and the windowless, doorless rooms were pitch black, looking somewhat eerie.

Shuyue immediately thought of the furniture in her room: the double-door wardrobe with carved patterns made of high-quality wood, and the long table.

That was it!

After the liberation, when the landlords’ land was divided, those who were quick got something, and those who were slow got nothing. Being so close, it was really no surprise that they could move a couple of things home.

Er Ya lowered her voice even further, acting cautious.

“Stay far away from that place in the future. There are dirty things in that broken courtyard; if you get tainted by them, you’ll catch a madness.”

Er Ya shuddered as if thinking of something terrifying. “And you have to stay away from the family living next to that courtyard, the ones living in the stone house. I heard they used to be bandits; they kill people.

Oh, you don’t know what killing people is, right?

It’s… um…” Er Ya gestured as she spoke, “*Swish*, the white blade goes in, and *splat*, the red blade comes out. It hurts a lot.”

Shuyue kept a blank face, her heart rising and falling.

How brutal!

What kind of hellish place had she transmigrated into?

The small river was indeed not large, but it was completely different from the shallow water she had imagined—the kind where you could step on scattered pebbles and the water would only reach your calves.

Shuyue found a tree branch and probed the water, then held it up against her own body to compare. The water was already up to her chest, and the silt under the water was very soft; the branch sank more than ten centimeters without much effort. If she were to go down, she feared it would submerge her head.

“Pfft, you aren’t actually planning to spear fish like that, are you?

If you can spear one, I’ll take your surname.”

Er Ya mocked Shuyue while rolling up her pant legs and sleeves, ready to head into the river.

Wouldn’t she be taking the surname Bai anyway!

Shuyue was speechless. She grabbed Er Ya’s skinny arm, “Don’t. If there were fish here, why wouldn’t others be catching them? There’s no one else catching fish here, so there definitely aren’t any. Let’s go where there are people; where people are catching fish, there must be fish.”

Mostly, she felt that if Er Ya went down there, it was uncertain where the water would reach.

Er Ya was left confused by Shuyue’s words. In the end, they walked along the river and didn’t see a single person fishing, so Er Ya never managed to get into the water.

But to their pleasant surprise, the two of them discovered three wild duck eggs in a patch of reeds.

Shuyue’s eyes brightened slightly. She wondered if she could hide one to keep as a reserve ration.

(End of chapter)