Li Cunxin glanced at Yan Baiyu’s injured calf. “Can you stand up?”
“I’m fine. That snake had short fangs; the bite isn’t deep.” Yan Baiyu looked at her calf. There was no swelling around the wound, and the dizziness had dissipated after she’d eaten her fill. Her body felt light; she didn’t feel uncomfortable anywhere.
Yan Baiyu put on the shoes by the bed. Li Cunxin reached out to support her.
“Thank you.” After Yan Baiyu stood up, she could better observe her surroundings.
This adobe house faced south. The walls were a little over two meters high, built with a timber frame filled with clay. One could stand upright inside without feeling too cramped. The two fir logs serving as the main pillars were taller, supporting the beam. Yan Baiyu didn’t know what method Li Cunxin had used to secure the beam to the pillars, but the house was sturdy. Looking up from inside, one could see the roof covered with thatch and tree bark, densely layered so no snow was visible outside.
In the corner at the foot of that earthen bed were wooden tools that looked like farming implements. Yan Baiyu lacked knowledge in this area and didn’t recognize many of them.
Li Cunxin walked to the small door in the eastern wall. “This side is where I sleep in the summer.”
Beyond the small door was a bamboo room. The bamboo had been flattened and bound together to form a bamboo wall. Three such walls enclosed the eastern wall of the adobe house, forming this bamboo room. The bamboo room was lower than the adobe house and was also roofed with thatch and tree bark.
Inside was only a bamboo bed, spread with a pieced-together animal hide like the one Li Cunxin wore.
Yan Baiyu followed Li Cunxin outside. The black donkey was lying outside the adobe house, chewing forage sadly. The two gray wolves had already devoured the fat rabbits, mouths wide open as they curled their tongues to lick the blood from their muzzles.
“This side is the kitchen.”
The kitchen faced east, perpendicular to the main house. It was also an adobe building, but smaller than the main house. Moreover, it had a chimney against the back wall. Although the chimney wasn’t very tall, was slightly askew, and had cracks at the top, it was indeed a chimney.
Li Cunxin was a bit excited. Her bright eyes watched Yan Baiyu’s expression, like a child showing a beloved toy to a friend, hoping the friend would like it too, waiting eagerly for praise.
Upon entering the kitchen, to the left against the wall was a bamboo shelf, again bound together with willow bark rope. The shelf could barely stand by leaning against the wall.
Below the shelf, clay bowls and plates were stacked. On the highest level were the willow branches.
Seeing these willow branches, Yan Baiyu felt a sense of familiarity and smiled knowingly.
In this godforsaken place, there were no toiletries, but they had to find ways to keep their bodies clean. Otherwise, if they fell ill, it could range from painful itching and insomnia to life-threatening danger. One of them was maintaining oral hygiene. Neglect could commonly lead to gum inflammation and pain, and tooth decay was very likely, making chewing difficult. When a toothache struck, it was absolute agony.
On the snowy mountain, Yan Baiyu had no means other than rinsing her mouth with clean water. After reaching the mountains and forests, she, too, would carefully search for willow and plant branches, chew out the plant fibers, and use them to clean her teeth.
To Yan Baiyu’s right, against the wall, was a large clay vat. Its lid was made of bundled wood. Curious, Yan Baiyu lifted the lid. Inside reflected her lovely face. The vat contained half a vat of clear water, with a water ladle floating on the surface.
Suppressing the ripples in her heart, Yan Baiyu asked Li Cunxin curiously, “What is this made of?”
Li Cunxin went over to look and found that Yan Baiyu was pointing at the water ladle. “A gourd.” Li Cunxin gestured. “You cut that kind of yellowed, hardened gourd in half lengthwise, and it’s just the right shape for a ladle; its fat belly can hold water. Back before water supply systems were as developed, it was pretty common. Afterward, with rapid modernization and running water in every home, it wasn’t needed anymore, becoming just a decorative piece in the living room. At least it could keep its whole corpse.”
Further past the water vat was the earthen stove. On its surface was a round hole where the iron wok sat.
Yan Baiyu’s lips pressed together. She realized it truly was iron. The wok had been burned black, with some grease on the edges, but the inside of the pot had been scrubbed clean.
But she had no time to be surprised. On the left side of the stovetop was the opening to the firebox, with a small wooden stump to serve as a stool. Behind the stump, all the way to the wall, stones were piled up to enclose an area containing bundles of dry grass and bundles of branches tied with straw rope—fuel for the fire.
Leaning against the piled-up stone wall were an iron axe, an iron hammer, and a pair of fire tongs. Beside the stone wall was a thick wooden stump so large it required both arms to embrace. It was at just the right height for a person to stand straight and rest their hands on. Judging by the knife marks on the cross-section, it was used as a chopping block. On the stump lay a wooden-handled cleaver, its edge gleaming with a cold, blue-green luster.
Next to the kitchen was a thatched shed. The shed was relatively cruder—four tree trunks supporting a thatched roof, with a single log encircling it at mid-height in all four directions, serving as a railing. Beside the shed was a haystack piled from straw, covered with tree bark and thatch to keep off the rain.
Opposite the kitchen, about ten paces away, was a separate small adobe building. Inside were rows of clay vats. Yan Baiyu saw Li Cunxin remove the covers from the vats and realized this was a storehouse, and the supplies inside were extremely abundant.
In those clay vats were mostly unhulled rice and wheat.
Yan Baiyu was astonished. “How can there be so much?”
“You have no idea. The soil fertility here is high, pests are few, and there’s no need for much topdressing. I’ve reclaimed two and a half mu of fields, and sometimes I can’t even plant it all on my own. At first, it was a bit of a struggle—the seeds I found were few, and after all, they were wild, so the quality wasn’t great and they weren’t exactly high-yield. But luckily, they were highly resilient and gave stable yields. After growing them for two years, the situation improved quite a bit. Though not like modern yields of a thousand jin per mu, the output was still quite substantial, more than enough to feed me alone. I planted, ate, and had leftovers, occasionally feeding some to Mei Wenqin. Over the years, I’ve saved up this much. Oh, I also planted cotton.” Li Cunxin searched among the vats as she talked. She continued, “It’s just that I don’t know how to spin thread or weave cloth, can’t make gunny sacks, can’t make wooden crates or bamboo baskets. I can only fire clay vats—though, to be honest, my pottery skills are so-so. Haha, look at these vats, so many are oddly shaped. I had no containers to store the grain, so I had to keep firing clay vats to use as containers. Now this storehouse is almost too full to hold any more.”
“Found it, look!” Li Cunxin found a clay vat and pulled out a handful of fluffy, soft white cotton. Some cotton seeds hadn’t been picked out yet.
Yan Baiyu quietly gazed at her. Li Cunxin suddenly felt as if a statue of a serene, downcast Buddha was looking at her—kind and calm. That gentle strength pierced straight into her heart, exposing her years of loneliness and low spirits under the sunlight, making her unbearably sad.
Awkwardly, Li Cunxin tugged at her stick-out hair. “I’m just used to it. When no one interrupts, I just chatter on and on. It must be very boring to listen to.”
Yan Baiyu shook her head. The gentle movement was soft and tender. “I like listening to it.”
Li Cunxin bit her lower lip and pressed it with her tongue. “I-I also raise rabbits.”
Li Cunxin turned to lead the way, but as she turned, she bumped right into the wall. The force was so great that her body stumbled backward. Yan Baiyu caught her.
Looking up, Li Cunxin saw Yan Baiyu’s amused, half-suppressed smile. With a boom, her face flushed red. She also couldn’t help but laugh in embarrassment. “I’ll take you to see.”
On one side of the storehouse, split firewood was neatly stacked. On the other side was a passage between the storehouse and the bamboo room. A small shed, about half a person’s height, was built next to the bamboo room. The ground was laid with stones, covered with forage. Outside, a fence was built with logs. In one corner of the enclosure, two adult rabbits huddled, a cluster of white kits surrounding them.
Not far from the rabbit enclosure was an elongated, arched earthen structure with a chimney at one end, half a person’s height, like a little house.
“Is this the horizontal kiln you built for firing clay vats?”
“The truth is I don’t understand much; I just cobbled it together…”
“But you fired them successfully. At the very least, those clay vats don’t leak water. Actually, on my journey, I also tried firing pottery, but they easily cracked.” Yan Baiyu couldn’t suppress the admiring tone in her voice.
“If you dry the molds in the sun first before firing, they’re less likely to crack. Still, I only have these couple of tricks. Though what comes out has a shape, only two or three vats are truly leak-proof. The rest have some problem or other, just barely able to hold things.”
A trace of envy arose in Yan Baiyu’s heart. Compared to Li Cunxin’s accumulated resources, she herself could be considered quite well-off. On her arduous trek, she had at times crazily wished for a sharp metal tool. She had also thought of stopping right there, settling down on the spot, but she was afraid that once she stopped, she would become useless. Li Cunxin was presenting her with a possible alternative—the path she had doubted but not chosen.
When she and Li Cunxin arrived in this primitive world, their circumstances must have been the same: nothing but the clothes on their backs. The more Yan Baiyu recognized how hard-won these houses, tools, and foodstuffs were, the more she admired Li Cunxin, astonished by the energy within this person.
At dusk, Yan Baiyu’s conviction grew even stronger.
When Li Cunxin lit the fire to make dinner, she remembered that the rice was all gone. She scooped a ladle of unhulled rice to hull again.
Without a rice huller, without a millstone or roller, she could only hold the wooden pestle and pound the rice over and over. After pounding, she still had to toss and sift the rice again and again to remove dust and husks. After all this work, Li Cunxin was so hot she tore off her animal hide and denim jacket, wearing only a T-shirt in the dead of winter.
Yan Baiyu watched Li Cunxin’s practiced movements, saw the calluses on her palms and the scars on the backs of her hands, watched her drenched in sweat yet not uttering a sound. A sudden pang of sympathetic sorrow struck her.
It got dark early in winter, and they didn’t have the means to shower in this season. Li Cunxin heating a pot of water just to wipe down her body was considered a luxury.
At night, Li Cunxin let Yan Baiyu sleep on the earthen bed while she went to sleep in the bamboo room.
Before it got fully dark, Li Cunxin had draped an extra layer of thatch over the bamboo room and laid straw and cotton on the bamboo bed. But it was still no match for the main house in keeping out the cold.
Yan Baiyu was unwilling, as a guest, to be the one cared for while the host suffered the cold. But Li Cunxin had long since crawled onto the bamboo bed and lain down, not giving Yan Baiyu a chance to refuse.
