Sweet Seed

The sweetness of Wuren Street was tucked into the gaps between its blue-gray paving stones, drifted through the smoke rising from the sugar-art stalls, and filled the honey jars of its seventy households. But the great fire forty years ago burned the sweet shops and extinguished their lights. All that remained was an orphan named A Kui, watching over a withered “sweet tree.”

She didn’t know that Lu Zhaoran, the woodworker at the neighboring Guizhen Workshop, had been guarding the tree for her for twenty years. He hid a remnant branch and carved it into a hairpin, buried two blood seeds in the heart of the tree as a token, and used his woodworking plane to shield her from the poisoned blades of the Evil Honey Cult three times. Then one night, the dead tree suddenly sprouted. Seven lingering souls appeared in its golden-red veins: Sweet Granny, A Kui’s mother, and even Chen Huaian, the sorcerer who had destroyed the sweets all those years ago...

It turned out that protecting sweetness had never been one person’s responsibility. The little sweet treasure’s sugar-clay cat lured the snake out of its hole; Cui Mei pretended to defect to get the key; and the seventy households joined together, carrying honey tea and sugar art, to carve a monument through the night. When the tree of unity bore the “fruit of seven generations of sweetness,” and the sweet tree dissolved into the wind and joined every household’s sweet soup, A Kui finally understood Sweet Granny’s words: “Sweetness isn’t in the monument or the tree. It’s in Auntie Zhang’s honey jar, Uncle Li’s sugar art, the little sweet treasure’s sugar clay... It’s in the hearts of everyone who protects sweetness.”

And Lu Zhaoran stood beneath the tree, holding a wooden marriage contract. The words he had kept unspoken for forty years finally fell to earth with the sweet fruit: “A Kui, let our sweetness be buried in forty years, eighty years, and all the years to come, because as long as our hearts endure, our sweetness will last forever.”

(A fantastical fragrance of sweetness mingles with the warmth of everyday life. This is the story of two guardians of a tree and their bond over forty years, but also of how seventy households used sugar clay, honey tea, and sugar art to turn the protection of sweetness from one person’s monument into the springtime of an entire street.)