In the twenty-third year of the Republic of China, there was a severe drought in the Central Plains, and the land was red for thousands of miles.
Deaths from hunger are everywhere, and abandoned babies are found on the roads.
Guangdao couldn't remember the day when his parents wrapped him in rags and threw him in the corner of the City God's Temple. He only remembered that his mother finally gave him half a tooth-hard wheat cake and said, "Be good, wait until mother comes back." But the sun melted the corners of the wheat cake, and froze his hands and feet. The threshold of the City God's Temple was shiny with the footsteps of those who fled, but he never saw that familiar figure again.
Later, he followed the flow of people fleeing the famine to the west, eating tree bark and gnawing Guanyin soil. He watched helplessly as the people around him fell one by one and were dragged into mass graves by wild dogs. He was dying and did not starve to death, but he only had one breath left. He was rolled up in a torn mat by a kind-hearted fellow villager and thrown to the edge of a mass grave ten miles away from the city - Quan thought it was a message to Prince Yama that he would not claim his life for the time being.
This is a place where living people stop. The rotten smell can make people unable to open their eyes. Crows flap their wings and crow on the dead trees. Buried in the soil and thrown on the ground are lifeless people. Guangdao huddled behind a broken coffin board, his stomach was so hungry that it felt like there were countless claws clawing at it, and his throat was so dry that it was burning. He knew that if he didn't leave, he would be the next person to have his eyes pecked by a crow.
But where to go?
The world is so big that there is no room for a nine-year-old child like him.
The night was getting darker, and the wind in the mass grave howled like a ghost. Guangdao squeezed himself tighter, his eyelids were too heavy to lift up, and his consciousness gradually became blurred. He thought, maybe it would be better to die, at least he wouldn't have to be hungry anymore.
