In the twenty-third year of the Republic, a severe drought struck the Central Plains, leaving thousands of miles of barren land.
The starving dead littered the fields, and abandoned babies lay by the roadside.
Guang Dao couldn’t remember what day his parents had wrapped him in rags and left him in a corner by the City God Temple. He only remembered his mother’s last gift: half a hard wheat cake that hurt his teeth. “Be good and wait for me to come back.” The sun baked the edges of the cake, then the cold froze his hands and feet. Refugees trampled the temple threshold until it shone, but that familiar figure never returned.
Later, he joined the streams of refugees heading west, eating tree bark and chewing Guanyin clay. He watched helplessly as one person after another fell beside him, only to be dragged into a mass grave by wild dogs. He was tough enough not to starve to death, but he was barely clinging to life. A kindhearted fellow villager wrapped him in a worn-out straw mat and dumped him at the edge of the mass grave on Ten-Mile Slope outside the city, as if sending the King of Hell a note saying, “Please hold off on claiming this life for now.”
This was where the living were supposed to stop. The stench of decay was enough to make your eyes water. Crows flapped and cawed in the dead trees. The earth was full of the dead, and the ground was strewn with them. Guang Dao curled up behind a broken coffin lid, his stomach clawing with hunger and his throat burning with thirst. He knew that if he didn’t leave soon, he’d be the next one to have his eyes pecked out by crows.
But where could he go?
In all the vastness of the world, there was no place for a nine-year-old boy like him.
Night fell, and the wind howled through the mass grave like a ghost. Guang Dao curled up tighter, his eyelids too heavy to lift as his mind slowly drifted away. He thought that perhaps dying would be for the best. At least he wouldn’t be hungry anymore.
