The big goose woke up from the cold.
It's not the dry cold in the winter when the heating stops in the north. It's damp and cold that penetrates into the bones. It's like the quilt in her hometown that never dries during the rainy season, wrapping her body in a sticky chill.
She struggled to turn over, but found that her whole body was as heavy as lead, and the back of her head hurt suddenly, as if someone had hit her with a sap. My eyelids were too heavy to open, and there was a noisy sound in my ears - not the clicking of keyboards in the office building, nor the crying of children in the nursery, but a... Very ancient sound.
There was the crackling sound of burning firewood, mixed with the sobs of women, and someone whispering curses in a dialect she couldn't quite understand. The tone was ups and downs, with a strange rhythm. It was neither the Mandarin she was familiar with nor any dialect she had ever heard.
