The heavy rain pounded on the roof of the woodshed, like thousands of hammers taking turns beating down the rotten wood.
In the gaps where the rain was leaking, water droplets formed a line, one drop, two drops, three drops... Hitting Shen Qingyan's forehead.
She didn't hide.
It's not that he couldn't move - his wrists and ankles were locked to the beams with rusty iron chains. The iron rings were worn through the flesh, and dark red blood oozed out, mixing with the rain and winding down.
She just opened her eyes, staring darkly at the gray light leaking through the cracks in the roof.
For seventeen years and more than 4,000 days and nights, she slept in the firewood shed of the wine shop on the charcoal pile on winter nights. She memorized the fragments of the "Jiu Sutra" in the heat of the fermentation of the distiller's yeast. Before her adoptive mother died, she held her skinny hand and listened to her say: "Qing Yan, you are not from the Shen family... You are from the "Yan" generation. You are a girl who has been burning incense in the Shen family ancestral hall for twenty years, but did not dare to write it into the family tree."
Ten taels of silver.
