Farming | Travel between ancient and modern times | Adorable child | Infrastructure building | Everyday life | Heartwarming and healing | No romance | Civilization building
Five-year-old Fubao has lost her grandmother.
In the hospital corridor, her aunt calls her a “burden,” while her uncle calls the orphanage to ask about getting her on the waiting list. In the van heading for the outskirts of town, she clutches the last piece of malt candy her grandmother gave her on her deathbed. At the sound of brakes and the crash, she closes her eyes.
When she opens them again, the sky is no longer the same.
A dilapidated earthen house, cracked yellow-mud walls, and a thatched roof with gaps everywhere. In the yard outside, a crowd of gaunt villagers are arguing. After years of drought and no harvest, they plan to divide up the last of their food and go their separate ways.
This is Linxi Village, an ancient village that has suffered through three years of drought.
Fubao looks down and sees that the old piece of greasy paper that once wrapped her malt candy is still in her pocket. Soaked with her blood, it is giving off a faint warmth.
She doesn't know yet that this little piece of candy paper will let her travel back and forth between two worlds. She'll trade wild walnuts from the mountains for gleaming white rice and fine salt, and dried wild greens for drought-resistant seeds and farming tools. Nor does she know that the tears she sheds onto the roots of a dead tree will bring forth tender green shoots by the next morning.
All she knows is that the taciturn hunter Zhao Dashan found her in the back hills and brought her home, and that the village chief, Li Youtian, put the last half of his coarse-grain flatbread in her hands. This was the first kindness she encountered in this world
She wasn't going anywhere.
From then on, a modern little darling put down roots in an ancient village. With the candy paper connecting two
