She was a little girl of twelve or thirteen years old, so skinny that she had only a handful of bones left, her face was dirty, her eyes were red, and her lips were as chapped as cracked earth.
When she saw that I was awake, she burst into tears.
"Dad, you scared He'er to death! If you fall into the ditch and drown, what will our family do?"
Ho'er?
I looked down at myself - a linen garment so torn that no color could be seen, the cuffs were frayed with threads, the palms of my hands were as rough as sandpaper, covered in soot, and the gaps between my fingernails were all black.
At this moment, a large amount of memory suddenly flooded into my mind, like someone forcing data into a hard drive. It hurt so much that I grimaced.
The original owner was also named Shen Mo, a very poor charcoal seller outside Lin'an City. His wife died early and left behind a daughter named Li Qinghe. The father and daughter lived by burning and selling charcoal every day.
When is it now? The 10th year of Xianchun in the Southern Song Dynasty, 1274 AD.
The Yuan army had just conquered Xiangyang and was marching south. The wealthy households in Lin'an City were packing up their belongings and running away. The poor outside the city could not escape and could only wait to be used as cannon fodder.
