No rebirth, no transmigration, not even a golden finger.
Just a naturally gifted nose and a keen sense for wine.
The coming-of-age story of a boy.
Autumn, 1997. The Hexi Corridor.
The Tu family is hosting a birthday banquet with eight tables. Seventeen-year-old Ran Qinghe is doing odd jobs outside the kitchen for three yuan a day and two meals. His grandmother has been without her medicine for half a month.
A breeze drifts in from the main room. He can tell something is wrong with the wine.
He lifts the curtain and, in front of more than a hundred people in the courtyard, takes apart the jar of "thirty-year-old aged liquor" from top to bottom: the daqu has been replaced with bran koji, the fifty-two-proof liquor is actually thirty-eight-proof alcohol diluted with spirits, and the kiln mark on the bottom of the jar says 1986.
"Whose is it?"
"Ran Qinghai's."
One by one, the chopsticks in the courtyard are set down.
Seven years ago, his father performed a certain test on the drying ground at the grain depot, then never came home. Seven years later, he performs the exact same test at the mouth of a wine jar. People in the trade call it "passing the wine," a way to verify aged liquor.
But his father had been standing on the grain depot's drying ground that day.
That truckload of corn came from Jiuduntan: 3,200 jin, marked "Grade One" on the inspection form.
The land at Jiuduntan can't grow corn.
He has a talent no one else possesses, and an old case no one dares reopen.
