A farming story about life's little joys, with perhaps a touch of political intrigue now and then, though intrigue isn't the main theme.
There is no god in the temple.
Xiaoman, the youngest daughter of the Chen family, was sixteen. Her mother had been coughing for half a year, and the family couldn't afford medicine. She carried half a bowl of congee up the hill, knelt in the half-collapsed temple, and bowed three times.
The next day, the bowl was empty. On the third day, a bundle of herbs lay at the foot of the statue, their roots still caked with wet earth. She boiled them into a remedy for her mother. After six nights, the coughing eased a little more with each passing night.
She believed. She swept the floor, cut grass, and carried stones, making the temple her home. At first she spoke while kneeling; later she spoke sitting down. She told it things she couldn't tell anyone else: her father wanted to trade her for an ox and two tiled-roof houses.
She didn't know there was someone hiding in a crack behind the statue. He could walk and move, and would secretly cut the patch of grass by the entrance for her when no one else would. He simply refused to come out. The things he gave her always came from somewhere she couldn't see: a bowl of congee, a handful of medicine, the red ribbon she'd lost.
His wounds had long since healed, but his heart was completely broken. He no longer wanted anything.
Then she stumbled upon something she shouldn't have seen at the foot of the hill, and someone tried to silence her on the spot. This time, one lantern wasn't enough.
He came out.
She liked him, but he never said a word about it. He told her,
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