The Old Aristocracy on Earth and Beams

On the barren northwestern loess plateau, farmer Li Chuizi lived in poverty all his life. Only the vague oral tradition of "ancestor Zeng Kuo" was the spark of comfort in his bleak life. After a heavy rain, he dug out a rotten clay pot in the mud of the collapsed ancestral home, which contained a volume of "Longxi Li Family Genealogy" with long handwriting. When the words "after Li Guang, the Marquis of the Pass of the Han Army" and "hereditary replacement" came into view, the hammer's withered life was instantly ignited. The preliminary approval from the Cultural Relics Bureau and a collection certificate were like an imperial edict, cementing his false "noble" status with the glory of the official seal. From then on, "descendants of the Marquis" became a shackles that he could no longer remove. The coarse cloth coat was replaced by a shabby gown smelling of camphor, and the hoe and sickle rusted into scrap metal in the corner of the yard. He walked around the village with his stiff back, using charcoal to write imaginary "ancestral merits" crazily on the kiln wall. The wife left with her son in tears, and the grain tank was completely bottomed out. The old woman huddled in the corner of the kang breathed her last breath in the cold and hunger. In her withered hands, she clutched a copy of her son's family tree, which she regarded as a treasure. This "honor" was her only companion in her cold death. Due to the identity of his deceased mother, "Mrs. Mao Ming," Hammer cried frantically in the morgue for a "good burial with ancient rites," but in his frantic scramble for the copy paper of the "certificate of identity," he encountered the most absurd abyss of human nature. That gown, which symbolized "respectability", eventually became the most dazzling patch on the shroud. The loess can bury death from hunger, but it cannot bury a soul that has been gnawed away by a false identity to the point of madness. His "long robe" cannot be taken off, just like the thousands of ravines on the plateau, it is a crack in the incurable disease of the times.