Qingzhou, Langya Commandery, Hua County.
A ragged, shrivelled old man hunched his back, clutching tightly at his thin clothes. His front bulged awkwardly as he guarded a two-year-old toddler.
The toddler was bound to his chest with cloth strips, while around the old man's waist was tied a drag-sled made of woven brambles, carrying several dozens of catties of firewood. He trudged step by step through the deep snow toward the county town.
The old man had already walked twenty li of mountain road and reached the highway. The snow here was not quite as deep; as long as he walked another ten li or so, he would see the city wall.
In this year of great calamity, a mere thirty li felt like an uphill battle, for the heavy snow had fallen continuously for ten days and ten nights!
It was now the twenty-ninth day of the first lunar month! The weather remained freezing cold, with lakes and marshes locked in ice.
Countless civilian homes had been crushed under the weight of the snow. Coupled with extortionate taxes like tigers, the common people lacked clothing and food, and countless numbers froze or starved to death.
The old man's own house had collapsed long ago. He had holed up in a cave formed by a courtyard wall and the ice and snow, surviving until now.
At this moment, a fierce gale lashed his cheeks, the howling filled his ears, and the cold wind felt as though Grandfather Heaven wanted to kill someone.
The snow had stopped, but under such harsh conditions, even without falling flakes, it was unbearable.
Yet the old man endured it stubbornly. He could not afford to die yet.
Taking advantage of the finally ceased snowfall, he took his grandson to the tea hills to chop some firewood, intending to take it to the city to sell for money and trade for some rations.
He had not eaten for three days, and the child had gone without rice for two.
Everything near his hometown had already been eaten up, and his last hope could only be pinned on the county town.
Perhaps the granaries had already been opened to distribute grain in the city. In the last two days, he had even seen quite a few refugees fleeing thither. Worst come to worst, firewood was always needed, wasn't it? In this freezing weather, he could surely trade it for some grain.
Suddenly, his foot tripped over something. He lowered his head to look and saw what appeared to be a person, covered by the snow, life and death unknown.
The old man hurriedly put down the sled, pulled the firewood chopper from his waist, and scraped frantically at the accumulated snow. When he had completely dragged the person out, he sighed...
Dead. Frozen entirely solid, simply harder than iron.
It was a woman carrying a child. Her entire body was bare, save for an iron thumb ring worn on her little finger.
She held the infant in her arms tightly, and the infant in her embrace, maintaining the posture of crying, had also become a lump of ice.
Neither mother nor child had any clothes. It was impossible to know whether someone had robbed them and left them to freeze, or if they had been stripped after freezing to death.
In this day and age, some people had already begun eating human flesh, and stripping women and children of their clothes while leaving them to freeze to death was hardly surprising anymore.
Along the road, the old man had already seen quite a few stiff corpses—some alone, some in pairs, and even whole families young and old embracing as they froze to death.
Alas... Looking at this pair of mother and child, the old man thought of his starved younger daughter-in-law.
The old man's surname was Jiang, and he had two sons. The eldest, Jiang Tian, was strong and robust, skilled with weapons and a capable fighter; he had died on the battlefield.
The second son, Jiang Nong, had a dull and honest disposition and was an expert at farmwork. Two years ago, he was conscripted into the army and also died on the battlefield.
Fortunately, before enlisting, he had married and left behind a posthumous child.
It had not been easy for the daughter-in-law. These past years were marked either by famines or rebellions. She cared for him in his old age while pulling the child up to the age of two. Yet last year, King Qi Sima Jiong expanded his royal residence; not only were funds and grain apportioned among them, but corvée labor was also forcibly levied during the autumn harvest.
There was no help for it. He was the only man in the whole family, and they had no money to buy their way out of labor service.
The daughter-in-law, all alone with the child, fought desperately to harvest the crops, but alas, she still missed it. A heavy rain rotted most of the millet, yet the taxes could not be lessened by a single fraction.
Driven to despair, she had no choice but to sell the five mu of land awarded for his eldest son's death in battle, becoming a tenant farmer for the Zhang Clan of Hua County. She even sold her axe, leaving the family's entire worldly wealth reduced to a single firewood chopper.
She had thought to keep this firewood chopper to dig for wild roots in the deep mountains during winter to survive the season.
Yet before she knew it, another snow disaster struck. Snow sealed the mountains, leaving a vast, blinding expanse of white.
In utter desperation, he ran to the city to beg the wealthy and powerful for relief, only to be ruthlessly turned away. Because in the year of great calamity, there were far too many borrowers, and as a mere old pauper, no one cared to entertain him.
By the time Old Man Jiang returned home, the house had collapsed. The daughter-in-law had thus curled up in the ice cave with the child in her arms, frozen stiff.
Before dying, she had stripped off all her clothing to wrap the child tightly, waiting until he returned.
"Waaah!" Old Man Jiang's commotion in unearthing the corpse startled the grandson in his arms.
"Nuer be good, don't cry..."
Old Man Jiang had given the child the nickname 'Nuer', harboring no hope for greatness—as long as he lived, that was enough.
Seeing his grandson wake up crying, he coaxed him hurriedly while using the firewood chopper to dig a pit, intending to bury this pair of frozen-to-death mother and child.
"Grandpa, hungry..." The grandson opened his mouth weakly in his embrace, his eyes unable to even open.
Old Man Jiang coaxed him again: "There's food, there's food. Once Grandpa buries your mother... bur... buries her, I'll take you into the city."
"Grandpa climbed the mountain and chopped lots of firewood. Once we get into the city, we'll have grain to eat. We're almost there... almost there..."
Coaxing him all the while, he chiseled through the ice and snow to dig a shallow pit, finally burying the bodies of the mother and child hastily by the roadside.
Daring not to delay, he quickly dragged his firewood and pressed onward.
Old Man Jiang walked slower and slower. Already weak, he had wasted too much strength digging the pit, and he could not help regretting his unprovoked burst of benevolence.
In this bitter cold, the living could hardly be looked after; who had the spare capacity for the dead?
"Almost there... almost there..."
"Once we're there, we'll have grain to eat..."
How long Old Man Jiang walked in a daze, he did not know, but at last he saw the city wall.
Yet as he drew close, he saw masses of refugees just like himself crowding outside the city.
These people might not have known one another, but they huddled together, stretching along the city wall out of sight.
Most of them had snow falling upon them, motionless, seemingly dead.
Others shook themselves with all their might, twitching and rubbing away the ice and snow on their bodies, trying every possible means to keep warm.
Old Man Jiang's withered face grew even stiffer. He approached and patted a 'snowman'.
Only to find that the man was already frozen stiff, to the extent that he had frozen into a single lump with a dozen people around him!
"Why aren't you going into the city?" Old Man Jiang shouted, but his voice was dry, cold, and hoarse.
No one paid him any heed. The living here knew only to shake and rub snow, as if by doing so they could stay alive.
"Go into the city!" Old Man Jiang walked and shouted, finally finding the tightly shut city gates, yet he was unable to approach.
For that was where the greatest pile of corpses had accumulated, forming even a snowy slope constructed of frozen human bodies.
Looking at the city gates that were almost 'buried', Old Man Jiang's heart turned completely cold. He wanted to cry but could not, and wanted to shout but did not know what to yell.
They could still enter the city three days ago; why were they no longer letting people in?
He didn't know. He knew nothing at all. No one explained it to him, and there was no one he could ask. Hunger and cold were all that awaited him.
Old Man Jiang could only keep walking along the city wall. He refused to give up—perhaps the other city gates were open?
Yet no matter how far he walked, he saw frozen-to-death common people. Countless people, mingling with ice and snow, had surrounded this city.
Looking at the second sealed gate, Old Man Jiang finally realized why the refugees circled along the city wall... They were all just like him, pinning their hopes on the second gate, or even the third... the fourth...
Should he keep walking? Old Man Jiang took two numb steps and abruptly realized that those several dozens of catties of firewood had long since been discarded somewhere unknown.
Should he go back to find them? There was no need... They were all wet... soaked through...
Only dry firewood could be sold. All that talk of entering the city to trade for grain was just something he had started deceiving himself with at some unknown point...
He was tired. At last, he collapsed helplessly.
Like the other refugees, he curled up beside one snowman after another, shaking and rubbing snow.
Yet what he had to do that the others did not... was to still clutch the emaciated grandson in his arms.
From very early on, the grandson had been unable to open his eyes. Ever since the boy was plucked from the mother's arms, his consciousness had grown hazy and his whole body burned with fever.
Old Man Jiang knew the child could not hold on much longer, but he had no way out—not a single way.
In the end, he could only do as the daughter-in-law had done: stiffly strip off his clothing, wishing to wrap it around the child.
"Grandpa... hungry..." The grandson was pulled out, and stung by the cold wind, he let out a faint sound.
Hearing this "Grandpa", Old Man Jiang finally broke down, beating his chest and stamping his feet in agonizing tears: "Eat me instead!"
"Aaaaaah!"
War, taxes, extra levies, corvée labor, natural disasters... hunger, cold, and death had beaten him down step by step.
Already plagued by hunger and cold, after crying out his grief, he finally grew overly exhausted, his head lolling to one side as he fell unconscious.
In the darkness, he had a dream. He dreamed that his eldest and second sons returned safely, and the imperial court rewarded them with ten mu of fields.
The eldest son married and had a daughter; the second son married and had a son.
What was that granddaughter's name again? Let's call her Xue'er. Why call her Xue?
Old Man Jiang felt this confusion in his dream, when abruptly a heavy snow arrived, and then he saw the naked corpse of his daughter-in-law suddenly raise her head to say to him, "Father, I leave Nuer to you..."
Cold, so cold!
Old Man Jiang awoke with a start, feeling a bone-piercing chill, a cold deep in his heart.
It was from the open lapel of his garment, which he had not managed to wrap back up before... and the lump of ice in his arms...
"Nuer!"
Old Man Jiang cried out in heartbreaking agony, weeping in his heart: Nuer, Grandpa can bring you through this, we can survive, Grandpa will go eat human flesh...
He rubbed his frozen grandson frantically, but he too was freezing stiff, his body practically immobile, shaped like a corpse.
Yet he still rubbed desperately, rubbed with all his might. But aside from working his own limbs loose, in the end he confirmed only a single fact... Nuer was dead.
His last surviving kin, his final spiritual pillar, was gone. He no longer even knew why he was alive.
"Grandfather Heaven! Why won't you take me with you?!" Old Man Jiang's tears formed icicles upon his eyelids.
Falling asleep like that, he ought never to have woken again. Yet awake he did... at the very last moment before freezing solid.
"Wuwuwu..." Old Man Jiang could not even make an expression, only sobbing blankly and numbly.
Grandfather Heaven had taken all his kin, leaving him behind alone to the very end, to gaze upon this blindingly white world.
Suddenly, he struggled and climbed to his feet.
"Nuer, we cannot die outside. Grandpa is taking you home."
Old Man Jiang did not wallow in the misery of being all alone waiting to die; he convinced himself once more.
He figured that Grandfather Heaven had let him wake up so that he could collect the bodies of his family.
Fallen leaves return to their roots. The graves of his old partner, his daughter-in-law, and the cenotaphs of his eldest and second sons were all buried on the earthen slope behind their home. He and his grandson had to go back too.
Thus, Old Man Jiang walked step by step with determination, embarking on the journey back.
He did not know how long he walked before the killing-cold wind of Grandfather Heaven gradually subsided.
And right at that moment, he heard the cry of an infant out in the wild.
p.s: Sorry.