Yellow Plum Rains

Suzhou and Hangzhou.

In the yellow plum season, every household had rain; by green ponds, frogs were everywhere.

Jiangnan's plum rains spoke endless sorrow. Fine rain drifted unseen, eaves dripped against gauze windows beneath leaden skies. The rain was as fine as needlepoints, as thin as ox hair, like smoke, like mist...

On the clean, rain-slick Stone Slab Path, a boy of perhaps twelve or thirteen hurried along. Delicate-featured and handsome, he held a lotus leaf over his head. Rain had soaked through his shoes, making him terribly uncomfortable, while a cloth pouch clutched to his chest seemed to hold something important.

Suddenly, his foot slipped.

"Ah... ow...!"

With a bang, he fell to the ground. The hard Stone Slab Path made his knees ache fiercely. Ignoring the lotus leaf, he snatched up the cloth pouch, hugged it to his chest, and ran toward a household. Once beneath the gate shelter, he knocked on the door.

A sturdy constable answered.

"Xu Xian? Get inside, quick. Don't catch a chill~"

"Thank you, Big Ox~"

Xu Xian went indoors with the constable, shook the rain from his hair, then opened the cloth pouch. Seeing that the books inside had not gotten wet, he breathed a sigh of relief.

In the blink of an eye, more than ten years had passed. The little boy once wrapped in swaddling clothes had become a refined youth. Yet the beautiful, happy life once spoken of had never arrived. Back then, his family had run a small business and made a modest surplus. When Xu Xian turned five, he had been sent to a private school to learn to read and write. Who could have expected heaven to turn against them? His parents left the siblings behind and passed away.

Without their parents, his elder sister struggled