"Little one, what's your name?"
Shen Tang conjured a piece of maltose candy out of thin air to coax the little girl.
The little girl stared at the candy, drooling. She gave an audible slurp, then couldn't help swallowing. Her grape-like black eyes were full of longing; her attention was entirely captured, and she didn't notice Shen Tang's question at all. Jimò Cong said, "Her name is Yao. Her nickname is A Shan."
"A Shan? Wow, that name sounds so sturdy."
The little girl was named Gongxi Yao. The High Priest had given her that name in the hope that she would be as majestic and robust as a mountain, and as broad-minded as the earth. But she was still too young to tell what her potential or temperament might be. Jimò Cong sighed heavily.
Shen Tang asked, "Why the sigh?"
Then she asked, "Have you run into some trouble?"
Some novels and storybooks loved this kind of plot.
The secluded villages cut off from the world were always doing just fine—until an outsider, the protagonist, showed up. Then something was bound to happen.
The more Shen Tang thought about it, the more certain she was that she'd guessed right.
She'd gotten to know the people in the little village over the past few days and had noticed some strange things. For example, there didn't seem to be any elderly people in the village, only adults in their prime and children. At first, she'd worried that the village had a custom of abandoning the elderly to save on food. Later, she realized it wasn't that there were no elderly people; it was that the village elders stayed young forever. Jimò Bai was already quite old, yet looked no more than twenty or thirty.
That was not normal!
It made no