Was all of this a dream?
Night blanketed the mountains and forests, torrential rain pouring down upon the muddy hillside.
Stones littered the ground, streams of mud flowed past, shattered trees lay half-buried, and the once "level" slope had been ravaged by the mudslide as though plowed over.
The boy knelt on the ground, staring blankly up the mountain with wide, vacant eyes.
Rain and tears mingled across his face.
The boy had been born in the second year of the Republic of China, when the Beiyang Government was in power and that colossal dynasty, which had existed for over two hundred years and rotted to its very bones, had only recently collapsed with a thunderous crash.
He had been born into a fairly well-off family in a county town in North China.
He had few memories of that period. He had merely heard fragments from elderly people in the alleys: Qing banknotes becoming worthless paper, bank runs, provinces declaring independence, and the panicked chaos of a dynasty's final days.
But he soon felt it in his childhood—the unrest and chaos left behind by that fallen dynasty.
Two warlords went to war, and his father died.
With their pillar gone, his mother had no choice but to take him from the county town and seek refuge with relatives in their hometown in the countryside.
Life in the countryside was bitter—so bitter that sixty or seventy percent of each mu of land had to be paid in taxes; so bitter that droughts and floods forced people into debt just to survive; so bitter that merely staying alive took every ounce of strength.
Even worse, his mother contracted pneumonia, an incurable, terminal illness.
Relying on the education he had once received in the county town, on the knowledge and way of thinking