Gluttony's consciousness was dazed by the impact of the treasure, and fragments of long-buried memories rose to the surface.
He had originally been an ordinary man of ancient times, named Li Rong.
Born into chaos and raised amid famine, simply staying alive had been a luxury.
Back then, he had been sallow and emaciated, every rib standing out, like a walking skeleton.
Every day, he had to rise before dawn to work—tilling fields, carrying water, chopping firewood, doing every filthy, exhausting job there was.
Yet even with all that hardship, he could scarcely eat a full meal.
A bowl of watery porridge and a few wild vegetables had been his food for the day.
His greatest wish had been to eat one proper, filling meal.
"Not the coarse grains mixed with bran, but real white rice."
"If I could have a piece of fatty meat with it, what an earthly delicacy that would be."
But even that humble wish had been denied to him by heaven.
That year, a terrible drought descended. The fields cracked open, and not a single grain was harvested.
Famine spread like a plague.
At first, people could still chew bark and eat grass roots, barely managing to survive.
Later, the bark was stripped bare and the grass roots dug up clean. People began eating Guanyin clay.
That stuff made their bellies swell, but it had no nourishment at all. It only caused people to bloat to death.
Later still, exchanging children for food was no longer a rumor, but a bloody reality.
Li Rong had seen with his own eyes how his neighbor's child was traded to another family by his parents.
He had trembled from head to toe and fled the village overnight.
He began wandering from place to place, begging wherever he went.