(Extra story) Yun Chu (1)

Lead-gray clouds hung heavily over the mountaintops. Wind swept damp, cold air across the creek bank, setting the reeds rustling. Dusk slowly wrapped the entire village in its embrace, staining even the blue-gray stones beside the creek with a hazy chill.

Zheng Erya crouched on the pebbles beside the creek. Her thin, blue cotton jacket offered no protection against the riverside wind, and the cold crept down her collar into her bones.

She plunged her stiff, reddened fingers into the creek. A bone-piercing chill shot straight to her elbows. Her fingertips had long since gone numb; she could only scrub the coarse clothes in her hands through sheer habit.

The cloth was old material from last year, washed brittle, its edges fraying. It rose and sank in the murky creek, tearing her reflection into scattered fragments, much like her own muddled, uneasy days.

In the distance, from the direction of her family's mud-brick house, her mother's shrill curses suddenly erupted. Her little brother was probably crying for food again. Er Ya instinctively hunched her shoulders and tucked her painfully frozen hands into her jacket, then quickly pulled them out and worked faster. The creek soon washed away the suds she rubbed from the soap pods onto the cloth, leaving only a faint, astringent scent.

"Er Ya."

The voice that suddenly sounded behind her made her hands jerk. The clothes nearly slipped into the creek, and she swayed before steadying herself.

Turning, she saw Zhou Mingyuan standing beside a blue-gray stone nearby. His pale blue scholar's robe had been washed almost white, and a strip of light gray cloth had been sewn around the collar. Yet its hem was pressed perfectly flat, and even the wooden hairpin securing his hair had been polished to a shine.

He clutched a yellowed scroll,