"During the famine, the farmers barely harvested anything, so naturally they had no money or food. The old woman spent all day digging up wild greens and things like that, but how could that little bit feed two people? They often had one meal without knowing where the next would come from.
"The boy saw that I had nowhere to go and dragged me home with him. He even had a huge fight with his grandmother over it. A couple of days ago, I found out that Aze next door had picked up a pile of gold, silver, and jewels. He traded it all for steamed buns, saying they were for his mother.
"But his mother was already dead. Wasn't burying all those buns in the ground a waste? I planned to steal them tonight, but this morning, the villagers found Aze dead. He'd been strangled with a gold chain."
Lu Rui sighed as she spoke. "The dead can't come back to life. I thought the buns he'd left behind should go to the living. Then, well, you saw what happened. That boy was already painfully thin. If he didn't get something to eat, he really wouldn't survive."
Lu Rui turned to look at Ye Chu and Pei Yanchuan beside her. She felt as though something had changed between them, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it.
"By the way, what happened to you two these past couple of days?"
Ye Chu told her everything that had happened, from meeting the beggar Aze to their later visit to the Town Chief's house.
After listening, Lu Rui nodded. "That's true. The old woman often said Aze was a devoted son, too. I can understand wanting his mother to have a better life underground, but I can't accept it. How