Although everyone had already given the little girl the name [Ye Ying (kanao)],
the Kocho Sisters felt they needed to be careful about her surname, which concerned her lineage.
Unfortunately, neither the human trafficker from before nor the child herself
knew what her original surname was.
Xia Xi had even wondered for a time whether this child had ever had a proper name at all.
After all, in the Far East of this era,
not everyone had a surname to begin with.
As for given names, many people did not even know what they would eat tomorrow. Who would bother thinking up a nice-sounding name?
Most simply numbered their children one, two, three, four and made do with that.
Names like Ichiro, Jiro, and Taro.
They meant roughly the same thing as [Zhang Yi, Zhang Er, Zhang San].
Of course, many people also liked giving their children humble names, believing that would make them easier to raise.
Names like [Inu Taro] and [Iron Ball] were everywhere.
Put another way, they had the same feel as the names [Goudan] and [Tie Zhu] that Xia Xi knew.
And this little girl, who had suffered violence for so long from an early age... perhaps her family had only ever addressed her with words like "Hey" and "Get lost."
And now,
Kanae and the others wanted to let the child decide for herself.
Because the child could not speak at all,
they prepared some slips of paper bearing different surnames and placed them in front of her.
At this point, even the usually rather impatient Aoi Kanzaki came over to watch.
A whole crowd surrounded Ye Ying.
That clearly made the little girl much more nervous.
Kanae soothed her gently. "Little Ye Ying, nobody means you any harm."
"Since none of us knows your