The closer they drew to Bado Manor, the more familiar sights Qu Zan saw, and tangled, complicated memories came flooding uncontrollably into his mind.
The familiar Bado Manor appeared before him.
His great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and mother had all been born on this manor. None had lived to thirty, dying either from illnesses brought on by overwork or from a host of ailments...
After their deaths, their bodies had either been thrown into the river at midnight or dumped among the rocks in a mountain gully, left for wild beasts to gnaw on.
Though generations of his lineage had lived here, not a single trace of them remained.
Bado Manor was an immense complex of buildings, the grandest shika for dozens of miles around.
A rammed-earth wall over ten feet high enclosed the entire manor. Its foundations were built entirely of large slabs of dark bluish stone, its surface evenly coated in milky white paint, its eave corners and battlements decorated with deep red and inky black, and tricolored prayer flags...
In the distance, Namkha saw a group of people walking through the bitter wind with baskets on their backs. Dressed in ragged woolen cloth, they broke open the frozen earth with wooden picks and tipped the black soil from their baskets into it.
"What are they doing?" Namkha asked instinctively.
Qu Zan replied as though it were nothing unusual, "This is the winter manure levy. When the manor lord begins planting in spring, the fields need a great deal of fertilizer. In the depths of winter, serfs are assigned to collect cattle and sheep dung and soil fouled with human and animal waste. They carry it long distances on their backs to build up fertilizer for the manor lord's land."
"They dig through frozen ground and pick up