Chapter 108: Karma I (1/2)

Shazhong Village, a down and out hamlet.

There was no electricity and road.

The only mode of transport were donkeys and handcarts.

The nearest road was seven kilometers away, and from that road, it was about another 20 kilometers away from other villagers.

The young villagers had gone away to work, leaving only the elderly and the children.

The children wanted to attend school. There had been volunteer teachers that came in about eight years ago, but since then, no more had been allocated to this village. There was only a 63-year-old man who took over the role. This 'teacher', however, had just also learned to write for a year or so.

The slightly senile 'teacher' only knew about 200 words. The only textbooks that the volunteer teachers had given him were all torn and tattered.

His lisp, coupled with a little hysteria, made all the teachings he could impart limited.

In fact, he couldn't even recognize some punctuation marks and phonetics.

There were at least 20 children in the village and half of them were orphans, mostly because their parents went away to work and left them behind. A majority of the parents never came back since.

The elderly could only console them with a 'maybe next year'.

Of course, children were naive and they were never really beaten down by their plight.

The elderly were simply waiting for the children to grow up and follow in their parents' footsteps.

The village was set to fall into ruin eventually.

Why not let the children work the land when they grow up?

The village was limited in size and the seven elderly shared everything.

The children slept in seven respective houses that belonged to the elderly.

The produce from four pieces of wasteland was barely enough to support these elderly and children.

There was a mountain spring to supply them with water, but the water was no longer as sweet as when the village was thriving. That was mainly because there hasn't been anyone to clear the bamboo pipelines for years.

And the elderly were okay with just getting by.

As for poultry, there were always mountain chickens running about.

The young and strong chickens were difficult to catch. Since none of the children could get to them, the villagers only ate the old ones.

Old, as in, unable to move at all, so the villagers had to steel themselves to slaughter and cook them.

They ate one chicken each month and occasionally get a few eggs to go along with it.

The children ate first, then the elderly.

Seven years ago, the government visited the village once.

The government deemed that it wasn't practical to stretch electricity cables for over 20 kilometers just for a handful of people.

The officials talked about relocating the people to a nearby village with electricity, but the elderly declined without hesitation.

The elderly refused to leave and thus were gradually forgotten.

They already knew what to expect and they were ready. They would wait for all the children to leave for the city before they dig graves and wait to be buried in the place they were born.

12 children: 7 boys and 5 girls.

My name is Goudan, the fastest runner in the village.

There was a burly kid that bullied the four of us often, pointing out that we had no parents.

But I knew that his parents didn't want him either.

Whenever we brought that fact up, he would start whacking us.

I ran the fastest, but the other three weren't as quick and they couldn't overrun Burly.

Burly and gang, eight in total, had parents whereas the four of us were orphans.

Because of that, even though none of the elderly gave us labels, the 12 of us were still unofficially split into two groups.

This was the reason why I absolutely hated Burly. He was mean to the core.

Whenever we had boiled vegetables and cornbread, Burly and gang would take most of them away, leaving us orphans with only a little.

While Burly wasn't exceptionally burly, he was still half a head taller than us.

As such, we could only let him bully us because we were unable to fight back.

Plus, they outnumbered us so we would just inevitably lose.

We were the happiest at the end of each month because then we would have meat to eat, even though the four of us were only given the leftovers.

Even the rarely seen eggs would end up in Burly's stomach. We had no share.

Yet, we were happy.