Chapter 164: Shang Yue
“Yes, I need someone to build houses.”
However, Jian Xingxia was a bit concerned. “But in your current condition… can you actually build houses?”
Building a house was, after all, a highly skilled trade. Jian Xingxia had initially assumed someone like Old Man Xu would arrive, perhaps even bringing their own tools. Yet the person standing before her looked no different from how Da Hei had looked upon arrival.
He was dressed in complete tatters, without shoes or socks. His hair was a long, tangled mess, and his cheeks were deeply hollowed out. In fact, when Da Hei’s slap sent him to the ground, the ragged cloth on his back shifted to reveal clearly visible bloody scabs over raw, lacerated skin.
Jian Xingxia had the man sit down and handed him a bamboo tube. Inside the tube was water mixed with a tiny, imperceptible hint of salt and sugar—not enough to taste, but enough to quickly replenish his electrolytes and help restore his physical strength.
The man gulped it down in massive drafts.
After finishing it, he let out a long sigh and forced a smile. “Alright. Now, even if I die this very instant, at least I won’t be a starving ghost…”
The moment the words left his mouth, two lines of tears came rushing down his swarthy, yellowed face.
“Father! Mother! Your child has been unfilial… I didn’t even let you eat a single full meal before you died!”
Jian Xingxia unearthed a cob of corn and signaled Da Hei to hand it to the man.
Da Hei thought: He hasn’t performed any labor yet! And he gets to eat another one! Even so, seeing the man’s agonizing state as he wept, Da Hei silently shoved the corn into the man’s hands.
It was likely the sweet potato and the homemade electrolyte water that had restored a bit of the man’s physical strength. This time, he exercised restraint, refraining from grabbing the corn and cramming it into his mouth like a starving ghost. He took a bite and, under Jian Xingxia’s gentle guidance, recounted his background.
“My name is Shang Yue. I was originally a common peasant living at the foot of Xiangyang Mountain. Life in the mountains was leisurely. I originally had two brothers… After my eldest brother married and had a child, he was called away for corvée labor. Once he left, he never returned.”
“Two years later, the imperial court wanted to wage war. Households with an only son were exempt, those with two or three sons had to send one, and those with four, five, or six had to send two. My second brother went to the battlefield. In the beginning, there were still letters from home, but later, all news ceased as well.”
“Last year, the imperial court wanted to build city walls again. I was the only one left at home to care for my parents, so I standardly shouldn’t have been drafted for labor. But the officials who came to conscript men claimed that since my eldest and second brothers had merely vanished without their bones being sent back, how could anyone know if they were alive or dead? They also claimed that corvée labor and military service were entirely separate matters, and they bound me by force to take me away.”
“Only when I reached the frontier did I discover that I wasn’t even on the conscription roster this time. It was a childhood friend from the same village who had been drafted. His father was the village chief. Taking advantage of the fact that no one in my family could read, they gave my parents five hundred wen, falsely claiming it was a loan to buy grain seeds. They tricked my parents and me into signing a substitution agreement.”
“After I was bound and taken away by force, the suffering of my service was worse than death by a thousand cuts… Fortunately, I excelled at construction and craftsmanship, and by a stroke of luck, I won some appreciation. I didn’t have to endure daily beatings, and the food was barely enough to fill my belly. After enduring a bitter year of hardship, I was finally able to return home.”
“But upon returning to the house, I only then discovered that my parents had both passed away.”
“It turns out that after I was forcibly conscripted into service, my father and mother learned that the five hundred wen was blood money for my life. They refused to keep it and wanted to return it to the village chief’s family to trade me back.”
“But the village chief’s family threw the money out, leaving it to be scrambled over and looted by the villagers. Furthermore, under the pretext of collecting a debt and exploiting the fact that my parents had no sons around to back them up, they actually went so far as to seize my family’s fields and land!”
“My parents traveled to the county seat to report the matter to the officials. Little did they know that the people in the government office had long since colluded with the village chief. Not only did they refuse to uphold justice for the common folk, they even accepted money to give my parents a severe beating before tossing them to the roadside.”
“My parents carried their final breaths home. Their injuries grew progressively worse every day, and with no land or food grain, they ultimately succumbed to their severe wounds and starved to death in the house…”
Shang Yue wept so hard he couldn’t form words.
He had managed to survive the frontier corvée labor amidst a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood precisely because he still carried a deep attachment in his heart. Yet he never expected that after returning from a brush with death, his parents would already be nothing but withered bones.
The house at home had also been sold by the village chief to someone else. That person wasn’t innocent either; they were a fellow villager from the same community, which was why they could purchase a house in this village. They were entirely aware of the circumstances of Shang Yue’s household, yet they still coveted a cheap bargain, helping the villain commit evil by purchasing the house from the village chief’s hands.
Shang Yue’s attempts to reason with them yielded no results. In a fit of absolute rage, he set fire to the old house and the village chief’s home.
The only pity was that because of his return, the two families had been alert, so they hadn’t been burned to death; only their houses were destroyed. Shang Yue was thrown into prison as a result.
Once inside the grand prison, because Shang Yue’s arson crime was grand, he was sentenced to death. However, since the county magistrate couldn’t execute the sentence immediately and had to wait until autumn for the execution, the village chief worried that a long delay might bring unforeseen trouble. He bribed the county magistrate again to have Shang Yue sent to perform labor in the mines.
There, Shang Yue experienced treatment that was far more brutal than what he had faced at the frontier. But perhaps because he possessed the experience of frontier service, his constitution was significantly stronger than an ordinary person’s. He stubbornly endured for over half a year, and although he was on the verge of death, he constantly maintained a single breath.
Until this time, Shang Yue was pushed down a mine shaft by the guards. Immediately following that, the rumble of a mine collapse echoed.
Shang Yue had originally still been desperately crawling outward, but he tripped and fell along the way. When he wanted to crawl back up, he suddenly felt tired. In this world, he no longer had any family, and the times were entirely filled with darkness. Whether he lived or died made no difference at all.
Thus, Shang Yue stopped running, simply sitting right where he was to quietly await the collapse of the mine.
The expected pain of being crushed to death never arrived. In the next instant, sunlight unexpectedly appeared overhead. Shang Yue raised his head blankly, only to find himself in the mountain forest.
Shang Yue carried absolutely zero concern regarding his sudden appearance in the mountain forest. The two people before him—one male and one female, one black and one white—were dressed in highly bizarre ways, yet Shang Yue remained completely unmoved. Even if they were the Black and White Impermanence, messengers of death, what of it? He had already harbored a death wish from the start.
But what he never expected was that the “Black and White Impermanence” would give him food and water. They spoke to him without a single beating or scolding, and carried no intent to humiliate or frame him.
With grain filling his stomach, Shang Yue thought of his parents lying at home, starving to death before his eyes, and a profound sorrow welled up from within, causing him to weep bitterly.
The cadence of Shang Yue’s speech was slightly different from Da Hei’s, but Jian Xingxia discovered that she could understand it completely. She didn’t know if the system had granted her an upgrade in this regard. No matter which dynasty or era a person came from, or what dialect they spoke, she faced zero barriers in comprehension.
After listening to Shang Yue’s account, both Da Hei and Jian Xingxia fell into silence. Even if Da Hei only caught half of it, he could still sense Shang Yue’s immense pain.
Da Hei silently sat down beside Shang Yue, lightly patting his shoulder.
In this world, everyone carried their own distinct fortunes and misfortunes. Da Hei had always believed that as a Kunlun slave, he was already at the absolute rock bottom, with nothing but the lot of being humiliated by others. He had never expected that there could be someone as tragic as Shang Yue in the world.
Da Hei felt a wave of immense guilt over his behavior just now.
