The first snowfall couldn't hold on. As soon as the sun came out, it turned into muddy, icy water, making the already rough dirt roads of Zhang Family Village even more difficult to travel. Yet, the harsh cold had taken root, stubbornly drilling into the houses through every crack in the doors and windows.
Zhang Yuansheng pulled his worn, cotton-padded jacket tighter. He sat by the stove, watching his mother, Zhōu Shì, carefully measure out millet with a small copper spoon and pour it into the pot. That small amount of rice, not even enough for his modern-day breakfast, had to be cooked into a pot of thin congee to feed their family of four.
"Mother, can't we add a little more?" his older sister, Zhāng Xiǎoyú, asked softly, her eyes fixed on the rice bin, which was nearly empty.
Zhōu Shì sighed. "Silly girl, it's still a long time until the new harvest. We have to ration our food." She glanced out the window. "Your father went to the county to sell grain to pay this year's Winter Tax. I don't know if it went smoothly."
"Sell grain to pay taxes." Zhang Yuansheng listened to the words silently. It meant selling what little food they had left to exchange for cold, hard tax money. A sharp sense of dissociation pricked him—he possessed knowledge that could increase crop yields, yet he couldn't conjure food instantly. Instead, he had to watch his family struggle for what little grain they needed to survive.
In the afternoon, his father, Zhāng Shǒutián, returned, bringing with him the biting cold and a torrent of anger. He slammed the empty grain sack onto the table, his face ashen.
"Outrageous! The Wang Family's grain store offered such a low price! Three *shi* of good millet only fetched this meager amount of loose silver!" He took a small cloth bag from his chest and unfolded it. Inside were a few small silver ingots of varying quality. "This… this isn't even half of the Winter Tax!"
Zhōu Shì's face instantly turned pale. "Husband, what are we to do? The village head is coming to collect it the day after tomorrow!"
"What can I do?" Zhāng Shǒutián asked, frantically rubbing his hands. "Borrow again? We haven't even paid off the loan shark money from Scholar Wang's family last year! Sell the land? That's ancestral property! It's our roots!"
The air in the room seemed to freeze, leaving only the crackling of firewood in the stove and the howling north wind outside. For the first time, Zhang Yuansheng felt so directly the immense weight crushing the self-sufficient farmers of this era. Exorbitant taxes, grain merchants driving down prices, loan sharks lurking with predatory eyes… all of it was colder than the weather.
All his previous ideas about a "model field" now seemed so minuscule and impractical in the face of brutal survival.
He had to solve the immediate problem first.
He stood up silently and walked to the backyard. A few scrawny chickens huddled against the cold wind. His gaze swept over a corner near the chicken coop, where piles of dried bean stalks and weeds lay. He then looked at a patch of discarded chicken manure behind the woodpile.
The key element of modern composting—the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio—flashed through his mind. Mixing dry straw (carbon) with chicken manure (nitrogen), along with appropriate moisture and turning, could generate heat and break down into nutrients plants could absorb.
This was a starting point. An insignificant one, but the only one he could control at the moment.
Without announcing his intentions, he found a dilapidated, half-buried abandoned earthenware vat. He began, like a child playing with mud, to chop the dried bean stalks into small pieces, mix them with chicken manure and some swept-up fallen leaves, carefully poured in some hot water, and then stirred it all laboriously with a wooden stick.
"Brother Shen, what are you tinkering with now?" his sister, Zhāng Xiǎoyú, curiously followed him.
"Making a… warm nest," Zhang Yuansheng explained vaguely. "Burying these things that generate heat underground, and in the spring, the vegetable seedlings will grow faster." He used words a child could understand.
Zhāng Xiǎoyú looked skeptical but still helped him move some chopped grass. Zhōu Shì watched from the kitchen window, mistaking it for the rare playfulness of her son after recovering from his illness. A fleeting moment of ease appeared on her worried face, and she didn't stop him.
For the entire afternoon, Zhang Yuansheng worked silently on this task in the backyard. The freezing cold reddened his fingers, but this simple labor strangely eased his inner anxiety. He was using a method he was familiar with to fight against the powerlessness of this world.
In the evening, the old servant, Uncle Zhang, returned from outside, his expression grim.
"Master," he said in a low voice to Zhāng Shǒutián, "Sūn Lǎoqī… he's gone."
The main hall fell silent.
"Gone? Where to?" Zhāng Shǒutián didn't understand for a moment.
"Where else could he go? He took his wife and children and ran away in the night. He owed rent to the Wang family and was afraid they would really arrest his daughter to pay off the debt…" Uncle Zhang sighed. "That dilapidated house is now just an empty shell like an ice cellar."
Zhang Yuansheng was just entering the house when he heard this and stopped. Sūn Lǎoqī's family was like a mark wiped away silently by the harsh winter. No one cared where they went, whether they lived or died. This was the end result of resistance—a silent disappearance.
And the threat from the Wang family did not disappear with Sūn Lǎoqī's escape. Instead, like the cold wind outside the courtyard, it blew more tangibly into the hearts of everyone in the Zhang family. Today it could be Sūn Lǎoqī; tomorrow, who would it be?
Zhāng Shǒutián gulped down a mouthful of cold tea, his eyes complexly glancing at the dark night outside the window. In the end, he said nothing, only his back seeming even more stooped.
At night, Zhang Yuansheng lay on the *kang*, unable to fall asleep for a long time.
His father's powerlessness, his mother's worry, his sister's hunger, Sūn Lǎoqī's family's flight, the Wang family's shadow-like threat… all of it intertwined into a cold net, tightly ensnaring him.
The dream of saving his family, its first step, was not high-yield crops, but how to scrape together the damned Winter Tax money; not grand plans, but the vat of manure in the backyard slowly fermenting, emitting a faint warmth.
The road had to be walked one step at a time. Food had to be eaten one bite at a time.
He turned over, his gaze once again firm.
Survive first, and only then can there be a future.